Articles by Hugh

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A recent study done by Roger Bohn of UC San Diego, estimates that the average American consumes about 36,000 words of text per day, during leisure hours. That number includes print, email, the web, and text messaging. That’s a lot of text. At that rate the average American could read Moby Dick every week.

The question you might ask yourself is: who is creating all that text? Well, if you are reading this, there’s a good chance that you are.

You might ask another question: who’s going to edit all that text? And if you are reading this, we’re hoping you’ll help with some of it.

Connecting Writers, Readers, and Word-lovers

That’s why we built Bite-Size Edits: so that people who write text can connect with people who can improve it. Usually that implies a vice versa.

Last month, we announced that we’d split Bite-Size Edits out of Book Oven, but it was a very barebones affair: text in, editing, text out. But while editing is the reason for the existence of Bite-Size Edits, the real power lies in connecting writers, readers, editors and people who love words.

We’ve just released a whole host of new social features: contacts, random editing, privacy controls on texts, and much more. We’ve built in some gamish stuff too – everything you do in Bite-Size Edits will win you points, if you’re into that kind of thing.

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So, we invite you to come take a look at the new Bite-Size Edits, to add some text for editing, and even better, to do some editing yourself.

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If you are worried about privacy and Google Buzz (you should be), here’s how you can turn it off.

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UPDATE: See here (Thanks Karl!): http://www.scotxblog.com/legal-tech/lawyer-privacy-on-google-buzz/

You can follow the Google Blog for more information.

Dinner (beef stew and mashed potatoes, if I recall correctly) was smelling delicious and ready to be eaten. We wanted to watch a movie. We’ve got a subscription to Zip.ca, and I have a habit of listing every avant-guard movie from 1927 I can find, with the odd bit of candy. So we often have some difficult films to choose from. It’s not that difficult is bad, but let’s just say that every time the Criterion Collection screen comes on, my wife groans; and as wonderful as Kurosawa can be, some nights one just wants to watch Adam Sandler get kicked in the nuts.

Anyway, there we were with two choices: Bicycle Thief and Doctor Zhivago.

Not knowing which to choose, I asked Twitter, and from thence flowed a stream of opinions, a 50-50 split between the two (we went with Bicycle Thief; a bit on the dismal side, to be honest). At some point, my wife yelled: “Stop looking at Twitter and watch the movie!” … because I kept a running tally, shouting out “another for Zhivago” and “oh, so-and-so thinks we made the right choice.”

This story was related by my wife to some non-Tiwtterites, who were in awe of this strange and magical tool that elicited such information, like some digital Oracle of Delphi.

Just a few days ago, I had yet another Delphesian experience on Twitter. I needed a third book to fill out an online book order and get free shipping (the other two books I wanted – Bolano’s 2666 and Elise Blackwell’s Hunger – are not available as ebooks in Canada). And so, I asked Twitter.

And here, for the record, is a list of what the Oracles of Twitter answered (Note: where links were not provided, I will link to whatever comes up first in the Google):

@jbeswick: “The Atomic Obsession” – great read

@seancranbury: goddammit, hugh! Monstrous Affections
or this is really good Unknown Soldier Vol. 1: Haunted House

@janinelaporte: True Deceiver is great. Buy that one Hugh to get your free shipping

@seancranbury: how’s this? Monsieur Pain

@danwagstaff: I keep hearing great things about True Deceiver by Tove Jansson + Blue Fox by Sjon.

@karenjones4: six pixels of separation is great! :) im a media hacks listener! Heard good things about Blue Oceans Strategy, next on my list.

@FNHPodcast: How about “Vulcan 607”

@michaelerard: governing the commons, by Elinor Ostrom.

@jenni_fleur: “Recital” by John Siddique….UK poet.

@chebuctonian: Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows

@jmcd77: War of Art

@somisguided: eating the dinosaur by chuck klosterman

@dknippling: When in doubt about what book to get, get Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds.

@jforrest: Zeitoun

@marianslibrary: Have you read 13 1/2 by Nevada Barr? It’s a thriller.

@chriskingstl: Bohumil Hrabal, “I served the King of England”; anything by Robert Walser; anything by Charles Nicholl (Reckoning, The Lodger…)

@D3WEY: that’s a shame it’s amazing like climbing literary mount everest — have you read Updike’s Rabbit series?

@ShireenJ: Mine. :P Seriously though, “Lifeliner” has had good reviews and is a fast read.

@openmargin: The Collaborative Habit by Twyla Tharp?

@jambina: new Michael Chabon?

@lorissa: If you enjoy fantasty reads, I’d suggest The Name of the WInd by Patrick Rothfuss.

@subumom: Have you read the Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa?

@echobase77: Mistborn by @BrandonSandrson!

goldenpen80: Try Razor’s Edge by Maugham, if u haven’t already. Short, sweet, and absolutely sublime.

I chose Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, well before all the other recommendations came in. I’ll let you know what I think of it sometime.

I can’t recall where I found this, but it’s very very cool:

I haven’t been writing much bloggy stuff lately, certainly not political rants. And true enough I don’t know much about the history/implications of suspending parliament by prorogue (can anyone point to a good recent source that explains Harper’s action in a historical context? Is it usual? Unusual? – I’d never heard the word before last year, and now he’s done it twice).

On principle, I don’t like it. MPs are elected and are supposed to represent us in parliament. Which they cannot do when parliament is suspended early. Because of the Olympics? Come on. The Olympics? You have to be kidding.

Anyway, why not put voice to your annoyance at a democratic government that wants to govern outside of democracy? Some ways to do it:

1. Join the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook Group.

2. Email Harper & tell him you don’t like it: pm@pm.gc.ca … you could say:

Dear Mr. Harper,

Canada is supposed to be a democracy. For democracy to function, our elected officials are supposed to represent us in Parliament, which they cannot do because of yet another prorogued session. Please reconsider, and get our MPs back to work.

3. Email your MP (mine is Tom Mulcair: Mulcair.T@parl.gc.ca) and tell them you don’t like it:

Dear Mr. Mulcair:

I am writing to you register my strong disapproval at the government’s decision to prorogue parliament. Please do everything in your power to help MPs get back to work soon.

4. email the Governor General: info@gg.ca

Dear Ms. Jean:

I am writing to you register my strong disapproval at the government’s decision to prorogue parliament, again; and your agreement with the decision. Our parliament is supposed to represent the people of Canada, which it can’t do while suspended.

RESPONSES:
Response from Mulcair’s office:

Dear Mr. McGuire,

On behalf of Thomas Mulcair, Member of Parliament for Outremont, I acknowledge receipt of your e-mail.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the shutting down of Parliament by Mr. Harper. We share your outrage.

Stephen Harper is locking out Members of Parliament, preventing them from doing the very important work they were elected to do.

By pulling the plug on Parliament, Stephen Harper killed 36 government legislations which were making progress, including bills dealing with important issues such as consumer protection, white collar crimes or digital policy. It is our view that this is a further attempt by the Harper Government to avoid being held accountable for torture issues in Afghanistan.

The NDP Caucus had a retreat planned the week before the scheduled return of Parliament. The meeting will go ahead as planned,
and NDP MPs will attend and discuss the strategy for the next few months.

Sincerely,

Mathilde Rogue
Adjointe parlementaire
Parliamentary assistant
___________________________________________________________

Thomas Mulcair, député/MP Outremont
Tél. : 514 736-2727
mulcat@parl.gc.ca

On Saturday December 26, 2009 LibriVox cataloged it’s 3000th free, public domain audiobook title.

Here are four pieces of software that have really changed my quality of life for the better. I thought I would share them with you.

1password ($39.95). I don’t know what unit stress is measured in, but every time I see a web login page the little needle on the gauge attached to my ear starts bouncing. Considering I see about 10,000 login pages everyday, that adds up. 1password is an encrypted, desktop password manager, that integrates seamlessly with my browsers (FF & Safari at least). Every time I register for a new site, I tell 1password to remember the password. So now instead of having a list of 1,000 login details in some “secret” excel file, everything is stored and encrypted in 1password. All I need to do is remember one password, and just login once per usage session. This changed my life completely. It’s expensive, OK, but so worth it.

Skitch (Free) Almost every day, it seems, I want to take a screenshot of something, and mark it up a little, to explain how to do something, to comment on a site/design, to quickly (re)post an image to the web. Skitch is a simple little tool that does this and more. It’s a: screengrabber, image marker-upper, and image post-to-webber (and image host) all in one. It is the ugliest program that I use, but man do I love it.

Dropbox (free –> $19.99) Ever pour water on your computer and have to get a new one? Yeah, me too. Luckily, all my important files are stored on dropbox, which is: a) a little app on your machine that b) syncs selected folders with your online dropbox account. You can sync that account with multiple computers too. It is so easy & so seamless, I forgot that big brother can read everything in the cloud. Free for up to 2G, and $9.99/month for up to 50G. $19.99 for 100G. There’s even an iphone app, so you’ve always got your files at your fingertips. I just recently upgraded to the 50G dropbox.

Grand Perspective (free): What is taking up all the space on my damned hard drive? GrandPerspective will tell you, by showing you a “picture” of what’s on your drive, with the memory hogs represented by big squares. The colours are god-awful, but if you want to clean stuff out, it’s a great way to find out what.

[link]

Well, the real world got in the way of my grand plans to write a nanowrimo novel. But here is Chapter 3 in any case. This is lifted from a chapter I wrote, and liked, in a collaborative Nano novel a couple of years ago…and was in my mind as I started this new one.

***

Rain pours down, glowing like yellow bullets in the headlights, smashing into the windshield, and the wipers, on high, extra high, wash against the glass, past E’s lower-lip-biting face, over and over and over, thwack thwack thwack thwack like the sound of some manic drummer, some heartbeat, some constant beating against the night, an endless fight against the rain that will not let up, that comes harder and harder and so hard she thinks she must be drowning in it by now today. Eiko is shaking, cold, hands cramping against the wheel. She leans right up against it, her nose almost touching the leather of the wheel, so that she can see better, so that she can get under this rain, get closer to wherever it is she is going–she doesn’t even know where. Just away from where she had been. She wants to escape where she has been–the sirens, the shouts, the sounds of collapsing buildings, the shattered glass, the falling masonry, the million pieces of paper that floated down around her.

She keeps looking in the rear view mirror, her eyes flashing up and to the right, but no one is following her. There is nothing but dark back there, an empty universe of inscrutable black, but she can’t help herself, can’t help checking, verifying, assuring herself that she is alone. She doesn’t even know who would follow her, or why, but she can’t help herself, can’t help checking. The manic windshield wipers keep flailing thwack thwack thwack thwack in a losing battle against the rain. She’s crying, wipes at her tears.
Was she driving away from the noise? From these memories? Dreams? Images of a crumbling city? She didn’t know, didn’t have time to think, could not remember.

She knew only that she had to keep driving, driving away from what was behind her, that if she let her mind wander, at this speed, in this dark, with this rain, on this windy, unknown road wherever it was, she was lost. If she thought too much about it, she would lose control of the car. She would smash into the dark trees that flashed at her from either side of the road, reaching out at her as her headlight poured into them, those trees that flashed for brief seconds, one after the other, again and again, trying to slow her down, get in her way, and then flying past her as she kept speeding along. The road was getting worse, smaller – one lane now, bumpier, winding more, and she shifted down, and up again as she tore around the bend, and there was a big thunk from beneath her, and she was momentarily weightless, head flung up and back, everything seemed to stop, even the wipers, and she hung there, waiting waiting waiting for something, feeling a sudden sense of relief, a sense that the end might have come, that this dark panic in her gut might melt away, might be washed away with warmth and calm that she knew existed somewhere, had once felt, and she waited for the cramps in her shoulder and neck muscles to loosen and relax, waited for sleep, sleep with no more of these dreams.

The car landed, and she bounced up and down again, and back into position, nose inhaling the leather of the steering wheel, teeth cutting into her lower lip.

The paved road had turned to gravel, and now she could hear the rocks and stones bouncing up from below her, hitting the undercarriage of the car like bullets, an asynchronous rat-tat-tat-tatat percussion to go along with the constant thwack-thwack-thwack of the windshield wipers that continued their assault on the windshield in front of her.

She turned another corner, felt the car skidding under her, sliding towards the trees, and she shifted down, spun the wheel, as the tail of the old Mercedes got away from her, fishtailing right, and then left, the full nature of her momentum, now beyond her control. This was it, she had time to think, we think we are in control, pointing in one direction but a false move and everything we are doing is undone, beyond our control, not under it. We don’t control these machines. And she felt something welling up in her, fear that was already there in her throat now took over her whole body, this is it she thought, maybe I won’t have to run anymore. But whatever she did–she could not have told you if you asked, and if you did she would smile and giggle a little, and say, I have no idea! Ha! I was so scared! – but, somehow, somehow she managed to get the car straightened, and she realized she was crying, the tears coming down like the rain outside, with no windshield thwack-thwack-thwack to wipe them away.

She wiped at the tears no more than a second–her hand covered her eyes one beat, a moment so short the wipers made only one thwack, maybe two–and then she opened her eyes, clear of tears.

And saw him standing in front of her, illuminated in the road, standing tall, taller than any man she had ever seen, dressed in white, drenched with the rain, but just standing there.

As she slammed on the clutch and the brakes she had time to study him, as the car slowed, and began to skid straight ahead towards him.
She did not have time even to spin the wheel – not that it would have made any difference – and as the fender hit his legs she watched his face, a kind face, crumple in pain and exertion, his fine features that reminded her, for some reason, of the black-and-white picture of her father standing, legs spread, hands behind his back, in military at-ease pose, outside their house in the mountains in Akita Prefecture, with his linen shirt and pants, and wire-framed glasses. The body hit the windshield, bounced into the dark, and the car, suddenly was stopped, and silent, except for the windshield wipers, thwack-thwack-thwack. She turned the wipers off and jumped out of the car, the wind and rain hurling abuse at her. She slipped in the mud, grabbing at the hood of the car as she raced to get to him.

He was lying on his back, lit by the bright lights of the headlamps, drenched.

He must be dead, she thought, and she knelt beside him, crying again now, and took his face in her hands, wiped his black hair from his eyes. Hello, she said, hello hello please hello are you all right hello … she had never killed a man before. She thought she might be sick.

Hello, he answered, eyes still closed. Yes, he said, I think I am OK. I think so.

He lifted his left arm, flexed his fingers, then lifted his right arm and flexed that hand too, eyes still closed. Hands work, he said. Let’s try the legs. Left, then right, he lifted them, nodding. Yes, he said. Feet OK now. Oh, I will have a headache.

Stay, don’t move, Eiko said. What’s your name?

Daichi Okada, he answered.

Don’t move, Okada-san.

He did, he moved, he sat up.

Yes, he said, I will have a headache. He opened his eyes and looked into hers, a gentle smile on his face. He felt his forehead with his hand, tapping and pressing it, then the top of his head, the back of his head.

“All my parts are in the right place,” he said.

Eiko laughed and cried at the same time, and she hugged him and kissed his neck, and then realized what she was doing, and pulled back, bowing her head. I’m sorry, she said. I’m just happy you are alive.

I know you from somewhere, he answered. And touched her cheek, briefly.

Did he really do that, she thought to herself. Yes, yes he did, he did touch my cheek.

She studied him, and yes he looked like her father from that picture.  But he can’t be her father. Her father has been dead seven–no, eight–years, and he had gray hair when he died. This man is in his thirties or forties. She tells him she does not think it’s possible that he knows her, and he replies, What do you mean, exactly, by possible?

Unsure how to answer him, she helps him to his feet – he groans, but nothing seems broken – and helps him to the passenger seat of the car. He is drenched, his back is covered in mud from the muddy dirt road. She opens the trunk and finds two towels – why did she bring them, she wonders – and gives him one, closes the door, and then installs herself in the drivers’ seat, using the other towel to dry her hair.

What were you doing out on the road like that?” she asks.

Well, it’s my road, a private road, so really I should be asking you that question.

She does not answer but instead starts the engine again, starts the windshield wipers. She doesn’t know how to answer, except to start driving again, which she does, and he doesn’t complain.

“I was looking for an Epiphany,” he says.

Again she does not answer, she’s not sure what this man means, what he wants, why he was out on the road.
That’s my dog, he says. Epiphany. My wife named him that, it was a joke.

She liked to tell people on the phone that I was out looking for Epiphany. But of course, Epiphany is always escaping. That’s the nature of that dog. I’m always chasing after it in the rain. Always looking for an Epiphany.

But that doesn’t quite make sense, Eiko answers.

I know, she was a sweet woman, my wife. She’s dead now. She thought it was funny, even if the article messed up the joke. She died in
the war. I miss her. And if Epiphany wants to spend the night in the rain, that’s her problem.

What war? Eiko thinks but does not ask.

Up here, he says, just a little further, on the left. She slows, and he guides her into the driveway, a small opening in the trees that she never would have seen. This pathway is even smaller than the small road, and the branches of the trees actually caress the side of the car as she continues on, another layer of percussion in the night drive jazz show she’s been listening to since she can remember. Thwack-thwack-thwack rat-tat-tat-tatat shish-shish-shish-shish … They drive, slowly now – she feels safe, and whatever she was driving from is far behind them – down this little winding drive, until finally they come out into a clearing.

Her headlights illuminate a little shack with a kerosene lamp burning in the window, and beyond it she can see rocks and the sea. The rain has stopped, she realizes, but the wipers are still on, thwack-thwack-thwack. She turns them off.

Come in, he says, Let’s have some warm coffee and pie.

A dog barks, runs at them, tail wagging.

Epiphany, Eiko says. And the man says, Yes.

He opens the door to the little shack, and she feels the warmth inside: books lining the walls, Brahms wafting from unseen speakers. She steps inside. It is small, open, with a little kitchen, and a loft with a ladder and a bed; two chairs by a desk and piles of books, a microphone on a stand. She is shivering, cold and wet deep in her bones, but she feels the cold (and the fear, and the panic) seeping away. Epiphany curls up in the corner, and Daichi Okada closes the door.

Coffee, he says. And pie.

Technorati Tags: nanowrimo, writing

I’ve started to write a novel for National Novel Writing Month, aka nanowrimo (wherenin mad people try to write a 50,000-word novel in a month). I’m asking for help proofreading it, using Bite-Size Edits. Could you, would you cast your grammarian’s eye on a sentence or two?

I’ll post the proofread stuff here once in a while I guess. Note: proofread is no guarantee of any kind of quality!

***
Lot’s Wife: Chapter 2

“It was very kind of you to offer me a ride,” she said, opening the door. “And very nice of you to drop me off here.”    

I told her it was my pleasure and that I would happily give her a ride any time.

I blushed as I said it, “I mean…”

“Yeah right,” she smirked at me, scrunching her nose and making one of those non-committal faces so I didn’t know whether she thought it was funny, or suggestive, or what, but she certainly didn’t chastise me.

“My husband just left me,” she said. “What sort of woman do you think I am?”

“An attractive one,” I answered. “But I didn’t mean…”

“You men,” she said and patted my knee. “Only one thing.” She gathered her bag. “See you around! And thanks again.”

She opened the door and got out into the rain. Before she slammed the door shut, I called to her, “Hey, I didn’t get your name?”

She poked her head back into the car, looking genuinely surprised. “You want to know my name? Really?”

I was taken aback. It was as if she’d never been asked the question before. She blinked at me, looking fragile for the first time, finally looking like a woman whose husband had just left her, finally looking like she was upset.

“Of course I do,” I said.

She seemed to think it over for a few seconds. “You can call me Iris,” she said.

Then she smiled again as if it were all forgotten.

“My name is Oscar,” I called out as she shut the door, but it was too late; she was already running under the awning to a grocery store. And then she vanished inside.

***

Iris didn’t want to know my name — not then anyway — but I’ll tell you while I have your attention: my name is Oscar Writh. I was thirty-one when I met Iris (I’m a bit older than that now, but not much), and I worked then part-time as a dishwasher, which I guess I should explain. People wonder about it. The pay is terrible and the hours are bad, but I like washing dishes, and it’s something I’ve done for years. I like it; it’s comfortable and not demanding, and the requirements are clear. Dirty dish becomes clean dish. It’s very simple and requires little judgment, just diligence, and that’s something I appreciate.

When I am not washing dishes, I am a musician and composer of the kind of music that no one likes to buy, and only a few people like to hear: atonal improvisational stuff, the sort of stuff that is “big” in Japan and parts of Germany. Or at least, the kind of stuff that gets me flown to Tokyo and Berlin (or: Osaka and Munich) once in a while, and paid decent amounts of money (for a dishwasher) to give performances and the odd lecture about finding music in the everyday, and other esoteric kinds of subjects that handfuls of people clap about when I am done. So, I wash dishes for money and create music that sounds an awful lot like an industrial kitchen to fulfill the needs of my soul.

This is important because I had been working on a piece called “Lot’s Wife” for the past six months. It was the most ambitious work I’d ever done, certainly the most draining.

I’d always been fascinated by that poor nameless wife of Lot, who gets one mere line in the Old Testament, but who has always been to me the most arresting character in the whole book. She breaks my heart. The one who got turned into a pillar of salt for the sin of looking back. You’ll remember, God is about to rain fire and brimstone upon Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin cities filled with iniquity–not 10 citizens are deemed good among the people there. Some angels come to take Lot and his family out of Sodom and warn him, Look not behind thee, neither stay thou in the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed. The fire and brimstone comes, Lot and his family are whisked safely out of the city, and what does Lot’s wife do? She does what I would have done. She does what we all want to do. She looked back.

I can’t help looking back. I’m doing it right now.

But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

That’s the first and last we hear of Lot’s wife, bless her soul, in the entire Bible, save for Jesus’ entreaty that we remember her as an example of what not to do.

But I’ve always wondered if Lot even conveyed the instructions from the angels to his family. Did he even tell her not to look back? As for Lot, well he made some questionable choices, wasn’t the best father, and yet, he never got turned into a pillar of salt. Unlike poor, nameless, Lot’s wife.

Oh, about the car: it was borrowed from my friend, Paul Whinstone, a biblical scholar at Concordia University, an ex-Jesuit (yes, they still exist) who played in a Dead Kennedys cover band. That’s completely irrelevant, but I wanted to make clear that dishwashing, atonal improvisational music and car ownership do not tend to coincide very often. That’s completely irrelevant, but I wanted to make clear that dishwashing and atonal improvisational music and car ownership do not tend to be found together very often.

***

I ran into Iris again a week or so later, at the grocery store where I’d left her off. She was examining grapefruit.

“Hello,” I said.

“Oh, hello, it’s my rainy-day taxi driver, Oscar.”

“How do you know my name?” I asked.

I was just happy that she was being so friendly, so I didn’t press her on it. I assumed–with a dash of pride–that she might have known of me from my music, as outlandish an idea as that was. Eventually we found ourselves at a cafe just down the street from the grocery store and not far from my little apartment.

We chatted pleasantly, about art and music–nothing personal. After a while she said, “Oscar, I was wondering if you could do me a favour?”

I said of course.

“It’s a strange request.”

She wanted me to take a bag to her husband. She hadn’t spoken to him since he left her on the corner, but she had something of his that she didn’t want any more.

I guess I was skeptical and asked her “Why me?”

She answered: “I think it’s easier if a stranger does it. I don’t want to see him. And I don’t want to ask someone close to do it; it’d just be strange. And, well, it just seems like if you have a car, it might be … but don’t feel obliged.”

It would be another chance, a few more chances to meet Iris. A drive to a house in Westmount, or TMR perhaps, ring a doorbell, pass a bag over to someone. What could be easier, right? Right.

***

It was a grey October day close to Halloween, the trees had just in the past week shed their yellowed leaves, and I had that nostalgic feeling I get every time the seasons change. I thought of old girlfriends, long-past sadnesses, and the strange sensation of growing older, but not wiser, something that had just recently begun to preoccupy me. It was a Kafka sort of day, when everything seemed a little off kilter; I had the faint desire to weep, though not about anything in particular. So I was already in a bit of a strange mood when I came upon Iris at our meeting place, a bench in Jeanne Mance Park.

She was sitting alone, with a huge, black suitcase at her feet.

She wore a woolen hat, a blue pea-coat, a striped scarf. Her nose and cheeks were rosy with the cold.

“Hello Oscar,” she said as I approached, standing. She looked deathly serious, like she had looked when I asked her her name.

I started to lean in to kiss her on the cheek in greeting, but she stretched out her hand to shake mine.

Chastened and a little stung, certainly disappointed, I pulled up and nodded formally as if she were a headmaster or an army officer.

“Here’s the package,” she said, all business.

“I see that. It’s smaller than I imagined,” I joked, but she did not smile.

“And here is the address,” she handed me a folded piece of paper. “The directions are there–exact directions, very specific directions–so make sure you follow them.”

I opened the paper to find tiny writing in black ink with what seemed to be a paragraph of directions; I couldn’t quite make out the letters.

“Where is it I’m going?”

“It’s on the paper,” she answered waving a hand at me. “I have to go, Oscar. I am sorry.”

I tested the handle of the suitcase; it was brutally heavy.

“What’s in here?” I asked.

“Thank you again. This means a lot to me. Goodbye, Oscar.” She turned and started walking away.

“Do you have a phone number?”

“So I can tell you when the mission is accomplished?”

“No.”

“How will I find you?”

“Don’t worry about that, Oscar.” She kept walking without looking back. “I’ll find you.”

***

I lugged the case to the car. It was unbelievably heavy, and I had to rest it on the ground several times before I got to the car. I struggled to get it in the trunk, finally succeeded. The car sagged noticeably with its cargo. I installed myself in the front seat to examine the directions Iris had given me.

I’ve started to write a novel for National Novel Writing Month, aka nanowrimo (wherenin mad people try to write a 50,000-word novel in a month). I’m asking for help proofreading it, using Bite-Size Edits. Could you, would you cast your grammarian’s eye on a sentence or two?

I’ll post the proofread stuff here once in a while I guess. Note: proofread is no guarantee of any kind of quality!

Lot’s Wife: Chapter 1

“Do you want a lift?”

I’m not sure what inspired me to ask. It wasn’t something I’d ever done before, but it was something my dad used to do on rainy days once in a while, when he saw women walking up the hill, especially if they were carrying grocery bags. It never occurred to me till now that there might have been something flirtatious about it – which would have seemed preposterous to me at the time, and still is, sort of, though now that I’m older I’ve come to realize that old people feel much the same the young do, as impossible as that seems when you’re just working out what it means to be an adult. But no, I don’t think he offered for any other reason than that it’s the gentlemanly, friendly thing to do. He was from a small town, grew up on a farm, and probably it was the kind of thing you did back when he was a young man, if you saw someone walking in the rain. I’m sure his father, a man I never met, would have thought it crazy not to offer a lift to someone walking in the rain. Most of the time the puzzled women just shook their heads and smiled, No thanks. Though I remember some of them getting in. This was before full-bore hysteria about sex and strangers seeped through everything, staining our world with mistrust. And anyway, I was sitting there in the car, an angelic little blonde-headed boy with a father who could have been a grandfather smiling at the wheel. Maybe it only happened a couple of times, but it made enough of an impression on me that it’s stuck in this brain of mine. I never asked my father about it, never got the chance to ask him, and I guess I was thinking about him in that vague way sons of long-dead men do sometimes, just wondering what sort of man he would have wanted me to be, and thinking maybe of the kind of son I would want to have one day, the sort of gentlemanly lessons I’d give to him, the importance of politeness, and the value of considering the people around you, of doing kind things for strangers. And so I pulled over – it was just pouring, really belting down, there were flood warnings in some of the expressways around the city – and said:

“Do you want a lift? It’s pouring.”

I didn’t expect her to say yes; I expected that slightly surprised/confused smile that I just faintly recalled from those years long ago. I also half-expected her to just ignore me, or even start running from this sicko madman offering to help a stranger out of the rain. I should say here, by way of context, that I am a nice-looking man. I don’t look like a rapist or jerk, whatever that looks like. I’m disarming, I think, certainly in this kind of situation with strangers. I have an open sort of face and kind eyes and I’m pretty sensitive to what others around me are feeling. I was thirty-one at the time—if any of these details are important to set the scene. So: Nice-looking, average kind of early-thirties man with kind eyes stops car in the rain to ask harried-looking woman hiking up a hill in what the radio says is one of the great rains of the century. So, I rolled down the passenger window (what’s the word for “rolling down a window” now that they are all electric?) I wondered to myself, recalling my family’s big red & wood-paneled station wagon, our first with electric windows, that likely was the scene of those childhood offers of rides that started this whole escapade), and leaned over to her.

“The radio says it’s going to keep raining like this all day,” I shouted. “And it’s a big hill – can I give you a lift to the top at least?”

We couldn’t really hear each other, what with the rain pounding on the roof of the car, and other vehicles spraying loudly past us, but I communicated the invitation, and she, after some hesitation, and after pointing down the hill and shouting soundless explanations, got in and shut the door.

It was probably when she first got in that I wondered what sort of sexual intentions my father might have had for being so gentlemanly. I don’t mean that he would have had any intention intentions, but I’m willing to bet that any man in the universe who invites a strange attractive woman into his car will consider the possibility that it all might end in sex.

I don’t know why I keep dragging my father into this, he has nothing to do with it, and I shouldn’t sully his name – or any man’s, for that matter – with my own particular convictions. Let me get away from the abstract, and tell you exactly what I thought, or at least do the best I can of recreating those thoughts, in the sequence that they came to my mind: 1. She is attractive. 2. It would be nice to end up having sex with her.

Of course I didn’t actually expect that we would have sex, but I was certain as soon as I rolled down the window, or, rather, as soon as I slowed the car, or rather, as soon as I saw her struggling up the hill without an umbrella, that if we did end up having sex I would be more happy with the outcome than sad. Now that I’ve painted myself as a bit of a perv (if, in my defense, the most common garden-variety perv, an affliction of 48% of the world’s population over the age of 13 – or, what do I know, probably 94%), I should probably get a few other things out of the way: I was single, mostly, though there was a girl I was in the process of falling out of love with, who had moved to London, England for a job selling metal futures or hedging contracts or something. We still talked regularly, still exchanged electronic missives with xo at the bottom. But you know how it goes, when you realize the person on the other end of the phone, on the other side of the world, is having more fun without you than you’re having without her. So that was all finished but for the final phone call, or painful meeting, or God help us, the parting email. And for the past few months I’d effectively been a single man trying to figure out how to have all the fun that I was supposed to have as a single man.

I’m sorry about all this: this whole story is about this drenched woman walking up a hill, and not about me, but I can’t help myself.

So, let’s get back to the specifics: kind-looking man, with sex not wholly absent from his mind, invites harried, soaked woman into his car. She gets in.

“It’s pouring out there,” I said.

It was the third, maybe fourth time I said it, and I should mention another thing about myself: when I first meet someone – especially an attractive woman – it’s very often as if every interesting thought I’ve ever had gets temporarily removed from my brain, and I am stuck making stupid comments, and frantically searching my mind for any question other than, “What do you do?” After waiting for a stream of cars to pass us, I pulled out into the road, as always, struggling to think of something to say. I began with an easy one, though I was already using lots of processing power to come up with my next conversational piece: “So where are you going? I can probably drive you there – if it’s not too far away. “It’s really pouring out.” (Time number five).

“Thank you, I’m …” She trailed off, then asked me: “Where are you headed?”

I told her, and she said that would be perfect, mentioned an intersection nearby where she wanted to be left off.

Now, let me tell you a bit about her.

She was not what you would call a striking beauty, but she had that aura about her that it didn’t matter … dark hair, dark skin, Eurasian? Middle Eastern? North African? Not fair in any case. I could go on and on about what she looked like, I suppose, but I think you understand what I’m trying to get at. She was dressed in the international attire of artisticy types–late twenties, or early thirties–and she sat in my car. She was pretty, and I was happy, happy to be charming and flirtatious with a woman I had rescued gallantly from the rain.

I mentioned that it was pouring, but the rain was really extraordinary, and after about five minutes it got so bad that I had to pull over.

“Wow,” she said.

“I haven’t ever seen anything like this.” It’s been that kind of day.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“No,” she said, not unkindly. “I’ll bet you don’t know what I mean.”

“Oh?”

“My husband left me standing on that corner,” she said. “He left me, he’s gone.”

“Do you mean left left?” I asked.

“I’m not really sure, but yep, that was the impression I got,” she said. “Would you like a fig? These are really good figs.” She pulled a bag of fresh figs out of her knapsack, and handed me one.

I accepted and popped the whole thing in my mouth. She bit into the fig and sucked the contents, making smacking sounds.

“God, these are good figs.”

“You don’t sound very upset about your husband.”

“My husband?” Or, ex-husband I guess. Soon-to-be ex-husband. Yeah, well. If you knew him, you’d understand. God these figs are amazing.”

They were, I agreed, tasty figs.

For a while I was leery of RFID technology, with worries about everyone & everything being trackable at all times. I guess I still worry about it in some sense, but it doesn’t matter. RFID is already everywhere, and will become even everywherer. The overwhelming pressure of the usefulness of RFID (and its successors) means that my worries or anyone else’s won’t make a shred of difference. Want to know what all that RFID looks like?

Immaterials: the ghost in the field from timo on Vimeo.

[via Warren Ellis].

A friend just asked if I was GTDing again, and here was my answer:

First: a warning: in my experience, GTD (and other time management techniques) is world-changing for a while when you first introduce it – it really clears everything out and increases productivity, reduce stress, and helps … get things done. GTD can feel like it will revolutionize your life.

But it won’t, unfortunately, or at least not completely. Often after a few of months, as the pile of undone things on your list start lingering, you start getting what my friend Maurizio calls the “black cloud of GTD oppression” … where (if you are using GTD software) you start feeling fear of opening up the software because of how guilty you feel about all the undone things.

I think part of this problem comes from trying to get a system to combat your personality and failings; whereas what you really need to do is find a system you like, and shape it so that it works well with your personality and failings.

So: GTD is great, but don’t rely on it to solve everything, you need to adapt it to yourself. I have been fairly successful with this recently – I’ll get back to you in six months. I am using Things, a very nice mac app/iphone that syncs between devices. I’m liking it very much.

One of the important things you have to do is figure out your “contexts” – in the end I didn’t like the suggested way that GTD likes you to organize things, by “project” and by context = “how you get that work done.”

So typically, you would have a set of projects, for me:

• LibriVox
• Book Oven – Product
• Book Oven – Business
• Book Oven – Community
• Atwater Library
• Personal
• Business – Other
• Rugby
• etc.

You can label your projects however you like of course.

Then there is the “contexts” sorting … which could be, if I understand orthodox GTD procedure:

• email
• telephone
• online
• writing
• etc…

But I found that I really do not like sorting contexts that way at all – not sure why. My need is more time-based – making sure I get stuff done on time.

So my contexts are:

• today
• thisweek
• thismonth
• eventually
• oppressive

And every morning I resort my Things list – adding new things to the today, and bumping things off that I realize I won’t have time to do.

The “oppressive” context was a real revelation for me – that’s where I put things that are nagging at me that I just can’t seem to get done for whatever reason. They are the great drivers of the black cloud of GTD oppression, so quarantining them is helpful. It lets you acknowledge to yourself that you won’t get those things done, because you just can’t get at them, and that they are increasing stress levels enormously. So stop thinking about them. The surprising result is that by acknowledging that you won’t get those oppressive things done, it gets much easier to get them done.

GTD is always a great way to declutter the brain, and break work down into component bits. But the challenge is integrating it into a long-term workflow that suits your personality – and acknowledges your faults rather than trying to defeat them.

I have not been paying much attention to the US health care debates, but I gather those opposed to Obama’s health plan have been portraying Canada as some kind of healthcare disaster. “We don’t want to be like Canada,” they say, “where the government has ruined healthcare.”

My wife Christine is an emergency doctor, so I know a bit about the problems in Quebec, which is probably as “bad” as anywhere in Canada.

The concise description of Canada’s health system is the following: critical health issues are dealt with quickly, and well. Less critical health issues mean longer wait times. And generally health outcomes in Canada are equivalent to outcomes in other industrial countries, and often better than those in the US.

Plus, we have universal coverage: for most healthcare, you don’t pay a cent, except through taxes (which turns out to be a much cheaper way to do it than thru insurance).

There is an excellent article in Bloomberg, Canadian Health Care Even with Queues, Beats US looking at the studies done in the past five years, including a recent one done by the OECD:

Opponents of overhauling U.S. health care argue that Canada shows what happens when government gets involved in medicine, saying the country is plagued by inferior treatment, rationing and months-long queues.

The allegations are wrong by almost every measure, according to research by the O and other independent studies published during the past five years. While delays do occur for non-emergency procedures, data indicate that Canada’s system of universal health coverage provides care as good as in the U.S., at a cost 47 percent less for each person.

“There is an image of Canadians flooding across the border to get care,” said Donald Berwick, a Harvard University health- policy specialist and pediatrician who heads the Boston-based nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement. “That’s just not the case. The public in Canada is far more satisfied with the system than they are in the U.S. and health care is at least as good, with much more contained costs.” [more...]

From Information Is Beautiful: Infographic on various billions spent, or planned, or earned:

Il y’a une petite article dans L’Actualité (Sept 09) sur Book Oven et LibriVox:

« Le numérique ne tuera pas l’édition traditionnelle, mais il va la changer », dit Hugh McGuire. Cet ancien ingénieur en mécanique âgé de 35 ans lançait en 2007 un autre collectif, Earideas, qui recense les balados (podcasts) de l’heure sur le Web. Et voilà qu’il vient de créer The Book Oven, un nouveau type de maison d’édition. « The Book Oven offrira une plateforme d’autoédition, qui permettra à un auteur de collaborer avec des rédacteurs, des réviseurs, des recherchistes, des photographes, des maquettistes », dit Hugh McGuire. [more...]

There are five days left in the federal government’s copyright consultations. Go make your voices heard!

http://copyright.econsultation.ca/

For more info, see Michael Geist’s info page: Speak Out on Copyright.

This, I love:

The Open Dinosaur Project was founded to involve scientists and the public alike in developing a comprehensive database of dinosaur limb bone measurements, to investigate questions of dinosaur function and evolution. We have three major goals:1) do good science; 2) do this science in the most open way possible; and 3) allow anyone who is interested to participate. And by anyone, we mean anyone! We do not care about your education, geographic location, age, or previous background with paleontology. The only requirement for joining us is that you share the goals of our project and are willing to help out in the efforts.

Want to sign up? Email project head Andy Farke (andrew.farke@gmail.com), and welcome aboard!

[via datalibre]

Here’s a bit of a confession, in the world of the web that I have been exploring with great excitement since 2004, the thing that has interested me least is marketing. Blogging, podcasting, wikis, Twitter, Identi.ca, community filtering and big online datasets, and many other things have been thrilling to me because of the sorts of things they allow individuals and groups to do that they never could do before. Any artist with a tiny tiny bit of tech savvy can now get their work out to the whole world. Anyone with a message has nothing standing in their way. Even more exciting, groups of individuals scattered across the globe can collaborate on massive projects in ways never before possible. You always wanted to write novels? Well nothing is stopping you now. What about exploring your world of bespoke tailoring? Turns out there are people who want to read about it. Host your own radio show? About music, or about health problems in Africa, or interviewing old timers in rural areas – all of this can be done, at almost no cost.

What has been called Web 2.0 has changed the dynamics of the universe. While there are some who think that Web 2.0 is just a marketing term, it was very real to me. I set up my first blog in July 2004 (using blogger – then I migrated to Wordpress); and made my first Wikipedia edit in September 2004. Uploaded my first Flickr photo in October 2004. Made my first podcast in September 2005. These were my 1.0 to 2.0 events, when I went from being a consumer of the web to a creator as well. It was a thrilling change, and I am still awed by the great possibility that comes with the web.

But something funny happened with all this wonderfulness. The marketers got hold of Web 2.0 – or what some call social media. (Note: I should admit that some of my best friends are marketers). And frankly, the thing which has interested me least about the new web is marketing. Or at least, the only thing about the new tools of marketing that excites me is that it is now so easy for one person or a small group with good ideas to find people who want those good ideas. But the marketing side of social media, well, it’s just never been my thing.

So it was very puzzling to me when I started developing a friendship with Mitch Joel. He is, after all, Canada’s digital marketing rockstar, a world recognized thought-leader in how new digital channels change our relationship to brands, and how companies and people need to adapt.

So what was I doing enjoying spending time with Mitch so much? At first I chalked it down to Mitch’s history as a music reporter in Montreal – marketing guru or not, you gotta like someone who made a living for years interviewing Gene Simmons and the guys from Whitesnake. But that didn’t seem to be enough; after all, unless someone told you about Mitch’s background, you’d never know that his youth was spent attending metal concerts for a Montreal newspaper.

A couple of years ago, Mitch and I, and fellow-Montrealer Julien Smith started having lunches together once in a while, then it became a regular thing. And these lunches were always the highlight of my week. We would pontificate about the future, about what technology changes meant, and rage on about things that were changing too slowly or companies that just didn’t get it. These lunches were thought-provoking and engaging and inspiring. They were great, even if Mitch was a marketer.

One time, Mitch and I drove back to Montreal from a conference in NYC. And in the car Mitch said something that made it click for me, made me understand why I liked Mitch the marketer so much. He said: “I want to totally change the way marketing is done. I want marketing to be about getting people who love something together with the people who have it.” (I am paraphrasing my memory of the quote). And in a flash, it all made sense to me. I understood why I like Mitch so much.

My greatest interest in the web is the ability it gives to people to create wonderful things. And Mitch’s real interest is helping connect wonderful things with the people who want them.

Having been knee deep in the web for a few years now, I am always surprised that what seems so obvious to we webby echo chamberists is not necessarily so obvious to the rest of the world. And I’ve long thought that someone needed to pen a book that would explain to people – primarily to businesses – what the hell all this stuff means.

Mitch has a new book out today that does just that: Six Pixels of Separation. What’s so refreshing though is that he has written it as a business owner and entreprenneur, and not as a pundit. As a webby person, I found his insights about business to be deeply satisfying; as an entrepreneur, I found his take on the web to be extremely useful. He talks not so much about specific tools or channels (though he does that too), but instead about people who have used these new channels to do wonderful things (disclosure: my project LibriVox.org gets a mention).

The world has changed, and will continue to change. That has implications for anyone with an idea they want people to hear about, a thing they want to sell, a cause that is important to them, a group of people who depend on them. It has implications for individuals, and multinationals. Six Pixels of Separation is a great guide to the changing world.

My colleague, co-founder, and the chief architect and getter-doner at Book Oven, Stephanie Troeth has proposed a moderated panel at SXSW this year called:

Beyond Publishing: When Every Book is Connected to Everyone

We have an all-star line-up who have agreed to join us (if SXSW agrees to give us some space to talk):

• Kassia Krozser co-founder of Quartet Press
• Peter Brantley, Director of the Internet Archive
• Andrew Savikas, VP of Digital Initiatives at O’Reilly Media
• and me, co-founder of Book Oven and LibriVox

The description of the panel is as follows:

What happens when every book is online, linkable, and connected to every writer and every reader? What happens when the book is liberated from being words on paper, unbound from a format that’s two thousand years old? What happens to how we read and how we write?

For more info, or to comment on or vote for the panel (please do!), see here.

danah boyd points to a study of Twitter usage by PearAnalytics, that concludes:

40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have “pass along value”; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news.”

As danah boyd suggests in her first sentence, studies like this are irritating. Every time someone complains about Twitter, or microblogging, blogging, or the web or anything else being overrun with “useless” information, I always have the same reaction: you could say the same thing about talking, but no one ever questions whether talking is useful or not.

These are means of communication, used by humans to communicate, each with their own idiosyncrasies, but all driven by the same impulses that have always driven humans to communicate: the urge to connect, to find, to babble, to sell, to buy, to share, to romance, to complain, etc etc etc…

Twitter, or microblogging in general, will bring profound changes to some of its users (it has for me) in how they find/consume/interact with information and other people. As did the printing press, ballpoint pen, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, email, blogs, youtube, mobile phone .. etc.

The interesting question is how these things change our informational & social interactions; but the question of whether or not these “new” tools are “good” or “valuable” are moot: if people use them, they use them because they find them good & valuable for whatever reason.

Humans have been pretty consistent in flaws and virtues over the past few thousand years; amazingly we still seem to be surprised when new tools of communication come along and display, in a new way, those same old flaws and virtues.

Roberto Rocha of the Montreal Gazette has a good article about Book Oven and the new publishing landscape, with a nice pic out the window of the office (with me blocking the view, unfortunately):

Before the Internet, when a writer could not find a publisher to print and sell a manuscript, he could take matters into his own hands, head to the print shop, and hawk the book himself.
Rejected auteurs today have it easier, with a handful of websites that let them write, edit and print books bound like the pros.

Call it Self-publishing 2.0. And it’s one of the fastest-growing sectors of the book world, which is itself enjoying a nice growth period despite the recession and the glut of competing media choices.
“Like in any other media, when you the make tools of publishing easy, people will take advantage of it,” said Hugh McGuire, founder of Montreal self-publishing start-up Book Oven. “It’s just now coming into public consciousness.”

McGuire is one of the leaders of the movement toward digital empowerment in books. When it officially launches (it’s in beta testing now), Book Oven will let people collaborate in the writing, editing and proofreading of a book, all through online tools. When it’s ready, book lovers will be able to buy a copy on the website, either in electronic or paper format. [more...]

Tomorrow I’ll be posting a long-winded manifesto about the term “self-publishing.”

Today is LibriVox’s 4th birthday. LibriVox is a kooky kind of project with the following objective:

To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.

Some statistics, as of today:

• Total number of projects: 3113
• Number of completed projects: 2556
• Number of completed non-English projects: 364
• Total number of languages: 29
• Number of languages with a completed work: 26
• Number of completed solo projects: 1214
• Number of readers: 3094
• …who have completed something: 2867

Total recorded time in all rss-ified works: 49596721 seconds, or 574 days, 0 hours, 52 minutes, and 1 seconds. Total of 50774 sections.

If you have a soft spot in your heart for LibriVox, perhaps you might consider leaving a little message on the blog, or the forum.

Or even better, perhaps you might help us record a few chapters of public domain texts? …

Book Oven Open for Cooking

We’ve been toiling away behind the scenes on the Book Oven for a few months. Now we’re ready to show you what we’ve been cooking. But there’s still work to do, and we want your help in building a new model for publishing.

Are you a writer? An editor? A proofreader? A small press? A designer? An agent?

If so, what would be the ideal web tool to help you get your manuscripts through to finished product? We want to build it, and we want to build a global community of book lovers and makers of books who will come together to make better books.

Bite-Size Edits

Our first offering is Bite-Size Edits, a new way to proofread text. You can help proofread other peoples’ texts, you can proofread your own text (in private) using Bite-Size Edits, you can invite a small group, or open up your project for proofreading by the world.

And, if you can believe it, Bite-Size Edits actually makes proofreading fun. And addictive.

But don’t just trust me, try it.

There is more to Book Oven (though for the next couple of weeks there will be an extra step to see the rest of it…).

Cloud-based Book Publishing

We call it “cloud-based publishing,” but the name doesn’t matter. The web has given us the ability to connect and collaborate in new ways. It’s given us the ability to make and distribute our art and writing to a global audience of billions, at almost no cost. We think this means that millions of people can engage with books in ways they never did before. And we want Book Oven to be a place where book lovers of all stripes come together to help make (and buy! and read!) better books.

Background: LibriVox

Back in 2005 I started a project called LibriVox.org — to get volunteers to make audio recordings of public domain texts. LibriVox started as a crazy idea, but it has evolved into a big, vibrant platform to help groups of people get together to make and publish audiobooks (it’s actually pretty complex, with recording, proof-listening, project management, metadata allocation, uploading, cataloging etc). We’re now the most prolific audiobook publisher in the world, all run in a totally distributed way by “strangers” from all over the globe. It’s worked because people naturally find things they are good at and enjoy – editing audio, recording texts, organizing projects, organizing files, prooflistening, and much more.

And what’s amazing is the creative ways people find to organize themselves to do interesting things when they have the right kind of platform.

Background: Books and Digital

In the mean time, there has been a revolution bubbling in the book world, and digital has arrived: ebooks, print-on-demand, and online sales mean you don’t need thousands of dollars to make & distribute a book anymore. You just need the time and passion and skill.

One of our myths is that writers work alone. In fact, they collaborate all the time: writers share their work, get feedback, editors help them sculpt their language and content, proofreaders clean up their copy, designers make it pretty, other designers make beautiful book covers.

A Space to Collaborate on Books

Book Oven was born of this inspiration: to make an online space where writers could gather a group of collaborators (editors, proofreaders, designer) around their work to help take a raw manuscript through to finished product, and then, if they wish, to sell it through online channels (though of course, if they wish to ship the final manuscript to a publisher, they can do that too; or they can just keep it for themselves).

That’s what a bunch of us have been working on for a few months: Stephanie, Yanik, Antoine, Marie-Eve, Suw, Andy, Dan, Chris, Frederic, and me … and a few others.

So, What is Book Oven?

Book Oven is: an online space to create, collaborate on, and sell books.

In the end, though, it’s about building communities: the smaller communities that form around writers and their works, and a larger community of writers, readers, editors, proofreaders, designers, and book lovers of all kinds.

How far along are we?

We are excited to show you what we’ve built so far. It’s pretty exciting, we think, but there’s more to do. We hope that you can help craft the long-term vision. Right now, you can upload your text in certain formats, build your team, comment on and edit your text, read/annotate in our (we think) beautiful interface. You can also play around with Bite-Size Edits.

But there is much more we want to do.

In the coming months we’ll be tweaking the interface, making things easier & more obvious, adding new features.

We’d like your help

We hope you’ll have fun with Bite-Size Edits. We hope that you’ll poke around in Book Oven. We hope that you’ll start a writing project, and invite some colleagues, friends, editors, reviewers to help you out. We hope that you’ll be tolerant of bugs when you find them, and let us know about them. We hope you’ll be mindful that we have many more features we plan to build, and that we’ll need your help in figuring out what the essential features are.

Above all we hope that you will think of Book Oven as your space, a place where you can contribute to building a new community and platform where you will, we hope, make and help make many great books in the future.

Questions?

If you have questions, problems, confusions etc … please do send me an email:
hugh@bookoven.com

Or ping us on twitter: @bookoven or identi.ca @bookoven.

If you have some specific feedback about Book Oven, bugs or feature requests, you can tell us about it here:
http://feedback.bookoven.com/

Looking forward to seeing you in Book Oven!

August 22 is Ray Bradbury’s 89th birthday. Here’s the opening of his short story, The Long Rain, about summer in Montreal:

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

A Parable of the Past

An, er, friend of mine heard an interview on Fresh Air with Scottish director Armando Iannucci about his new film In the Loop (IMDB). He’d never heard of Iannucci, or the movie, or the TV show upon which the movie is based. The audio clips from the movie were so great he then went to Youtube to see if he could find more clips. He could. The clips video looked even funnier than the audio.

The movie — it appears — “comes out” on August 14. In the old days, that meant my friend had two choices:
1. Wait two weeks to watch the movie in a theatre
2. Wait six months (?) to rent the movie and watch it at home

It always annoyed my friend that he had to wait to watch movies he wanted to see, because movie studios liked to release movies at different times in different cities; and then wait months after that to release the DVD for rental.

The studios did (and do) this not because they surveyed their customers, and found they preferred having to wait to watch movies they wanted to see in the way they wanted to see them. The studios did (and do) this for various business reasons, that have proved, over time, an effective way to increase revenues on a movie.

Times Are Changing

But these are not the old days, they are new days. And a few things have happened. My friend watches 95% of the movies he watches on his computer; he rents DVDs using zip.ca (Canada’s Netflix); and occasionally when he wants to watch a certain movie right now, he looks for it online.

The movie studios so far have decided that he should not watch movies online when he wants to watch them.

Which in the old days, meant he just had to wait, despite being more excited about this movie than any other movie he’d heard about in past year or so.

A Parable of the Present

But it turns out that other people (not studios) can get their hands on copies of movies as soon as they are available — often before they are released in theatre — and those people make them available online. This is especially true for movies that lots of people really really want to see, right now.

So my friend now has a third choice:
3. Watch the movie when & where he wants.

It turns out that my friend much prefers option 3. It also turns out that movie studios don’t want to give my friend option 3 – which makes my friend shrug a little when he hears them talking about piracy.

Not because he wants things for free, but because it seems to him that “digital” means studios and moviegoers no longer need be constrained by the two choices of the old days. Option 3 is easy and cheap, and that’s the option he wants.

He often says: If you, as providers of content, give me what I want, when I want it, at a reasonable price, I’ll be happy to pay for it. But if you don’t want to give me what I want, when I want it, I’ll be compelled – when I really want something – to find other ways to get it.

Lessons

1. If there is demand, there will be supply.
2. In the digital world, media is infinitely copiable & distributable at rougly zero cost
3. Media companies have long built their business around a restricted supply
4. If demand exceeds restricted supply in the digital world, someone — not necessarily the owner of the good — will meet that demand by making & distributing infinite copies at zero cost
5. Trying to stop # 4 is like trying to stop water going down hill
6. If restricting supply is no longer a viable business, then something else must be
7. When supply is unlimited, other factors drive the choices people make
8. Those drivers include: ease, quality, curation, attention, service, connection
9. Media companies – including book publishers – should stop thinking about business based on phony restricted supply
10. Media companies – including book publishers – should start thinking about how to build business around the actual drivers that will bring their customers to them (see #9 above), instead of sending them to the pirates

Epilogue

It was one of the best movies my friend has seen in a long while; and he has urged me to urge you to watch it. You’ll love it (he says).

The Government of Canada is holding copyright consultations, which you can answer by sending an email to the this address [info AT copyrightconsultation DOT gc DOT ca] which answers the following questions:

1. How do Canada’s copyright laws affect you? How should existing laws be modernized?
2. Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time
3. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster innovation and creativity in Canada?
4. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?
5. What kinds of changes would best position Canada as a leader in the global, digital economy?

Visit here for more info & to submit your responses.

Michael Geist has posted his short answer.

My short answer would begin by noting that the five questions can really be grouped into three key issues:

Why does copyright matter to you?
How can the government ensure that copyright reforms remain relevant in the long term?
What specific reforms should the government prioritize (having regard for creativity, innovation, competition, and the digital economy)? [more...]

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works.

And (unrelated, but from the same article):

The [elevator] escape hatch is always locked. By law, it’s bolted shut, from the outside. It’s there so that emergency personnel can get in, not so passengers can get out.

From a fascinating & terrifying story about elevators, and getting stuck in them, by Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker.

Once you’re done with the story, check the video.

For the price of a beer (or a pitcher, or a round), you can support VisibleGovernment.ca … the non-profit that promotes online tools for government transparency, openness and accessibility around government and civic data (yay!).

They’ve got a little fundraiser going, in celebration of Canada Day: Beers for Canada …

How we’ll spend your money

We work on several aspects of transparency:

Creating new tools: We work with developers and designers to build websites that encourage citizens and governments to communicate openly.
Encouraging government openness: We show elected officials the benefits of open, two-way discourse, highlighting places where information is lacking and celebrating the efforts of those who want to be more transparent.
Public awareness: We emphasize the civic importance of transparency and open government.
Working with other organizations: We share and collaborate with organizations like the Sunlight Foundation, MySociety and Changecamp.

We’re also organizing Code For Canada, an application design competition that awards prizes to people who build web, facebook, and iPhone apps that provide visualization, analysis, and access to federal government data sets.

So, go support a worthy cause.

This week on Media Hacks we talk about the new iPhone, the next level of mobile, and … yep … Twitter, Iran, and the characteristics of the reach of microblogging.

> Media Hacks 12

It’s been … wow, almost three weeks since BookCamp Toronto, and I guess I should get around to writing out some thoughts. So in no particular order, here are some of my personal reactions to the event:

1. What a great event
I have been involved as a participant and an organizer of numerous unconference / camps: barcamps, podcamps, democamps. But there was something amazing about this one, and certainly for me personally it was the most rewarding camp – or indeed conference of any kind – that I’ve attended. (With the caveat that, as an organizer, I am probably biased, but still … that was my personal reaction).

2. Engagement from industry
One of the most powerful things about BookCamp, compared with other events I’ve been to, is that this was not just a grassroots group. There was high-level engagement from the publishing industry, with publishers, editors, senior VPs, production managers, marketers, and interns, and everything in between. It was great to see the honest debate and conversation being lead by these insiders, who are truly grappling with the future of their business and their passion. This is something different from almost all the other “camps” I’ve attended (with the exception of BookCamp London), where it is often a grassroots gang talking about the future, with very little stake in existing business. BookCamp felt a very relevant meeting for a big industry in the throes of change.

3. Mixing publishing insiders and outsiders
One of the things of which I am most proud was our success in getting dialogue going between book business insiders and passionate outsiders. Along with the publishing big wigs, there were free culture advocates, open source proponents, artisanal bookbinders, librarians, web developers, readers, standards and accessibility experts, writers, bloggers, podcasters, technologists, marketers, newspaper folk, booksellers, and on and on. It truly was the open, mixed crowd we were hoping for, and I think the beauty of the event is that we managed to create an even playing field, where everyone got to talk as equals, all driven by the desire to see a healthy future for books.

4. Getting the numbers right
We worried about numbers. Too many people? Too few? How do we feed everyone? Will they fit? Well, we had some 350 sign up, and about 225 show up (good stats for a free event). Some sessions might have been a touch too big, but all the sessions I attended were full of lively discussion, and I think everyone who wanted to talk and engage were able to do so. We had just enough lunch, and everything worked out just fine.

5. No powerpoint
One of the best decisions we made was to discourage powerpoint presentations. If you are planning a discussion-centric event, I urge you to not provide any powerpoint capabilities. Powerpoint is so often a conversation killer.

6. Great session moderation
We gave some guidelines to session moderators: 1. focus should be discussion, 2. no power point, 3. 15-20 mins of intro, then open up the floor to discuss. This model was embraced in all the sessions I attended, and worked swimmingly I think.

7. Kick-ass organizing team
It truly was a pleasure to be a member of the team who put this together. Mark Bertils did so much work to make sure the on-the-ground set up was in good shape, and to keep the wiki up to date and information flowing well to attendees. Alexa Clark took care of the food, and it all worked out perfectly. Erin Balser organized all the volunteers, and info management on the day of the event. And a special thanks to Mitch Joel, who when I asked him: “Should we do a BookCamp Toronto,” answered, without blinking: “Let’s do it.” Also: Judy Dunn and UofT’s iSchool were perfect hosts. And Morgan & Michael at BookNet Canada were brilliant and understanding sponsors for the lunch.

8. Venue
U of T iSchool was a great place to hold the event.

9. Post-event Party
That was fun at the Bedford Academy, even if we got there before they were ready for us.

10. The Americans!
It was nice to see so many of our colleagues make the trip from south of the border, and contribute so much to the event.

So thanks again to: all the attendees for being so amazing, my co-organizers for being so on the ball, the session moderators for being so wonderful, and for everyone else who helped make this such a success.

For more BookCampTO posts, see Mark’s list.

Photo credits: Sniffles, Fiacre1, LexnGer.

This is my presentation at the BookNetCanada Tech Forum in March, titled: Time, Love & Books. Sorry, there is 1 slide only, for you Powerpoint buffs.

I talk about audiobooks, time acquisition, LibriVox, Google, the link, and the digital archaeology of love. And Hinton, Alberta.

Link to the vid.

O, present, we hardly knew ye.

More here: layar via here: Martin Bryant.

One of the reasons I started LibriVox, I think, was so that I could make an audio recording of “The Dead,” by James Joyce, from his collection Dubliners.

It is a story of such grace and skill; the build up slow and good-humoured and banal, but when that last section finally comes, it contains so much nostalgia, so much melancholy, so much revelation. All of us have had those moments, when what we thought we knew got thrown on its head, our own tiny place in the world gently exposed, and the wide, huge and lonely universe – of which we still remain a part – becomes clear and cold and expansive for just that brief moment.

Almost four years after LibriVox was born, I finally got the courage to record the Dead. I don’t think it’s catalogued quite yet, but here are the mp3s for those who want to listen to an audio version of one of the most beautiful-sad short stories ever written.

• The Dead – Part 1 [mp3]
• The Dead – Part 2 [mp3]
• The Dead – Part 3 [mp3]

Happy Bloomsday.

[Thanks to Kayray for the editing, and to Gesine for making sure I finished on time].

Kids boycott classroom with CCTV cameras. People call them brats. Kids respond with an op-ed that every adult should read.

Many users suggested that cameras were a good idea because they could be used to keep an eye on bullying and student behaviour, we were accused of been “narcissistic megalomaniacs” angry at “being nabbed for our churlish troublemaking”. This stereotypical and frankly ignorant view ignores the fact that Davenant Foundation School produces some of the best exam results in Essex. Violent behaviour among pupils is simply not an issue, making the justification for putting cameras in our classrooms more surprising…

Eroding standards in schools and deteriorating discipline are down to a broken society and the failure of the education system. The truth is that we are whatever the generation before us has created. If you criticise us, we are your failures; and if you applaud us we are your successes, and we reflect the imperfections of society and of human life. [more...]

[via boing]

One of my favourite podcasts/radio shows is CBC’s Spark, with the lovely Nora Young. Spark covers technology and society, and Nora is a wonderful interviewer of wonderful guests. So I was thrilled when Nora asked me to talk with her about the future of books in the digital age, after our experience of putting on BookCamp Toronto, which happened June 6 at UofT’s iSchool.

Here is the full interview.

From xkcd:

There’s a nice article, and some goofy pictures of me, about BookCampToronto in the National Post:

While some may bristle at a group of outsiders spearheading discussion on the future of books, the industry response has been positive.

“I really think I’m going to get in trouble for saying this, but book publishing needs to stop being so insular. We need to stop just looking at our own industry for inspiration,” says Deanna McFadden, marketing manager, online content and strategy for HarperCollins. “The people who are doing BookCamp in Toronto are all smart people who understand where the industry is and where we need to go, and are really looking at innovative ways for us to keep book publishing alive and healthy.”

That seems to be at the root of Book-Camp Toronto — not a hostile takeover, a rejection of traditional books for e-books or putting big publishers out of business.

“I care deeply about books and literature and the publishing business,” McGuire says, “and I’d like to see a thriving future for writers and readers and people in between.” – Check back in two weeks for our letter from BookCamp. And check The Afterword and Twitter for live coverage. [more...]

For some reason the article is posted twice, with different pics.

I’ve been invited by Mike Shatzkin to join a panel at BookExpo Amercia the details of which are as follows:

Digital Debut Tool Time
An insider’s presentation of new and soon-to-be-mainstreamed web-based entities providing innovative digital services and tools to authors, publishers and readers.

Moderator: Mike Shatzkin – Founder & CEO, Idea Logical Co, Inc
Presenters:
Peter Clifton – President & Ceo, FiledBy, Inc.
Mark Coker – founder & CEO, Smashwords, Inc.
Hugh McGuire – co-founder, BookOven
Neil Jones – founder, Cooler Reader

You can catch us pontificating between 9:30AM and10:30AM on Friday morning, May 29, 2009 at the Jacob Javitz Centre in New York City.

Ug. Apple iPhone App store rejects Eucalyptus ereader app … because you can read erotic texts from the public domain. As we say in Quebec, QQF? I presume this will get sorted out, but still …

If you’re wondering why Eucalyptus is not yet available, it’s currently in the state of being ‘rejected’ for distribution on the iPhone App Store. This is due to the fact that it’s possible, after explicitly searching for them, to find, download from the Internet, and then read texts that Apple deems ‘objectionable’. The example they have given me is a Victorian text-only translation of the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. For the full background, a log of my communications with Apple is below. [more...]

The round and round email thread with the app store is a treat to read.

(For the record, I downloaded Fanny Hill on Stanza on my iPhone.)

My pal Chris wrote a moving post about an experience he had growing up in South Africa, a white boy who went with his church to talk about Jesus in the “coloured” townships.

Which made me think about traveling and the relationship we rich, “white,”[*] educated people have with the rest of the world. I commented on Chris’ blog, but here’s what I wrote:

I was in Cuba some years ago on holiday and I recall reading before I went about how Cuba had been “spoiled” by tourism, and how you couldn’t have a genuine interaction with people any more because they see Westerners only for their wallets now. It’s true, as far as it goes – those Cubans did see me as a wallet.

But these days (even then), that kind of talk makes me angry, because built into it is this assumption that we deservea certain kind of treatment, as if the world is a kind of park, where we can go visit various places to get wonderful experiences: Bhutan for the mountains and the sage monks & yak-milk tea; Philippines for the sunrise while visiting tropical islands in a skiff guided by a wiseacre biologist; Hong Kong where we can do commerce with the shouting market people, who get such a kick out of Gweilos straying beyond Kowloon. Drinking beer late at night in the veld listening to stories of African leopards. Cuba for sexy music and smiling, dancing people.

I’ve experienced all these things and loved them, they are experiences I cherish. But I have done these things, am able to do these things because I am wealthy and white, and the world, truly is my oyster. I remember being in university, thinking: I will travel the world, I will undertake adventures, I will see distant land and do great things. And for a few years I did. I loved it; it was dashing and daring and exotic and all the things it’s supposed to be. And granted to me with ease, and no sacrifice, because of who and what I am.

I hated that trip to Cuba, not because Cubans see me for a wallet — which actually is “annoying” — but rather because of what I, as tourist, saw Cuba as: a place filled with people who should like me for who I am, give me the benefit of the doubt, people who should see beyond my colour and my new running shoes and instead have a conversation with me about what life is really like for them, because, well, I’d be happy to do the same for them if they came to Canada. That is, I saw Cuba as: entertainment. I’d paid for it, and didn’t get what I wanted.

And it pissed me off, not that Cuba didn’t deliver; but rather that I had put myself in that position, of “he who has paid to be entertained.” I don’t mean that on a surface sense, but at a deeper level. Tourism puts us in such an odd dynamic with people: you are there to get something out of an “experience” … joy, wisdom, commune with nature, commune with another culture, history, something…And the exchange? What do we give up? Our time and our money. Only one of which is worth anything to anyone.

I have this odd feeling that tourism and it’s thinly veiled cousin, “international development,” are about as colonial as a military invasion: the real beneficiaries are the tourists, the NGO’s and their rich, adventuresome consultants; just as the beneficiaries of military invasions are rarely those under whose name invasions happen, these days at least.

I say all this because I am conflicted by Chris’ story of the townships … I have been treated well by people all over the world, treaded poorly by others; i’ve been robbed and cheated, threatened and bored to death. All of it great, and I wouldn’t trade it. Saying I’ve had yak’s milk in Bhutan gives me great pleasure (I was there to “help” the Bhutanese, naturally).

But it’s curious when our own innocence or blindness is caught out — as I guess the young Chris Hughes’ was — by something so moving, which is the twin realization that:
a) we do not belong somewhere
and yet:
b) we are welcomed nonetheless.

I think that might be just the thing that irks me about our modern white fascination with “doing” Asia, or “doing Columbia,” … this assumption that we do belong there. It’s our world afterall.

So I find Chris’ story very moving because, I interpret it something as a recognition that he did not belong where he was … and yet….and yet…there was kindness, despite his naivete, despite where he came from, despite the preposterousness of the situation, and not because of it.

* Re: “white” I use this term broadly, and really it’s the wrong term. It’s not “white”, so much as “affluent middle-class, educated westerner…” I’m using it as a cultural marker, not a racial one; though the two are not totally unrelated.

Books are going digital. New York Times had an article about the implications, which reminded me of that famous saying about not knowing history and doomed repeats. Things to remember:

a) this means that if people want a book for free, it’ll be gettable free
b) there’s nothing anyone can do about that
c) the music business has been through all of this before
d) it would be a good idea for the book business to study the mistakes made by the music business

Here is a great video from the Globe and Mail about the history of Napster, music downloading, and the rise of the mp3, from their great series: Download Decade:

Brett’s swinging copyright film RIP: A Remix Manifesto is now a pay-what-you-want download.

Sweet.

Here is Media Hacks #7, about where the bucks are or aren’t in online advertising.

This episode, an intimate trio performs for your pleasure: C.C. Chapman, Mitch Joel and me.

LISTEN HERE: Media Hacks: Episode 6.

Or: Mp3 download.

Man I am getting behind on my Media Hacks postings. Oops. Well here is Media Hacks #6, about Twitter and scalability, Demi Moore’s bum, Facebook’s new company features.

Tearing up the airwaves in this episode: C.C. Chapman, Julien Smith, Chris Penn, Mitch Joel and me.

LISTEN HERE: Media Hacks: Episode 6.

Or: Mp3 download.

Over the weekend, Amazon.com started “deranking” sexually explicit books, and anything with lesbian/gay content….meaning that it’s become much harder to find those books in Amazon’s catalogs. Included in the purge is Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Jeanette Winterson, and a host of Romance Novels.

Kassia has an open letter, and there is a bit of a twitterstorm going on tagged #amazonfail. Smartbitchestrashybooks has called for a Google bomb of the search term Amazon Rank. You’ll find plenty of other things to read about it, assuming Google isn’t deranking search results, by googling “amazonfail”, and “amazon rank.”

So far the only official response from Amazon that I’ve seen was an email to YA author Mark Probst:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage

Aside from the specifics of this particular decision by Amazon, it raises some pretty deep questions we need to ask ourselves:

We now rely on two companies, Amazon & Google to help us find, and then deliver to us a huge amount of our information. These companies have enormous power to make decisions about what society will and will not see.

We’ve had faith in their general decentness about using this power, about not gaming their systems, and generaly working hard to provide us with the “right” search results. Still, I’ve long been annoyed that Google filters search results based on where I am searching, and, I presume, my browsing habits. But when I am searching, I want to find the stuff that is most popular, not “what Google thinks I want to see based on my profile.” And as this story indicates, it ain’t all gravy over at Amazon either.

Is it enough for us to believe that Google will do no evil? Clearly it’s not enough to believe that Amazon will show us the most popular books … for now anyway, they’ll only show us the most popular books they approve of.

This is a pretty extraordinary article from Bloomberg, nominally about the hot new music site/service, Spotify (not available in Canada or the US yet).

What was striking: the execs from the music business, including Michael Nash, Warner’s SVP Digital Strategy and Business Development, finally cottoned on that the real challenge of the music business is not to fight a lost battle against P2P, but rather to find ways to make it easier for listeners to listen to their music. Check this quote:

“These types of social media are highly competitive with illegal file-sharing,” said Michael Nash, Warner’s executive vice president of digital strategy and business development.

Sites such as Spotify allow users to access the music for free rather than searching for it on BitTorrent and downloading it illegally, Mulligan said. Spotify and the Comes With Music mobile-phone music service by Nokia Oyj, the world’s biggest handset maker, “are the two strongest tools that people have to drive a genuine alternative to piracy,” he said. [more...]

That is, the music business has finally understood that suing listeners who want to listen to their music isn’t a very sensible long-term business strategy. The better strategy is to figure out how to provide more music to those people.

P2P isn’t going away, and the music business’ success will depend on doing a better job of serving their customers than Pirate Bay does.

I went to see The Examined Life last night, a really, really good film about … philosophy. Wonderfully done. Interviews with eight philosophers (Zizek, Cornell West, Judith Butler and more) about their thoughts and work.

It’s no easy feat making an entertaining feature-length talking-head documentary, especially about philosophy, but Astra Taylor succeeds in this one. Not sure if/when it will be available online, or where you can see it, but here is the trailer:

My big question though is when are the action figures coming out? Cornell West vs. Peter Singer throwdown!

Would you like to take a look at what we are doing at Book Oven? We are building an online collaboration platform for the making of books. Lots still in development, and everything still in alpha (meaning still private, still not finished). But we are starting with a small (private) alpha launch today of Bite-Size Edits, a collaborative proofreading tool.

Or, a word-based online game.

Or, a massive — yet productive — time waster.

Anyway, we’d like you to tell us what you think …

To get some feedback, while doing some good for the universe, we are starting by helping Project Gutenberg & Distributed Proofreaders edit some of their public domain texts. If it works, we hope to keep feeding error correction into the Gutenberg/Distributed Proofreaders process.

For more info, and to login, see the Book Oven Gutenberg Rally.

There are a bunch of codes below, please use one and post in the comments which one you’ve taken.

If you do have time to try it out and have problems, please let me know: hugh@bookoven.com

Also, feel free to use the invites from your account if you think you know others who might be interested…

Again, here is the URL: http://bookoven.com/gutenberg/

And here is a first batch of codes. Use one and post below which one you used.

6yPZJVVB
DCu2uxhD
apHBPVta
KFepnooo
L3sZdpSA
biVfm82b

John Chambers, CEO of CISCO on what the future holds, from MITWorld. He thinks we are about to see the most fundamental change in businesses and government that we’ve ever seen, moving from command and control to collaboration and teamwork.

“The Big Takeover: The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution,” by Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone:

In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world’s most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.

In other words, it’s AIG’s rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive — to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that’s been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren’t such a nightmare. [more...]

And:
“No Return to Normal: Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than you think,” by James K. Galbraith in Washington Monthly.

The oddest thing about the Geithner program is its failure to act as though the financial crisis is a true crisis—an integrated, long-term economic threat—rather than merely a couple of related but temporary problems, one in banking and the other in jobs. In banking, the dominant metaphor is of plumbing: there is a blockage to be cleared. Take a plunger to the toxic assets, it is said, and credit conditions will return to normal. This, then, will make the recession essentially normal, validating the stimulus package. Solve these two problems, and the crisis will end. That’s the thinking.

But the plumbing metaphor is misleading. Credit is not a flow. It is not something that can be forced downstream by clearing a pipe. Credit is a contract. It requires a borrower as well as a lender, a customer as well as a bank. And the borrower must meet two conditions. One is creditworthiness, meaning a secure income and, usually, a house with equity in it. Asset prices therefore matter. With a chronic oversupply of houses, prices fall, collateral disappears, and even if borrowers are willing they can’t qualify for loans. The other requirement is a willingness to borrow, motivated by what Keynes called the “animal spirits” of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. In a slump, such optimism is scarce. Even if people have collateral, they want the security of cash. And it is precisely because they want cash that they will not deplete their reserves by plunking down a payment on a new car.

The credit flow metaphor implies that people came flocking to the new-car showrooms last November and were turned away because there were no loans to be had. This is not true—what happened was that people stopped coming in. And they stopped coming in because, suddenly, they felt poor.

Strapped and afraid, people want to be in cash. This is what economists call the liquidity trap. And it gets worse: in these conditions, the normal estimates for multipliers—the bang for the buck—may be too high. Government spending on goods and services always increases total spending directly; a dollar of public spending is a dollar of GDP. But if the workers simply save their extra income, or use it to pay debt, that’s the end of the line: there is no further effect. For tax cuts (especially for the middle class and up), the new funds are mostly saved or used to pay down debt. Debt reduction may help lay a foundation for better times later on, but it doesn’t help now. With smaller multipliers, the public spending package would need to be even larger, in order to fill in all the holes in total demand. Thus financial crisis makes the real crisis worse, and the failure of the bank plan practically assures that the stimulus also will be too small. [more...]

My friend and colleague Suw Charman-Anderson launched an Ada Lovelace Day initiative (site, twitter) getting bloggers to pledge to write a blog post about women in technology.

To honor my pledge, I am writing about Danielle Zaïkoff, P. Eng.

But first, a little introduction about my more recent experience with women in technology. Every project I’ve worked on on the web has had women playing integral an role in making it happen:

LibriVox started growing with the help of Kristen (designed the site) and Kara (pretty much ran the forums, and continues to do much of the heavy-lifting on cataloging), and later Betsie (developed the structure for the cataloging system), Annie (developed the structure for the cataloging system), Cori (helped develop the community podcast, and general internal systems), Gesine (designed much of the internal systems workflow), and Kristin (numerous wordpress improvements and php hacks). Of course many more people, men, women and children contributed to all of this, but it’s fair to say that LibriVox never would have succeeded without the efforts of these, and later, many other women.

Collectik (RIP): was designed and turned into html/css by Kristen.

Earideas, and the Canadian Podcasting Directory (RIP): were designed by Marie-Eve, with html/css integration done by Patricia and Madeline.

Datalibre: is driven mostly by Tracey.

The Atwater Digital Literacy Project: is run by Miriam.

The Atwater Library’s computer centre: is run by Jun.

BookCampToronto: is being organized by a team including Lex, Erin and Julie.

Book Oven, my biggest and most ambitious project, was co-founded by my business partner, the extraordinarily talented Stephanie (read the Ada Lovelace post about Steph here) who is CTO, product manager, production manager, project manager, UI designer, and countless other things, every day. Marie-Eve does the design; and Suw Charman-Anderson is developing our community management approach, managing user testing, and generally helping us think better about that grey zone where people and technology intersect.

So it’s fair to say that my life in web technology has been spent surrounded by dedicated and skilled women who have helped me build some things that I am proud of.

But back to Danielle Zaïkoff.

My first real job out of university, was with a group called the E7 (now E8), a non-profit group funded by electric utilities from G7 (now G8) countries. The mandate of the group was twofold: to develop joint policies about sustainable development in the electricity industry, around pressing issues such as climate change; and to do knowledge transfer projects about best practices and environmental management in developing countries. I worked in the Secretariat (permanently based at Hydro-Quebec in Montreal), which consisted of a senior engineer, nearing retirement, and a small team of junior engineers just out of university. The Managing Director (I worked for two, both women) was generally a senior executive from Hydro-Quebec, who was winding down a successful career, and wanted to spend a couple of years doing something challenging, but not necessarily tied to central operation of Hydro-Quebec.

Danielle Zaikoff was my first boss at E7. She had started as an engineer at Hydro-Quebec in 1972, I believe she was the first female engineer on staff at the company. Not content to stay in the offices in Montreal, she worked as a project engineer on the huge James Bay hydro installations, a post she was initially refused, because the company did not think women should work in in remote field operations. She went on to become the first female director of Hydro Quebec, the first female president of the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec and the first woman president of the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers.

I learned many things from Danielle, mainly the importance of precision and clarity in work, and the dangers of sloppiness. She was a generous boss, who spent much time mentoring the young engineers and others under her command. She demanded excellence and promptness, was exacting, fair, tough and dedicated.

Like many of the women I’ve worked with in tech over the years.

Media Hacks #5: this one ended up pretty interesting, talking about Twitter as a search engine and possible Google rival, Google search tweaks, brands, and conferences/unconferences. On the media hacks hotline: C.C. Chapman, Julien Smith, Chris Penn, Mitch Joel and me.

LISTEN HERE: Media Hacks: Episode 5

Brett’s movie, RIP: A Remix Manifesto on the BBC:

From TPM:

Earlier today, we highlighted some excerpts from a 2004 deposition given by Joseph Cassano, who was then the head of AIG’s financial products unit — the division whose massive losses on credit default swaps would later bring the company to its knees. But the story of the underlying case, as summarized at the time by a trade publication, is just as revealing as Cassano’s testimony.

AIG was being sued for breach of contract by a former employee, Rob Feilbogen. Feilbogen claimed that when the unit he worked for, AIG Trading, was put under the control of Cassano’s AIG Financial Products, he was informed in writing by an AIGFP executive that the company’s previous guarantee to pay him a bonus of $1.3 million would no longer be operative. Feilbogen said he was told he would still be eligible for a bonus, but the $1.3 million figure would not be guaranteed.

In a letter to Cassano, Feilbogen insisted on receiving his $1.3 million bonus. In response, Cassano played hardball, telling Feilbogen he could agree to the new deal, or resign. Feilbogen continued to resist, and was soon informed by an AIGFP lawyer that his employment had been terminated “as a result of his decision to resign.” [more...]

Media Hacks #4: a conversation about the economy, advertising, newspapers, books and where the money might be, with C.C. Chapman, Chris Brogan, Chris Penn, Mitch Joel and me.

LISTEN HERE: Media Hacks: Episode 4

So along with a few others, I’ve been organizing BookCampToronto, a:

conversation about the future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age.

The event is June 6, but it’s currently full (huge flood of demand), but send an email to bookcampto@gmail.com if you’d like to get put on the waiting list.

I asked Book Oven’s wonderful designer, Marie-Eve Bélanger to come up with a logo, and this was the beauty she produced:

Sweet, eh?

March 10 (Bloomberg) — Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit said his bank is having the best quarter since 2007, when it last posted a profit. The shares rose as much as 27 percent and helped spur gains for finance company stocks.

“I am most encouraged with the strength of our business so far in 2009,” Pandit wrote in an internal memorandum obtained today by Bloomberg. “In fact, we are profitable through the first two months of 2009 and are having our best quarter-to-date performance since the third quarter of 2007.”

“I am, like you, disappointed with our current stock price and the broad-based misperceptions about our company and its financial position,” Pandit, 52, said in the memo, adding that the price doesn’t reflect the New York-based bank’s capital strength and earnings potential. The company had $19 billion of revenue in January and February excluding writedowns that have already been disclosed, Pandit said. [more...]

vs.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Citibank (C) has become the latest recipient of a government bailout – this one to the tune of $300 billion, or thereabouts, depending upon how you do the math which, in this case, appears to be quite complicated. [more...]

From an old unpublished novel, for a lark, here is Chapter 3:

Vivianne stood inside the walk-in refrigerator, with her back to me, her small wiry body tight and ready to pounce, her mass of curly blond hair bobbing with her head. She wore her crisp white chef’s jacket, with loose-fitting black-and-white checked pants, held a note pad and pen in her little hands. She swore in creative flourishes, in English and French, at the produce.

“Nothing,” she said, turning to me finally, “is personal in my kitchen. There’s no such thing as private personal business in the kitchens of Révolution”

Genevieve, the manager responsible for scheduling had failed to accommodate my request for time off for driving classes; she had referred my application for Tuesday nights off to Vivianne. I pressed my case. She walked past me out of the refrigerator.

“This is a collective kitchen. We,” she continued, sweeping her hand around the room, as if showing me her kitchen and staff for the first time. Julie rushed into the kitchen, taking her pink, puffy winter jacket off and she hurried by us, muttering an apology for her tardiness, which Vivianne ignored. “We are a team, a unit,” she continued. “One for all, Oscar. It’s like a, like a … battalion in, you know, a … an army here. The marines. No man left behind, that sort of thing.”

[more...]

Previously, on Blind Spot:
Chapter One
Chapter Two

Have there been any studies about whether having computers & wifi in a class improve or diminish the success of teaching? I’m a bit of a luddite on this front: I suspect that students get distracted by their technology, and the great brain sucker, the Internet.

But I have no idea.

On the other hand, as a teacher (especially at university level) you should be able to be interesting enough to your students that lolcats will seem boring.

Anway, I’m of two minds on this, but sympathetic to teachers and profs who don’t want the web in their classrooms. From Language Labs Unleashed:

A professor I had last semester had a bad experience with her undergraduates and laptops, banned them, and noticed a dramatic change in her classes. She then decided that she would do the same thing with her Educational Psychology graduate course on CMC, (a course full of 30 and 40-somethings), due to seeing someone in class doing e-mail next to her and her being distracted by the typing sound. Needless to say, I was very upset. I simply cannot keep up when trying to write by hand, and the Internet access allows me to better challenge points raised in class that need challenging. I think I understood her position, but I didn’t agree with the policy.

When I put on my teacher cap, I can understand the urge for faculty to ban everything they can’t control, including the technology of the time. We’ve all heard the stories of the ballpoint pen being banned by faculty in the late 1940’s in favor of the fountain pen and the calculator in the 1950’s in favor of the slide rule. Faculty do have legitimate authority to control the classroom environment, and to eject students from class for anything they choose, including staring at a laptop screen instead of the professor, I guess. [more...]

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.

[more...]

In my post about the the stock market bubble(s) of the past 15 years, I asked what kind of policy shift happened in the 1990s to allow such a significant change in stock asset valuation. The answer comes from Niall Ferguson, in this fabulous (and scary) interview in the Globe:

“Monetary policy evolved in a peculiar way in the 1990s towards de facto or de jure targeting of inflation, an increasingly narrow concept of inflation – core CPI. I thought it was a mistake at the time because it seemed to me crazy to ignore asset prices. Why differentiate? What’s the difference between pricing a loaf and pricing a house? Why do we care about one and not the other? In fact, we should probably care more about the price of a house than the price of a loaf, certainly in developed societies. I think there was a flaw in the theory there, that essentially you could call the Jackson Hole consensus. When the central bankers got together at Jackson Hole, the view that emerged from the debate in the late 90s was, we shouldn’t really pay attention to asset prices in the setting of monetary policy.” [more...]

With all the talk of newspapers shutting down, I wonder if we might flip the traditional interpretation:

Maybe the problem is not so much online news sources killing off business for print newspapers; maybe the problem is the continued existence of print newspapers is stifling innovation in the online news space.

Since so much (local) advertising dollars are still going (being wasted?) on dying print news outlets, there isn’t enough left over to properly fund a leaner, profitable online alternative.

If print newspapers are gone, then local advertisers are going to start wondering how to get people to come to their stores; radio/TV, OK, but if the eyeballs are online, and there are no more papers distracting the advertisers, then …well there is an untapped market there for the online news sites to figure out. And since online can do a better job (in theory) of matching ads/marketing to reader preference, thru cookies, browsing habits, tracking sales (Facebook Beacon notwithstanding), then the death of the traditional news business might be exactly what it takes to kick the online news business, and online content, to real innovation, and real profitability.

Check this little gem of a tectonic shift, found in Wired’s The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time (see page 3):

The Taiwanese firms, Shih argues, now have enormous clout in the PC industry. In the US, we regard branding and
marketing—convincing people what to buy—as core business functions. What Asustek proved is that the companies with real leverage are the ones that actually make desirable products. The Taiwanese laptop builders possess the atom-hacking smarts that once defined America but which have atrophied here along with our industrial base. As far as laptop manufacturing goes, Taiwan essentially now owns the market; the devices aren’t produced in significant volumes anywhere else.

If you had asked Taiwanese hardware CEOs a few years ago about their relationship with Dell, HP, and Apple, they’d have told you that the American companies did the branding and sales while outsourcing their design and production to Taiwan. Today the view from Asia is increasingly the reverse. “When I talk to them now,” Shih laughs, “they say, ‘We outsource our branding and sales to them.’” [more...]

Wealth ought to come from the creation of value. That is, by designing and selling a better shovel, you make it easier for farmers to dig irrigation trenches which increases their yield. With your shovel, their output goes from 100 to 200 units a year, and so you, as shovel-maker get to benefit from a proportion of that 100 increase. It’s “worth” giving you a cut, since your shovel added the value to their output. That, more or less, is the basis of capitalism. As time goes by, technology and methods improve, adding value, meaning we get more widget output per unit of resource input, and wealth increases.

There’s another way to make wealth though, which is easier: by cutting costs, or essentially extracting value. Cutting staff, for instance. That means you spend less money per shovel, meaning profits increase, for a while anyway.

The third way to make wealth is to borrow lots of money. The problem is, eventually you have to pay it back.

Value creation should be a long-term and sustainable wealth-generation technique; value extraction is a short-term, unsustainable wealth-generation technique. Borrowing to make wealth is probably the worst way, since it creates bubbles that burst.

I’ve been thinking about value vs wealth in the context of the global economic meltdown. I don’t have any answers at all but I am struck by the shape of the stock market curves for the past 40 years. Below is the S&P 500, between 1970 and 2009, a good proxy for the value of the economy.

It looks to me like there was a historically stable amount of value creation, reflected in the indexes, that for some reason in 1993/94 started to go a bit nuts. Two things drive it, I believe: low interest rates, meaning cheap debt flooding the market with money – corporate, personal, housing, financial; and increased global trade, namely with China, which kept prices and inflation low.

But it looks to me, based on this graph, that the wealth of the past 10-15 years was illusory, and that in fact the markets have dropped back to where they “should” be.

Does anyone have a better analysis of what happened in 1993/1994 when the whole thing started to go a bit nutso, in historical terms? I have a pretty surface understanding of financial policies, but this graph looks pretty telling to me.

Have I ever mentioned that I wrote a novel? I finished Blind Spot in 2005, sent it out, got a stack of rejections. It’s been sitting in various formats of a drawer for years now, and I figured it was time to release it into the wild.

The about goes something like this:

A novel about learning to drive, dying student drivers, terrorists, the CIA, an anarchist driving instructor, and one, or more, murders.

And here is the beginning of Chapter One:

He talked about the car crash all through the evening shift. Sylvain was shaken, true, but there was something reverential about his tone, as if he felt honoured to be the universe’s first chosen beholder of these deaths, and now that the two of us were alone, finishing the last of the kitchen clean-up, he grew more animated in his descriptions, more precise, more excited. His eyes sparkled as he spoke.

It was incredible, he said. Just incredible. The blood, the bone fragments. The damage done to a human body.

The sound of the crash had woken him at 7:12 a.m. that morning, and he had rushed out of his Villeray apartment, wearing only a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, despite the cool of the October morning. He expected survivors, he said, and took his cell phone with him, dialing 911 on the way down the stairs. The little red car had smashed head-on into a poorly-placed concrete divider, and as he rushed towards the steaming metal, Sylvain lost hope of finding anyone alive. The damage done to the automobile was frightening, and he braced himself for the carnage he would find inside.

“Have you ever seen a really bad car accident?” he asked me, suddenly. “I mean close up, I mean with the bodies, I mean before it gets cleaned up? Have you ever seen what actually happens to people?” He wasn’t interested in my answer to that question, and he pushed on with an uncomfortable mix of glee and horror, giving me more details I didn’t want to hear. The smashed windshield, jutting bits of metal, and descriptions of blood and bodies, the angle of one of the victim’s arms. “Pointing in all the wrong directions,” Sylvain said. “It was so weird.” He rested his chin on his mop, sombre and somehow pitying my lack of knowledge of the world. “You have no idea, Oscar,” he said, and the lights glinted off the shining tile of the floor, “how terrible it really is. How really terrible when you see it up close like that. These were people talking and breathing and all of a sudden they’re gone. I’m not religious,” he continued, cleaning again as he spoke, paying close attention to the floor, moving the mop in slow figure eights, the cleansing symbols of infinity, over and over in front of him. “But it’s scary seeing a body moments after the soul disappears. You have no idea.”

I did have an idea but instead of saying so, I just nodded. [more...]

It’s available in multiple formats:

• I’ll be publishing chapters weekly (Wednesdays), on http://blindspot.hughmcguire.net
• I’ll be podcasting each chapter weekly (Wednesdays), on http://blindspot.hughmcguire.net
• You can download the pdf (free!), or epub ebook (free!)
• You can buy the softcover.

I’ll be exploring more channels for getting it out there (Smashwords, Shortcovers, Podiobooks etc.) in the coming weeks.

And of course kind feedback is always appreciated.

My write-up of Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, over at the Book Oven Blog:

I’m back from TOC and still mulling over the problems, and maybe some solutions to problems in the publishing business. There are lots, but a fundamental problem seems to be that most publishing houses have never had much to do with their readers. Their clients, traditionally, have been book stores. And outsourcing relationships with the people who are your reason for existence is a bad idea.

If you look at the talk around the perilous state of the publishing business, and the challenges of ebooks and DRM and digital and the web, it ends up being this old sad story of: “How do we maintain our financial viability when fewer people are reading?” And not, “What do readers want and how can we best provide it?” [more...]

I should have posted this a while ago, but: Mitch Joel has convened a collection of talkers for a semi-regular (bi-weekly?) discussion about what’s on our media minds. The radio show (which you can listen to on your computer) is called Media Hacks, and said hacks include: C.C. Chapman, Chris Brogan, Chris Penn, Julien Smith, Mitch and me. Not all of the hacks will be there every episode, but some of us will be.

Episode 2 is about Wikipedia, Britannica, and Gaming. The audio is crackly, but the talkin is crackin’ good stuff.

LISTEN HERE: Media Hacks: Episode 2

As a start-up, I’ve complained about how conservative the Canadian business culture is, especially banking and finance. But boring has it’s benefits, when things get shaky. From Newsweek:

In 2008, the World Economic Forum ranked Canada’s banking system the healthiest in the world. America’s ranked 40th, Britain’s 44th.

Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalized and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize. The Toronto Dominion Bank, for example, was the 15th-largest bank in North America one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn’t grown in size; the others have all shrunk.

So what accounts for the genius of the Canadians? Common sense. Over the past 15 years, as the United States and Europe loosened regulations on their financial industries, the Canadians refused to follow suit, seeing the old rules as useful shock absorbers. Canadian banks are typically leveraged at 18 to 1—compared with U.S. banks at 26 to 1 and European banks at a frightening 61 to 1. Partly this reflects Canada’s more risk-averse business culture, but it is also a product of old-fashioned rules on banking. [more...]

Given that we lost 129,000 jobs in January alone, I don’t think it’s fair to say our economy is thriving. But certainly our banking sector appears to be in decent shape.

Speaking of which: 60:1 leverage in European banks? God help us.

Who do you think are the top ten digital thinkers in Canada? The people who are writing, or doing, the most innovative digital stuff in the country? You can name as many or as few as you like.

From Superbomba’s superb flickr stream.

Announcing BookCamp Toronto, Saturday, June 6, 2009 at the MaRS Center, 101 College Street.

BookCampToronto is a free unconference (definition at wikipedia) about:

The future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age.

For more information, and to register, suggest sessions, please visit the wiki.

BookCamp Toronto is inspired by BookCamp London.

The Toronto version is being organized by Mitch, Mark B, Erin and Alexa. And me!

Allentrepreneur has just posted an interview with moi:

Allentrepreneur: Welcome to Allentrepreneur Hugh and thanks for taking the time to talk. You’ve got quite a start-up resume to your name. LibriVox.org, earideas.com, datalibre.ca and your latest one, The Book Oven, which has me particularly curious since I’m a book junkie. Could you give us an introduction?

Hugh: The book business is going through massive changes, there are cutbacks all over the place in publishing houses, bricks and mortar booksellers are in trouble, and there’s angst everywhere about how digital and ebooks will upset business models that have been entrenched for 100 years. But books are still a $50 billion business, and there are passionate readers and writers all over the world. The book business looks a lot like the music business did 10 years ago, with these huge companies knowing things are going to change, but having great trouble adjusting.

One really exciting thing is new technologies that make publishing a book cheap and easy: print-on-demand and ebooks. In some sense these technologies can take the publisher out of the picture – in the same way that musicians can now make and distribute their music online, writers now have the same abilities.

But making a book is an arduous and collaborative process. Book Oven will help bridge the gap between writing, and publishing a finished product. [more...]

I have to think about this little bit more. Kevin Kelly has a compelling argument that access is better than ownership (because it comes with fewer responsibilities), for social goods such as movies, books, music. But one thing that strikes me is that while “consuming” might work in this model, the true test is what you can do with a good, and who gets to decide. In any case:

Ownership is not as important as it once was.

I use roads that I don’t own. I have immediate access to 99% of the roads and highways of the world (with a few exceptions) because they are a public commons. We are all granted this street access via our payment of local taxes. For almost any purpose I can think of, the roads of the world serve me as if I owned them. Even better than if I owned them since I am not in charge of maintaining them. The bulk of public infrastructure offers the same “better than owning” benefits.

The web is also a social common good. The web is not the same as public roads, which are “owned” by the public, but in terms of public access and use, the web is a type of community good. The good of the web serves me as if I owned it. I can summon it in full, anytime, with the snap of a finger. Libraries share some of these qualities. The content of the books are not public domain, but their displays (the books) grant public access to their knowledge and information, which is in some ways better than owning them.

Very likely, in the near future, I won’t “own” any music, or books, or movies. Instead I will have immediate access to all music, all books, all movies using an always-on service, via a subscription fee or tax. I won’t buy – as in make a decision to own — any individual music or books because I can simply request to see or hear them on demand from the stream of ALL. I may pay for them in bulk but I won’t own them. The request to enjoy a work is thus separated from the more complicated choice of whether I want to “own” it. I can consume a movie, music or book without having to decide or follow up on ownership. [more...]

From Oren Lavie:

Oren Lavie’s flash site (sigh).

And a live set on Morning Becomes Eclectic.

[via @mdash]

From Michael Geist:

The federal government has announced plans to spend over $10 million to establish a “Corridor for Advancing Canadian Digital Media” from Stratford to Kitchener. Coming on the heels of the Nortel bankruptcy, this initiative reinforces the tech shift westward from Ottawa to Waterloo. While tech leadership once resided with Nortel, JDS, Corel, Newbridge, and Cognos, the shift to RIM, Open Text, etc. has a direct effect on the location of future tech iniatives in Canada.

When I worked at Prebon in 2000 (on financial/insurance products that would financing greenhouse gas reductions while hedging against the risk of greenhouse gas legislation), I remember trying to figure out the credit default swap market. At the time, it was a relatively new product, and it was where Prebon – a broker, not a trader – was making a killing. Generally in the financial business, new products are where all the profits are. Once your clients and competitors figure out what they’re buying, transparency comes into the market, efficiency, and prices/margins drop. But in the early days of a financial product, the margins are huge – because if you are offering something people want, and no one else is offering it, and no one else understands it, you can strip out enormous profits.

Anway, at the time the CDS market was pretty new and pretty hot. A credit default swap, nominally, is an insurance policy against the issuer of a financial product (say, a bond) defaulting. What it became was something else altogether, a massive commodity trading scheme where the underlying commodity (the CDS) had come completely uncoupled from the underlying assets. By the time things started collapsing last year, the CDS market was $30 trillion dollars. It’s a massive liability that no one’s really owned up to yet. NYTimes has a good article explaining things and asking when the next shoe will drop:

Any honest assessment must include the role that credit-default swaps have played in this mess: it’s the elephant in the room, the $30 trillion market that people do not want to talk about.

Credit-default swaps are insurancelike contracts that Wall Street created in the early 1990s. They allow bondholders to protect themselves against losses if a company or a debt issuer defaults….

Sellers of C.D.S.’s spent years raking in premiums while underestimating or simply ignoring the possibility of rising defaults. Regulators let the market grow unchecked.

In the end, far too much of this insurance was written at way too cheap a cost. Now, with Wall Street and the economy in tatters, the fear that already-hobbled financial companies may have to pay off huge amounts on C.D.S. arrangements hangs like a cloud over the markets.

C.D.S.’s have already figured prominently in taxpayer bailouts. The $150 billion rescue of the American International Group, for example, came about because of swaps the insurer had written on mortgage securities. And the $100 billion taxpayer backstop handed to Bank of America on Jan. 16 had a good bit to do with soured credit-default swaps that the bank inherited when it acquired Merrill Lynch. [more...]

nfb.ca, the National Film Board’s web site is now live, and open for viewers. Seven hundred documentaries, shorts, animations and general filmy goodness are available in their entirety on the site. I’ve been playing for a while now with the beta, but very happy this is out there in the wild now. I still have some niggles about the navigation and UI, but as long as they keep adding content, I will be a happy man.

The NFB used to make some of the most beautiful films in the world, and was a beacon of experimentation and integrity in the new art of the documentary film. Watch, for instance, this exquisite doc, by the master Gilles Groulx, Un Jeu Si Simple. You don’t have to care a whit about hockey, or speak French for that matter, to appreciate one of the most elegant movies you’ll ever see, a study in brilliant editing. If you are a hockey fan, this is something like uncovering a footage of Greek gods on Olympus.

[Good on ya, Matt]

[x-posted at Book Oven & Huffpo]

As the death watch continues for the publishing business and perhaps even the book itself, a group of writers, technologists, publishers, agents, designers, booksellers, and social architects convened in London for BookCamp, a one-day thinking session (bookish experimentation) about what the future of the written word might be.

The event was organized by Jeremy Ettinghausen, digital publisher at Penguin UK; James Bridle, of BookTwo, and Bookkake; and Russel Davies.

Thinking about books

If the amount of thought and enthusiasm generated that day — and evening — is any indication, I think we’re going to be OK. The book is alive and well, even if defining “book” is becoming more complicated; and the publishing business, bracing itself for the biggest shake-up since the paperback, will come out the other end, transformed certainly, but alive nonetheless. That’s my projection anyway.

An open slate

If you’ve never been to a “camp” or “unconference,” you should find the next one near you, show up and dive in. These un/conferences vary from place to place and event to event, but tend to share a few characteristics: they are free, they are open, and the sessions are not formally presented by the organizers, but rather decided by participants. Everyone is supposed to contribute. The result is that you get a much wider mix of people and perspectives than at industry conferences.

BookCamp London started with a blank grid: 6 timeslots and 5 spaces (or 5 spaces, 6 timeslots?), with participants asked to fill in the grid, adding sessions they’d like to discuss. (For some reason I didn’t write anything in. First time I’ve ducked that responsibility at a camp.)

The sessions

Sessions included (paraphrasing titles): Talking to Terrified Writers about the Web, the Book as Social Object/What Happens When Books Are Free?, EBook Gadgets, Is the Web Making Writing More Oral?, Social Networks and the Book, Encouraging Kids to Read. And more.

Fellow-BookOvener Suw Charman-Anderson lead a session about the Book as Social Object; or, What happens when all books are free? The group struggled with this difficult question: what happens if writers can no longer make their money from just selling books? The answer wasn’t so clear, but several things are certain: ebooks are coming; DRM won’t stop infinite reproduction on the web; no one likes DRM; and no one really knows how the business is going to work in a decade. But music, for all the worries about the industry at the corporate level, is thriving. How will writing evolve?

The next session I attended was Bookkake: How to Start a Publishing Company in Your Bedroom. James Bridle,Bookkake founder & BookTwo writer, has published new editions of five public domain titles, using ebooks, print-on-demand, and covers designed from photos on Flickr. An inspiring view of indie publishing’s future.

Michael Bhaskar of Pan Macmillan hosted a session on the web and the increasing orality of text, how text is taking on characteristics that we once associated with oral communications: quick feedback, ephemeral, linear, disposable ; Mark Johnson and Kate Hyde of HarperCollins (and Authonomy and BookArmy) lead a discussion of social networks and the book, that the successes and challenges they’ve had with their initiatives.

Speaking of books ….

In addition to enjoying talking with these smart people, I had great conversations with too many more to list, but some particularly good ones with Peter Collinridge of Apt Studio, Anthony Topping, of lit agents Greene & Heaton, Lucy Crichton, Alex Ingram, digital buyer at UK bookseller Waterstones, Naomi Alderman, and Adrian Hon. It was also nice to see some familiar faces, Aaron Straup Cope of Flickr, and Matt Biddulph of Dopplr, as well as Cory Doctorow, who I’ve crossed paths with numerous times online, but never met in person.

It was a great event, and I am very happy I decided to make the trip to the UK. Well worth it, and a real encouragement that what we’re up to at the Book Oven, behind the curtain, is on the right track. My only complaint was that it lasted one day, and not a week.

Can you see the future?

While there are nerves about the future of the book business, the overwhelming sensation I had leaving bookcamp was optimism. What else could be the result of spending a full day with so many bright people, excited about books, and actively shaping their future?

For some other thoughts on bookcamp (I’ll try to keep this up to date, as I see links) see:

• PenguinBlog
• Chocolate and Vodka: here, here and here.
• The Rosemoirs
• Going Underground’s Blog

[Photos by: Matt Biddulph, Annie Mole, and Russell Davies]

Good, safe investment these banks, eh? The blue circle represents market capitalization of banks in Q2 2007; the little green peas are the same banks’ market caps in Jan 2009:

[via zig]

Mitch Joel, Julien Smith and I get together every once in a while for lunch, inevitably yakking about media, the web, communities. Sometimes they make me talk about marketing too. It’s almost invariably intense, and fun, and illuminating, and I usually leave all fired up (after having let loose with a few grumpy-old-man tirades against various offenders against common sense). Mitch keeps saying, “You know, we should record these lunches.” And Julien & I say: “Yup.”

But Mitch one-upped that idea, and asked some more smart digital people to join us for an every-so-often podcast. So, together with the three Montreal amigos, Chris Brogan, CC Chapman, Chris Penn will help round out the podcast sixsome. We’re calling it:

(No url yet, but it’s coming I think).

Here is the first episode (mp3), featuring Julien, Chris Brogan, and Mitch, but not: CC, Chris Penn, and me. [Note: it's intro'd as Six Pixels of Separation, but it'll have it's own, er, branding soon. Also Note: Julien swears like a drunken sailor, which is why we love him].

[photo by CC]

I was just in London for BookCamp (fantastic, see my comments here). When I fly, I usually download a number of TED Talks to watch on the plane. Loved this one, about the moral decision-making of liberals and conservatives.

From MagCulture:

Ben emailed me last week promising a surprise, which duly arrived in the post yesterday.

He and Russell have published a tabloid newsprint publication featuring some of their favourite posts from 23 friends’ blogs last year. The project came about when they found out how cheap and easy it is to print 1000 copies of a newsprint tabloid. They also wanted to draw attention to some longer written pieces that are more easily assimilated in print than online.

Wonderful…”we” ought to do the same.

[via liber.rhetoricae]

Just posted over at LibriVox:

Just in time for your 2008/09 new year’s celebration, LibriVox has reach another great milestone, by cataloging our 2,000th book, Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. VI.

The rest of the series can be found here:

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

LibriVox is an all-volunteer project to record public domain audiobooks, and give them away for free. We are among the most prolific audiobook publishers in the world.

We reached 1,000 books on October 31, 2007, after 26 months; the second thousand came 14 months later.

Congratulations to all the readers, coordinators, proof-listeners, moderators, and techies who have helped build LibriVox into one of the great communities online. Thanks to Internet Archive for hosting our audio files, and to Project Gutenberg for making thousands of public domain texts available online. And thanks to all our listeners for listening.

If you’d like to volunteer to help make audio recordings of every public domain text in the universe, you could take a look at our volunteer page, or jump right into our forum.

[X-posted at Huffpo & Book Oven]

Question: What would happen if, tomorrow, every publisher, and every book store, went out of business? What would you do?

The Big Stores

About fifteen years ago I walked into my first of the new breed of big book stores, Chapters in Toronto. I thought to myself: how can the book business support such a huge store? How can book selling pay for all this real estate? How can there be so many books?

At first I was encouraged by these stores. The choice of titles seemed endless. They were comfortable, well-designed. There was attention to detail. The coffee-shops were a nice touch, especially in the old days when you could get a stack of books from the shelves, get a coffee, and flip through books to your heart’s content. If these book stores could be profitable, I thought, maybe there was hope for humanity after all.

Soon these big book stores were everywhere: Barnes & Noble and Borders in the US, Chapters and Indigo in Canada (now merged, but with separate branding to create the fiction of competition), Waterstones in the UK, and others elsewhere. They invested massive amounts in real estate, getting huge commercial spaces in prime locations in major cities, and bigger spaces in the suburbs. They stocked their stores with a dizzying array of books.

Boon or Bust?

But things started to go a little sour early on. The first indication that the new book behemoths might be bad for the long-term health of the book ecosystem came quickly, when the little guys started going out of business. Economies of scale and and pricing clout meant that the big stores could charge less than their smaller competitors; and because of their size, their selection was always bigger. Following their in-store caffeine partners, Starbucks, they liked to choose their locations near existing successful independents. The little guys couldn’t compete, and went out of business, or got bought up, and absorbed into the book selling borg.

So now, there are precious few independent books stores left even in big cities.

The indie stores weren’t the only ones complaining. Because of the volume that goes through these stores, they could squeeze the publishers, on cost of books and return policies. They could charge for prime shelf-space. Small publishers found it harder to get the attention of the readers. But even the big publishers complained about the policies of these stores – and a little later, the other behemoth on the scene, Amazon.

Then there’s that odd feeling of being in a book store staffed by people who don’t know much about books. Any inquiry about a more obscure title more often than not ended up in front of a terminal. It seemed as if book stores, if their hiring policies were any indication, no longer cared much about books.

More: as time went on, it turned out that book sales weren’t really the most profitable kind of business these stores could do. Solution: reduce the shelf-space for books, increase the shelf-space for candles and trinkets. In Canada Chapters/Indigo has reduced book shelf-space from 75% to 60% (with Canadian fiction losing, and publishers cutting their lists in consequence). If the trend continues, books will be the minority in bookstores, and we might consider renaming them smelly candle stores that carry books.

The book business has stopped caring much about books.

Step One: Make Profit

These big stores are public companies, and big businesses. Like all businesses listed on stock exchanges, the people running them (boards of directors, and executives), have one central responsibility: to increase shareholder value.

The problem is that “shareholder value” has been defined almost exclusively as: “increased profits.” The owners of shares of Borders or any other large company don’t give a shit about books. They care about increased profits and increased share prices. The same is true in all businesses listed on stock exchanges. Mutual fund managers and institutional investors don’t buy stocks because of what a company does; they buy stock in companies whose stock prices will rise. And stock prices rise when profits go up.

But extracting profit is not necessarily related to long-term creation of value. In the book business (selling and publishing) what we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades might be considered a stripping of true value, in order to deliver shareholder profit.

The “fault” does not lie with the big companies. They’re driven by a particular motive – profit. It’s built into the DNA of public companies, and the way stock exchanges work. There’s no use blaming them, might as well blame beavers for chewing through trees. But we should all remember that these companies are not driven by “value,” if you define value as healthy long-term prospects for readers and writers.

The state of the book publishing business is dire. Publishers are cutting back staff, editors are getting fired, or leaving. Amazon is putting the squeeze on everyone, and bookstores across the land are having a hard time, with major closures expected.

The Future?

So the rest of us, readers and writers and lovers of books, entrepreneurs and technologists, those of us really interested in the voracious appetite of the powerful and relatively affluent group, are going to have to come up with new and different ways to get books written, published and in the hands of readers.

Imagine: what would happen if every publisher in the world went out of business tomorrow? If every book store closed it’s doors?

Here’s what I think: I think we would see a flourishing of innovation and the kind of excitement the book business has not seen since the printing press was invented. These companies (sellers and publishers) aren’t all going to close their doors, but a good number might.

Lamentable? Maybe. Or maybe this is a fabulous opportunity for something new.

I’m optimistic. New technologies are coming along that change the economics of books: ebooks, ipods, print-on-demand, the web, and more to come yet. The readers are there, maybe fewer of them, but no less passionate. The writers are there. And let’s face it, if the doom and gloom in the business is right, whatever model these companies were using hasn’t worked all that well.

So it’s up to us — all of us who care about books — to figure out what the book business is going to look in the next decade or so.

Exciting times.

Canada’s feisty copyright lawyer, Howard Knopf, explores how good intellectual policy could help Canada thru the economic mess:

Most governments are now taking decisive steps towards decisions on and implementation of major stimulus/investment packages to rescue, resuscitate and even reinvent national and international economies. Canada, apparently, is going about this in its own way, with no such decisions yet announced. In Canada, things are actually getting “curiouser and curiouser” as we head towards a political crisis.

However, following the Rahm Emanuel maxim that “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste”, here are some bold ideas that would probably never fly or even be seriously considered in normal times in Canada about using IP and IP policy to help fix up the economy. Some of these would require legislation or regulations. Some would not and would only require sufficient leadership, will and skill at the political level – which are not necessarily any easier to come by [more...]

From Michael Geist:

I’ll be on a panel this afternoon about science, web, collaboration, and I’m not sure what else, organized by Steven Mansour:

On Saturday, November 29th, please join us for an informal discussion panel bringing together Scientists, Technologists and Designers to weigh in about the current and future influence of each of these disciplines on one another. The Mother-Child Health International Research Network, The World Association of Young Scientists and the Canadian Centre for Architecture invite you to a public conversation on collaboration between these three critically important – and increasingly interdependent – fields of knowledge.

This session will be structured around a series of questions posed to our guest panelists, followed by a discussion and open exchange with the audience.

Saturday November 29th, 2008, from 2:30pm until 4:00pm
Canadian Centre for Architecture: 1920 rue Baile, Montréal, Québec – Shaughnessy House.
Refreshments will be provided.
[more...]

(By the way, it’s almost 2008, and the CCA does not have a URL for an event they are hosting.)

I was asked to join a panel discussion at Montreal StartUpCamp3 about lessons learned in pitching successfully for financing. Seb Provencher of Praized and John Stokes of MSU (our financiers) were my partners in crime on the stage.

My advice is:

• Do some practice pitches to a small group of the smartest friends you can gather
• Be sure about the core of your product, and be excited about it
• Don’t sell to yourself, sell to the funders

I made a bit of a hash of my presentation, though it turned out fine (I wasn’t really pitching) … violating another important rule:

• be prepared

The other attendees/presenters included:

• Smarthippo
• DokDok
• Tiamat Trading
• Arkalumen
• Austin of Akoha

One in a while I get together with some friends and make home made sausage. An important phase in the process is what we like to call the “Meat Sink.”

Here is a pic of the links. And the drying sausages.

UPDATE: The meat sink is the key to all good start-up pitches.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article suggesting academics should blog, and it generated some intense debate and discussion, both on Huffington Post, and on my own weblog. I had nine points, which you can read, but the first two points were, er, indelicate critiques of academic writing, born of some recent encounters with the form. I attacked both the quality of prose and the tenuousness of some ideas, and my generalizations might have been a wee bit on the sweeping side, though the scalpel-wielding semanticist in me thinks I might have carved out a little escape route. No matter: I got lambasted from several directions, and deserved a good lot of the heckles.

After much back and forth, I retreated somewhat on both counts, though I won’t give up the fight entirely. I still think there is a certain strain of flabby academic writing that serves mainly to fill out pages in journal articles, and I believe that strain of writing is pernicious. I also think there is something about the academic method that makes it hard to kill off bad ideas. But this post is not meant to pick more quarrels, but rather to make a more convincing case about why academics should blog.

So, with much thanks to those who called me out (especially academics Alexandre, and Huffpo commenter endoxos), and forced me to realign my positions, let me try that again. Here are some revised reasons I think that academics should blog.

1. Academia Is Important
Academia should be a vanguard of our understanding of the world. It’s a place where people have the time and space to think about the shape of the world, the source of some of the ideas that transform us. If something is important it should be more visible to the world. Blogging is a simple platform to make important ideas more visible to the world.

2. Blogging Releases the Constraints
Academic writing is hamstrung by the conventions of the academic method. Caution, references, sources. That all makes sense in the context of academia, where each bit of knowledge must be made to fit snugly within the existing ecosystem of Knowledge. But this kind of writing ties your hands, you can’t write on hunches, or outside your area of expertise, without doing your back-up work. Blogging has none of these constraints, and can be used however you wish to use it. You are free to make sweeping generalizations and explore ideas beyond your usual area of study. You are free to write what you like, which is both liberating, and can also help you sketch out and explore ideas in ways you can’t in your professional writing. You can also write about your cats if you feel like it.

3. Important Ideas Should Circulate Outside Academia
The work academics do should be made more open and accessible to the world at large. Academics should blog in the same way that academics should give public lectures, write articles in popular press, and give interviews on the radio and television. If you believe your ideas are important, then you should consider more ways of making them accessible (at the very least available) to the world at large.

4. Writing for the Public Will Help Clarify Ideas
In my last article, I was accused of being unfair or naive or wrong about the character of academic writing. Let me rephrase (or change) what I mean: writing for the general public, even for a selected group of the general public, is different than writing for academia. A premium is placed on clarity, where in academic writing the premium is on robustness of argument. So by writing for a public audience, you might be forced to clarify the language of your ideas, which, I would argue, could be a useful way to clarify the ideas themselves.

5. Cross-Pollination of Ideas Is Good
Ideas from academia should circulate more freely in the population at large. When ideas circulate more freely, there is more interaction among them, more challenges, more negotiation among positions. This strengthens the value of ideas. Opening up ideas to a public outside academia will mean that a wider range of ideas from a wider range of disciplines and points-of-view interact, and individual academics, academia, and society as a whole should benefit.

6. Blogging Will Help You Engage with Students
There was a recent article about the web and juries in the UK. Young jurors, the inquiry suggested, were not used to listening to people talk for long periods of time: their first instinct is to check facts on the web. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but your students (the serious ones, anyway) will appreciate having an online space where they can find you, and read more about your ideas.

7. Public Interest Will Be Helpful for Your Career
Or at least, public interest will be helpful to the public. Again, assuming that your ideas are interesting and valuable, don’t you want more people to have access to them? If so, then blogging is a good way to let your thinking spread to the world. Note that you could publishing sketches, thoughts, or full articles, depending on what your preference is. And, assuming you have many people from the outside world, well, is that going to hurt your career?

8. Do You Want People to Know about Your Ideas?
See above. This is the most fundamental reason I think academics should blog: your ideas are important, and more people should be able to see them, read them, hear about them, criticize them, discuss them, not just within academia, but in the wider world.

Remember when you thought $700 Billion was a lot of money for the US government to chip in to the economy? Now multiply by 10. From Bloomberg:

The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $2.8 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the only plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis. [more...]

[via Mike Cane]

What happens if (or, rather, when) China decides to stop financing US debt to create export demand for its manufactured goods, and instead starts to spend that money on creating consumer demand in China?

I wrote to the STM, about their new Opus Card:

Hello,
Why can I only put 6 rides/tickets at a time onto my OPUS card? I don’t want a weekly or monthly card, but I want to load up with many rides, not just 6. This does not make any sense at all. Are you planning to change this? Because if not, you will have very many very unhappy clients.
Thanks …

They responded:

Hello,

It is currently possible to load up to two six-ticket booklets on an Opus card. However, should you have 7 tickets left on your card, it would not be possible to load another booklet, as the total would be 13 instead of 12 tickets.
These limits have been set mostly to avoid mistakes during the new system’s deployment. It is planned that these limits will eventually be reconsidered.

A new STM product will however be available as of January 2009: the ten-ticket booklet to be loaded on an Opus card.

Your comment will be forwarded to the authorities in charge to be taken into account.

Thank you and have a nice day,

QQF??

Avoid mistakes? Like: oh, I am too stupid to know how many tickets I want? … Maybe a screen that says: “How many tickets do you want? 6, 12, 24, 48, etc…” Or: “How much money would you like to add to your card? $5, $10, $25, $50?”

Goddammit. Smart card, my ass.

Send your emails to: SAC.Commentaires AT stm.info

I had a great evening with Aaron while I was in San Francisco, talking books, reading, maps, photos, geo, politics, CBC, beer, Selagh Rogers, Yahoo, Mexican food, hand-waving, museums, and all sorts of other things. I had just got my iPod Touch a couple of days before, but after trying to rely on inferior technology to help me get around, I went back to my old navigation standard: drawing a map of the parts of the city I planned to be in.

Aaron took a photo:

David Simon is a former journalist who quit his job because he could no longer do it the way he wanted to do it: the companies that run papers these days don’t want their journalists to ask the most important question out of the famous five Ws + H (who what where when why how) … That is: Why? … It’s the tough one, that takes time and attention and doggedness, and it just doesn’t seem to work well with the “bottom line” (which, for those counting, is looking pretty grim).

Eventually Simon, along with a former cop, and former teacher, created the TV show the Wire,

In this talk at Berkeley, he explains why he is not (or maybe is) the most angry man in television, how the decline of journalism is paired with our disfunctional democracy, how a barge, not a hurricane, caused the floods in New Orleans, lies, damn lies and statistics, systematic corruption, and how we should all pick something to give a shit about and, absurd or not, fight for it.

Here is the video. Watch it. It’s the most compelling bit of web content I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Peter Schiff gets it right in 2006/07 about the US economy, and gets howled off the stage by the other “experts.” What’s funny is how sensible his arguments are (there is no real wealth in the US, no production, no savings; just foreign & consumer debt), and how they are totally dismissed by the rest of the panelists.

(Mind you he got his gold call wrong).

[via Derek Sivers]

In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae.

Read by Gord, Kristen, Kara, Mike, Randomdad, Mark, and me, for LibriVox. I believe it was our first “weekly poem,” and was Mike’s idea. These were all recorded around November 11, 2005.

I think this guy was on to something, when he wrote this in 1980:

In the information society (1) information, the axis of socio-economic development, will be produced by the information utility … a computer-based public infrastructure … (2) self-production of information by users will increase; information will accumulate, (3) this accumulated information will expand through synergetic production and shared utilization and (4) the economy will change structurally from an exchange economy to a synergetic economy …

The Information Society: As Post-industrial Society, Masuda, Yoneji; World Future Society

Find in a library

Young jurors want to check this stuff out on the web, not listen to a bunch of people yammer on, says the Telegraph:

In a speech, Lord Judge of Draycote, the Lord Chief Justice, said it might be better to present information for young jurors on screens because that is how they were used to digesting information.

He said: “Most are technologically proficient. Many get much information from the internet. They consult and refer to it. They are not listening. They are reading. “One potential problem is whether, learning as they do in this way, they will be accustomed, as we were, to listening for prolonged periods.

“Even if they have the ability to endure hours and days of sitting listening, how long would it be before some ask for the information on which they have to make their decision to be provided in forms which adapt to modern technology? [more...]

Knitted animation, a music video of the song Les peaux de lièvres, from Montreal band Tricot Machine… wow:

[via Knitguy]

Interesting article in the WSJ, about that scrappy entrepreneur, Barack Obama:

If Barack Obama ran for president by calling for a heavier hand of government, he also won by running one of the most entrepreneurial campaigns in history.

Will he now grasp the lesson his campaign offers as he crafts policies aimed at reigniting the national economy? Amid a recession, two wars, and a global financial crisis, will he come to see that unleashing the entrepreneur is the best way to raise the revenue he needs for his lofty priorities?

Like every entrepreneur, Mr. Obama’s rise was improbable. An unusually-named, African-American first-term senator defeated two of the most powerful incumbent political brands, the Clintons and John McCain. Like many upstarts, he won by changing the rules of the game.

Mr. Obama, following FDR’s mastery of radio and JFK’s success on TV, is the first candidate to fully exploit the Web. The community organizer seemed to realize that new social networking and video technologies were perfect for politics. It didn’t hurt that Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes worked for the campaign. “What ultimately transformed the presidential race,” Joshua Green of The Atlantic wrote in June, “was not the money that poured in from Silicon Valley but the technology and the ethos.”

The results of Mr. Obama’s decentralized Web effort were staggering: 8,000 Web-based affinity groups, 50,000 local events, 1.5 million Web volunteers, and 3.1 million donors who contributed almost $700 million. Republicans, Charlie Cook reported on Nov. 3, believe their large but impersonal centralized databases could not match the tacit knowledge, individual initiative and agility of Mr. Obama’s diffuse social networks.

Such creativity could bubble up because Mr. Obama was stable at the top. Not just anyone could recruit an army of volunteers and let them run free, establishing their own networks, offices and events. Because Mr. McCain lurched from one message and tactic to the next with dramatic frequency, his supporters froze. They spent more time defending or deciphering his shifting policies and tactics than they did organizing and persuading. Mr. Obama’s even temper and relentlessly consistent message, on the other hand, encouraged supporters to take risks without the worry of being blindsided.[more...]

The article goes on to argue for laissez-faire economic policies and deregulation, much of which I don’t agree with. Experience at LibriVox tells me that what leads to success is a clear objective, backed up with carefully designed regulation that clarifies what people can/can’t do, and *then* the widest amount of freedom possible, within set constraints. Obviously LibriVox ain’t the United States, but unleashing individual creativity is still about balancing openness with clear boundaries, and that’s the challenge Obama has, writ not just large, but world-wide.

One part of the recent economic picture has been the too-cheap credit that has kept us all feeling really rich for the past decade. In the most famous story about this problem, cheap credit meant many people bought houses they couldn’t afford, and we all know what happened there. When the bad mortgage market collapsed – as it had to do, since it was built on fantasy demand – the housing market went with it, wiping out apparent wealth people had invested in their homes. Initially people here talked as if it was a problem specific to the USA, and that the Canadian real estate market and economy would be fine, since our banking and real estate sectors are significantly more conservative. The fundamentals of the Canadian economy were fine (whenever you hear that, you can assume the opposite).

The problem is that while our banking and mortgage systems might have been in better shape, the underlying demand for real estate is driven by the health of the overall economy. 30% of our GDP is generated by direct exports (not counting the significant spinoff economic activity that comes with those exports). 81% of our exports go to the ravenous USA. So, with a little bit of math you can conclude that if the US stops buying, Canada’s economy is up the creak.

And the problem is that the “cheap credit” problem was hardly confined to the real estate market. It’s in every bit of the economy. Credit was sloshing around everywhere, and that means spending everywhere: corporate mergers and acquisitions, new business, expansions, small business loans and student loans, car financing, luxury good purchases, lots of jobs for lawyers, accountants, and every kind of supplier to the big and little companies you can imagine, including web designers. Credit sloshing means we all feel rich, since there’s lots of cheap money to invest in new projects, lots of money and work to spread around.

But starting with the mortgage crisis, credit started drying up. All of a sudden the the rosy prospects for the whole economy contracted greatly. With credit expected to be no longer cheap, all the big spending ways of companies and governments and individuals, and all the VC money starts to tighten.

Imagine you have a platinum card, $100,000, and you spend accordingly, assuming you’ll be able to pay it off later. Then all of a sudden your card gets cut to a $1,000 limit. You’re going to spend less money: fewer trips, fewer gold necklaces, fewer iPhones. And each company that used to benefit from your largesse will feel the pinch too.

That’s why the stock markets have plunged. Because as each company’s credit has dried up, they are likely to buy less (services, materials etc). And since each company is likely to buy less, each supplier sees drops in their orders across the board. So everything is going down down down.

Since the stock market has long been a proxy for “health of the economy,” at least in the media, a shudder of terror went through just about everyone as the Dow, Footsie and TSX (and the rest of them) started to tank. But in some sense I get the feeling that people still think this is an abstract problem, with impacts on their RRSP statements, mutual fund holdings and stock portfolios, robbing them of significant paper wealth, but not quite linked to the day to day of life.

Of course it is: the result will be job losses across the board.

And then there is another problem: China.

While cheap credit was one reason we’ve all felt so rich the last decade or so, the other part of the equation is China’s manufacturing sector. Ever notice how cheap things are these days? You look at an item, say a BarBQ at Costco, and you just can’t figure out how something with so many components, materials, weighing tens of kilos, could have been assembled, built and shipped to you for such a low price. It often doesn’t make any sense, but we haven’t really bothered to care about that, we’ve just happily bought and bought more.

I worked for an environmental tech R&D company for a while, and one of our main products was a power inverter for alternative energy sources. A major part of the inverter was printed circuit boards. To get prototypes built here in Canada cost about $350 a piece, and took several weeks. To get the same thing from China too several days, including shipping, and cost $35 a piece.

That’s 10% of the Canadian price, and while I’m sure workers are paid poorly in China, I had trouble squaring such a price difference.

And the problem is that our whole economy is built on Chinese imports – of consumer goods sure, but just about everything now has Chinese components somewhere or other, especially anything in the hightech sector.

So if there is a problem in Chinese pricing, and if there is a real readjustment, then we’re all going to face the consequences. Here’s what Avner Mandelman has to say in today’s Globe:

You see, China, like Nortel and Japan and Soviet Russia, has been selling most things below true cost – which is the direct cost of production plus the cost of capital – and thus lost money on much of what it produced, and so destroyed much of its capital. A company that does so must eventually lay off workers and go bust. China, in my opinion, now faces similar risks, which Mr. Wen finally admitted.

Why does China sell below true cost? Because it is a dictatorship that wants to keep its restive people employed, and so, like (democratic) Japan before it, it keeps throwing good savings at bogus products. I say bogus because if you sell below true cost you create fictitious demand that otherwise wouldn’t be there had the product been priced realistically. Thus the large factory you built to satisfy the goosed-up demand cannot be rebuilt once it wears out because you didn’t include depreciation in the product’s price.

What this means is that we’ve been rich based on two simultaneous fantasies: cheap credit and cheap goods from China. But cheap credit eventually dries up, and the cheap goods from China have essentially been sold at below cost, meaning China’s whole economy could come tumbling down.

It’s hard to figure out how all of this will play out. After all, China owns much of the US’s debt, and China can only keep it’s economy going if the US keeps buying. So everyone has an interest in keeping the fantasy going, but the laws of physics, I fear, are going to get in the way eventually.

All that to say, things might be much worse than we think they are. I hope not.

Wi-fi structures and people shapes, from Dan Hill:

One of the ideas I’ve been exploring relates to how urban industry – in the widest sense of the word – in the knowledge economy is often invisible, at least immediately and in situ. Whereas urban industry would once have produced thick plumes of smoke or deafening sheets of sound, today’s information-rich environments – like the State Library of Queensland, or a contemporary office – are places of still, quiet production, with few sensory side-effects. We see people everywhere, faces lit by their open laptops, yet no evidence of their production. They could be using Facebook, Photoshop, Excel or Processing. [more...]

Jon Udell on the NYTimes:

The newspaper industry has surely earned this kind of scathing criticism. And it may well fail to capitalize on the amazing opportunities for self-reinvention afforded by the Internet. But the Times is attracting an all-star team of information architects, interactive graphics designers, programmers, and media producers. And according to Gabriel Dance and Shan Carter, these folks are increasingly collaborating with reporters to marshall complex information in ways that make the newspaper’s stories deeper and more open to independent analysis and interpretation.

So I’ll say it differently: When the lights go on at the New York Times, our work can start. [more...]

My friend Oana Avasilichioaei recently released her latest book of poetry, feria: a poempark (amazon link):

Oana Avasilichioaei deftly dismantles language and landscape in a whirling collection of poetry. feria is a poetic frolic in Vancouver’s Hastings Park eluding boundaries of landscape, time and narrative. Avasilichioaei writes and rewrites over this image, interpreting its evolving layers. Park and book coincide, and the author finds herself asking what is natural, what is language, and whose voices are we listening to. This is a book that pulls the reader into a wild ride, leaving you breathless but exilirated by the end.

Part of the project included shooting a beautiful film, which was done by another friend of mine, Theirry Collins:

This is when I got sold on Obama, his June 2006 podcast about net neutrality. Have a listen. Speak my language? Yeah:

The topic today is net neutrality. The internet today is an open platform where the demand for websites and services dictates success. You’ve got barriers to entry that are low and equal for all comers. And it’s because the internet is a neutral platform that I can put on this podcast and transmit it over the internet without having to go through some corporate media middleman. I can say what I want without censorship. I don’t have to pay a special charge. But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the internet as we know it. They say they want to create high-speed lanes on the internet and strike exclusive contractual arrangements with internet content-providers for access to those high-speed lanes. Those of us who can’t pony up the cash for these high-speed connections will be relegated to the slow lanes. [more...] [mp3]

I don’t know how Obama’s presidency is going to go, and I don’t hold my breath for any miracles. Any president of the USA has one hell of a challenge on his (or her) hands, and the O-man has inherited a bigger mess than anyone can clean up.

But, man if he wanted to make me happy, he could not have started in a place nearer to my heart than his Tech/Science platform, released today. First para:

The Problem: We need to connect citizens with each other to engage them more fully and directly in solving the problems that face us. We must use all available technologies and methods to open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency to change the way business is conducted in Washington and giving Americans the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision-making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago.

A datalibrists dream.

Whether Obama can do what he plans or not, I don’t know. He may be great or he may be terrible: we’ll find out. But I am happy that on day 2, I feel, frankly, more excited by the concrete vision described here than in all the talk of hope and renewal that had me cheering with the rest over the past few months.

See the rest of the platform here.

Let’s hope whoever wins the looming Quebec election has such vision.

O’Reilly TOC blog has an interview with … me! …. about LibriVox:

LibriVox is a volunteer effort with a big goal: record audiobook editions for every title in the public domain. In the following Q&A, LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire discusses the project’s beginnings, the organic development of the LibriVox community, and the distinctions (or lack thereof) between “professional” and “amateur” efforts. [more...]

I’ve been imagining this headline for a few years now.

[Also published at Huffpo]

I just came into possession of an iPod Touch, which is more or less the iPhone without the phone part (my friend Matt got an iPhone, so I inherited his Touch). I got the little gadget the night before a trip to San Francisco, and I loaded it up with audiobooks from LibriVox, podcasts from earideas, TEDTalks videos, and a host of public domain texts from Gutenberg to keep me busy during the plane ride.

It’s a beautiful little machine, which we expect from Apple. As an iPod it’s as good as you’d like — with the nice addition, for me, of video. But the biggest shock for me was how pleasing it was to read novels on the thing. I was surprised by how much I liked the elegant ereader application, Stanza. I read Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and I started reading – and continue to read – Tolstoy’s War & Peace. I even chose a number of times to read on my iPod in bed, instead of the paperback non-fiction & hardback fiction books I had brought along. War & Peace is, actually, a dream to read on the iPod. (Who would have thought?).

Reading digital text on a small handheld device is nothing like reading text on a computer (desktop or laptop). A mobile device is much more comfortable, for plenty of reasons. You can lounge and arrange yourself as you like; you can whip the device out while standing in line of passport control, and in the most cramped of subways (always annoying trying to hold a paperback open in a sardine-crowd). There’s an almost unlimited number of books you can pack into it. And the chunk of text displayed seems about exactly right for my own internet-frayed attention span, with the pleasant effect that I am propelled forward from page to page.

I tried an experiment too, listening to the LibriVox version of War and Peace while reading along, which was a relaxing immersive experience on the plane (though after a while, the slow speed of the audio compared with my reading became too distracting). But this could be a wonderful tool for those learning to read, language students, those with learning disabilities, and auditory learners reading dense, difficult texts, Kant for instance.

The iPhone and nifty apps like Stanza have convinced me that there is a real future in ebooks, one that I’ve always thought was more theoretical than actual. I’m a book person, paper and print. I love the smell, feel, texture and experience of reading a book. I always will, and I don’t think that ereaders will ever replace books for me. Ebooks have too many drawbacks.

The also have plenty of advantages, and now that I know I actually enjoy reading on an iPod, I’m pretty sure that ebooks on handheld mobile devices will continue to be one part of my reading habits.

Teleread reports that Apple is cutting iPhone production, and that will have negative impacts on the uptake of ebooks. They’re probably right, but for me — a former skeptic — the compelling case for ebooks has been made. I like ‘em.

Whether it’s the iPhone in the next year or so, or something else in five years, I’m sold.

I’m no conservative, but I’ve long said that the people who should be most angry with Bush & Co. (or, better, who are most responsible for Bush & Co.) are the real conservatives in America. They have allowed this president, his administration, and the people behind him to undermine true conservatism in the name of power. It might have been a decent deal while Bush ruled the White House, but the long-term implications for the movement could well be devastating. We’ll see. Anyway:

Last Monday, former Bush White House aide Peter Wehner made a startling statement in an op-ed in The Washington Post. He said that while “the GOP is in bad shape, conservatism is not.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Conservatism has been badly damaged by Wehner’s former bosses, President Bush and Karl Rove, and others who never understood our movement, who only saw it as a tool to serve the political needs of this administration, never as a framework for governance.

From steel tariffs to prescription drug benefits, to the massive expansion of the police powers of the national government, to bloated transportation and energy bills, to federal mandates to the states on education, to nation-building, Reaganism was not only thrown under a bus by this administration, it also repeatedly ran back and forth over it.

The work of millions of conservatives going back to the 1940s has been sullied and misshapen into something unrecognizable, and Wehner writes as if he was simply an innocent bystander, rather than an active participant in its demise.. [more...]

I was at the annual meeting of the Open Content Alliance (hosted by the Internet Archive) when news of the big settlement between Google and Authors over use of out-of-print and orphan works in Google’s Book Search.

The Open Content Alliance is an open, public domain version of Google’s book scanning endeavour, which is dedicated rather to making a commercial tool in the service of Google.

So the OCA was pretty worked up about the agreement and what it would mean. I’ve not yet processed the agreement and it’s implications (generally I am skeptical that it is the best outcome for the public in general, unless alternate sources of scanned books remain viable). So I was happy to see that Harvard announced it would not join Google’s efforts, for the right reasons. According to Harvard University Library Director Robert Darnton:

“As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher education community and by patrons of public libraries.” [more...]

[via Teleread]

The most fascinating bit of audio I’ve heard in a long while, The secret life of bacteria – small, smart and thoughtful, from Australian Radio National:

We can´t survive without them — and we´ve long underestimated their prowess. Controversially, bacteria could even have cognitive talents that rival our own. Predatory behaviour, cooperation, memory — Jules Verne eat your heart out — Natasha Mitchell takes you on a strange adventure into the secret world of microbial mentality.

>Listen here.

What a wonderful, elegant little book, by James Wood:

How Fiction Works, James Wood; Farrar, Straus And Giroux

Find in a library

I have a new article up at Huffpo, On Books & Ebooks:

Among book lovers, there continues to be an prevalent negative feeling about electronic books, or ebooks. The reaction, one I myself have experienced, goes something like this: I enjoy reading books, I enjoy the feel and the tactile feedback, touch, smell, look, books can be marked up and carried around, they never run out of batteries, I can keep them on my bookshelf, they look great, and they are permanent; they are easier on the eyes than screens, and dammit, I just love them. I do not want to read a book in an electronic format. And so I don’t think ebooks will succeed, no matter what Oprah says about the Amazon Kindle.

While I’m sympathetic with that reaction (indeed I feel the same way about paper & ink books), it entirely misses the point of ebooks. Ebooks are not in opposition to print & paper books; they are a parallel tool to get the content contained in a book [more...]

Testing John Miedema’s Open Book plugin, which helps blogs publish data from the great OpenLibrary site (sorta an open IMDB for books, a project of the Internet Archive).

Here is the test: One of my favourite books is:

Independent People: An Epic, Halldór Laxness; Vintage International

Find in a library

It works. Nice.

I’m at the annual conference of the Open Content Alliance, hosted by the Internet Archive. They’re just launching their open source Flip Book. Very nice, and you can embed it in your site, to whit:

Pretty neat, eh?

I’m taking a Media Theory course at Concordia in their Media Studies MA program, which involves a fair bit of reading. I’ve come to the conclusion that all academics should blog. Here’s why:

1. You need to improve your writing
I have never read such dismally bad writing as that which is prevalent in academia. Not all of it is terrible, but the stuff that is bad is just atrocious. It’s wordy, flabby, repetitive, and filled with jargony mumbo-jumbo. I realize that jargon is the very stuff that you work with and to the extent that you need your topic-specific jargon to make a point, then you should use it. But there is a whole other class of general academic mumbo-jumbo that you need to cut out of your writing right now. Go read Orwell’s rules, and then Strunk and White, and then we can talk about it again. Hint: utilize=use, militate=block, empower=mumbojumbo. You need lots of practice writing clear, good prose and saying what you mean. Blogging will help you get that practice.

2. Some of your ideas are dumb
The sooner you get called out on bad ideas, the better. Blogging has an almost-immediate feedback loop, and if you write a discipline-specific blog, then your colleagues around the world will read it (if they don’t then you are doing something wrong). That means that when you have a dumb idea, you should hear about it quickly, and you can then reconsider. When you have a good idea, you’ll hear about it; when you have an incomplete idea, and some others chip in with suggestions, you’ll get a better-formed idea. Etcetera.

3. The point of academia is to expand knowledge
If you believe that the reason academics publish is to expand knowledge, then expanding it beyond the few tens or hundreds of your colleagues that read the obscure journals you publish in should be a good thing. Your ideas should matter (if they don’t you should try to come up with some better ideas). If they matter then more people should know about them, and right now almost all your ideas are locked up inside the walls of journals, academic conferences, and university quadrangles. Set them free, and the good ideas will spread, be built on by others, and knowledge as a whole will benefit.

4. Blogging expands your readership
Cross-polination of ideas makes for a more healthy intellectual ecosystem, and blogging means that anyone, not just those in your discipline, will be likely to read your stuff. This includes other academics, as well as the rest of us (politicians, policy developers, artists, engineers, designers, writers, thinkers, kids, parents, and on and on). Anyone might have an interest in your work, or nuanced ideas about how it might be improved, or indeed thoughts on how your thoughts might improve their own thinking on a particular (perhaps nominally-unrelated) topic. More readers, from a more varied background, means your ideas will have a bigger impact.

5. Blogging protects and promotes your ideas
By blogging a new idea, you put your stakes in the (cyber)ground, with dates and readership to attest to your claim. When you blog, you’ve published, meaning people know you have published, and further meaning that a much wider audience – anyone with an Internet connection – can get access to your ideas. Which leads to the next point.

6. Blogging is Reputation
In blogging links are currency: your reputation is made by who links to you and how often. It’s a built in, and more-or-less democratic system of reputation as defined by interest. By having your ideas online, the value of your ideas (as reflected by who is interested in them) becomes immediately apparent. The academic/journal system works in similar ways, with Journal references as the currency. So you should be right at home.

7. Linking is better than footnotes
Linking is much better than a footnote. It allows your readers to visit your source material immediately (assuming it too is online), so again is likely to expand knowledge by giving readers direct access to the ideas that underpin your ideas.

8. Journals and blogs can (and should) coexist
Blogs and (online) newspapers exist in a symbiotic relationship: bloggers sift through and refer to newspapers, sending traffic to them. Newspapers now blog, and bloggers write newspaper articles. There is a general sense that blogging can be a bit more free-form, a bit less polished. While newspaper articles are more rigourous and final. Something similar should happen with blogs and journals. If academics blog, they can evolve and develop a series of ideas. When the ideas are clearer and polished, they can move on to be journal articles. But let’s get those journals online and free as well. Speaking of which:

9. What have journals done for you lately?
Journals define your reputation, and don’t pay anything. That’s like blogging. They are exorbitantly expensive, have abusive and restrictive copyright terms, and are not available online to the general public. You can’t link to them, and often you can’t find them. That’s unlike blogging. Journals should all be open access and free online (as newspapers have come to be), and you should tell them that, and choose to publish in open access journals whenever you can. It’s good for knowledge, and you are in the knowledge business. You should support whatever is good for knowledge.

Dylan Wittkower, LibriVox’s resident philosopher and reader of such gems as Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism, and JS Mill’s Untilitarianism, has edited a new academic/popular text, The iPod and Philosophy.

I have a blurb on the back of the book, getting the pole position ahead of Clay Shriky (!).

I’m doing a Master’s in Concordia Media Studies program, or at least part of a Master’s (taking just one class at the moment). Below is a paper I just wrote for the Media Theory class I am taking (with Charles Acland). After doing much writing in the past years – blogging, novel writing, article-making, it was strange to have an actual assignment with rules. This is a “synthesis paper” that is supposed to analyze three papers, and make them “speak to each other. ” What came out was something a bit more polemic, and I had some trouble shoehorning in ideas from one paper in particular. Anyway, here it is. For posterity. Comments welcome.

The serious contenders for organizational models of Western societies have more or less fallen away since 1989 leaving some form of liberal democracy as the only viable option for now. The pitched battles of the 20th Century between democracy and the big isms (fascisim and communism), have shifted somewhat onto home turf, with the role of the public sphere itself questioned, and in many cases diminished. At the same time there has been a countermovement protecting and growing the public sphere, in particular on the web where production and distribution of independent media – from blogs to music to film to encyclopedia – has fractured the dominance of some of the entrenched powers that control the public sphere.

At heart this is an ideological struggle, about the value of the public sphere as a legitimate tool or platform for the creation of societal good. On the one hand, there are what Nancy Fraser calls “civic-republicans,” dedicated to debating together in the service of the common good of society; on the other, “liberal-individualists,” who think that the common good is best achieved by reducing (government, public) interference with the choices of individuals (Fraser, 20).

Particularly in the past decade we’ve the liberal-individualists ascending. There has been significant erosion of the public, through shifting of power, responsibility, and even respect from what once was called “public” into the other spheres. The examples are numerous especially in the United States, where the battles have been most pronounced: the corporate encroached on public defense in the form of military contractors; the political ate into public lawmaking and regulation with politicization in the US Department of Justice, and scientific independence at the Environmental Protection Agency, and other public institutions; “free-markets,” private actors and corporate self-regulation were chosen over public oversight in the lead-up to the economic meltdown of 2008; and the role of “community organizers” was dismissed as unserious at this year’s Republican National Convention. In all these cases, an argument has been made that private/corporate/political actors are “better” at producing societal good than are the quasi-governmental agents of public sphere. (Whether this is a true ideological position, or a cynical manipulation for benefit of the few is beside the point – in the public debate on the question, a large percentage prefer private/corporate to public).

While we’ve seen this kind of questioning of the value of the public, there has been another battle emerging in the true Habermasian public sphere of discussion and ideas, in the form of regulations surrounding the Internet, particularly on copyright and net neutrality, two fundamental principles that have seen the flourishing of a public sphere on the web. On both counts, there is a powerful movement seeking to cordon off the public space of the web – mainly for commercial reasons. Such actions may result in radical alteration of the public sphere of the web: a reduction in the ability of all members of society to equally access the idea distribution mechanisms of the Internet; and the locking down of ideas and information through draconian copyright laws.
We have seen many segments of the public sphere under attack – both the official public, tasked with “enforcing the public good,” and the public idea sphere itself, the space where discussions and deliberation about the common good are supposed to happen. The attack comes from many different angles. One ideological underpinning, championed by free-marketeers, deregulators and the libertarian-leaning on the right of the spectrum, is the belief that the “public good” is best served by self-interested individuals, and not by a concerted effort of “society” (read: “government”) to engineer public good on the public’s behalf.

So given the tenuousness of the public sphere today, it’s worth asking a few questions: Is the public sphere still important? If so, why? And if so, what should we do about it?

By 1962, Jurgen Habermas was already describing the death of the idealized public sphere of the liberal era (18th and 19th Century), a time when members of the (bourgeois) public conversed and wrote and debated about the good of society. Indeed, as the bourgeois public gained power, control of the public sphere meant control of the mechanisms of democracy. The result was transformation of the traditional delineations of public, private, corporate, and political. The public gained new responsibilities (through governmental and private associations) for areas previously the responsibility of families: unemployment insurance, health insurance, retirement plans, and the other social mechanisms of the (public) welfare state. As these new public institutions expanded into the private, however, they established themselves “above the public whose interest they once were” (Habermas, 176). The role of the private family was eroded: it was no longer a central economic unit, but rather a consuming unit; and further the family disengaged completely from the “social labour context,” with the former public role of the family disappearing entirely (Habermas, 154).

At the same time the public sphere of ideas was invaded by the consumerist media. For Habermas this was the most significant shift, as the space for debate and deliberation about public good was turned over from the true public, to a “pseudo-public, or sham-private” world of cultural consumption (Habermas, 160).

The resulting society, more striking now in 2008 than it was in 1962, was one where decision-making “takes place directly between the private bureaucracies, special- interest associations, parties, and public administration. The public as such is included only sporadically in this circuit of power, and even then it is brought in only to contribute to its acclamation.” (Habermas, 176). Namely: in the election process, some portion of society gives a tepid benediction to a government that implements actual policies with little or no input from society itself.

The reasons for this state of affairs is fairly clear: in a democratic society, access to power is delivered through the vote, and the process of voter decision-making happens largely in the public sphere, where the options, choices, flaws and advantages of various candidates and policies are (supposedly) debated. So control of the public sphere is essential for access to power in general. Dominant forces will always vie for dominant control, and in the case of democracy, control is found by dominating the public sphere through whatever means necessary: through special interest groups, lobby groups, PR firms, media outlets, religious institutions, think tanks, as well as the more official tools of public infrastructure: schools, economic policies, environmental regulations etc.

The dominant group of the twentieth century were the spiritual descendents of the “bourgeoisie,” and they have succeeded in defining debate and discussion in the public sphere according to their interests. The public sphere, by virtue of the power of dominant groups, necessarily has become less about “the good of society” and more about “the good of the dominant groups.” Hence, media, public institutions, financial regulation, even armies were turned over, with general approval of this “public sphere,” to a smaller subset of the dominant group, with the inevitable concentration of power and wealth as more of both were grabbed by the dominant (whose dominant status inevitably leads to greater power). Most recently, the liberal-individualist faction of the dominant group has succeeded in transferring vast amounts of public power and wealth into corporate and private hands.

It seems apparent (to some anyway) that the faith in self-interested actors alone to generate the best outcomes for the “public good” have been misplaced, by any number of metrics: bungled Iraq, problematic Katrina, and most devastating, the recent economic melt-down. Still, the question is far from settled in the public at large. The debate about the value of the public sphere still rages, even as the concept of the “public” has regained some currency in the recent strong moves of governments and central banks around the world to inject some public stability into the shaky foundation of the private/corporate financial system, left too long outside public control. The former US Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, a long-time champion of anti-public deregulation, has issued his mea culpa, and to some extent the tides seem to be turning back to the civic-republicans (Andrews).

Into this late 20th Century mix came a new medium which made for a different kind of public sphere from that which had come before: the Internet. The Internet, coupled with technological innovations that have come to be known as Web 2.0, meant that everyone with access to a computer and the web could easily, and essentially at zero cost, distribute ideas, arguments, facts, and opinions not just to a local public, but to the entire world. Habermas’ complaint about the “new media” of the sixties, that it deprived the public “the opportunity to say something and disagree,” had found an answer (Habermas, 171). With the new tools of the web – blog, podcasts, digital video, wikis and the rest – the entire world could in theory not just answer the traditional media, but make their own, and rival the established giants who had dominated the media landscape for the previous half-century at least. The first most striking unseating came at the hands of Wikipedia, the “encylopedia anyone can edit,” that, regardless of opinions of its quality, undoubtedly is the most used encyclopedia in the world right now, probably the most used encyclopedia in the history of the world. Blogs came to challenge journalism, though rather than unseat the mainstream, they’ve served instead as a public counterpoint to the corporate pseudo-public media, holding them to account through rigourous (and often politically opinionated) fact-checking, answering and disagreeing as Habermas would have hoped.

Not just in content creation has the web affected media,; it’s also opened up a range of choice for the general public – which was previously beholden to the editorial decisions of the few big media corporations that controlled a constantly-growing percentage of mainsteam-media producers. Access to media from all around the world, the explosion of independent and previously-unheard media producers on the web, added to the already proliferating array of quasi-public groups, including non-governmental organizations, social activist networks, lobbyists, special interest groups, and countless others now defines our current public sphere.

Whether or not Nancy Fraser’s “plurality of competing publics” is a desirable conception of the public sphere becomes almost beside the point: it’s out of the bottle, and it’s almost impossible to imagine how it might be put back in. Not that there is any desire to do so. Habermas’ polite gentlemen smoking cigars and discussing the “good of society” was an (idealized) anachronism in 1962; in 2008 it’s unimaginable. This is the motley shape of our contemporary public sphere: a sphere where bad US mortgages topple French investment banks; where a central Canadian election issue is how the country will reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to meet international obligations for a treaty signed in Kyoto; where a months-long commission inquiry in Quebec discusses what sorts of things immigrants should or should not do when they come to this province; where a major controversy arises in Toronto when the school board approves a black-only high school; where international trade deals govern our economic health; and where an ever increasing amount of the goods we consume come from elsewhere, while we sell more than ever of our own production onto export markets; where hundreds of millions of individuals fill the web with writing, images, videos and audio every day.

A plurality of publics is what we have, and it’s fair to say that we’ve arrived here for precisely the reason Fraser suggests: a single “public sphere” just won’t cut it. The public sphere is still the seat of political decision-making, flawed though it might be, and so all these groups – from the oil lobbyists to the homeless activists – all these publics or counterpublics or subaltern counterpublics are required to represent themselves in the public sphere if they wish for their needs to be met, or even heard, by the machinery of power.

The Internet gives instant global distribution to any counterpublic which can and cares to use it. In a sense the Internet offers the utopian promise of the liberal democracy’s free marketplace for ideas, where in theory race, class, colour or creed need not have any impact on how one’s ideas are viewed. (The reality is something different: the Western experience is that the overwhelming majority of those producing content for the web are the modern equivalent of the Bourgeoisie; though the explosion of web use in China, and the innovative use of mobile technologies in Africa suggests that Western middleclass dominance of the digital communications may well be fleeting).

In any case the actual and potential importance of the web is significant, as a space where individuals and counterpublics have the ability to create and distribute their own media, define their own issues and their own experience. The web might offer a cure to the malaise identified by Negt & Kludge: that those excluded from power have their experience defined for them by a public sphere (media, school, political parties etc) controlled by those with an interest in continued dominance (Negt & Kludge, 65, 70). In fact, without a true and vibrant counterpublic sphere, the powerless life-experience is “split in two halves,” one half contributing to the consumer culture that supports the dominant; and another half “disqualified” by the dominant systems of society (Negt & Kludge, 76).

The web offers one space where, in theory anyway, counterpublics can and will emerge, with space to define themselves, their own experiences on the own terms, providing a means to avoid Negt & Kludge’s existential bisection.

For this reason, debates about what the web will look like in the future are essential. If maintaining a plurality of competing publics is the best case for participatory democracy, and if participatory democracy is thought to be desirable, then we should be careful about the sorts of policies and regulation we apply to the web and to other distributed forms of media communications as they evolve.

The web was built with two technical/philosophical principles: neutrality, and free flow of information. As it applies to the plurality of counterpublics, net neutrality ensures that all content on the web is treated equally on network – so data/content from TimeWarner is not privileged over data/content from HomelessNation, simply because TimeWarner pays Internet Service Providers a premium. The net neutrality principle is a precondition for a vibrant plurality of counterpublics, yet it is under threat in the United States, and already regularly violated in Canada, for instance when Telus blocked a pro-union website during a labour dispute in 2005 (Geist, December 19, 2005). Similarly, copyright law governs the way ideas and knowledge are created, used, and shared, and recent legislation tabled in Canada, modeled after the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, makes it easier for corporate interests to lock down knowledge, and stop its spread. While the commercial interests of content creators is important, there once was an ideal applied to copyright law that protecting content creators should be balanced against the public good. That principle seems to be abandoned, in the name of inscribing and closing off ideas within corporate ownership, to a far greater degree than any previous copyright law allowed (Lessig, 139).

Regardless of Nancy Fraser’s objections to Habermas, and Negt & Kludge’s worries about the working class metaphorically torn in half by an oppressive public sphere, until another model comes along, most of us will be stuck figuring out how to make some variant of the public sphere in a liberal democracy work better. While they aren’t ideal, the underlying principles of deliberation, debate, and a public sphere, pseudo or not, that generally helps society to work towards something like the “public good” remains the most compelling vision of contemporary democracy.

There is an argument to be made that the best solutions are arrived at by having the greatest number of possible solutions competing for attention. In practice, of course, things don’t work out so smoothly, but the ideal remains embedded in our conception of the advantages of democracy. In order to have the greatest number of possible solutions competing for attention, we need a vibrant public sphere, which is necessarily made up of competing counterpublics. The web has provided – in theory at least – a public sphere of ideas equal to Habermas’ lettered ideal (if cluttered with much else as well); with egalitarian space for all of Nancy Fraser’s subaltern counterpublics (if stratified still along class, racial, geographic and gender lines), and providing in principle a space for the working class to find their true experience (if somewhat shaped and mediated by similar forces that influence the rest of the public sphere). Still, as a marketplace for ideas, the public sphere of the web is a significant improvement on all that has come before (much like Churchill’s democracy, the web might be the worst form of public sphere, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time).

As the forces that have encroached on other realms of the public in the past decades begin circling the web, we should be cautious to help defend and indeed strengthen this unique chance at a wider, more effective realm of ideas, in the name of the public good.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, Edmund (2008). “Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation,” in New York Times, New York: October 24, 2008.

Fraser, Nancy (1993). “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, Bruce Robbins, ed., Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1-32.

Geist, Michael (2005). “Dangers in ISPs’ Bid For New Tolls,” in Toronto Star, Toronto: December 19, 2005.

Habermas, Jurgen (1989:1962). “The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 141-180.

Lessig. Lawrence (2004). Free Culture, New York: The Penguin Press.

Negt, Oskar and Kludge, Alexander (1988:1972). “The Public Sphere and Experience: Selections,” October 46: pp. 60-82.

How did we end up in this mess of an economic meltdown?

The answer is pretty simple: too much cheap credit, and no regulation of derivatives.

Probably more than any other individual, Alan Greenspan is to blame for both. He was Clinton’s and then Bush’s wizzard Fed Reserve Chairman, who waved the wand of reduced interest rates to keep the economic pump primed. Basically, Greenspan was the rich daddy who kept replacing junior’s maxed out credit card with a new one, but never really paid off the old ones.

And hence we are where we are.

Today, a mea culpa. Reports the New York Times:

Facing a firing line of questions from Washington lawmakers, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman once considered the infallible maestro of the financial system, admitted on Thursday that he “made a mistake” in trusting that free markets could regulate themselves without government oversight.

A fervent proponent of deregulation during his 18-year tenure at the Fed’s helm, Mr. Greenspan has faced mounting criticism this year for having refused to consider cracking down on credit derivatives, an unchecked market whose excesses partly led to the current financial crisis.

Although he defended the use of derivatives in general, Mr. Greenspan, who left office in 2006, told members of the House Committee of Government Oversight and Reform that he was “partially” wrong in not having tried to regulate the market for credit-default swaps.

And:

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”
[more...]

It’s easy to be popular when you keep handing out money. Not so easy to be popular once you’ve run out, when you have to admit you bankrupted yourself, and everyone’s been expecting more.

What a wonderful site is BibliOdyssey … :

Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart….eclectic and rare book illustrations derived from many digital repositories, accompanied by some background commentary.

A cornucopia of eye candy for biblionerds. You can buy the book too. Pure visual joy.

Creative Commons launches their 2008 fundraising campaign:

Creative Commons has now officially launched its 2008 fundraising effort – our Build the Commons Campaign. Many skeptics think this is a precarious time to launch our major fundraising initiative; we disagree. This is an opportunity. An opportunity to call our community members to action – to help us make sure that the Commons continues to grow and be supported. These times demand creative problem solving and innovation on a global level – innovation that stems from collaboration and knowledge exchange, both of which are facilitated through access and sharing, and all of which are made possible by the Commons.

[more...]

Donate now!

Paul Boutin has a linkbait article up at Wired, about why you shouldn’t bother blogging. My response is:

Don’t blog to get known, blog to be knowable.

Twitter, identi.ca et al are great, and certainly they’ve eaten into bog posting significantly; the pros have (of course, what did you expect?) moved into what used to be a wild & wooly amateur haven. But that doesn’t remove the importance of blogging for all sorts of significant things, not least of which is a platform to write long reasoned arguments about topics that are relevant to you.

From a more mercenary view though: if I am evaluating someone as a potential business partner, client, service provider, etc, I want to be able to trust them. There are a few ways of trusting someone: knowing them, getting a good recommendation about them, or knowing about them.

When I am researching a person, a company, a product, I want to be able to go somewhere like a blog to poke around, read up on their thinking and opinions, a place where I can get to know them, what interests them, what they are like. No other platform – not facebook, twitter or anywhere else – comes close to a blog for giving me immediate comfort about & trust in someone I know nothing about.

Mitch has some thoughts on the topic too.

I wrote my political platform the other day, with Health being one of my ten planks. One of the problems with Health is that it’s in provincial jurisdiction, so my federal platform would have difficulty really affecting health here in Quebec.

This province has the lowest rate of citizen access to family doctors, which you would think would be a priority problem for the government. It’s not. Having access to family doctors is the best way to keep healthcare costs down, by providing true preventative medicine that catches problems before they spiral out of control. Having health issues dealt with in the Emergency is the most expensive way to run a health system. (I suspect the government has a better economic equation: just letting people die is the cheapest course of action).

Why do we have so few family doctors in Quebec? Here’s one reason:

Medical students from out-of-province are REQUIRED to sign an agreement saying that they will leave Quebec after their residency. If they choose to stay, they must pay a significant fine.

So one of the reasons that we have a lack of doctors is that doctors who have gone to medical school in Quebec, and trained in Quebec medical residency programs, all at taxpayer expense, but come from other provinces are REQUIRED to leave when they are done their training in Quebec.

Make sense?

Last Friday, I went to the premier of the fabulous NFB film, Memoire des Anges, by Luc Bourdon (thanks, Matt). The movie is a love letter to Montreal of the 50s and 60s, and to the brilliant film-making that came out of the NFB at the time. It’s made up entirely of footage from NFB, an impressionistic collage of the city in the past, through the eyes & celluloid of the grand men (and some women) of innovative documentary, Gilles Groulx, Hubert Aquin, Richard Notkin, Suzanne Angel, Claude Jutra, Jacques Godbout, Arthur Lipsett, Denys Arcand, Tom Daly and scores of others.

Bourdon avoids all sentimentality, and instead gives us the faces, hands, feet of the people of the city, the roadways, bricks, snow, sun and chairs that define a place. There’s no narrative to speak of, though clever bits of story are peppered into the whole, often by splicing footage from numerous films, black and white to colour, a decade or two apart, to make something coherent, if fleeting.

For Montrealers, there is the added fun of picking out street corners and buildings treasured, hated, or gone. But the film works on its own as a document of a time gone, rooted in the look and sound of a city, the voices and faces of its inhabitants, and as a piece of art beyond all the bits that went into it. It’s really a marvel, not least for the rich sound of Paul Anka melting the hearts of the girls in the audience.

And with all the talk of cutting arts funding, I can’t help look to the NFB of the past, the creativity and innovation that forged in the smithy of our souls the uncreated conscience of our country. More of that please, less mediocre crap.

So to Federal Arts funding I say: less Pit Pony, and more (old school) NFB.

Brett’s movie Rip: Remix Manifesto will be showing as an ‘avant -premiere’ (?) at Festival Du Nouveau Cinema, this Friday Oct. 17th at 7:30 PM at the Cinema Imperial.

Joseph Stiglitz on the Paulson Bailout Plan, in the Guardian:

Britain showed at least that it still believed in some sort of system of accountability: heads of banks resigned. Nothing like this in the US. Britain understood that it made no sense to pour money into banks and have them pour out money to shareholders. The US only restricted the banks from increasing their dividends. The Treasury has sought to create a picture for the public of toughness, yet behind the scenes it is busy reassuring the banks not to worry, that it’s all part of a show to keep voters and Congress placated. What is clear is that we will not have voting shares. Wall Street will have our money, but we will not have a full say in what should be done with it. A glance at the banks’ recent track record of managing risk gives taxpayers every reason to be concerned [more...]

Ah, art, I love you sometimes:

This is a cover of Kate Bush’s 1978 (!) song, Wuthering Heights, about Emily Bronte’s book.

This past weekend, LibriVox reached an extraordinary milestone: our catalog now contains 365 days worth of free, public domain audiobooks. So, if you started to listen to the catalog today, spending 24-hours-a-day with your headphones, it would take you a full year to listen to our entire current catalog. By which time, you’ll have hours and hours of new audio from LibriVox to entertain and enlighten you. In our three year existence we have produced an extraordinary average of 8-hours-a-day of audiobooks, all read by volunteers, all made available for free. Our catalog is currently at 1,826 works, in 26 different languages.

In the past week alone we’ve released numerous wonderful recordings, including:

• Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott Abbott
• Middlemarch, by George Eliot
• Münchhausen, by Gottfried August Bürger (German)
• Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Volume 1, by Karl Max
• Les Trois mousquetaires, by Alexandre Dumas (French)

Perhaps you’d like to come help us record more?

[Cross-posted at HuffingtonPost & the Book Oven Blog]

The modern publishing business has been in existence since about 1800, but things are not looking so rosy in the ink-stained world. The publishing business is scared: if stagnating book sales and the creeping digital shakeup were not enough, the market meltdown has many tightening their belts while trying to figure out the future.

Still, there is no indication that books are going away, or are any less useful, needed or wanted now than they were 200 years ago. Books are still essential. People still love them.

The book publishing business has a great advantage over other big media industries. For various reasons, publishing is late to the digital party. So it can look to all the many mistakes the music business made in the past decade, and decide how to move into the uncertain future. Here is some unsolicited advice to ponder while ignoring the Dow.

Five Lessons Publishing Should Learn from Music

The Internet, Napster, and Bit Torrents have all shaken up the music business, but it was the iPod that put the final nail in the coffin of the old business models: radio doesn’t matter anymore, and barely anyone can remember what a CD is for. All of a sudden, the world is full of people who want to fill up their little white devices with music. In the book business, we’ve yet to see an iconic, affordable ereader that people love. When we do, the game will change. Kindle Two apparently shows promise. The new Sony Reader is getting lots of good reviews. And Stanza, the new ebook app for the iPhone, makes Apple’s handheld the most popular ebook reader in the world. What’s more, Stanza has converted many ebook skeptics I know personally. Question for publishers: do you want to be where the readers are? Then find out where they are, and go there.

2. Think Beyond DRM

Big media has reacted to the web with alarm and terror, and their favorite answer to the challenges of the future has been digital rights management (DRM). This has been a disaster for media customers, and it’s not doing much good for the music business, is it? Have you heard any happy reports about how DRM is saving music? Nope. In the case of book buyers, DRM stops many people from embracing ebooks, because it makes things too complicated, and limits what you can do with them. We want to read our books on different devices, how and when we want. We don’t want to be treated like criminals, or told what devices we’re allowed to read on. Experiment a little, make some gambles, see what works best. Try it without DRM, you might like it.

3. If You Help Us, We Will Buy

The music business and Hollywood made a big mistake by fighting online distribution. If, early on, big media had built (or allowed others to build) the tools to let us all download movies and music at reasonable prices, we would have come. Instead, the they fought digital distribution with every bit of litigious animosity they could muster. Result: alternate/illegal means of getting entertained filled the void.

So, to publishers: Make your stuff available online. Make it easy to find. Make it easy to buy. And don’t insult us: if a physical book – with the cost of production, distribution and retail overhead – is worth $20, a digital book is not. Cut the price accordingly. Take your margin, but don’t abuse your customers with outrageous prices for ebooks (otherwise, we will find other ways to get our books).

4. Don’t Be Afraid of Free

Do you remember how in the olden days, the publishing business lead a massive effort to shut down public libraries, because free was the enemy of the publishing business? How they fought to stop people giving a gift of their favorite books to a friend? Me neither. Libraries help readers, they help publishers, they help books in general. And giving away a book is one of the most powerful marketing signals in the universe. The mainstream book business seems to live in terror of free, and yet free access to books has traditionally been the cornerstone of the publishing business. You don’t have to give everything away, but remember how much good “free” has done for you in the past.

5. Find Out What Your Customers Want

Then build your business around that. This is the most important point. Readers love books. They love reading. They love writers. We will support the publishing business, and writers, but you have to find out how we want to do it. Don’t try to shoehorn us into an old business model that doesn’t make sense with new technology. Your job is not to force customers to behave the way you want them to. Your job is to find out what your customers want, and then deliver it to them. Times are changing. Find out what we want, what we need, and then help us get it.

There are some encouraging signs that the publishing business are trying to make some good changes. Let’s hope they keep going in the right direction.

Here is my platform that I undertake to implement as Prime Minister of Canada. Please vote for me on Tuesday.

Broadly, I will:

• Make Canada a recognized global leader in communications technology, and energy technology
• Increase regulation of financial markets
• Address climate change
• Strongly articulate the Canadian Vision to the world, one that focuses on our success at integrating a multiethnic population, based on shared values of a strong social fabric. [NOTE: this sounds a bit bullshitty, but I strongly believe that in these very troubled times in the world, Canada seems to have negotiated the difficulties of the 21st Century remarkably well: we should use this to our advantage].

Specifically, here’s what I will do:

1. Economy (Part 1: Financial System)

Things are bleak, and I have to admit I don’t know how to fix it. The real terror here is that maybe, just maybe, the very basis of “growth” as the fundamental driver of economic and social policy might have been stretched to it’s limit, and broken. If that’s the case, we’re in trouble, because we don’t even know how to talk about anything else. The short term problem is that there is very little Canada can do about it: we are at the mercy of a global economy, and a neighbour that looks to be in disastrous trouble. At the very least, Canada should:

• develop better regulation of national and international financial transactions and systems, no more unregulated asset classes
• implement stricter control on the sale of key corporate assets to foreign buyers (it’ll be less of a problem now that credit has dried up, but what better time to work on this)

But that doesn’t deal with the current crisis, so we better focus on that. We’re all going to have to tighten our belts, roll up our sleeves and work very hard to navigate the coming storms.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t have any answers yet, but I promise you, this will be the top focus for the government. I think anyone who says they have solutions right now is lying – it’s hard to even know what the problems will look like.

2. Economy (Part 2: Innovation)

Communication technologies will continue to be the dominant transformative force in the world, economic melt-down or not. Canada needs to position itself to be a true world leader in this sector, instead of the pathetic laggard it’s become in the past decade, notwithstanding RIM and Flickr. This means a few things, including:

• implement policies that make Canada’s mobile space competitive with the world, for consumers and developers
• commit to broadband for all
• massive investment in hackerism in our education systems

In addition to commitments to leadership in communications tech, we’ll identify two other sectors where Canada is a high performer, and target a global ranking in top 3 by 2013. One of them will be energy: massive investment in developing new energy technologies, exporting energy, and/or exportable expertise.

3. Arts

Arts. This is a tough one. Can I level with you? I’m not sure that all this government Arts funding & grants results in very good art. A lot of what Canada produces is, let’s face it, mediocre. Maybe a bit of hunger and global competition would help the Arts more than hinder it. But, don’t worry I won’t be too radical. There will still be a big pot of money, but I’d like to explore new ways to fund arts in more interesting ways. This is a dodge, I know, but I have to be careful with how this one plays in Quebec.

Oh: I will strongly support the CBC, the NFB, the NAC and a few other similar institutions, but in order to get a cent of funding they have to put everything on the web for free. And CBC is not allowed to make any more TV series set in the 1800s in the Maritimes. Also, production of other kinds of schlock will not be encouraged.

4. Environment

Climate change is going to be a doozy, if we aren’t careful, and we are running out of time. There is a reason Kyoto was signed in 1998, without commitments until 2008-2012: To give us a decade to adapt our economy. Instead we pissed that decade away, and didn’t do a thing. So let’s try this again, starting in 2010, all major polluting companies will have to bring down their GHG emission by 1%, 2011 2%, 2012 3% and 2013 4% … and then we’ll see how things are going. We’ll make a carbon trading market, with strict criteria on what acceptable credits are (none of this tree planting bullshit). We’ll integrate with other international markets (EU and the state-lead initiatives in the US); but only 30% of purchased credits to meet obligations can come from international markets, the rest will have to be internal reductions or Canadian-based credit purchases. A 2% tax will be added to all transactions, to go into a federal climate fund, that will fund R&D and adaptation. As the market develops and matures, we’ll start adding requirements on vehicles to either meet new GHG standards, or to be sold along with a stream of pre-purchased carbon credits that will offset a portion of emissions caused by the car. This means that business and consumers will all share the brunt of this. I’m sorry, people, but that’s the point: it is going to be more expensive (though maybe offset by efficiency improvements). If no one had to sacrifice anything, we would have dealt with this years ago.

5. First Nations

It struck me today for some reason that we need to make a serious effort to solve, or move towards solving, the problem of the First Nations in Canada. Question: as you’ve been gloating about how amazing it is that racist USA might just elect a black president, have you wondered how likely it is that we’ll elect a Native Prime Minister in our next election? That says lots of different things, all of which we should seriously try to address. The problems with First Nations are complex, with blame to go all around: you can probably shovel as much of it onto the doorsteps of Native leadership as on the front yards of all the major political parties, and Canadians in general. But finding out who is at fault isn’t worth a thing. Finding out how to solve the problems is. So, as Prime Minister I will commit to sitting down with Native leadership, to define the three most serious issues facing First Nations. Then we’ll start figuring out how to solve them. No bullshit proclamations, I mean really implement serious changes. For some reason, I feel like this might be crucial to Canada’s successful future. No idea why, but that’s how I feel about it.

6. Defense

Afghanistan is going to cost us $16 billion by 2011, and only this past year did the military investigate the history of the Russian involvement in Afghanistan. Jesus Christ, guys. I don’t even know what to say. Turns out we’ve made all the same mistakes as the Russians. Look: we need to define the goal or get out. I would not commit to immediate withdrawl, but someone damn well better be able to articulate a decent vision of “victory in Afghanistan” that has a chance in hell of actually happening. And if no one can do that, then let’s get out. I’m willing to talk on this one, but I tell you I am leaning heavily to: Get Out. My only hesitation is that, love em or hate em, we have to play nice with the USA, since they are our neighbours, and we are tied to them whether we like it or not. Oh, and by the way, when I do cut the Afghan mission, I’m not going cut military spending, I’ll just focus it better on military infrastructure and domestic needs, including the Arctic. I think the Canadian military has been starved of funds, and I just don’t think that’s a good idea.

7. Copyright

This might seem like a niche issue to some, but to me copyright law is the legal framework that underpins how we create, use and share information. It is the legal basis for the intellectual life of the country. We will implement a modernized law, that takes into account the Internet, drops criminalization of personal use and doesn’t have any of this damned anti-circumvention crap in it. We’ll consult with New Zealand, and Israel, who apparently have recently come out with new laws. Michael Geist will be my special advisor, and we’ll do a wide consultation before committing to law any stupid legislation that might screw up Canada for a generation.

8. Transparency in Government

First, we will ditch Crown Copyright, and commit to making taxpayer-funded datasets available to citizens for free, in accessible formats. We’ll start with StatsCan, and work out from there. In addition, we will actively support grassroots initiatives that build on government datasets. In addition we’ll work to have government decision-making processes opened up to more scrutiny on the web. Everyone in my government will sign the I Believe In Open Pledge, and maybe we’ll pass it into law.

The first dataset we release will be the set of postal codes tied to electoral districts.

9. Education

We’ll tie education in with #2, innovation in the economy, with lots of money for educational hackerism, and for wonky abstract arts too, since that’s where so much innovation comes from, even if it takes a while to trickle back to the rest of the world.

We’ll increase commitments to funding post-secondary education.

10. Health

Health. God, what a mess. Whatever we are doing, it is not working. Things are getting worse and worse. We will:

• Define specific Canadian health priorities (with a focus of preventative medicine – not the fake kind that gives everyone drugs for diseases the might get later)
• Better manage drug costs, with a Canada-wide drug insurance plan (provinces that don’t want to play can go on their own, and when studies show the Canada-wide durg costs 25% lower than the independent province costs, they can let their populations decide what they want to do)
• Examine 4 healthcare models (Australia, France, UK, Canada), match outcomes with our health priorities, and then model Canada’s new health system on the best practices from those countries
• Level with Canadians and tell them that our healthcare system is broken and getting worse, and that we already have so much private stuff in our system, that we just have to face up to the fact that it’s going to be part of the solution.
• Get more nurses on the job, and shake things up so that nurses and Doctor’s assistants can do more of the routine work
• Prioritize on increasing numbers of family doctors

In 2000-2001, I worked in New York for an interdealer broker (a financial broker to banks and other big institutions) Prebon Yamane, now Tullett Prebon, setting up their Environmental Products division. I worked with a few former investment bankers, putting together structured financial instruments to help big energy companies hedge against the multi-million/billion dollar risk of Kyoto Protocol ratification. Kyoto ratification would mean that companies would be forced by their governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to buy carbon credits, or do both. Our financial instruments were, more or less, derivatives: they were carbon credit futures contracts, packaged up as insurance. On one side we would have big energy companies paying insurance on the risk of Kyoto ratification; on the other side of the transaction, we would invest in large greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world that would create a pool of credits that we, along with our partners, a big investment bank and a big reinsurance company, would undertake to guarantee as “Kyoto Compliant.”

But as the Vice President of Sasol, the South African energy & chemical giant, told me when we met in Johannesburg in early 2001, “I spoke with Dick Cheney last week, and he told me the US will never sign on to the Kyoto Protocol.” He was right out of Lethal Weapon 2, and he was dead on. Despite campaigning on regulation of GHGs in 2000, Bush scuttled Kyoto. And that (along with September 11th) was the end of my involvement with Prebon and the world of fancy financial derivatives.

Prebon Yamane did lots of business with Enron. Tthey were hated by everyone, they were arrogant and abusive, which is par for the course in the financial business, but they were the worst. So I had a front row seat as Enron imploded that year, from more or less the same sickness that is now afflicting our global financial markets.

In short: complex financial derivatives had abstracted financial worth very far away from the underlying value of assets. This enabled magic “creation” of extraordinary wealth, built on manipulation and trading of the abstract derivatives, but not the asset itself. At it’s height, Enron generated $111 billion in revenues, with hardly any assets. Fortune magazine called them America’s Most Innovative Company six years running. In the case of Enron, there was a whole pile of fraud as well, as things started to unravel, but the *real* culprits were:

• regulators, who closed their eyes because too much money was being made, and the “free market” was king
• rating agencies, who gave positive ratings to institutions whose actual financial health was based on vapour
• accountants/auditors, who stopped doing their job, which is to verify the financial soundness of the numbers provided by their clients.

And the problem was, and continued to be that so many people were making so much money, that no one wanted to upset the apple cart, even if there weren’t any apples in it to begin with. The system was “working,” meaning lots of people were getting rich, and you and I were living in prosperous times, relatively comfortable and happy. Who’s going to put a stop to that and still get elected next year? Well, it turns out: no one.

The same can be said today, and we’re going to face the consequence of a decade or two of fantasy.

Enron collapsed, and that should have been a warning that the modern financial markets were a disaster waiting to happen. Instead, interest rates were slashed through the late 90s and early 21st century, cheap credit flooded the market, and deregulation increased, rather than decreased.

One of Prebon’s most profitable businesses, even in 2001 was the credit default swap desk. Billions of dollars went through that desk.

Credit default swaps are insurance against someone defaulting on loans, bonds, or other financial obligations. Which makes sense. Except people started betting on likelihoods of defaults, buying default insurance on someone else’s assets. And then trading them on an open market, betting for or against defaults that had nothing whatever to do with them.

In 2007, there was something like $60 trillion (yes, trillion) worth of credit default swaps out there, based on an underlying asset value of about $5 trillion. The abstract “value” created by the magic of these derivatives is 12 times the value of the underlying assets … $60 trillion.

To put that in perspective, the world’s GDP in 2007 was $54 trillion. So outstanding credit default swaps are worth more than the entire world’s economic output. Make sense? Yeah. (Ps, sorry for the bold italics, but perhaps it’s justified here?)

This is, essentially, a colossal pyramid scheme, roughly the size of the entire wrold’s economy.

Credit default swaps have been completely unregulated, meaning no one in the financial business even knows who is exposed to what risk, because no one has to report their exposure anywhere.

For those counting, the $700 billion bailout is 1/85th of the exposure in the the credit default swap market, and who knows what other fancy financial eggheadery there might be out there.

Fasten your seatbelts.

[I highly recommend This American Life's latest episode for a better explanation of what's happening and why it matters].

[Inspired by a conversation with Ian Rae, and an email exchange with John Beckmann]

Jeremy Mayer’s typewriter robots:

[link] [via JacketCopy]

From the BBC:

Germany’s finance ministry has agreed a 50bn euro ($70bn; £40bn) plan to save one of the country’s biggest banks. [more...]

[cross-posted at the Book Oven Blog]

Bookkake, is “an entirely print-on-demand, and web-oriented, publisher,” launched by James Birdle. Either he’s a pervert, or a good marketer, but he’s starting with … well, let’s call them saucy books.

Interestingly his first batch of books are all old classics, and out of copyright, such as John Cleland’s 1748 porn classic Fanny Hill (which, incidentally, is available in audio at LibriVox, and I highly recommend hearing this one in audio as well as reading the original). Bookkake is launching with five titles: Fanny Hill, plus Liber Amoris by Wiliiam Hazlitt, Memoirs of a Young Rakehell by Guillaume Apollinaire, The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau, and Venus In Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

I expect to see many more of these small indie publishers popping up (do you know any others?), and for all the worry about the publishing behemoths collapsing under their own weight, this is the future of interesting publishing, I have no doubt.

Says James:

The website, which is at the core of my approach, comes with extensive extracts, high-resolution covers, all the social media dooh-dahs and, most notably I think, entirely free ebook editions of every title.

Right on. Bookkake has a blog, where you can follow progress on the project.

Fast on the heels of the I Believe in Open candidate pledge campaign, Michael Geist has launched a reasonable, balanced copyright pledge. Some of us would like it to go further than this, but anyone who does not take this pledge is making their postition regarding respect for Canadian citizens pretty clear.

Will you commit to a balanced approach to copyright reform that
reflects the views of all Canadians by pledging:

1. To respect the rights of creators and consumers.

2. Not to support any copyright bill that undermines or weakens
the Copyright Act’s users rights.

3. To fully consult with Canadians before introducing any
copyright reform bill and to conduct inclusive, national hearings
on any tabled bill.

And en français:

Vous engagerez-vous dans une approche équilibrée de la réforme sur le droit
d’auteur qui reflète les opinions de tous les Canadiens et Canadiennes en
promettant:

1. de respecter les droits des créateurs et des consommateurs

2. de ne pas supporter tout projet de loi sur le droit d’auteur détruisant
ou diminuant les droits des utilisateurs face à la Loi sur le droit d’auteur

3. De consulter pleinement les Canadiens et Canadiennes avant d’introduire
toute réforme sur le droit d’auteur et de tenir des audiences nationales
inclusives sur tout projet de loi proposé.

I wrote a long post a while ago about the newspaper business and the challenges for media and knowledge institutions in the digital age. One of my thoughts was that the real role of a newspaper is not so much producing content (though that is important), but more fundamentally helping readers make sense of the world. And so part of their role is filtering content well. Applied to our connected world, that means that newspapers should spend serious time combing the web and providing a filtering service to their readers — by pointing to other sites, even competitors.

The Washington Post has taken my advice, and just launched the Political Browser, which points to important stories around the web.

More of this to come, no doubt.

[via Publishing2.0]

[cross posted at the Book Oven Blog]

There’s been much teeth gnashing and lamenting over the impending collapse of the publishing business. See, for instance, the exhaustive New York Magazine article titled The End, with the lede: “The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after.” Readers are reading less (supposedly) and buying fewer books, sales are stagnating, and the Internet is ruining everything.

Well, the traditional publishing business might be in for a rough ride, but I think we’re poised to see a flowering of a new kind of independent writing, book-making and reading, driven by the web but rooted in the old-fashioned book.

Take a look at the music business. I don’t think there has ever been a time when music was more varied and vibrant than it is today. Yet this explosion of music and access happened as the major record labels have shed great rivers of tears over the demise music, the end of civilization, and fears that soon all we’ll hear are the sounds of crickets chirping in the silence. And instead of figuring out how to better serve their voracious fans, they started suing them.

Music itself is doing just fine, thank you. Musicians are making music, and listeners have a richness of choice and quality never before seen. The new business model is still evolving (hint: live shows, inexpensive drm-free downloads & web-based CD sales, and connecting with fans in new ways online). In the indie world, things are great. Says Derek Sivers ex-of CDBaby: “Despite the moaning you hear from the major labels, independent artists are selling better than ever. Even physical CD sales are up 30% over last year!” If your metric of success of a cultural space is the amount of new material produced, and the amount of new material being consumed, we’re at a zenith.

If your metric of success is the number of record exec Ferraris, things are looking bleak.

I think we’re going to see something similar happen in the book publishing world, as a new generation of writers and readers wrest the tools of publishing from the big companies that have gobbled up all the little guys. It’s happened already in journalism (with blogs), encyclopedia (wikipedia), but books, because they are harder to make, are hanging on as a kind of last bastion. Things are changing: Ebook readers are getting better, print-on-demand is becoming a viable alternative to traditional publishing, and in 2007, Japanese sales of books to cell phones grew 331%, Korea’s growth was even bigger. The web is the most powerful tool of distribution we’ve ever had. You’ve heard it before, but every individual can reach a global audience of billions just by pressing “publish.” We’re now seeing new ways to engage with literature, fan-made translations, and we are just getting started. Eoin Purcell was “amazingly not depressed by the [New York Magazine] article,” and I think that’s the right reaction. Even within the belly of the corporate publishing beast, some are working hard to transform things.

There’s going to be a shake-up, no doubt. It’ll be ugly for publishing companies that don’t adjust.

But if your passion is writing, reading, books and literature, I’ll bet things are about to get much more interesting for all of us.

Publishing is dead. Long live publishing.

From the NYTimes:

Washington Mutual, the giant lender that came to symbolize the excesses of the mortgage boom, was seized by federal regulators on Thursday night, in what is by far the largest bank failure in American history. [more...]

Jennifer Bell, of Visiblegovernment.ca has launched a new site, ibelieveinopen, asking candidates to take a pledge for openness:

I believe candidates should:

• Support reforms that increase government transparency and accountability.
• Make campaign promises specific and measurable, and report progress on promises and their metrics at least semi-annually.
• Publish the content of his or her daily schedule, including meetings with lobbyists and special interest groups.
• Support reforms allowing free access to scientific and survey data gathered by government institutions.
• Support reforms that make it easier for Canadians to obtain government information they have a right to know.

As of today, there are 51 candidate pledges (about evenly split between the Greens & the NDP, with 1 Libera)l. I’ve emailed all my candidates to ask them if they will be taking the pledge, except Sebastian Dhavernas, who does not have an email address listed on the interweb!

Here is the little email I sent, if you would like to copy it:

Hello,

Will [Candidate Name] be signing this pledge?

http://ibelieveinopen.ca/

51 candidates have done so already.

Hugh McGuire
Outremont

Washington Post reports, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office warns that the bailout could cause things to get worse. Why? Because it might expose how bad things actually are under the hoods of the world’s financial powerhouses:

During testimony before the House Budget Committee, Peter R. Orszag — Congress’s top bookkeeper — said the bailout could expose the way companies are stowing toxic assets on their books, leading to greater problems. [more...]

Michael Geist was in town last week to talk about copyright, and C-61. The Canadian Journal of Communications has the audio podcast (good quality), and Michael has put his slides up with audio (not such great quality).

I gave a semi-impromptu presentation/discussion yesterday at Podcamp Montreal* on “The Intimacy of Audio.”

I’ve always felt that audio is the most intimate communication medium, and in the session yesterday I wanted to explore the idea of intimacy further. In particular, I wonder how we can build and use technology to help people become more closely connected with the things that are important to them, rather than just feeding more information faster and better. Much of my experience of technology seems to detract from my life rather than add to it (though of course I get great value too). I’m a slave to my computer and the web, and so much of it is distraction from things I find important.

That is why I like podcasts – because they let me get *away* from technology, and into a place where I can be more intimately connected with ideas and thoughts and emotions. Good podcasts (and good radio and good audiobooks) make me think in ways that I can’t when I am sitting in front of the computer, checking RSS feeds and answering emails. They’re also great when cooking, or driving long distances.

With LibriVox, I think, we’ve used technology to help people find this intimacy, by helping volunteers read texts that are important to them in a closer and deeper way. That people like me get to listen occasionally is a wonderful side-benefit.

In discussing the “intimacy of audio,” I played a really moving piece from Scarborough Dude’s Dicksnjanes podcast, about the death of a young boy from the neighbourhood. Here’s the excerpt (mp3-slightly edited). And here is the full episode.

We had a great talk afterwards, with comments from CC Chapman, Mitch Joel, Julien, Steph, Yanik, Patrick, and a host of other people whose names and/or URLs I don’t know (if you were one, please let me know).

There are a few other bits of audio that have really moved me, and that I thought of playing for the gang, but didn’t:

• Julien Smith on what it’s like to have epilepsy
• Phil Collins on loss and art on This American Life [mp3 link]
• The Emigrant’s Lament, read by Peter Yearsley for LibriVox [mp3 link]

(Though my podcasting listening habits tend more to public radio/professional stuff, three out of four of the most moving audio bits I’ve heard were from DIY podcasts – not surprising, I guess, but significant).

In preparation for the presentation, I asked for some suggestions from the LibriVox community of the most moving bits of audio from that collection, which I didn’t have the chance to play. Here are some of the suggestions:

• Ezwa reading Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved” letter Section 4 [mp3 link].
• Karen reading St Crispian’s Day from Henry V [mp3 link]
• Clarica’s reading of the poem A Woman in Hospital from The Verse-Book of a Homely Woman, Section 9 [mp3 link]
• Deny Sayers reading The Bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima
• Holy Sonnets read by Earthcalling.

Any other suggestions for audio tearjerkers on the web?

I wonder what it is about audio that can deliver such intimacy in ways that text and video can’t? Why is the Scarbdude piece so moving? And, how can “we” do more to help make technology address our need for intimacy – creating it, connecting with it – rather than just flooding us with more information and efficient ways to organize things?

*And by the way, a huge congrats to Michelle, Sylvain, Laurent, Laurent, Julien, Bob, Jean-François, Harold and Mitch for putting together what everyone I talked to says was the best podcamp they’ve attended.

From Harvard professor of economics and former IMF chief economist, Kenneth Rogoff, in the Financial Times:

Were the financial crisis to end today, the costs would be painful but manageable, roughly equivalent to the cost of another year in Iraq. Unfortunately, however, the financial crisis is far from over, and it is hard to imagine how the US government is going to succeed in creating a firewall against further contagion without spending five to 10 times more than it has already, that is, an amount closer to $1,000bn to $2,000bn. [more...]

From the Washington Post:

From the rescue of Bear Stearns to the takeovers of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and American International Group, all the key decisions have been made by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Timothy F. Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York…

As they chart a government response to the crisis, the stakes could hardly be higher. If they succeed, they could tame the economic downturn and orchestrate a restructuring of Wall Street with minimal collateral damage. If they fail, the toll could be millions of jobs, trillions of dollars in lost wealth and a crisis of confidence in global capitalism. [more...]

Meanwhile, on Planet Mars:

At a rally in Ohio on Tuesday, GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin told the crowd that she’d head up energy policy in a McCain administration.

“John and I, we’ve discussed some new responsibilities that I’m going to have as vice president,” Palin said. “First, I’ll help to lead the mission of energy security.” [more...]

Fasten your seat belts.

Some of you know that Stephanie, Marie-Eve and I, and a few others including Dan & Chris from LibriVox & Collectik, have been working on a new project.

The project itself is still top-secretish, but we’ve sorta launched a weblog, called the Book Oven Blog. It’s about: “books, making books and our relationship with text.”

I just wrote a post today about typewriters and writing software…

I’ve recently come into possession of the old Underwood typewriter that was in the office of the house I grew up in. After my mother threatened to throw it out, I inherited the thing, and now it’s serving as a decorative piece collecting dust in our front entrance way. I used to love that typewriter as a kid – I remember writing stories and school assignments and once a contract between my father and me for the purchase of a Rawlings baseball glove (he would pay half and I would pay half out of my allowance, collected over several months)….[more...]

If you have any interest in writing something for us about books or writing or publishing (?), ping me…and, of course feel free to comment read or subscribe etc.

Michael Geist, University of Ottawa law professor, and Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law, will be in Montreal to discuss Canada’s proposed copyright legislation, Bill C-61.

Professor Geist is a leading voice in the debates around Canada’s place in the digital future.

He writes a weekly column for the Toronto Star, and blogs regularly at: http://michaelgeist.ca

DATE: Monday, Sept 15, 6:30pm
LOCATION: Concordia EV Bldg 1515 St. Catherine West, 11th Floor Rm. EV.11.705 (Mackay entrance).

SPACE IS LIMITED, SO PLEASE COME EARLY.

***
Michael Geist, professeur de droit à l’Université d’Ottawa et titulaire de la Chaire canadienne de recherche sur la législation d’Internet et du Commerce électronique, sera à Montréal pour discuter du Projet de Loi C-61.

Professeur Geist est très actif dans le débat concernant le positionnement du Canada dans l’ère numérique.

Il publie une chronique hebdomadaire dans le Toronto Star, et blogue fréquemment sur http://michaelgeist.ca.

L’evenment aura lieu le 15 septembre, a 18h30 au: Concordia EV, 1515 St. Catherine West, 11e étage, salle: EV.11.705.

L’ESPACE EST LIMITÉ, SVP ARRIVEZ TÔT.

Sponsors include:

• Canadian Journal of Communications
• Concordia Department of Communications Studies
• Concordia Interactive Narrative Experimentation and Research Group

Covers is a beautiful weblog dedicated to the appreciation of book cover design, run by Fwis, a design firm based out of Brooklyn, NY and Portland, OR. They post pics of covers, comment on them, and invite outside commentary.

Some other nice covers can be found here and here.

Every once in a while, for my own benefit, and for those of you who like to write, I republish this wonderful list from George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language“, which is some of the best advice to writers you’ll ever read:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

[via spectraversa]

Matt just released his beautiful new book, Ojingogo. (I don’t think you can buy it online yet.)

I’m not a great reader of graphic novels, but I must say I love Drawn & Quarterly’s store on Bernard, and the attention graphic novelists, their publishers, and their readers give to the object of the book. The D&Q bookstore exudes a love of books, everything about them, that’s rare to see these days. Why not pop in and browse for a while, before buying a few books, especially Ojingogo?

On Saturday mornings we make scrambled eggs, read the Saturday Globe and Mail, and listen to the podcast of On the Media, the best American current affairs program out there.

This week’s episode has a really interesting piece (starting at 37 minutes), about print-on-demand web t-shirt company CafePress. Fred Durham, co-founder, claims that political t-shirt designs and sales are better predictors of political outcomes than polls. You can follow the data here: CafePress Meter.

Apparently Obama is the front-runner in the election, though last week Obama’s sales went down by 2.67%, and McCain is up 2.86%. However, Obama is selling 60-70% of candidate shirts, to McCain’s 20ish %.

I’ve been saying for a long time that one of the problems with the Left/Democrats in the US is that they have been attacking Republican/Bush policies for the past 8 years on the wrong front, questioning the morality of what the US is doing. The problem with that tack is that morality is abstract, and there are a good number of people who just don’t agree with the Dems positions on what’s moral and what’s not. And moral issues aren’t the sort of things voters change their mind on. Either you think torture is immoral, or you think it can be justified, but telling the guy who thinks it can be justified that he’s immporal isn’t going to win his vote.

The more convincing argument from my point of view is not that the Republicans are immoral, but that they are coming dangerously close to wrecking the country. They are foolish and irresponsible and careless, and possibly immoral. But the nice thing about 1, 2, and 3 is that you can point to example after example and say, you see: Foolish. Irresponsible. Careless.

Without making the appeal to morality, you can make the case, based on any in a great number of examples (Katrina, subprimes, Iraq/Afghanistan, gitmo, Gonzales and the “Justice” Department, tax cuts, climate change, Iran, Georgia, the list goes on and on), that the real problem with the Republicans is not that they are “immoral,” but they are just plain dangerous. That if you reelect them, we all might just see the USA driven over a cliff.

This is a substantial debate, and there’s a pretty good body of evidence that really the last 8 years have been pretty catastrophic for America, and another 8 years could well finish things off.

That’s a *real* debate, and one worth having. Some Republicans will disagree, but I’ve said here numerous times that the people I think who bear the brunt of the responsibility for the past 8 years are not the Democrats (they’ve been useless), but those on the Right who have watched this band of fools run roughshod over a couple of hundred years of experience running a law-based constitutional democracy, and perhaps the past 2,000 years of military and foreign affairs wisdom.

The Bush Republicans have been brilliant politicians, but they’ve been dismal at governing.

I still don’t quite know what to think of Obama, but he sure is one hell of a breath of fresh air. Instead of the same old pap and mush that you hear from the usually-spineless Democrats, here’s a guy who stands up and calls a spade a spade. He scoffed (as he should have) at Hillary’s stupid attacks on him. And he’s made McCain look like a fool. The guy knows his stuff, and he has an amazingly rare gift of not mincing his words. So it was refreshing to hear the tone of his speech, which I’d call inspiring indignation.

He conveys the sense that I’ve felt over the past 8 years, which is: “You’ve got to be joking. Come on, we’re better than this. This just isn’t good enough.”

Instead of whining, as most Democrats seem expert in, he does this funny thing of demanding more. Of his opponents. Of the country. Of all of us. From his excellent speech (text, video), this was my favourite line, and why I like Obama:

America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.

It’s powerful because even if you are a Republican, other than the most rabid, I think most people agree that whatever happened in the last 8 years, it just was not great. Just not good enough.

When was the last time you remember thinking a politician was demanding more out of us all? Not just saying the words, but actually having the moral force behind the words.

I don’t remember that ever, and that I think that’s the power that Obama has.

Whether he’d be a good president or not, I just don’t know, but I like the idea of having politicians who demand that we all, all of us, pull up our socks and start acting like adults.

I was at the Akoha top secret private screening demo thing last night. It’s ambitious, and complex… but it looks like they’ve done a good job of what they are trying to do (making doing good fun) in a way that just might work. I think many of us continue to think about how the things we are doing on the web can start crossing over into the real world, and Akoha is a clever, and possibly revolutionary, way to make that happen.

Good luck guys.

For some reason, I got contacted by Liberal Marc Garneau’s campaign (he’s running against Anne Lagacé-Dowson in a federal by-election in Wesmount-Ville Marie). They emailed me because I occasionally write political stuff on this blog, and invited me to an event. I said, probably not, but what does Marc think of the Conservatives new copyright bill, Bill C-61? They said, why not come have a meeting with Marc, and you can talk about it. So I said yes.

The interview got off to a slow start but Mr. Garneau did say this was his, and the Liberal’s policy:
-C-61 should be scrapped
-public consultations should be done
-and a brand new Bill should be drafted
-”personal use” should have more protection

But he told me something interesting: He has had more mail and communication from constituents about C-61 than any other issue in the election.

And so I wondered, Why, if copyright is the topic that he has heard more about than any other, is there not a single mention of C-61 on his web site? I emailed him afterwards to ask that, and, Lo, here is his statement:

The government’s new copyright bill, introduced on June 11, 2008, is a very important matter for the student, business and cultural communities in Canada. The effects of any major revision of our Copyright Law will be far reaching and serious for both communities. With the stakes so high, it is critical that the right balance is found.

Does Bill C-61 strike the correct balance? Should it be approved by Parliament?

These questions cannot be answered without first holding extensive consultations with stake holders, and in this case, all Canadians are stake holders. All Canadians have a stake in the outcome of the examination of Bill C-61, either as creators or as consumers of intellectual property…[more...]

UPDATE: Which, as Daniel points out below, says little about what the Liberals think the legislation should be, or where it’s major flaws are. And god knows their history on Copyright isn’t stellar.

We went on to talk about technology and innovation, and that’s where Garneau got animated, and convincing. He’s been an astronaut, the head of the Canadian Space Agency, and lead author of the Report on Science and Technology, written for the Liberal Renewal Commission.

I particularly pressed him on information and communications technology, where I feel that Canada has dropped dismally by the wayside in the past 15 years, compared with, say, Finland, which has gone in the other direction. He got excited talking about Nokia, and excellence, and defining a clear set of objectives and getting all of Canada behind them. That gave me some hope. Garneau is an tech guy, and he gets it.

Mind you, Anne’s got Corey.

[Incidentally, what the hell is wrong with the Liberal party's web design team? What is this, 1996? How hard would it be for the Liberals to provide a decent site template for all their candidates instead of this dog's breakfast design with a static html "blog," no RSS, and numerous other crimes against the Internet. Reminds me of that line from Sate and Main: "It looks like Edith Head puked, and the puke designed that website." UPDATE: seems candidates make their own sites, so the question is: What's wrong with Marc's design team?]

After a long hiatus due to a wordpress hack, datalibre is back up and running. I did a full reinstall of wp, a full update of the theme files, and put in most of the customization (I think).

So we’re back to agitating for data freedom in Canada, to whit:

datalibre.ca is a group blog, inspired by civicaccess.ca, which believes all levels of Canadian governments should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens. The data is collected using Canadian tax-payer funds, and we believe use of the data should not be restricted to those who can afford the exorbitant fees.

If you’ve got an opinion on that, maybe you’d like to write a post for datalibre?

This American Life can be a bit much at times, but some wonderful radio/podcasting comes out of the show. Ira Glass and gang often manage to get such moving stories out of people, with an underlying concept that people on the radio and in podcasts should sound like people.

I’m a very minor closet Phil Collins fan (Against All Odds and In the Air Tonight), but even if you HATE Phil Collins, check out this piece with him on the show.

It’s extraordinary audio. It starts with a silly premise, heartbroken girl wants to talk to Phil about heartbreak, then weaves its way from mildly cringe-inducing humour into something else altogether. By the end, all sorts of barriers have come down, and its turned into one of the most personal and moving interviews about loss and art I’ve ever heard.

Download or listen to it quickly: TAL’s podcasts are up for a week only, and this came out last week sometime.

[LINK]

I have a new start-up project underway, and I’m really excited about it. I have been lucky enough to get some fabulous people on board to work with me on it – some old salt collaborators of mine on LibriVox and other projects, as well as some new talented and smart people. And the project, I think, will be great.

As we progress in this very early phase, I though it was worth taking a peek at this old presentation I did for DemoCamp last year, about my experiences with Collectik.net, my first commercial web project. I still think Collectik was a great idea (so great that google reader’s shared items implemented the base principles a year after us, but they have a slightly bigger budget). We built good technology too, and really, when you got into it, the UI was solid and understandable. But it was hard for people to “get in,” and because of various mistakes and lack of resources Collectik never really got off the ground.

This presentation looks at some of the mistakes we made, and suggests some ideas about how to make a successful, rather than unsuccessful web project.

Nice to jog the memory a little bit.

From Usenet, circa 1991 [Link via Karl]:

From: timbl@info .cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee)
Newsgroups: alt.hypertext
Subject: WorldWideWeb: Summary
Date: 6 Aug 91 16:00:12 GMT

In article <6...@cernvax.cern.ch> I promised to post a short summary of the WorldWideWeb project. Mail me with any queries.

WorldWideWeb – Executive Summary

The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.

The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.

Reader view

The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents which, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is another (“virtual”) document containing links to the documents found. A simple protocol (“HTTP”) is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword search by a remote information server.

The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.

To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire world of data.

Information provider view

The WWW browsers can access many existing data systems via existing protocols (FTP, NNTP) or via HTTP and a gateway. In this way, the critical mass of data is quickly exceeded, and the increasing use of the system by readers and information suppliers encourage each other.

Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your existing data. Making it public involves running the FTP or HTTP daemon, and making at least one link into your web from another. In fact, any file available by anonymous FTP can be immediately linked into a web. The very small start-up effort is designed to allow small contributions. At the other end of the scale, large information providers may provide an HTTP server with full text or keyword indexing.

The WWW model gets over the frustrating incompatibilities of data format between suppliers and reader by allowing negotiation of format between a smart browser and a smart server. This should provide a basis for extension into multimedia, and allow those who share application standards to make full use of them across the web.

This summary does not describe the many exciting possibilities opened up by the WWW project, such as efficient document caching. the reduction of redundant out-of-date copies, and the use of knowledge daemons. There is more information in the online project documentation, including some background on hypertext and many technical notes.

Try it

A prototype (very alpha test) simple line mode browser is currently available in source form from node info.cern.ch [currently 128.141.201.74] as
/pub/WWW/WWWLineMode_0.9.tar.Z.

Also available is a hypertext editor for the NeXT using the NeXTStep graphical user interface, and a skeleton server daemon.

Documentation is readable using www (Plain text of the instalation instructions is included in the tar file!). Document

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

is as good a place to start as any. Note these coordinates may change with later releases.

I just spoke with someone in the publishing business about the discouraging state of Canadian fiction. Not the writing, but the business side. I’m not sure what has happened in the rest of the world, but: Chapters/Indigo has reduced space for books from 70% to 60%. The rest is candles and calendars and crap of one kind or another. And what they cut was mostly fiction – anything literary, and especially anything new from “unproved” writers, has much less shelf space. There are precious few independent booksellers left in Canada, so as Chapters/Indigo goes, so goes Canadian publishing.

The result is that publishers aren’t taking many new writers. The big presses have kicked out their smaller performers; who are now getting picked up by the mid-range presses, meaning that mid-range presses aren’t taking new young writers any more, and small presses are swamped with manuscripts from both published and unpublished writers…with nowhere to sell their books.

All of which makes me think that something is badly broken in the publishing business. People still want to write; people still want to read. But there’s little room left in the mainstream book business for anything but top sellers. And smelly candles, of course.

The book business needs a shake-up, I think.

Here are the abouts from my twitter friends:

i podcast and create junk for a living
Indie Music and Fun
UX & Web developer from Poutine land.
Dopplr CTO. If you follow me, consider starting off with an @mattb message and introduce yourself.
I do web stuff for people, design, xhtml/css, blogs, etc.
Still having fun with the web.
sweeping generalizations and jalepeño peppers
Web smith
develop coffee, drink code, free software and wonder
CTO and Co-founder @ Praized Media
dacodac
i do/create/study stuff. i sometimes get angry. But i’m mostly happy
President of Twist Image. Podcaster of Six Pixels of Separation. Professional Speaker.
Canadian Entrepreneur & Community Instigator
Screenwriter and freelance reporter
San Francisco, Montreal, Wikitravel, kei.ki, certifi.ca, Vinismo.com, identi.ca
Author, journalist and editor of Regret the Error.

http://jonudell.net/bio.html

Sysadmin, Rush addict
Game designer, raging extrovert.
I make audiobooks and knit
A cynic in the making
Insatiably curious
Illustrator, comic book artist, and blogger. Author of Ojingogo.com
New Media + Politics
free public domain audiobooks
great audio suggestions from around the world, via earideas.com
music, macs, mets.
Coworking space in Montréal
gardening, beekeeping, knitting, spinning, puzzles
Mosaicing a virtual self, one tweet at a time
Keeping track of what you think about anything, in 140 characters
“…the hottest thing from the North to come out of the South…”

Humans are gone. The city remains. 23 Skidoo is a beautiful and chilling 1964 short, by Julian Biggs, from the NFB’s beta screening room. Wonderful sound track (Kathleen Shannon and Ted Haley) to go along with the lonely images.

For those wondering, “23 skidoo” is a slang term from the 1910s meaning, more or less, to leave suddenly (so says Wikipedia in any case).

The National Film Board of Canada has launched their beta player, with a cornucopia of wonderful documentaries, shorts, animations and abstract films. Established in 1938, and then reincarnated in the 1950s, the NFB was one of those great Canadian enterprises from a time when Canada was interested in doing new and challenging things. The NFB explored new territory and set the standard in documentary-making and animation. So we applaud their efforts to get these treasures in front of people again. Congrats to Matt & the team.

Here are some of my recommendations:

• Golden Gloves, Gilles Groulx, 1961, 27 min 43 sec
  A beautiful documentary about a young black Montreal boxer, Ronald Jones, and others in the Golden Gloves competition. Main problem: this is the English dubbed version, not the original French. wtf?
• Bill Reid, Jack Long, 1979, 27 min 50 sec
  A film about Haida sculptor, Bill Reid.
• Le merle, Norman McLaren, 1958, 4 min 39 sec
  The master experimental animator, playing with a Quebec folk song.
• Debout sur leur terre, Maurice Bulbulian, 1983, 54 min 19 sec
  Life in three Inuit villages in Quebec.

And of course, The Big Snit:

See some more recommendations at MetaFilter.

1. finishing novels
2. a fine scotch to celebrate finishing novels

Evan just launched an open source twitterish thing called identi.ca. He’s got tons of traction in a few short days (that surely have been long for Evan and the rest of the crack team at Controlez-Vous), including lots of interest from luminaries such as Dave Winer, Tm O’Reilly and others. So: first, a big kudos to Evan.

Identi.ca also has its pooh poohers, including the knife sharpeners at TechCrunch, who wrote a lukewarm piece called The Problem with Identi.ca Is That It’s Not Twitter. And that’s been pretty much the line of those less than impressed: It’s got fewer features, why bother, everyone is on Twitter, why would they leave, and: who cares if it’s open source, it still needs to be good. etc.

Which speaks of breathtaking short-sightedness, not to mention, a total erasure of the last, oh, half-decade plus of the most recent Internet history.

So here is my take: Identi.ca is not an alternative service to Twitter; it’s an open microblogging platform. That’s a huge difference.

(OK, identi.ca is an alternative service, and laconi.ca is the open microblogging platform behind it, but for the sake of this article lets say they are the same thing).

It’s not difficult to find salient parallels, either. Biz Stone and Ev Williams’ pre-Twitter project (before Odeo) was Blogger. A great platform for making blogs. But it turned out that an open source version, Wordpress, was far more powerful, versatile, and compelling. Bloogger is still popular and still a good solution for many people. Wordpress though turned into something different, and arguably much more important.

Will identi.ca be as successful as Wordpress? Who knows, but if you think that microblogging is important, then *something* like identi.ca will be successful, and it’s the best candidate so far, that I know of. Again, it’s not a service; it’s a platform (and an open one at that).

Let me give two small examples:

Mobile Microblogging in the Developing World

I met Joel Selanikio, a doctor, epidemiologist, and software developer, at the Stockholm Challenge, where Joel’s project, EpiSurveyor won in the Health category. Here is a short description of EpiSurveyor: an open source mobile phone platform for collecting health & epidemiological data, which is being implemented by the World Health Org among others (which gives great cost and efficiency improvements over both paper/pencil- the usual method – and expensive commercial software & consulting).

Joel and I had some great discussions about mobile as a platform in the developing world: ie, why spend money on OLPC in the developing world, when every teacher already has a computer in their pocket … a mobile phone. The smart thing to do is to develop applications for the “network-connected minicomputers” people already have, namely: phones. Let’s develop for the tools that exist rather than the ones we’d like to imagine.

We also talked about Twitter as a web platform for mobile communications; interestingly, Joel thought Twitter was puzzling (I’m putting that mildly, I think he said it was a waste of time!), whereas for me – other than the time-wasting/communication aspect, Twitter is compelling as a platform for developing web-based/mobile enabled communications, the specifics of which I can’t put my finger upon. One example that I provided was the Tower Bridge Twitter stream in London. This is a trivial little project that scrapes the web for info on when the bridge is opening/closing and what ships are sailing through. The example itself is irrelevant; the point is that one can imagine useful bits of information being transmitted to your mobile device in such a way.

Here are some interesting facts:

• many/most people in developing countries have mobile phones
• many/most people in developing countries DON”T have: computers & high bandwidth net access
• mobile phone-enabled microblogging tools might be the perfect platform for information distribution/communication in such a place
• a microblogging tool could be used for any number of useful things, beyond “just” the run-of-mill social communication, eg:
  • price discovery, for say exchange rates, market prices
  • boil water alerts
  • traffic reports
  • education (say, informing parents of homework? still wondering about this one…)
  • health alerts
  • news headline distribution
  • who knows what else?

Identi.ca can become a development platform to do all this, and much more that you and I can’t think of. Luckily there are 5 billion people on the planet who will be able to take identi.ca/laconi.ca and build/improve upon them. While Twitter, Plurk, Pownce and all the rest are constrained because they are just closed services, that do only what their owners wish them to do.

Archiving Links, and Search Rank

Here is another area of significant interest. I wrote a while ago lamenting that Twitter has replaced del.icio.us for me as a place to archive interesting links. While Twitter does a good job of letting me share interesting links with friends immediately, it doesn’t serve as a useful archive in the way del.icio.us does. So that means:

1. unless I post twice, I lose a structured archive of links I found useful
2. because of ubiquitous use of URL-shortening services in Twitter, the web is also losing the significant work of URL-sorting/ranking that we used to do by blogging about interesting links, and putting them into del.icio.us (etc).

The other night, I had dinner with Larry Sanger (thanks for the invite, Mike), and Larry was batting around some compelling ideas about opening up the search space.

And that had me stewing about things, thinking about Identi.ca and my problems with Twitter and (no longer) archiving my links. It would be “easy” to do this in identi.ca, by specifiying:

• that this identi.ca post contains a link (this can be inferred by the existence of a url)
• that i want to structure it somehow – eg using #hashtags
• that i wish to archive this – ie an RSS stream of my categorized links, that could easily be fungible with a more centralized or decentralized bookmark depository (del.icio.us or other) …

You’d also want the system to keep track of the true link, rather than the shortened on.

This is not just more useful to me, but Important in how the web/google/searches assign value to different URLs.

Now, theoretically all this could happen at Twitter. But Twitter is a company, with a few guys and (apparently, gasp) ONE mysql database (with two slaves). They have enough problems just keeping the fail whale at sea.

Identi.ca, on the other hand, belongs to us all … and if I had the chops and the interest (I have the latter but not the former, and not the time) I could code something up that would do the trick, and pitch it to Evan, or install my own identi.ca instance on my server doing what I want it to do.

Summary: Identi.ca is important because it is a microbloggin development platform; not because it is an alternative to Twitter. Whether or not identi.ca and the open source codebase laconi.ca succeed I can’t predict. But something like this *will* succeed because mobile-enabled microblogging might just be the most compelling new communications space, especially in the developing world where access to mobile phones is almost ubiquitous, while access to computers and bandwidth is limited.

[Incidentally, and as an aside, all this has much to do with why I thought Steve's comments on my iphone post were off-base ... there may be many people who lament that their shiny gadgets are too expensive, but given all this above, it's clear that there is much exciting work to be done in mobile web, much of it important, and with crappy data plans Canadians are excluded from this area of innovation, which is what pisses me off - luckily, tools like identi.ca mean we webbers have a new development tool to do interesting things in the space].

From NY Times:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners….

[more...]

I’ve been thinking a fair bit lately about the disconnect between the “wealth” of the West in the past 30 or 40 years, and actual “reality.” I argued here that our wealth is a fantasy because: it is based on unsustainably cheap credit (most famously the subprime mess, but endemic throughout the economy), and “exporting” poverty and cheap labour/manufacturing to other countries, notably China. And my larger point was that the fundamental principle of our modern economy, limitless growth, can’t be viable in the long term. I don’t know what that means, but it’s scary.

There has been some work done that establishes the geographic footprint of the average North American, that is, the amount of land (including land for water, food, energy etc) needed to support your average North American life. This data suggests that in 1900 the average was about 2 acres per person, by 1950. 5 acres per person and in 1995, 12 acres per person. I’d be willing to be that in 2008 we’re up around 18-20 acres… does anyone have any recent data?

One thing I notice just in my family is how little value things have compared to when I was a kid. We buy things now with the intention of throwing them out; that wasn’t the case 25 years ago; certainly not 50 years ago. So what’s changed? Culture plays a role, but the underlying reason for the cultural shift is that the relative cost of “things” compared with our incomes has been dropping steadily. Part of that has to do with better technologies, the efficiencies that come with global trade, but just as significant is the cheap credit and exportation of poverty/cheap manufacturing that’s been fueling our economy recently.

That got me thinking about the people behind all this. And I have a question: how many people work full time to sustain the average North American individual.

That is, given, say a yearly income of, say. $70,000, what is the equivalent number of people working around the world to produce all the things that such an individual buys in the course of a year?

For instance:
-Joe buys 10 shirts, 5 pairs of pants, 2 pairs of shoes, and one jacket a year.
-For each item, what is the total number of human hours of work that went into the item that he buys?

This includes a number of stops along the production chain. For one shirt that would be: cultivation and shipping of cotton, manufacture, dying and shipping of textile, design and manufacture of shirt, shipping of shirt, storing and selling of shirt, and the taxi Joe takes to and from the store.

So for the purchase of one shirt, probably something like 8 people (and likely many more) would be involved in getting that shirt from cotton seed to Joe’s closet. But Joe’s shirt would be only a tiny fraction of their yearly work. If you talley up all those fractions, for each of Joe’s shirts, and all his pants, shoes, and all the food he eats and TVs he buys and trips in the car he makes and furniture he purchases etc etc…

So, add all that up, and what would be the total hours of human work that went into sustaining Joe’s life? What is the equivalent number of people working full-time to sustain Joe’s lifestyle?

I bet it’s much higher than you’d expect, and here’s the question I ask: is Joe’s contribution to the world valuable enough that he should be able to (effectively) employ a full-time staff of X people?

Has anyone seen any numbers like this? I’m curious to see what they look like.

I sent Rogers customer service the following email:

Re:

http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wireless-products/iphone_voice_data_packages

you must be joking? those rates are terrible. why does canada have the
worst data plans in the world?

you”ve just killed the iphone in canada, congrats.

And they responded with:

Dear Hugh McGuire,

Thank you for taking the time to write to us, we appreciate your use of
online customer service.

In your recent email, you have informed us that our newly released
iPhone 3G plans are a disappointment.

We are sorry to hear that our iPhone 3G voice and data packages value
are less than you were expecting. We would like to point out that they
do offer more data and airtime than our traditional packages and they
also come with the added features of bonus text messages and visual
voicemail. However, we appreciate that this release has come with
expectations from our customers.

Each carrier has a different pricing strategy. Rogers has designed a
pricing structure that offers high-value, flexible voice and data
packages so that Canadians can make the most of their iPhone 3G
experience.

To fully appreciate everything this device has to offer (phone, iPod and
Internet in one 3G device), our price plans include both voice and data.
We have a wide selection of high value, flexible plans to meet your
needs.

? The majority of carriers offering iPhone 3G worldwide do not have
unlimited plans for this device. Some carriers have implemented a ?soft
cap? so the plan isn?t truly ?unlimited?. For example, in France the
soft cap is 500MB where we have a plan that includes 4 times that amount
in your bucket. Unlimited plans could end up costing you more for what
you don?t use.

? Based on reports that the average usage for the first generation
iPhone was less than 100MB per month, our iPhone 3G plans more than
accommodate the vast majority of customers. Rogers?s customers get 4
times the data on our $60 entry level plan (400 MB) and 20 times the
data on our most comprehensive plan.

At Rogers we are always aiming to improve service to better meet the
needs of our customers and we appreciate your feedback. Your comments
will be passed along for further review and consideration.

We truly hope that you continue to stay loyal to Rogers Wireless however
should you feel that you need to make that move elsewhere. We kindly ask
that the account holder contact our customer care centre by phone at
your convenience. You may contact our Wireless Customer Relations
department toll free from a landline at 1-888-764-3771 or by dialing
*611 from your wireless phone. Our Hours of Operations are Monday to
Friday from 8AM to 9PM and on Saturday from 8AM to 6PM, EST.

Thank you for contacting Rogers. We appreciate your comments. We are
pleased to have been able to address your inquiry. For additional
information please visit our website at www.rogers.com.

For future email correspondence with respect to this e-mail, please
quote reference number 38955822

Regards,
Patty T.
Rogers Online Customer Service

http://www.rogers.com

You know one of the problems about this whole copyright debate is the massive conflict of interest in reporting it in our media companies, which also happen to be our ISPs. Canada’s top 6 ISPs, in order of customer base, are: Bell Sympatico, Shaw, Telus, Rogers, Vidéotron, Cogeco. Looking at what these companies do other than provide your Internet:

• Sympatico is owned by BCE, which also owns a big stake in CTV Globe Media, representing: Canada’s biggest private TV network (CTV), Canada’s biggest national newspaper (Globe and Mail), and 35 radio stations across the country.
• Shaw – mostly a tech company.
• Telus – mostly a tech company.
• Rogers owns magazines (including Maclean’s and Canadian Business), TV stations including CityTV and RogersTV.
• Videotron is owned by Quebecor, which owns scores of newspapers across the country (including Journal de Montreal and the Toronto Sun) numerous magazines in Quebec, the TVA television network, Archambault record stores, Videotron video rental stores, and a number of book publishers.
• Cogeco – mostly a tech company.

So between them, UPDATE: the owners of Bell Sympatico, Rogers and Videotron, probably own three quarters of Canada’s non-CBC news media; the balance owned by CanwestGlobal (which owns Global Television, the National Post, and, of course, Dose Magazine).

All in all not very healthy. The Canadian mania for, and regulatory approval of, consolidation not just in the media business, but in merging media and technology, means that our ISPs are our news providers. So any discussion of Net Neutrality and Copyright will be filtered through the lens of Big Content Providers.

Which, I guess, just means that we have to keep getting the word out.

Jeff Jarvis asks 10 questions of newspapers… Probably these should be asked of anyone who has anything to do with:
a) information
b) the webbernet

Here are the questions, and some teasers… see more here.

1. Who are we?
“I’m going to start with an existential question. It’s a fairly ridiculous one but I don’t think any newspaper has really decided what they are,”…

2. A new relationship?
Jarvis said news organisations need to decide on the appropriate relationship with their audience…

3. Are we generous?
Generosity could take many forms, according to Jarvis – sharing technology, supporting people with the Guardian ad network, allowing people to be stars in the outside world…

4. Do we know who’s smart?
“I’ve changed my mind – I used to be Mr Everything Should Be Open but I have read CiF comments too,” Jarvis said, adding that he was not picking on CiF in particular. “We need to figure out who the smart people are – it’s not just about creating content but also curating people.” …

5. Are we findable?
The idea that people will come to us is changing, and news websites “can’t be findable enough”, according to Jarvis…

6. Are we a platform?
The Guardian had already moved towards becoming a platform with the launch of Comment is Free and the fact that commenters have their own profile, Jarvis said…

7. Are we inventing new narratives?
Jarvis said reporters should go out with audio equipment all the time just to capture what might happen….

8. Are we in data layers?
“Data can tell you things if you find a way to listen,” Jarvis said…

9. Are we having fun yet?
Jarvis said it was essential to experiment and “play” with new ideas in order stay ahead of the competitors…

10. Are we agile?
“The Guardian is the best in the world but others are catching up,” Jarvis warned….

NYTimes reports:

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

As I recently read, expressed with great eloquence, elsewhere, Dubya-tee-EFF?

[via talkingpointmemo]

The published online version of Bill C-61 is difficult to manipulate. I’ve copied and posted here the English portion of the most worrying part of the Bill, Section 41, which deals with “circumvention” and “technological measures” aka digital locks.

Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry
Josée Verner, Minister of Canadian Heritage
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada K1A 0A6

Dear Ministers Prentice and Verner,

Thank you for your email of June 12, 2008 informing me of the introduction of Bill C-61, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act.

I am the founder of LibriVox, an all-volunteer, web-based project to make audio recordings of public domain texts and give them away for free. Since our inception in 2005, we’ve run on a yearly budget of $0; yet we’ve become one of the most prolific makers of audio books in the world, with a production rate recently topping 100 books per month. We’ve got a catalog of some 1,500 audio books, including authors such as Dickens, Cervantes, Austen, Dante, Darwin, Sun Tzu, Hobbes, Einstein, and Plato. We also have a number of Canadian classics from Leacock, Lucy Maude Montgomery, and others. We have thousands of volunteers around the world, who make audio versions of texts and give them away because they believe access to knowledge and great literature is one of the most precious gifts we can give to each other. We’ve gained some fame over the years, with articles in the NY Times, radio spots on the BBC, as well as many more mainstream and web media mentions and profiles. The Vice President of Creative Commons recently called us “perhaps the most interesting collaborative culture project this side of Wikipedia.”

LibriVox is the sort of project that is on the outer edge of copyright case law, because what we do was not possible even a few years ago. At our core, we are about reading old books, but we use digital recording software, distributed production models, mass online collaboration, bit torrents, blogging and podcasting, online forums and wikis, bandwidth, mp3s and zip files, all to make recordings of old texts and give them away online for free.

I have some personal objections to Bill C-61 as it has been tabled, objections you’ve heard no doubt from thousands of concerned and angry Canadian citizens. But I wanted to outline two concrete examples of how Bill C-61 would criminalize legitimate activities of Canadian LibriVox volunteers.

EXAMPLE 1: A publisher puts a digital lock on an e-book of a text that is out of copyright, but difficult find in print.

A LibriVox volunteer has purchased the e-book and wishes to copy the public domain text and share it with fellow LibriVox volunteers so that they may make an audio version. Under Bill C-61 it is unlawful for the (Canadian) volunteer to circumvent the digital lock on the e-book, even though the text itself is in the public domain.

This scenario is not far-fetched, it is already happening: in one instance, an e-book version of the American Constitution (certainly in the public domain) was distributed with digital locks and (spurious) copyright terms restricting uses of the text. Of course those copyright terms did not legally apply to the text, but with C-61, it would not matter, because it would be illegal for Canadians to circumvent the digital locks to use the text in ways that they are legally entitled to use it.

Bill C-61’s anti-circumvention provisions mean that publishers get to decide, unilaterally, what is and is not in the public domain. In fact, Bill C-61 would encourage publishers to put digital locks on public domain works (as they already put false copyright claims on print versions), and effectively destroy the principle of limited copyright term, one of the basic tenets of copyright law.

EXAMPLE 2: LibriVox releases all its recordings into the public domain, which means that anyone may use them for any purpose, including commercial uses. A business may — legitimately and legally — decide to bundle and sell LibriVox recordings on CDs, with digital locks.

However, even though LirbiVox, the original publishers, put the recordings in the public domain so they are free to be copied, sold, or given away, the new publisher is able to restrict use on the republished recordings, by putting digital locks on them.

Under Bill C-61, even I, the founder of LibriVox, will be breaking the law by circumventing the digital locks put on LirbiVox recordings, sold by another publisher.

Bill C-61 will allow publishers to take works with liberal copyright terms, and restrict further uses of those works by adding digital locks. It will be illegal for Canadians to break those digital locks, even for uses allowed under the original license of the works.

***

These are two small examples from the LibriVox project, but they are indicative of Bill C-61’s problematic approach of criminalizing legitimate activities by making circumvention illegal.

Making digital locks sacrosanct and better protected than the rights of Canadian citizens makes no sense. As Bob Young has said, Bill C-61’s anti-circumvention provisions are “similar to making the use and ownership of screw-drivers and pliers illegal because they can be used to commit crimes such as burglary.”

The future of knowledge is digital. Bill C-61 is not just about mp3s of the latest rock n’ roll songs, or DVDs of television shows. Bill C-61 is about how Canadians can access, share, consume and use knowledge of all kinds.

If we are to have new copyright legislation in Canada, let’s be sure that we understand what we are doing, and why we are doing it. Let’s be sure that the new copyright legislation at least makes an attempt to understand the changes happening around us.

Librarians, educators, entrepreneurs, software developers, musicians, documentary film makers, and others, as well as thousands of Canadian citizens have voiced their opposition to Bill C-61. You can add to this list public domain audio book makers.

Locksmiths do not get to decide what property rights citizens have under Canadian law. Digital lock makers should not get to define our right to knowledge either.

Bill C-61 must be changed.

Sincerely,

Hugh McGuire
Founder, LibriVox.org

cc.
Hon. Thomas Mulcair, MP, Outremont
Hon. Stephane Dion, Leader of the Opposition
Hon. Charles Angus, MP Timmins-James Bay
Hon. Jack Layton, Leader, New Democratic Party
Hon. Gilles Duceppe, Leader, Bloc Quebecois
Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada

DadaDodo works rather differently than Dissociated Press; whereas Dissociated Press (which, incidentally, refers to itself as a “travesty generator”) simply grabs segments of the body of text and shuffles them, DadaDodo tries to work on a larger scale: it scans bodies of text, and builds a probability tree expressing how frequently word B tends to occur after word A, and various other statistics; then it generates sentences based on those probabilities.

The theory here is that, with a large enough corpus, the generated sentences will tend to be grammatically correct, but semantically random: exterminate all rational thought.

[link]

There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time….Steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.

Lord Chesterfield, quoted by Christine Rosen.

I occasionally ask, has Miette read you a bedtime story yet? You should let her; The New Yorker has, and they liked it, even if they mixed up one Irish lass for another (who, I wonder?).

Speaking of which, whenever I come across Eveline [txt], I always think about Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful essay about writing, in which he writes:

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of our language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences that were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favourite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader more than those words do.

http://www.miettecast.com/podpress_trac/web/208/0/Miette_Joyce_Eveline.mp3

Youtube has just launched the Screening Room, “connecting films and audiences in the world’s largest theater.” They launched with the truly fabulous NFB short animation, The Danish Poet (what’s not to like about Norway, poets, true love and falling cows?).

I’ve been waiting for more of this kind of thing for a few years now, and very happy that NFB is part of it. I just hope they make more and more available to us.

Canada’s copyright Minister Jim Prentice will be on CBC’s Search Engine this morn, at 11. If you miss it, you’ll be able to listen by podcast (I’ll post a link).

UPDATE: here is the mp3. Have not listened yet.
mp3.

Here is the best primer on the issues I’ve seen yet, from Brendon Wilson.

Also: There is another meeting tonight at Station-C tonight about this:

Date: Thursday, June 19, 2008
Time: 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Location: Station C
Street: 5369 Blvd Saint Laurent
City/Town: Montreal, QC

Once again I can’t make it – Thursdays don’t work for me.

The Smithsonian is putting a collection of public domain photos on Flickr, part of the Flickr Commons project.

Here’s an example, with this curious description:

After parcel post service was introduced [in the US] in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.

Thursday, June 12, 2008
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Station C
5369 Blvd St. Laurent #430
Montréal, Québec H2T1S5

Montreal’s technology and creative communities are mobilizing against a new federal bill to restrict creators’ and consumers’ rights to use digital media.

On June 12th, 2008, Industry Minister Jim Prentice will introduce the amendment to the Canadian copyright act, commonly called “the Canadian DMCA”. The bill was crafted under pressure from American media cartels, and it’s expected to have a chilling effect on free expression and free speech in this country. It will restrict Canadians from freely using their computers and other devices to save, store, and play their legally-purchased media.

The Montreal Chapter of Fair Copyright for Canada is holding an emergency action meeting to respond to the new bill. We’ll have information for citizens to learn more about the Canadian DMCA, and materials for writing and sending letters to MPs asking them to oppose the bill. Talks by Fair Copyright for Canada leaders, including a phone call from Michael Geist.

Come meet others in the Montreal area who want a balanced, fair copyright system that works for all Canadians.

-Evan

P.S. Please pass this invitation along to people you might think are interested! The bill was announced yesterday, introduced today, so we’re on very short time frame to have a strong community response. Let’s get the word out!

See: Upcoming.

Unfortunately, I can’t make it!

UPDATE:
This just came into my emailbox:

The Government of Canada has introduced Bill C-61, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act. The proposed legislation is a made-in-Canada approach that balances the needs of Canadian consumers and copyright owners, promoting culture, innovation and competition in the digital age.
What does Bill C-61 mean to Canadians?

Specifically, it includes measures that would:

• expressly allow you to record TV shows for later viewing; copy legally purchased music onto other devices, such as MP3 players or cell phones; make back-up copies of legally purchased books, newspapers, videocassettes and photographs onto devices you own; and limit the “statutory damages” a court could award for all private use copyright infringements;
• implement new rights and protections for copyright holders, tailored to the Internet, to encourage participation in the online economy, as well as stronger legal remedies to address Internet piracy;
• clarify the roles and responsibilities of Internet Service Providers related to the copyright content flowing over their network facilities; and
• provide photographers with the same rights as other creators.

What Bill C-61 does not do:

• it would not empower border agents to seize your iPod or laptop at border crossings, contrary to recent public speculation

What this Bill is not:

• it is not a mirror image of U.S. copyright laws. Our Bill is made-in-Canada with different exceptions for educators, consumers and others and brings us into line with more than 60 countries including Japan, France, Germany and Australia

Bill C-61 was introduced in the Commons on June 12, 2008 by Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Heritage Minister Josée Verner.
For more information, please visit the Copyright Reform Process website at www.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/crp-prda.nsf/en/home

Thank you for sharing your views on this important matter.

The Honourable Jim Prentice, P.C., Q.C., M.P.
Minister of Industry

The Honourable Josée Verner, P.C., M.P.
Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women
and Official Languages and Minister for
La Francophonie

Wordle.net is fun. Here is this post wordled:

From the Minister of Industry:

The Honourable Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry, and the Honourable Josée Verner, Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages, and Minister for La Francophonie, will deliver brief statements and answer media inquiries shortly after the tabling of a bill to amend the Copyright Act. Members of the media will also be able to attend a technical briefing and lock-up prior to the tabling of the bill to amend the Copyright Act.

This whole “lock-up” business had me wondering, and further down in the press release it says:

Once the media lock-up has begun, no one will be allowed to leave the room or contact his/her office until the embargo is lifted. Journalists will be required to sign an undertaking to respect the release arrangements.

Wireless communication devices such as cellular phones, BlackBerrys, personal digital assistants or any other removable wireless communication devices (including modems, air cards and wireless microphones) will not be allowed in the lock-up area.

Which, in a way, sounds a little like the Conservatives copyright platform in general. More info to be found on Michael Geist’s blog.

Well, this is just about the most exciting thing anyone has written about LibriVox. From Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons:

Check out LibriVox, perhaps the most interesting collaborative culture project this side of Wikipedia.

[link...]

LibriVox, the all-volunteer audiobook project, just cataloged it’s 1,500th book, James Baldwin’s children’s history book, Four Great Americans. This milestone was reached during the record-breaking month of May, when LibriVox released 115 (!) audiobooks into the public domain, or almost four per day. Some gems from the catalog include:

• Enviro/sci-fi/horror surprise, Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore
• Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in Spanish and English
• Dream Psychology, by Sigmund Freud
• Tree-swinging favorite, Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• The beautiful Japanese zenish masterpiece, Book of Tea, by Okakura Kakuzo
• Cosmological page-turner, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, by Albert Einstein.
• John Stuart Mill’s handbook for ethical philosophizing, Utilitarianism
• Rudyard Kipling’s Indian adventure yarn, Kim
• Supercomupter scifi classic, The Cosmic Computer, by H. Beam Piper
• Voltaire’s Candide, en francais, bien sur.

Find out how to volunteer here.

Peter Tosh: Bush Doctor (live 1983)

Jimmy Cliff: The Harder They Come (1972)

Linton Kwesi Johnson: 5 Days of Bleeding (1978)
I saw dub poet LKJ when I first moved to New York. Was a fantastic concert.

We just hit 1,500 items in the LibriVox catalog. The lucky audiobook is: Four Great Americans, by James Baldwin.

This was the 96th book published in May, and we are on track for a 100-book month, which would smash our previous record of 77 books set in July 2007.

Books also give off special smells. According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books—so important that they resist buying odorless electronic books. CaféScribe, a French on-line publisher, is trying to counteract that reaction by giving its customers a sticker that will give off a fusty, bookish smell when it is attached to their computers.

From The Library in the New Age, by Robert Darnton, in the NY Review of Books [tipped by mitch]

Tourism-Montreal has just launched, according to Patrick, a $1.5 million web site. I just violated their terms of service, because incredibly (that word is too weak), their terms of service indicate:

You are prohibited from creating links in other Web sites leading to this Web site without prior express authorization from the Site Owner.

????

UPDATE: Martin Lessard has news (from Emmanuelle Legault, Directrice des communications, Tourisme Montréal) that all shall be well on the Tourism-Mtl site, and the crazy anti-linking terms will be taken away (apparently it had something to do with porno sites!?!).

A few Montreal classics from back when I listened to CKGM (the Cage):

The Box: L’Affaire Dumoutier (Say To Me) (1985)
I didn’t realize it, but Jean-Marc Pisapia, lead singer was a member of Men Without Hats (see below).

Safety Dance: Men Without Hats (1982)
Ah, the eighties in Quebec.

Corey Hart: Sunglasses At Night (1983)
Pout for me Corey. Pout harder. That’s better.

Cool:

GridRepublic members run a screensaver that allows their computers to work on public-interest research projects when the machines are not otherwise in use. This screensaver does not affect performance of the host computer any more than an ordinary screensaver does.

By aggregating idle resources from users around the world, we create a massive supercomputer.

Gridrepublic is built on the system that started as SETI@home, which was turned into a general distributed computing platform BOINC. Gridrepublic is a central place for all projects using this distributed platform, where you can dowload & install the system and even better, choose which projects your computer’s idle time will be supporting, including:

Einstein@home: you can contribute your computer’s idle time to a search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors.

Climateprediction.net: computing a massive environmental model intended to forecast climate conditions in the 21st century.

Proteins@Home: investigating the “Inverse Protein Folding Problem”: Whereas “Protein Folding” seeks to determine a protein’s shape from its amino acid sequence, “Inverse Protein Folding” begins with a protein of known shape and seeks to “work backwards” to determine the amino acid sequence from which it is generated.

Donate here.

This looks pretty important: CRTC, Canada’s communications regulator, is doing a consultation on “New Media Broadcasting.” Here is a CBC story on it. Here is the consultation overview doc. Here is the e-consultation site.

[via Michael Geist]

Dan’s the guy who keeps LibriVox servers running. He loves Rush. It’s his birthday. So:

Rush – La Villa Strangiato (Live at Pinkpop 1979)

Rush: Limelight

Rush: Fly By Night

I should have mentioned this eariler: LibriVox is a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge, an award & conference put on by the City of Stockholm, which:

…features a six category Award for ICT for Development projects. ICT stands for Information and Communication Technologies and the best projects will win the prestigious Stockholm Challenge trophies and receive a 5.000 Euro stipend… An extended program of workshops, conference, study visits and social gatherings will bring together the most inspiring ICT entrepreneurs, researchers and students from all over the world to share experiences and knowledge.

Thanks to some financial support from Project Gutenberg (maybe you’d like to donate?) I’m off to Sweden on Friday (with a stopover in London), for a week.

In the fall of 2004, I quit my job consulting in the renewable energy industry in order to focus on writing. In addition to fiction-writing, I worked on a research/writing contract to develop an exhibit on dinosaurs (part of which is still online) for the Canadian Museum of Nature.

I’d never used Wikipedia much before, but I used it frequently on that project as a starting point for research. It was an excellent resource (to be backed up with others, of course), and since it was so useful, I thought I should contribute. I got hooked.

So it’s nice to see, three-and-a-half years later, that the article on feathered dinosaurs, for which I was the second editor, still contains a pretty good summary, I think, that I wrote about the history of these peculiar fossils:

Shortly after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, British biologist and evolution-defender Thomas Henry Huxley proposed that birds were descendants of dinosaurs. He cited skeletal similarities, particularly among some saurischian dinosaurs, fossils of the ‘first bird’ Archaeopteryx and modern birds. In 1868 he published On the Animals which are Most Nearly Intermediate between Birds and Reptiles, making the case. The leading dinosaur expert of the time, Richard Owen, disagreed, claiming Archaeopteryx as the first bird outside dinosaur lineage. For the next century, claims that birds were dinosaur descendants faded, with more popular bird-ancestry hypotheses including ‘crocodylomorph’ and ‘thecodont’ ancestors, rather than dinosaurs or other archosaurs.

In 1964, John Ostrom described Deinonychus antirrhopus, a theropod whose skeletal resemblance to birds seemed unmistakable. Ostrom has since become a leading proponent of the theory that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs. Further comparisons of bird and dinosaur skeletons, as well as cladistic analysis strengthened the case for the link, particularly for a branch of theropods called maniraptors. Skeletal similarities include the neck, the pubis, the wrists (semi-lunate carpal), the ‘arms’ and pectoral girdle, the shoulder blade, the clavicle and the breast bone. In all, over a hundred distinct anatomical features are shared by birds and theropod dinosaurs.

Other researchers drew on these shared features and other aspects of dinosaur biology and began to suggest that at least some theropod dinosaurs were feathered. The first restoration of a feathered dinosaur was Sarah Landry’s depiction of a feathered “Syntarsus” (now renamed Megapnosaurus or considered a synonym of Coelophysis), in Robert T. Bakker’s 1975 publication Dinosaur Renaissance.[2] Gregory S. Paul was probably the first paleoartist to depict maniraptoran dinosaurs with feathers and protofeathers, starting in the late 1980s.

By the 1990s, most paleontologists considered birds to be surviving dinosaurs and referred to ‘non-avian dinosaurs’ (those that went extinct), to distinguish them from birds (aves or avian dinosaurs). Direct evidence to support the theory was missing, however. Some mainstream ornithologists, including Smithsonian Institution curator Storrs L. Olson, disputed the links, citing the lack of fossil evidence for feathered dinosaurs.

Fossil evidence

After a century of hypotheses without hard evidence, particularly well-preserved (and legitimate) fossils of feathered dinosaurs were discovered during the 1990s and 2000s. The fossils were preserved in a Lagerstätte — a sedimentary deposit exhibiting remarkable richness and completeness in its fossils — in Liaoning, China. The area had repeatedly been smothered in volcanic ash produced by eruptions in Inner Mongolia 124 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous Period. The fine-grained ash preserved the living organisms that it buried in fine detail. The area was teeming with life, with millions of leaves and the oldest known angiosperms, insects, fish, frogs, salamanders, mammals, turtles, lizards and crocodilians discovered to date.

The most important discoveries at Liaoning have been a host of feathered dinosaur fossils, with a steady stream of new finds filling in the picture of the dinosaur-bird connection and adding more to theories of the evolutionary development of feathers and flight.

To improve the article, head on over to wikipedia. Kinda nice to know that for 95% (50%? 80%?) of the young, English-speaking, students of paleontology in the world, it’s my text that might first introduce them to feathered dinosaurs.

This one goes out to Facebook, Google, and the Warentless Wiretap program.

Rockwell: Somebody’s Watching Me (1984)
One-hit wonder.

The Romantics: Talking In Your Sleep (1984)

Hall and Oates: Private Eyes (1981)
I was hoping this one was a 1984 tune as well, but no dice. Incidentally, I seem to have an inordinate amount of Hall & Oates tunes in friday mixed tapes. That’s kind of embarrassing.

Martin Heidegger’s 1954 piece, The Question Concerning Technology transformed the way I look at technology (it’s really dense, and the translation is heavy-handed). I read it in 1995, a decade before I got implicated in the web, and 40 years after it was published. When I first started writing on the web in 2004, I had a draft post, consisting of one sentence, called “The Question Concerning Digital Technology,” which was to be an attempt at an update of the Heidegger piece for a networked world. That draft has long since disappeared, but I’ve been thinking about it again of late.

A rough summary of Heidegger’s argument is:

• the purpose of technology is to order nature for human use
• humans are part of nature
• in ordering nature through technology, humans become part of that which is ordered
• in becoming part of the ordered universe, humans lose humanity
• this is a bad thing
• we might be able to save ourselves, by appealing to the greek root techne, which means, in part: “art”

It’s a compelling description of technology in general, and the web in particular: that the prime driving force is ordering “nature” (in a broad sense), with the result being, more or less, efficiency. If you look at what we’ve all been doing over the last few years on the web, much of the most exciting things had to do with ordering – specifically information, for more efficient access:

• google as a high-level orderer of information on the web
• RSS as an orderer of information sources I want to stay aware of
• del.icio.us as an orderer of information I want to keep track of & share with others
• flickr as an orderer of photos
• wikipedia as an orderer of encyclopaedic information

The list can go on and on, and of course “technology” does many different things, beyond “just” ordering, but in general the force propelling technology often seems to be mastery of the world around us for our use, one way or another. Which, as Heidegger points out, has worrisome implications for all of us.

I’ve always come at technology from something like this angle: I’m not particularly interested in technology per se, I am interested in the ways we might use it to make our lives richer and more meaningful. And in general, I think that creating things is the activity that gives humans the greatest sense of meaning and richness in their lives. Certainly that’s the case for me, and from my beginnings on the web, it was the confluence of free software (that is, the building and dissemination of free tools), collaboration, and unlimited distribution that excited me. “Everyone” could create things now, and share those things with the world. The projects I am most proud of (LibriVox, Atwater Digital Literacy) are platforms for people to create things that, I hope, bring richness into their own lives. I’ve always considered LibriVox as most important for what it does for our volunteers: it gives them a way to deepen their connection to a text they love, to read it and record it, and give it away; to make connections with literature that they might not have made otherwise. That we’re also making a free library of audio literature for the world is in some ways a fringe benefit. [Interestingly, and as a side note, coding itself is, to coders, a deeply creative and satisfying enterprise].

Of late, I’ve been feeling cold about the web. So much of what is going on is the ordering of nature, which, if you believe Heidegger, is the inevitable drive of technology. And “dangerous” for our humanity. I know many people involved in working on tranches of this ordering, and I have a few projects along this line as well (datalibre, earideas, collectik). Just off the top of my head: Evan’s Wikitravel tries to better order travel info; Vinismo order’s wine information; Dopplr tries to better manage your travel, and intersections with others who are moving around too; pal mat is working on google maps, ordering geography; the praized guys are building a better system to organize places and preferences. More will come. All of it is “good,” in the sense that it makes it easier to do the things we want to do, but I often hear Heidegger’s warning echoing through my mind: in ordering nature, we are becoming that which is ordered, and so we risk losing our humanity.

Here are some of the things that are coming, I think, from the inevitable drive of technology to order nature, and our human desire to have efficient sorting systems:

• We’ll continue to cataloging everything (from books to people to places) online, and find better ways to sort all that information, using objective authority (eg authoritative incoming links, aka google juice), personal network authority (links/preferences from your chosen network) as relevance indicators.
• We will map this network on the web, and increasingly apply it to physical space (starting with google maps, and becoming more customized and personalized)
• Mobile technology will mean both that our access to cataloged information becomes ubiquitous, and our efforts to catalog things will be unconstrained
• RFID, or something like it, will mean that this sorting of physical objects will move from its current general state (eg. tracking & finding something like “any copy of a certain book”), to specific (eg. tracking & finding something like “a particular copy of a certain book”), and will touch people too
• We’ll get all the media we want, when we want it
• We’ll get most of the data we want, when we want it
• Our mobile devices will increasingly interact with our physical surroundings (point at an object, get info on it; buy it; sell it), and will become our bank, and keys, our thermostat, and more, as well as everything else it already is (telephone, email, library, map etc).
• All data on the web will become structured, and mostly available
• More data sets (eg government-owned) will arrive on the web, and more people will participate in using that data to understand the world, and make decisions, to order nature
• Data about people will become structured, and mostly available [For a well-networked human in my circle, this has already happened: I can track their interests, on a daily basis (del.icio.us, google reader shared items, digg etc.), their movements (dopplr), their public thoughts (blogs, twitter), books they like (librarything, gutenberg bookshelf), things they buy, etc etc.]

Lots of money will be made (if all goes well, some of it by friends of mine) finding new and different ways to do all this, and more and more. In essence, we’ll continue to use the web (and increasingly, mobile devices) to better order nature. And we’ll become better ordered at the same time.

Looking at this very brief list of what’s going to happen, I can’t help but think: “so what?” Is any of this going to make people’s lives richer or more meaningful?

My suspicion is “no.” I say this as a digital native, if a relatively recent, adoptive native (starting in 2004). For myself, I have found that the price of the benefits of the web has been heavy: while the web has allowed me to do all sorts of things, to build things and relationships, and projects, I find the quality of my time on the web so often unsatisfying. In a comparison of value to me between a random “leisure” hour on the web and a random hour doing something else in the real world, the real world trumps the web almost every time. Yet the web still usually wins the battle for my time (this says as much about me as it does about the web, of course).

I had a dinner a while back with Mike Lenczner, of Ile Sans Fil, and Jon Udell and some others, and this was the question MIke was asking, more or less: “so what?” Is free wifi access for all really such a great thing for people? Free encyclopedia? Free audio books? That’s not to say there is no value in those things, but we in the tech world imbue this stuff with a magical capacity to improve people’s lives, and I don’t think it’s clear that it has. Much less RSS feeds and online bookmarking. Free Software we see as a moral victory; OLPC as a revolutionary project that will save Africa; global voices online, as a dialogue builder that will transform our understanding of each other. All these things are good, great even, and there are countless other examples of wonderful online projects. But part of me agrees with Michael: it’s not clear that on balance they are truly improving people’s lives in any real sense.

But the point of all this is not really to criticize the web, nor to gnash teeth about the things people, including me, are building with it. Rather it’s a call to look at technology from a different angle, a call to designers and technologists and webbies and to consider a different approach, inspired by Heidegger’s solution of technology as art.

The web provides us enormous and efficient access, but a problem seems to me that it strips away the intimacy of our connection. Consider reading a book, versus reading on line; conversing in IM versus having a coffee; viewing a photo versus touching an object. This is not to criticize any of these experiences, or to say we are stuck with the modes and interfaces and tools we have now. I’m not saying that the web means less intimacy, exactly.

But what if we, those of us trying to make the world better with what we do on the web, rethink our projects in these terms. Leave the ordering for a moment, and consider intimacy instead.

What can we, as a community interested in making lives richer and more meaningful, do with technology to help humans experience more intimacy with the things that are important to them?

I don’t really have any answers, but it seems to me that it’s a challenge worth considering.

The web, and technology, will continue to order the world, there is no doubt about that. Your participation in this process is fine – and probably lucrative. But there is more, and more exciting things to think about.

A truly radical and creative use of technology, will find ways to help humans become more intimate with the things that matter to them. Those things might be art, books or songs; and people; probably food, and family. I don’t really know what else, and I don’t really know what I expect this to mean, but I think it’s worth thinking about.

OTTAWA–The federal Conservatives have quietly killed a giant information registry that was used by lawyers, academics, journalists and ordinary citizens to hold government accountable.

The registry, created in 1989, is an electronic list of every request filed to all federal departments and agencies under the Access to Information Act.

Known as CAIRS, for Co-ordination of Access to Information Requests System, the database allowed ordinary citizens to identify millions of pages of once-secret documents that became public through individual freedom-of-information requests over many years…

Alasdair Roberts, a political scientist at Syracuse University in New York, built a version of the database by requesting the CAIRS electronic records through an Access to Information Act request, and updated the site monthly.

CBC journalist David McKie took over the work in 2006 using another publicly accessible website (http://www.onlinedemocracy.ca)…

[more...]

Busy night tonight.

First, pal Nora Young, of CBC’s Spark, will be at the Blue Met, hosting a panel, 7pm at DELTA CENTRE-VILLE – RÉGENCE A:

OUT OF THE BOX: ADVENTURES IN ELECTRONIC LITERATURESince the computer was invented, writers have been using it to forge new literary forms. From the early days of hypertext fiction to the latest in narrative gaming, these authors write beyond the book and way outside the box. – Hosted by Nora Young.

J. R. Carpenter
Jason E. Lewis
Jeff Parker
Alice Van Der Klei

Next, impresario Boris, will be presiding over the 5th installment of Pecha-Kucha Montreal, 8pm at SAT:

What is Pecha Kucha Night?

Pecha Kucha Night, devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham (Klein Dytham architecture), was conceived in 2003 as a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.

Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.

From GRAIN:

Farmers across the world produced a record 2.3 billion tons of grain in 2007, up 4% on the previous year. Since 1961 the world’s cereal output has tripled, while the population has doubled. Stocks are at their lowest level in 30 years, it’s true,[4] but the bottom line is that there is enough food produced in the world to feed the population. The problem is that it doesn’t get to all of those who need it. Less than half of the world’s grain production is directly eaten by people. Most goes into animal feed and, increasingly, biofuels – massive inflexible industrial chains. In fact, once you look behind the cold curtain of statistics, you realise that something is fundamentally wrong with our food system. We have allowed food to be transformed from something that nourishes people and provides them with secure livelihoods into a commodity for speculation and bargaining. The perverse logic of this system has come to a head. Today it is staring us in the face that this system puts the profits of investors before the food needs of people.

[more...]

I for one welcome our robot overlords.

Kraftwerk: The Robots (1978)

Daft Punk: Robot Rock (2005)

Styx: Mr. Roboto (1983)
Ouch. This is pretty terrible.

Happy May Day. Sylvain has organized a meeting tonight to discuss putting together a podcamp montreal:

Jeudi 1er mai / Thursday May 1st
19h (?)
Sergent-Recruteur
4801 Saint-Laurent

I can’t make it, but here are my thoughts:

For a podcasting conference in Montreal, I would like to see this question be the central theme:
-what new and exciting things can we do with podcasting content?

and:
-how can we make it happen?
-who can help?

that is, why are there no podcasts about, oh, i don’t know:
-interviews with old farmers in the gaspe about what life used to be like
-discussions with 6 year olds about the world’s problems
-weekly interviews with montreal university profs (mcgill, u de m, concordia, uqam) who are doing interesting research, whatever the field
-in-depth exploration of the health care system, with interviews with doctors, nurses, orderlies, administrators, patients, academics … ideally with interviews with the same in other countries so we can really find out how to have a better healthcare system
-weekly podcast with interviews of montreal fiction writers
-quebec history
-the immigrant experience in quebec
-a podcast dedicated to bringing quebec’s french cultural heritage to anglos; a podcast dedicated to bringing quebec anglo culture to francophones
-more audio documentaries
-podcast from the musee des beaux arts
-podcasts of various lecture series, with visiting speakers from around the world (eg who speak at mcgill etc)
-podcasts from le devoir, la presse, the quebec musician’s association
-lives of aboriginals in northern quebec

generally: how can podcasting change the world? how can it make things better? how can it build a stronger quebec? how can it create more understanding in the provice? how can it be a tool for innovation? how can we use podcasting as an instrument to become the most innovative, socially and economically vbrant population in the world?

also, generally (this is a different conference, maybe):
how is quebec going to deal with the changes that the web is bringing? if freely available information (in a broad sense) is the foundation of innovation, what does quebec need to do to remain innovative with information freely flowing on the web? what impacts will this have on language? on language policy? on culture? can we close it off? do we need to open it more? what does this mean for education, for business, for culture? how do we come to terms, as a society, with an overwhelming amount of the innovation happening on the web in english? that is, how do we come to terms with the fact that, in order to be at the leading edge of web development, and web innovation, we need to be participating in a global network/community (eg twitter) where english is (right now) the primary language? what are we doing to prepare for the change, in 20 years, when the language of innovation might be chinese? what tools should educators be building, what tools should podcasters and quebec web entrepreneurs be building?

where does podcasting fit in?

etc.

Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life….
Art as the redemption of the man of knowledge–-of those who see the terrifying and questionable character of existence, who want to see it, the men of tragic knowledge.
Art as the redemption of the man of action–-of those who not only see the terrifying and questionable character of existence but live it, want to live it, the tragic war-like men, the hero.
Art as the redemption of the sufferer–as the way to states in which suffering is willed, transfigured, diefied, where suffering is a form of great delight.

Friedrich Nietzsche in Will to Power, fragment 853

Nothing says heartbreak like good country music. Here’s a few about the other woman:

Patsy Cline: She’s got You

Loretta Lynn: Other Woman
The coal miner’s daughter.

Dolly Parton: Jolene
What a fantastic song. What a voice. [Also, check the White Stripes cover version]

An Open Letter to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanapoulos, By Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Daily News:

Dear Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos,

It’s hard to know where to begin with this, less than an hour after you signed off from your Democratic presidential debate here in my hometown of Philadelphia, a televised train wreck that my friend and colleague Greg Mitchell has already called, quite accurately, “a shameful night for the U.S. media.” It’s hard because – like many other Americans – I am still angry at what I just witnesses, so angry that it’s hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking. Look, I know that “media criticism” – especially when it’s one journalist speaking to another – tends to be a genteel, colleagial thing, but there’s no genteel way to say this.

With your performance tonight – your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters – you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

You implied throughout the broadcast that you wanted to reflect the concerns of voters in Pennsylvania. Well, I’m a Pennsylvanian voter, and so are my neighbors and most of my friends and co-workers. You asked virtually nothing that reflected our everyday issues – trying to fill our gas tanks and save for college at the same time, our crumbling bridges and inadequate mass transit, or the root causes of crime here in Philadelphia. In fact, there almost isn’t enough space – and this is cyberspace, where room is unlimited – to list all the things you could have asked about but did not, from health care to climate change to alternative energy to our policy toward China to the deterioration of Afghanistan to veterans’ benefits to improving education. You ignored virtually everything that just happened in what most historians agree is one of the worst presidencies in American history, including the condoning of torture and the trashing of the Constitution, although to be fair you also ignored the policy concerns of people on the right, like immigration issues….

[more...]

They’re called turntablists, and Montreal’s has had some good ‘uns over the years.

Kid Koala: Drunk Trumpet

Dj A-Track: at the ITF

Scratch Bastid: Scribble Jam 07

Dante’s Inferno: Cori reads; Gustave Doré illustrates; and lucid videoifies.

Dan Hill has a wonderful posting of Monocle design notes. There’s much good and thought-provoking stuff in there, particularly if you are interested in text as a medium, and the thinking behind the next generation of media, which sees web and print as different, and complementary, and builds both accordingly. This struck me particularly for some reason:

In terms of user generated content, or user discussion of Monocle pieces, my view was that we didn’t need comments on the site as people increasingly have their own spaces to talk, discuss, comment – whether that’s blogs and discussion fora, or the social software of Facebook et al. So a more progressive approach would be to ensure that everything is linkable and kept online – with clean, permanent URL structures – thus encouraging people to point to articles from the comfort of their own sites. At some point, we could begin to aggregate responses to Monocle editorial, Technorati-style, perhaps (it’s a development of a strategy I’d outlined at the BBC, which there was also predicated on ‘tear-off strips’ of content as well, enabling people to grab BBC media and build a blog entry around it).

Adam Greenfield wasn’t so taken by Monocle, which echoes my reaction years ago to Tyler Brulé’s previous magazine venture, Wallpaper: basically, a fancy mag for rich people who like to covet well-designed, and really expensive, things, and travel to exotic places to have experiences other people aren’t smart/rich/good-looking/adventurous/enlightened enough to contemplate. (Which is fine, but usually doesn’t interest me for all that long).

I’ve never read Monocle, and though I admire the web site, it’s never pulled me in for whatever reason. It might just be because the bespoke tailoring is for a kind of suit I don’t like to wear.

Glenn Gould: J.S.Bach’s Partita #2

Thelonious Monk: Round Midnight

Jerry Lee Lewis – Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On (1957)

This is great: internetisshit.org.

Of course in lots of ways it isn’t shit, but in many ways it is. So, what do you and I do about it? We can either: a) cut back our time on/commitment to the web, or b) find ways to make it less shit; find good, important things to do on the web, and do them.

One of the things I’ve been lamenting about twitter is that it’s replaced del.icio.us as the “place where I put interesting links” … ie. links my friends might be interested in. This means that I don’t really have a good, structured repository of links like I used to have with delicious. The problem is that twitter and delicious do a similar thing – let you share information – from a totally different philosophical starting point.

Delicious is a database designed to collect and organize URLs, which you can also share.

Twitter is a conversational tool, that also allows you to share URLs.

So delicious is built as an organizable archive; while twitter is built as an ephemeral transmission device.

But what I’ve found is that I want to do both: transmit interesting links, but *also* archive them for future reference. So I want to link the two services. I asked on Twitter if anyone knew how; Jordan (blog – twitter) pointed me to twitticious (review), by Alex Girard which, I think, does exactly what I want, unfortunately with some problems, but the meat of what I want twitticious does:

1. I post a URL to twitter, with a bit of text
2. twitticious then sends that post to delicious, with the twit text as the title, and the URL as the URL

I now am able to transmit my twits, and archive the URLs in a nicely structured/able database.

It’s so simple. And all you have to do to get it to work is:
-give twitticious your twitter name
-give twitticious your delicious name/password (hopefully notprobably too much of a security threat).

Problem 1: the delicious entries aren’t tagged, so you have to do that in a separate step.
Potential Solution: have twitticious automatically tag: “from:twitter” … so I can easily find & tag those entries

Problem 2: twitticious uses the twitter’s tinyurl as the URL it posts to delicious
Potential solution: could the true URL be extracted and posted instead?

Problem 3: Apparently it can’t be turned off
Potential Solution: you could just change your delicious pw, and that should do the trick, I think.

UPDATE: Problem 4: The password thing. Probably too much of a security threat.
Potential solution: I don’t know.

(PS what do you think gives the CIA more information: my Facebook account or my del.icio.us account?)

Since we were kids, most of us got emotionally attached to things that aren’t real: cartoons, teddy bears, and talking cars, for instance. Usually these attachments are built on the stories that surround, for instance, our teddy bears – stories we create. In the case of cartoons, it’s other people’s stories.

But there’s something different, exciting, and scary happening here. Watch this, and tell me what you feel when a) the guy kicks the machine, and b) the machine slips on the ice.

I found it heartbreaking watching the machine try to keep its balance on the ice. “Go little guy, go!” I thought. And I thought the guy was a real jerk for kicking it… yet I’ve kicked many a machine that hasn’t done what I wanted it to do.

UPDATE: zeke points out that this is a military robot…I know! That’s what’s crazy, but when those feeble feet were skidding on the ice I reacted – involuntarily – with pity.

Here’s another one that really got me emotionally:

The movements of these giant contraptions are so organic that it’s hard *not* to think of them as sentient somehow, and to react accordingly.

Finally, here’s an amazing CGI woman, not quite lifelike, but damn close.

So what’s striking about all this is how important movement is in our emotional reactions to things. Part of that suggests that we’re getting closer to loveable robots. But another thing is to consider the information that gets lost in text-based communication.

When I was at university, I worked as a waiter at the student pub, Alfie’s. We had DJs, but I used to come in a little early for my shifts, and they let me “spin” a bit before things started up. I usually got around to playing jazzy funky stuff, but I’d often start out with a little bit of the rock, as well as some roll; not big anthems, but those kinds of songs that sort of started you off slow and then got you going. Here’s a trio of wax I remember slappin’ on the turntables.

Led Zeppelin: Over The Hills And Far Away Music (1973)
I love when the big guitars kick in at 1:27 … the rest of the song’s a bit of a let down, but worth it for the big three-chord chop that kicks you in the butt.

Bob Seeger: Night Moves (1976)
Hmm. I’ve never seen this video before, which seems to have been made in the 1990s. Can’t say I like it much. And I’m not sure what I think of this song now, but it’s got a nice gravelly sumpin that works in a stinky bar when you’re setting up before the crowds get there (ps: is that Joey from Friends at 2:05? … I think so … )

The Clash: Jimmy Jazz (1979)
I usually played the studio version from London Calling, but this live version’s got a whole other bit of charm going on (from their 16-night Times Square residency in 1980, I think). A song like Jimmy Jazz is great because you can go in so many different directions from it: punk rock, R&B, jazz, reggae, soul. Man, the Clash was good.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain, and the question comes up often enough: why not license the recordings as creative commons/non-commercial instead? The question came up recently and here was my answer:

So, why should LibriVox recordings be in the public domain, rather than a creative commons license?

LibriVox comes out of a number of ideas: the idealism and pragmatic successes of the free software movement, the collaborative methodology (and “it needn’t be perfect to be useful”) of Wikipedia, Lessig’s defense of the commons, and the alternative licensing of Creative Commons works, the podcasting platform which democratized distribution of media, the astoundingly useful work of project Gutenberg, that has been toiling away since 1971 making public domain texts available to anyone for free, and finally Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive and the vision of universal access to all human knowledge.

One of the important ideas behind LibriVox was this: a vibrant public domain is essential for a healthy society, and is essential for innovation – which I think can also be expressed as: “finding solutions to problems.” Having a wide and vibrant public domain – of ideas, texts, learning, science, open source code, audio recordings, art etc. – means that as we face problems of one kind or another, we have at our disposal a whole host of tools and information and building blocks that will help us find solutions. We’ve seen in the past few decades, however, a move against this idea of public intellectual space – broadly the the movement towards protection of “intellectual property.” We’ve seen this across all sectors of society, from how universities treat their scientific research, to patenting of life, patents on processes, the abusive and self-destructive suing of fans by music companies and Hollywood. I oppose much of this stuff on a number of grounds: one is a moral objection to the greed of companies who wish to extend their ownership beyond where it had ever been imagined previously. The other objection is more pragmatic: that allowing companies to do this will stifle innovation, and in the long run will be very damaging to our societies.

So LibriVox – besides being a project about making audiobooks – was originally conceived of as a small bulwark in a larger moral, intellectual and political battle around the value of the “public domain” broadly defined. And part of that defense is this idea that people can and will and should build on the public domain to make new things and provide new more innovative solutions to problems. LibriVox would make the audio recordings, make them available, and the hope has always been that others would find great things to do with them. The Ebay cottage industry, which annoys some people, is a good example: we have not figured out how to provide CDs of recordings to people, yet people want them. It would take more work and organization, and it would be nice if we could do that for free. But we can’t, or have not been able to. So these other people download our files, burn CDs and sell them to people who want them. The end result is that more people get to listen to (inexpensive) public domain literature they wish to listen to (and wish to pay for), some ebayers have some added revenue generated from spreading great literature throughout the world, maybe more people hear about LibriVox (but maybe not). Some people see that as a problem, but I certainly don’t.

But I hope people will come up with even more useful things to do with LibriVox recordings, and if they are commercial, I just can’t see any problem with that. The “thing” that they will be doing may be using LV recordings, but it certainly won’t be replicating what LV does already. They will be doing something new and hopefully interesting, probably educationally useful, and even if it IS nike selling sneakers with Gord’s recording of Walden, well, at least more people might get turned on to Walden (though I assure you Nike can afford to hire someone to record a chunk of Walden).

So the question around licensing became this: do we want to limit how people use LibriVox recordings? What is *wrong* with commercial uses? As long as the audio remains accessible, and free for all to use forever, then I saw no reason why we should limit anything – limiting would just mean that in the scheme of things, fewer people would listen to the recordings we have made. And in my calculus of the universe, that’s a bad thing: I think the universe will be a better place the more people listen to LibriVox recordings.

But beyond that sort of pragmatic thinking, there is a wider philosophical question about ownership, control, and the act of truly giving something away. I think Creative Commons is a wonderful tool, and it changed the way I thought about art. But it maintains this idea: I own this work and you may do with it just what I say you may do. Now that’s fine: I license, for instance, my personal blog writing like this. But LibriVox is more radical. LibriVox says: we make these recordings, and we give them away, no strings attached. Use them as you like: you don’t have to ask permission or tell us about it, or do anything, just use them as you like. They are yours as much as they are ours now. We have gifted them to the universe.

That’s a pretty radical idea, far more radical than CC which says: here are the terms under which I allow you to use my work.

It’s radical and it’s liberating as well, because in some sense one’s ownership of things is a two way street, and the things you own in some sense own you too – ownership means you have certain responsibilities to that thing, including monitoring how other people use it. Breaking that ownership bond is a powerful sort of experiment.

There are of course some very important pragmatic reasons for a public domain license rather than creative commons: public domain means we just don’t have to worry about it. We don’t have to chase anyone, or ask for checks or tell them they can’t use such and such to do so and so, we don’t have to hire lawyers and sue our fans or anyone else. The files are there for all to use, and all we have to do is concern ourselves with our objective, which is:

To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.

Along those lines, we didn’t want anyone to ever have to question which LibriVox license a certain audio falls under. It’s all the same, all public domain, and anyone can use it for whatever they like. Period. Answering questions is easy. Having multiple licenses would have made that a headache for people, including us.

There is one final very important point, which I had not really thought about until Michael Hart of Gutenberg told me about it recently. US copyright law has extended and extended again the term of copyright, currently 95 years after publication date. This means that nothing has gone into the public in a very long time. And if copyright law-making continues on like this, there will be another extension when the next batch of public domain stuff is currently scheduled to click over. So, possibly, nothing new will ever go into the public domain again.

In the old days, there was about a 50-50 split: 50% of texts were in the public domain, 50% under copyright. Every year more and more texts came into being, but a whole swath of things went into the public domain, and the ratio kept more or less the same. That was a healthy for society because people had much easier access to those texts that went into the public domain.

That’s not happening anymore. So the public domain is shrinking as a ratio of available knowledge.

Which brings another point: Creative Commons does not, in fact, make any contribution to the public domain, because the term of Creative Commons licenses is the same as for copyright (i think, that is: 95 years after publication). So Creative Commons in fact does NOTHING to protect or enhance the public domain – it only creates a new class of copyright protection that is much more liberal than previous incarnations.

So LibriVox is a small beacon of light in this policy question, slowly adding to the public domain while all around the public domain is shrinking. This is important in some broad sense beyond anything particular we do at LibriVox. At least I think it is.

Having said all that, I understand why some people don’t want their recordings in the public domain. But that’s fine, there are many other places to put audio up on the web. People don’t need LirbiVox to add recordings to the web. We represent just one little corner of the audio world. Our corner is this: we make free public domain audio versions of public domain texts. If people want to help (many have) that’s great. If they don’t, then that’s OK too, there’s no reason people ought to be forced to make public domain recordings …

But that’s what LibriVox is for, making public domain audio recordings, and giving them away to the world.

The Astronauts: Firewater (1963)
Looks like a good party. Do you think the guy on the couch is gonna score with that girl? From the movie, Surf Party.

Dick Dale & The Del Tones: Surfing/Miserlou (1962)
Intro is the vocal “Surfing,” followed by the instrumental “Miserlou,” which is a traditional Greek folk song, with versions of it common throughout the Middle East. Here it’s reinterpreted by the legendary Dick Dale, who was born in Lebanon to a Lebanese father and Polish mother. You can hear all those influences in this tune (made re-famous in Pulp Fiction).

The Atlantics: Bombora (1963)
Australia’s best-known surf band. Bombora is the Aboriginal term for waves breaking over rock shelves.

Some real audio treats this week at earideas/wednesday picks: SciFi loses a great one, with the death of Arthur C. Clarke; a beautiful and tragic story of death in the Mossdale caves; and the mystery of Bobby Dunbar.

[thanks to Matt for the tip on dunbar]

I posted something on Twitter about this, but that’s a stupid place to write about something as complex as the subprime mortgage problem, so I’ll do a little run-down here. In particular, I am struck by the (lefty) media spin, which is, roughly:

The government will bail out the big banks, and leave ordinary homeowners with their pants around their ankles, suffering foreclosures etc.

Or:

Good news! The Fed has reduced interest rates, to encourage more irresponsible lending and borrowing which is what got us in this mess in the first place.

While I have no doubt that the government will protect their rich banker buddies, and leave the ordinary people out to dry, this sounds like: “if only the government would help out ‘regular homeowners’ everything would be all right…please find a way for us to keep buying expensive houses that we can’t afford.”

Basically the media is saying: “Everyone should have a house, why can’t the government fix this stupid subprime thing so that everyone can have a house again?”

And the problem with that is that the mess starts in the first place from the government fixing things so that everyone can have a house, by crafting policies that encourage banks to make bad loans to bad credit risks; which further encourages people to buy houses that are too expensive, which drives the market up, so everyone’s happy until the bottom falls out of the whole thing. It’s nice for everyone to have a house, but the irony is that this whole mess is kind of like a right-wing version of socialism, where through low-interest rate policies, bankers all got rich as sin, people got to enjoy houses they couldn’t afford … and in the long run, as with any kind of expensive social spending, the whole economy might get trashed in the process.

[Here is a great web comic that explains the surface details of subprime mess].

The past 2 decades really haven’t seen anything significant in the way of recessions (1987 was the last serious one, and the dotcom bust of 2000 hardly had any long-term impacts on the economy in general). Generally the economy has kept growing, life has appeared more prosperous for many, and inflation hasn’t been much of a bother. How was that achieved?

Policy makers usually have two economic factors they try to balance: growth (good: meaning more jobs, more profits etc), and inflation (bad: meaning less buying power). Generally interst rates, growth and inflation have a strange feedback loop: Low interest rates => high growth => high inflation => raised interest rates to curb inflation => slow growth. You need to balance the two to keep the people and businesses happy, and in the past 2 decades we’ve seen unprecedented growth, coupled with insignificant inflation.

That’s strange, because big growth is usually coupled with inflation.

So how did we manage to have lots of growth (that is, continue getting much richer) with almost no inflation? There are two answers:

1. growth was driven by tons of cheap (ie low interest rate) credit (due to a low interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve, plus the government borrowing tons of money from China). When interest rates are low, you borrow lots of money to fund businesses and to buy houses.
2. inflation was kept down by tons of cheap goods imported from elsewhere (again, primarily China).

This has meant that we’ve become accustomed to more wealth and more purchasing power than ever. Wealth seems to be increasing all the time (for the big swath of upper middle classers, at least). And as for economic activity/jobs, much of that was fueled by a red hot housing market: build build build and sell sell sell means lots of people working and getting richer.

But it’s based on a fantasy: debt that allows us to buy cheap goods from elsewhere. The debt levels (personal and governmental) are unprecedented. And the reason the debt is unprecedented is that it’s a bad idea. Fueling economic expansion with major debt whether the socialist kind (government borrowing & spending) or the right-wing kind (citizen borrowing & spending) breaks down eventually.

And then what happens?

So while the subprime mess means people will lose their homes, and that sucks, the really scary question is about how you keep the US economy going at all in the long term. Especially if we plan to keep the sort of wealth we are accustomed to. It’s not at all clear. And if we can’t keep it going, what sort of turmoil is in store?

UPDATE: If you want to get depressed, read this (though do note, it’s more or less an ad for his book).

Songs about the man of steel:

Laurie Anderson: O Superman (1981)
OK, not really about Superman, exactly…but still, it’s Laurie Anderson.

Crash Test Dummies: Superman’s Song (1991)
The audio’s a bit soft on this one, and I feel like an idiot, but for some reason this tune and video sorta gets me.

REM: Superman (1986)
REM live in 1987, the video’s a bit of a mess, but the sound is OK. That’s Gary Zekley, writer of the original 1969 version, on stage with tambourine.

Come on, Steve, you can do better than this. This is pathetic. There is NON WAY I would get involved in business with you.

Dear Friend,

How are you today and business in your country?
I am Barr. Steven Douglas, of the Steven Douglas legal chambers, Newcastle, United kingdom

I have a business proposal that will be of immense benefit to the both of us.

If you are interested, you can contact me through My private
Email: barr.steven_douglas@hotmail.com

In replying kindly state the following:

Your full names:
Age:
Location:

Sincerely,
Barr. Steven Douglas

As you probably know, I’ve been spending a lot of time on the WikiHistory project. In fact, I probably shouldn’t be writing it here (thanks to IATT Bulletin 1251, the draconian “don’t blog it” policy I opposed and still oppose, but I’m not an Admin, so who’s going to listen to me?). Anyway, I’ll go back tomorrow and erase the whole thing – lest I get another one of those passive-aggressive PMs from you-know-who. But in the mean time, this is for the benefit of those of my readers who are participating in the project anyway, just a rant, really, but with a bit of a “funny” ending. The whole Hitler thing blew up again on the forum (yawn!), but AsianAvenger, who’s a bit of a hot-head, but a pretty good guy usually got it in his head that the Hitler thing was “racist” and wanted to prove it by testing the “no assassinating” policy on some Chinese emperor. Anyway … check the forum to see what happened.

LOL … I’m gonna leave it for a day or two, see if any of the nervous nelly Admins sort it out. Which I bet they won’t, in which case I’ll be off to China soon. Wish me luck.

[More...]

[thanks Kara!]

Earideas Wednesday Picks: US Admiral Fallon retires over Iran & Iraq; Sound Opinions with Butch Vig, producer of Sonic Youth and Nirvana, among others; and Architecture prof Robert Jan van Pelt, on Auschwitz, architecture and education.

Listen here.

Via Michael Geist:

Sources indicate that the CBC is set to become the first major North American broadcaster to freely release one of its programs without DRM using BitTorrent. This Sunday, CBC will air Canada Next Great Prime Minister. The following day, it plans to freely release a high-resolution version via peer-to-peer networks without any DRM restrictions. This development is important not only because it shows that Canada’s public broadcaster is increasingly willing to experiment with alternative forms of distribution, but also because it may help crystallize the net neutrality issue in Canada.

From the New Scientist:

Scientists who want to describe their work on Wikipedia should not be forced to give up the kudos of a respected journal. So says a group of physicists who are going head-to-head with a publisher because it will not allow them to post parts of their work to the online encyclopaedia, blogs and other forums.

[more...]

Leaving aside the problem that posting about your own work on Wikipedia, violates two policies (no original research, and don’t edit articles about yourself or your work) … this is an interesting showdown.

Open Access journals, free and open to web linking, is the way science publishing has to go, for the same reasons NYTimes can’t keep its articles behind registration walls. Value is increasingly defined by network authority (is there an agreed term for this, or can I claim coinage of “network authority”?), aka google juice; and if you are out of the network, you are out of the authority. Scientists realize this – hence the desire to get their stuff on Wikipedia … Journals realize that it chips into their control of information, which it does. But like all other businesses, fighting it won’t make it go away, and the sooner they rejig their business models, the better.

Which opens the question: with the web as publishing platform, is there really a need to have academic journals running as businesses? Or is there a better way?

See: this …

Negroponte says that a Windows operating system is in the process of being fine-tuned on the XO as we speak. “Microsoft and OLPC are in discussion on how to release it, as well as how to announce,” he said. Negroponte added that the Windows operating system should be available on the XO in less than 60 days.

[more...]

Good, Bad, Ugly?

from the onion:

LOS ANGELES—The Novelists Guild of America strike, now entering its fourth month, has had no impact on the nation at all, sources reported Tuesday.

The strike, which scholars say could be the longest since 1951, when American novelists may or may not have voluntarily committed to a six-month work stoppage, has brought an immediate halt to all new novels, novellas, and novelettes from coast to coast, affecting no one.

ha. great.

[via Matt]

1. someone sends me an email.

2. i respond

3. i get this:

I apologize for this automatic reply to your email.

To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I have approved beforehand.

If you would like to be added to my list of approved senders, please fill out the short request form (see link below). Once I approve you, I will receive your original message in my inbox. You do not need to resend your message. I apologize for this one-time inconvenience.

Click the link below to fill out the request:

To which the only response I can think involves a loud, vocal swear word and some unkind thoughts.

MontrealTechWatch has a few pics from YulGeek entrepreneurs’ desks, including mine.

In honour of St. Paddy’s day, some Irish jigs & reels:

Thin Lizzy: Dancing in the Moonlight (It’s Caught Me in Its Spotlight) (1977)

Stiff Little Fingers: Alternative Ulster (1979)

U2: I Will Follow (1980)
The band didn’t go anywhere, but the lead singer went on to become a leading figure in modern dance. From their first album, Boy.

Theo Jansen is a kinetic sculptor. Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is a sculpture powered entirely by wind:

See another vid. And from TED.

This is an audio interview with Janne Vainio, an audio engineer at Nokia, who put together the Audiobooks project at Nokia’s BetaLabs. The project features LibriVox books as the first test books for download, in a special optimized format. From the about of the project:

Nokia Audiobooks is a beta concept that enables you to enjoy audiobooks while on the go. It includes a highly efficient audio compression technology optimized for voice (AMR-WB), a player application for S60 (Nokia Audiobook Player), and an audio converter tool for PC (Nokia Audiobook Manager). Whereas traditional music player applications are optimized for music, Nokia Audiobook Player is optimized for audiobooks, enabling you to browse chapters, set bookmarks, and automatically continue from where you stopped listening last time.

This is a segment from a longer LibriVox community podcast #74, that you can find here.

And here is the interview on its own: http://librivox.hughmcguire.net/communitypodcast/nokiaaudiobooks.mp3

A good friend of mine is a documentary film maker; more than that. His latest film, about violinist Malcolm Goldstein is a challenging and brilliant work of art in itself, much more than a typical portrait documentary.

The market for a film like that is small – a few festivals, hundreds, maybe a few thousand people will see it in a theatre. TV will never pick up something like this, not even arty cable. Certainly no commercial movie houses.

A movie like this — based so much on sound, and on the scale of the image — ought to be seen in theatre, where the full work of art can be appreciated and experienced as it should be. Big screen, big sound, silence, darkness.

That’s true enough.

Still, as a filmmaker, you are stuck in the constraints of festivals and distributors for your distribution; yet the film is made, and there are people – like me – who would like to see it, but cannot.

This is a ramble, and it’s obvious where I am going with it. But I just watched this beautiful documentary yesterday, on Vimeo – a free service – and what can I say? OK, it’s not the big screen, but it is beautiful, moving, fascinating. If you’re a film maker, put your stuff online, like this [best to watch it full screen]:

POSSESSED from Martin Hampton on Vimeo.

I wonder why I am so obsessed with the torture issue in the US (and elsewhere of course). I think it’s because of how quickly mainstream US society (and I guess to a lesser degree Canadian society) just accepted the change from being a country that abhors torture as a categorical evil, to a society that thinks: “You know what? Maybe torture isn’t so bad after all, as long as the good guys are doing it, for good reasons.” It’s a remarkable moral turn-around, one unimaginable 15 years ago … but here we are. It, along with many others similar fundamental changes in official public morality (ie doctrine of preemptive war), seemed such an easy switch to flick.

And it seems to me that, given people’s conception of what is morally acceptable is so easily flipped, the more effective argument against torture is that it just doesn’t work all that well. (Which doesn’t change my moral opposition to torture). In the clip below:

Former FBI Interrogator Jack Cloonan explains that regular interrogation tactics work well on even the worst terrorists, that there’s no such thing as a “ticking timebomb” scenario, and that waterboarding has done much more harm than good.

I think from Taxi to the Darkside?

And it seems to me that shadowy terror orgs would be smart enough to make sure there is all sorts of phony information in the heads of people likely to get caught and interrogated anyway … so torture, really, is a form of punishment and terror, rather than a useful interrogation technique. I’m no expert though… Jack Cloonan seems to be.

I wonder if we could see some evidence that torture really is a good interrogation technique?

[via boing]

UPDATE: 37 Short Essays about Torture, written by, among others these people (random selection):

Brigadier General Steve Cheney, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.), served nine years on the Marine Corps’ two Recruit Depots, including a tour as the commanding general at Parris Island. He was also the inspector general for the Marine Corps. Brigadier General Cheney retired in 2001; he is now the president of the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, Texas, and is on the board of directors for the American Security Project.

Kenneth M. Duberstein is chairman and CEO of the Duberstein Group, an independent strategic planning and consulting company. He was chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan. Richard Armitage is president of Armitage International and served as deputy secretary of state from 2001 to 2005. Both Duberstein and Armitage are members of the board of the American Security Project.

John Hutson is a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, attorney, and former judge advocate general of the Navy. He is the current dean and president of Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire.

William J. Perry was the nineteenth U.S. secretary of defense.

Thomas G. Wenski is the bishop of Orlando and chairman of the Committee on International Justice and Peace, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, U.S. Army (Ret.), was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. He is now the Pamela Harriman Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary.

From Jon Udell’’s Interviews with Innovators: Community Wireless:

Michael Lenczner is one of the founders of Île Sans Fil, Montreal’s community wireless network which comprises over 150 hotspots and serves almost 60,000 registered users. By any standards the project is a huge success. Yet Michael is an unusually thoughtful technologists who asks himself hard questions about whether Ile Sans Fil has really enhanced community life in the ways the founders hoped it would.

In 2001 a new breed of Velvet Underground-influenced, old-aesthetic rock started rolling out of a few bands. It was old and it was new and it was good again. Here are some of the tunes I remember.

The Strokes: Last Night (2001)
OK, so the Strokes ended up being disappointing. We all wanted them to be gritty kids from the wrong side of the tracks who bashed their guitars together to dull the pain of poverty. Or something. Turns out they’re rich Manhattan kids who went to fancy boarding school in Switzerland, and had drinking problems. Well, what can you do? Who else can afford to be an artist these days? (And for the record, I went to a fancy private school). This video makes things worse: the lead singer, especially, looks like the kind of arrogant prick who continues to be mean to unpopular kids even into his mid-twenties.

And let’s forget for a moment that the Strokes probably exhausted their creativity with that first album. And remember instead what a breath of fresh air it was when it came out, and the sounds of pure, good rock n roll, the likes of which we hadn’t heard since Transformer (maybe), hit the airwaves. It was the rebirth of rock, I was living in New York and it was great stuff.

White Stripes: Fell in Love with a Girl (2001)
While I can’t help feeling the Strokes were somehow phony (even if that first album was and still is a winner), the White Stripes were something else: raw and real and creative in ways hard to believe considering their instruments are limited to a little drum kit, a big guitar, and a crazy voice. Fantastic, challenging yet straight music, wonderful songwriting and a great video by Michel Gondry.

Franz Ferdinand – Take Me Out (2003)
A couple of years later come Franz Ferdinand. I first heard them when they played this tune live on some British awards show: the looked and sounded so sharp, like a mix of the best of ska and good punk (aka Clash), with a new, precise sound to their chops.

Well worth checking out.

One Nation Under Google: Citizenship in the Technological Republic

A public talk by Professor Darin Barney
Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship, McGill University.

Friday, March 14, 2008
Arts W-215, 853 Sherbrooke Street West, McGill University
18h30, free

Does more technology equal more freedom? While the nuts and bolts of technological progress – computers, cellphones, internet access wired and wireless – become accessible to more and more people, the promise of increased civic engagement enabled by these gadgets seems to have eluded our wired society. There’s a lot more to technology, and to democracy, than wires and buttons, and it has a much deeper affect on our lives than simply being tools we can use well or badly.

In Dr. Barney’s words, “technology is, at once, irretrievably political and consistently depoliticizing. It is at the centre of this
contradiction that the prospects for citizenship in the midst of technology lie.” Presenting a range of examples from YouTube to the
hidden networks of food production and government bureaucracy, Barney contests the common notion that technology necessarily leads to enhanced freedom and improved civic engagement. One Nation Under Google examines the challenge of citizenship in a technological society, and asks whether the demands of technology are taking over the practice of democracy.

Presented in collaboration with CKUT 90.3FM

[ps, godshdarn it, ckut has a frustrating web site]

QUESTION: How can you hold the “Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship” and not have a blog?

Sometimes I wish I was still a kid:

[via: infosthetics.com]

Open – All the code that’s fit to printf() is:

A blog about open source technology at The New York Times, written by and primarily for developers. This includes our own projects, our work with open-source technologies at nytimes.com, and other interesting topics in the open source and Web 2.0 worlds.

That’s pretty neat. The latest entry is a topic near and dear to my heart, parsing bad RSS.

Good writing is such as pleasure, especially when it’s about something you care about:

Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead it’s a fast-paced game of paintball.

I just finished writing a book review, for Books in Canada (I’ve suggested they fix their site). My reviewing technique, which is the same technique I used writing papers on texts in university, and is probably total overkill, is to make notes of important passages while reading, and then copy all those passages out (in university I mostly did it in long-hand). Then I review all the key passages, sketch out (on a yellow pad of lined paper – God’s gift to the thought process) the article, roughly identifying the subjects of each paragraph. Then I associate each quote with a different idea, and then start writing, using quotes when and if needed.

It’s a great way to really get to know a text, and it’s such a satisfying process (and one of the reasons I am planning to go back to school in the fall: I miss really working through a serious text, I do it so rarely now).

Anyway, if you’d like to check out the most interesting (to me) passages in Doidge’s book, here they are.

From LibriVox friend annie. With photos:

Norman Doidge (channeling McLuhan):

Electronic media are so effective at altering the nervous system because they both work in similar ways and are basically compatible and thus easily linked. Both involve instantaneous transmission of electronic signals to make linkages. Because our nervous system is plastic, it can take advantage of this compatibility and merge with the electronic media, making a single, larger system. Indeed, it is the nature of such systems to merge whether they are biological or man-made. The nervous system is an internal medium, communicating messages from one area of the body to another, and it evolved to do, for multicelled organisms such as ourselves, what the electronic media do for humanity — connect disparate parts.

Says Gerald Edelman:

If we considered the number of possible neural circuits [in the human brain] we would be dealing with hyper-astronomical numbers: 10 followed by at least a million zeros. (There are 10 followed by 79 zeros, give or take a few, of particles in the known universe).

So there are roughly 12,500[10 followed by (1 million-79) zeros] times more neural circuits in a human brain than there are particles in the universe.

In a sense, books increase those neural circuits because one brain gets exposed to the neural connections in another brain. A library multiplies these connections again, and the web adds orders of magnitude more to the connections.

So: what happens next? I mean, what really happens? We’re just at the edge now.

Instant info everywhere kills the secret, out-of-the-way gem:

As GPS transceivers become common accessories in cars, the benefits have been manifold. Millions of us have been relieved of the nuisance of getting lost or, even worse, the shame of having to ask a passerby for directions.

But, as with all popular technologies, those dashboard maps are having some unintended consequences. In many cases, the shortest route between two points turns out to run through once-quiet neighborhoods and formerly out-of-the-way hamlets.

Villages have been overrun by cars and lorries whose drivers robotically follow the instructions dispensed by their satellite navigation systems. The International Herald Tribune reports (tinyurl.com/24zcyg) that the parish council of Barrow Gurney has even requested, fruitlessly, that the town be erased from the maps used by the makers of navigation devices.

Hard-core surfers are finding their private waves are getting invaded by hordes, who have been following surfcams streaming live on the web.

At the same time, though, transparency is erasing the advantages that once went to the intrepid, the dogged and the resourceful. The surfer who through pluck and persistence found the perfect wave off an undiscovered stretch of beach is being elbowed out by the lazy masses who can discover the same wave with just a few mouse clicks. The commuter who pored over printed maps to find a shortcut to work finds herself stuck in a jam with the GPS-enabled multitudes.

You have to wonder whether, as what was once opaque is made transparent, the bolder among us will lose the incentive to strike out for undiscovered territory. What’s the point when every secret becomes, in a real-time instant, common knowledge?

Chris Hughes wins with his entry of Life is Life, by Opus. Truly the worst song in the world.

Beer and cookies will be offered, for free, next time Chris is in Montreal.

Writer/director John Hughes had a string of movies in the eighties that were definitive for a certain-type of middle class North American early-teen (ie. a type like me). They were usually about angsty high school seniors, rich kids (mostly cool jerks) and their less-well-off school mates (alienated music-lovers with soul), and usually a Romeo-Juliet story of love across class that cannot be. Here are a few vids from those soundtracks (somewhere i have a few of these on tape).

Simple Minds: Don’t You (Forget About Me) (1985)
from: The Breakfast Club (1985)
The greatest (?) of all John Hughes films …

Charlie Sexton: Beat’s So Lonely (1985)
from: Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)
Charlie Sexton was, apparently, a guitar prodigy. He pretty much disappeared from public view after this album, Pictures for Pleasure, but continued working with other artists, including David Bowie and Bob Dylan. He also produced my old Blizzarts pal Peter Elkas’ album, Wall of Fire.

Echo and the Bunnymen: Bring on the Dancing Horses (1985)
from: Pretty in Pink (1986)
Pretty in Pink was probably the most alternative of the Hughes movies, and I owned this soundtrack on tape. It had all sorts of great stuff on it, including the Smiths, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, New Order, Suzanne Vega.

From Infovore:

I’ve written before about how wonderful Twitter can be as a messaging bus for physical objects. The idea of overhearing machines talking about what they’re doing is, to my mind, quite delightful.

So when I found an untapped data source for such an object, I thought it was worth having a poke. Half an hour of scripting later and Tower Bridge was on Twitter. It tells you when it’s opening and closing, what vessel is passing through, and which way that vessel is going. The times are determined by taking the scheduled time for the “lift” and subtracting five minutes for the opening, and adding five minutes for closing – the official site suggests that, at rush hour, lifts should take five minutes to open and close tops.

Follow the Tower Bridge on Twitter.

I don’t know what to think of this, exactly, but it’s kind of neat. I wonder what inanimate object I’d like to hear from in Montreal?

By designing for the poorest people in the world, the One Laptop Per Child has developed a green machine with no peers. Radically lower power consumption, much less toxic crap. Here’s Mary-Lou Jepsen talking about it:

I had a conversation last night with my neighbour, who tells me that 80% of food production in the world is still done by bio power: horses, oxen, humans etc. But that there has been no innovation in tools for this kind of farming (ploughs, harrows etc) in about 100 years. Why? At least in part, because big agribiz companies want to control agriculture from seed to sale, and want as few farmers making decisions as possible. So: make farming expensive (machinery), and design farming technology (patented seeds, expensive fertilizers & pesticides) that help big companies control agriculture; not so that farming is better for farmers or people.

In a conversation two nights ago with some other friends, we were talking about the inherent conflict in the pharma business: between: the fiduciary responsibility to increase profits every year; and the public good. These are not mutually exclusive; but neither are the aligned, and making money trumps public good, by definition, in publicly traded companies. That’s how they work – to run them otherwise is actually illegal. So we were just postulating: what if a new kind of pharma “company” came along, with public good as its mandate, rather than profit?

How are all these things related? OLPC is a non-profit project that may have developed the most revolutionary advance in the technology of personal computing we’ve seen in years, and it did so in a non-profit model, by developing for the poorest.

The poorest people in the world use farm technologies no one is spending much time developing improvements to; agriculture R&D goes to: biotech, pesticides, herbicides, and probably a little bit to machinery. What happens if a non-profit effort develops around making ancient farming tools and techniques more efficient?

And for pharma, same question: why can’t we think of organizing our drug system in a way that prioritizes health, rather than profit? What would it look like? What would the results be?

Am I a crazy communist? Well, these guys are pretty good at making encyclopedia, and if you want to buy a tent, I’d send you, without a second’s hesitation, to these guys.

Michael Geist has an article in the Toronto Star about Canadian book 2.0 projects. The two projects cited are Evan’s Wikitravel Press, and LibriVox.

About Wikitravel Press, says he:

For example, Wikitravel, one of the Internet’s most acclaimed travel websites, was launched in 2003 by Montreal residents Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins. Using the same wiki collaborative technology that has proven so successful for Wikipedia, the Wikitravel site invited travelers to post their comments and experiences about places around the world in an effort to build a community-generated travel guide.

In less than five years, the site has accumulated more than 30,000 online travel guides in 18 languages, with more than 10,000 editorial contributions each week. The content is freely available under a Creative Commons licence that allows the public to use, copy or edit the guides.

Building on Wikitravel’s success, Prodromou and Jenkins recently established Wikitravel Press, which introduced its first two titles earlier this month. Wikitravel Press represents a new approach to travel book publishing based on Internet collaborative tools and print-on-demand technologies that should capture the attention of the industry for several reasons…

[there's more]
And on LibriVox:

Canadians are also playing a leading role in reshaping the creation of audiobooks. Hugh McGuire, a Montreal-based writer and Web developer, established LibriVox in August 2005. The site is also based on concept of Internet collaboration. In this instance, LibriVox volunteers create voice recordings of chapters of books that are in the public domain. The resulting audio files are posted back on to the Internet for free.

The LibriVox project, which does not have an annual budget, has succeeded in placing more than 1,200 audio books on the Internet, including Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, works from Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and hundreds more.

He finishes:

New technologies are rapidly reshaping the book industry and it is exciting to see how Canadians are quietly playing a leading role in the re-imagining of how books are created and distributed.

This blog is very funny, eg, this post:

White people spend a lot of time of worrying about poor people. It takes up a pretty significant portion of their day.

They feel guilty and sad that poor people shop at Wal*Mart instead of Whole Foods, that they vote Republican instead of Democratic, that they go to Community College/get a job instead of studying art at a University.

It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.

A great way to make white people feel good is to tell them about situations where poor people changed how they were doing things because they were given the ‘whiter’ option. “Back in my old town, people used to shop at Wal*Mart and then this non-profit organization came in and set up a special farmers co-op so that we could buy more local produce, and within two weeks the Wal*Mart shut down and we elected our first Democratic representative in 40 years.” White people will first ask which non-profit and are they hiring? After that, they will be filled with euphoria and will invite you to more parties to tell this story to their friends, so that they can feel great….

[more...]

The comments, also, are hilarious. Apparently, one thing white people like is leaving earnest comments on blogs.

Here are my candidates. Please submit your own. A committee of editors from the Friday Mixed Tape team will review and make an Official pronouncement in one week.

Huey Lewis and the News: Hip to Be Square (1986)

Phil Collins: Sussudio (1985)

Starship: We Built This City (on Rock and Roll) (1985)
The amazing this is that this band was once Jefferson Airplane, who performed this. Someone once said to me, which rings true here: much of the eighties can be explained by waaay too much cocaine.

A Rails conference, in Toronto, says:

RubyFringe is an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging technologies outside of the Ruby on Rails monoculture. We’re sick of the sold-out and over-sold labradoodle shows that are now staged with alarming frequency. In response, we’re mounting a unique and eccentric gathering of the people and projects that are driving things forward in our community.

Nice poster.

Kids in a school start building Legotown. Eventually, powerful Legotown figures emerge, and inequalities surface. Some kids are excluded from Legotown, some control the enterprise, some struggle against each other; trading markets develop for various pieces. Teachers get nervous. Eventually, Legotown gets destroyed by external forces, and teachers ponder what they’ve wrought, and start a number of “experiments” to see how the kids react to changing rules.

Why We Banned Legos: Exploring power, ownership, and equity in an early childhood classroom, by Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin. A wonderful and thought-provoking essay/report.

[I should note that I am glad I was not in this class as a kid, with these somehow-creepy-social-engineering teachers]

All of it applies somehow to the “open” world of the web, in some ways I have not quite figured out yet. Here are some choice paras:

The nature of power:

During the boom days of Legotown, we’d suggested to the key Lego players that there was an unequal distribution of power giving rise to conflict and tension. Our suggestions were met with deep resistance. Children denied any explicit or unfair power, making comments like “Some-body’s got to be in charge or there would be chaos,” and “The little kids ask me because I’m good at Legos.” They viewed their power as passive leadership, benignly granted, arising from mastery and long experience with Legos, as well as from their social status in the group.

What does power look like?:

We began by inviting the children to draw pictures of power, knowing that when children represent an idea in a range of “languages” or art media, their understandings deepen and expand. “Think about power,” said Kendra. “What do you think ‘power’ means? What does power look like? Take a few minutes to make a drawing that shows what power is.”

As children finished their drawings, we gathered for a meeting to look at the drawings together. The drawings represented a range of understandings of power: a tornado, love spilling over as hearts, forceful and fierce individuals, exclusion, cartoon superheroes, political power.

On being powerless (in one of the post-Legotown trading games):

When the teaching staff met to reflect on the Lego trading game, we were struck by the ways the children had come face-to-face with the frustration, anger, and hopelessness that come with being on the outside of power and privilege. During the trading game, a couple of children simply gave up, while others waited passively for someone to give them valuable pieces. Drew said, “I stopped trading because the same people were winning. I just gave up.” In the game, the children could experience what they’d not been able to acknowledge in Legotown: When people are shut out of participation in the power structure, they are disenfranchised — and angry, discouraged, and hurt.

On system unfairness vs. individual unfairness:

To make sense of the sting of this disenfranchisement, most of the children cast Liam and Kyla as “mean,” trying to “make people feel bad.” They were unable or unwilling to see that the rules of the game — which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy — were a setup for winning and losing. Playing by the rules led to a few folks winning big and most folks falling further and further behind. The game created a classic case of cognitive disequilibrium: Either the system is skewed and unfair, or the winners played unfairly. To resolve this by deciding that the system is unfair would call everything into question; young children are committed to rules and rule-making as a way to organize a community, and it is wildly unsettling to acknowledge that rules can have built-in inequities. So most of the children resolved their disequilibrium by clinging to the belief that the winners were ruthless — despite clear evidence of Liam and Kyla’s compassionate generosity.

On ownership (which, by the way, illustrates the radical and difficult departure that projects like LibriVox force us to confront, and why public domain – renouncing ownership – is so much more radical than creative commons – which just defines new rules of ownership):

In their reflections, the children articulated several shared theories about how ownership is conferred.

* If I buy it, I own it:

Sophia: “She owns the lavender balls because she makes them, but if I buy it, then it’s mine.”

* If I receive it as a gift, I own it:

Marlowe: “My mom bought this book for me because she thought it would be a good reading book for me. I know I own it because my mom bought it and she’s my mom and she gave it to me.”

* If I make it myself, I own it:

Sophie: “I sewed this pillow myself with things that my teacher gave me, like stuffing and fabric. I sewed it and it turned into my pillow because it’s something I made instead of something I got at the store.”

* If it has my name on it, I own it:

Alex: “My teacher made this pillow for me and it has my name on it.”

Kendra: “If I put my name on it, would I own it?”

Alex: “Well, Miss S. made it for me… but if your name was on it, then you would own it.”

Sophie: “Kendra, don’t put your name on it, OK?”

* If I own it, I make the rules about it:

Alejandro: “I own this computer, because my grandpa gave it to me. I lend it to my friends so that they can play with it. But I make the rules about it.”

Teachers impose the Bolshevik Revolution, to build New Legotown:

We invited the children to work in small, collaborative teams to build Pike Place Market with Legos. We set up this work to emphasize negotiated decision-making, collaboration, and collectivity. We wanted the children to practice the big ideas we’d been exploring. We wanted Lego Pike Place Market to be an experience of group effort and shared ownership: If Legotown was an embodiment of individualism, Lego Pike Place Market would be an experiment in collectivity and consensus.

Kids start sounding like zombie-versions of Newt Gingrich’s worst nightmare:

From our conversations, several themes emerged.

* Collectivity is a good thing:

“You get to build and you have a lot of fun and people get to build onto your structure with you, and it doesn’t have to be the same way as when you left it…. A house is good because it is a community house.”

* Personal expression matters:

“It’s important that the little Lego plastic person has some identity. Lego houses might be all the same except for the people. A kid should have their own Lego character to live in the house so it makes the house different.”

* Shared power is a valued goal:

“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building. And it’s important to have the same priorities.”

“Before, it was the older kids who had the power because they used Legos most. Little kids have more rights now than they used to and older kids have half the rights.”

* Moderation and equal access to resources are things to strive for:

“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes…. We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces.”

Teachers get excited by the raw clay of Hobbesian childhood they have molded, through idealism and power structure management, into paragons of Rawlsian enlightenment:

As teachers, we were excited by these comments. The children gave voice to the value that collectivity is a solid, energizing way to organize a community — and that it requires power-sharing, equal access to resources, and trust in the other participants.

Paradise, built and achieved:

From this framework, the children made a number of specific proposals for rules about Legos, engaged in some collegial debate about those proposals, and worked through their differing suggestions until they reached consensus about three core agreements:

*All structures are public structures. Everyone can use all the Lego structures. But only the builder or people who have her or his permission are allowed to change a structure.
*Lego people can be saved only by a “team” of kids, not by individuals.
*All structures will be standard sizes.

With these three agreements — which distilled months of social justice exploration into a few simple tenets of community use of resources — we returned the Legos to their place of honor in the classroom.

A fascinating story, and one I need to think about more. It’s very relevant to life in places like LibriVox, I think, and I’m not sure why I am reacting with at least some negative cynicism. Maybe because one power-structures not examined is the relationship between kids and teachers? Maybe because the kids didn’t choose to participate in this experiment? Anyway, why do I not celebrate this experience, which mirrors in some ways the collectivist-do-goodness that underlies a project like LibriVox? To ponder more.

Hmm, maybe I am just having a bad day? Any thoughts on this from yon readers?

[this comes via mike migurski]

Just got this email, from Radiolab, about the best thing going in audio these days:

Dear Hugh,

I see you’re a Radio Lab fan. I also see you’re up in Montreal, so you probably won’t be able to make it, but I wanted to let you know that Radio Lab’s Season 4 Premiere Listening takes place tomorrow (Thurs) at the Angelika Theater in NYC.

More info at www.radiolab.org & www.wnyc.org/events/93353, in case you you’d like to tell your readers about it.

Thanks,
David

This week from Earideas Wednesday Picks: on Glenn Gould’s radio masterpieces, funny politics trumpeted from the UK and New York, and trying to answer the question, “what is time?”

sometimes I feel like this too…

Mmmm, Danish:

[via: ernietheattorney]

This looks like a tide-turning event: National Post’s editorial on copyright reads:

For Canada to introduce DMCA-style legislation now would do nothing but encourage nuisance lawsuits. There is nothing wrong with tough rules against copyright infringement, but criminalizing behaviour that might facilitate copyright infringement only incidentally is the wrong approach. If that road had been taken when household videotape machines came onto the market – and the movie industry tried very hard in the courts to steer the law in that direction – no one would be allowed to own a VCR.

There’s more…

[via: Michael Geist]

Been a while since I wrote a longish piece on LibriVox. Peter Kerry Powers, a Professor of English and chair of the English department at Messiah College, wrote a piece about audio books, and LibriVox, here. I commented on that post, Peter answered here, and this was my comment to on his second piece (i’ve edited it slightly, some of it is in direct answer to Peter’s stuff, so you might want to check out what he had to say, but I think it all should make sense on its own):

i’ll defer to your analysis of dickens, but the wider point is that the roots – some ancient, some more recent – of text literature is oral. so “reading” is a particular type of experience of literature, but not the only one, not the oldest one. as to the value of these different experiences of literature, I think that’s up to those who experience it to decide and describe. Certainly reading text and listening are not the same thing, but how one values one or the other is surely a matter for the individual to assess. If audio books *result* in a decrease in (paper)text reading, then I will be with you in decrying the loss of a certain type of skill and experience, one that cannot be replaced by listening (or by reading online for that matter). But I don’t think it’s the case that audio books result in less reading; I suspect the opposite, but I have no proof of that.

As for myself, some of my own most formative experiences of literature involved my mother reading to me: RLS’s Kidnapped; The Trumpeter Swan; Stuart Little; The Hobbit; and countless others. It never occurred to me to criticize my mother for stumbles, substandard reading or non-NPR intonations. Some of the philosophy behind LibriVox is a recreation of that interaction: not a professional performance of a text (there are plenty of those available), but instead an intimate experience of someone reading to you – with all the little warts and idiosyncrasies that come with intimate readings.

For someone who aggressively promotes this philosophy, check out Miette, an occasional LibriVox volunteer, and one of the first audiolit podcasters in the universe. She is at once “professional” in sound and approach, and also intimate and personal. Her stuff is very much: Miette reading to you; rather than Miette performing a text. See:
http://www.miettecast.com/

The other issues you’ve raise all relate to a common problem – this is true of much of the web in general – which is a misunderstanding of what LibriVox is for. Mainly, you are looking at LibriVox as “provider of audio books,” in the model of a traditional publisher whose job (at least as it is usually understood) is to produce books that readers want to purchase.

It might be easier to consider LibriVox not as a publisher, but rather as a library, at least as far as our relations to the listeners are concerned. That is, you would not go into a library, pull out five random books, and say, “I didn’t like these books, this library is no good, the books here are all crap.” This is the same impulse people have when they say: “bloggers are self-obsessed, they rant and rave and have bad grammar, and I will never waste my time reading blogs because they are stupid.” … It’s true that some blogs are stupid, but not true of any I read, not true of this blog. So the problem is not “blogs”; the problem, among others, is that people don’t know how to find blogs that they like reading. And they are faced with a similar problem you express about LibriVox, because they say: “Well, you say there is good stuff on blogs, but how do I find it in the sea of crap?” You and I know the answer, but it’s not so clear how to express the ways to “find” good blogs to read in a general sense. In the non-web world, when you open a newspaper, you are guaranteed a certain quality/type of writing by the masthead; ditto when you open a Penguin Classic or a Vintage Paperback or when you walk into a certain section of the books store. The web world works differently, and the “guarantee” is delivered differently, in my case from something like “network authority.”

But getting back to LibriVox, our objective is:
“To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.”

So we evaluate how we do things based on that objective. And partly for reasons of various kinds of idealism, but also in large part for pragmatic reasons, we’ve decided (rightly, I think), that criticism, ratings, particularly bad ratings are a hindrance to our objective, not a help. The main reason is that recording texts is difficult, and putting them out into public is a traumatic and sensitive thing for many people to do. Criticism, especially unsolicited negative criticism, turns people off from recording. But, we have an objective, stated above, and that objective is not: “To make the best audio …” or “BBC-quality audio …” Rather our objective is to record “all public domain texts.” We need all the help we can get, and we do what we can to “protect” our readers from harsh criticism that will stop them from participating.

So in fact, I think it is entirely fair for you to say that (some) LibriVox recordings are dull. Or annoying. Or both. I agree with you, or rather, that has been my experience of some LibriVox recordings. But I have the same experience with any random collection of text or audio books or music or art. And that’s what LibriVox is, a random collection. If fact, I personally find random collections of professionally-read audio books have a much higher quotient of dull and annoying than a random collection from LibriVox, but that’s my personal preference about style: humanity over professional performance. And certainly for me, it is totally incorrect to say *most* LV recordings are dull or annoying.

A few points of interest come out of this:
a) there are plenty of professional, “high-quality” audiobooks available for a price; our books are free if anyone wants them (and if they don’t, no matter)
b) if you compare our catalog to older “free” audio lit projects, projects that DO have high “standards” (eg literalsystems.org), our catalog is much bigger … which means that we have provided a resource, that would not be there otherwise, for those who want it. whether people like or use the resource or not is another question.
c) in our large catalog, there is an impressive amount of beautifully-read stuff, searchable by reader, some great ones include: david barnes, andy minter, karen savage, gord mackenzie, kara shallenberg … the list is much longer.

So the *result* of our fundamental policy to take all comers, and turn away no one, results in a strange catalog filled with lots of stuff that sometimes *is* dull, or “badly” read, or hard to listen to, for some people, especially if you are expecting a certain style of audio. But that does not mean that these more idiosyncratic readings don’t have any value. And our approach also results in a large number of good recordings (mine, for instance, I think fall somewhere between badly-read and good … they seem worth doing to me; certainly my more recent ones are “better” than older ones); and a surprising number of extraordinary recordings, that I would put toe to toe with any professional recordings.

Now your problem is finding the good stuff, and I sympathize with it. I think we could/should probably do something like an informal “recommendation” page. But again, if you look at our objective, helping people find good LibriVox stuff is not our “job.” …Our job is to make the audio, and make it available for free. .

It’s the “job” of the rest of the web to start sorting out this resource we are providing, and sorting the good stuff. Metafilter is a work-around starting point, but eventually someone will put up a site that sifts thru librivox audio and finds the really good stuff. And if you follow links from our catalog page, you’ll get to the Internet Archive, where our audio is hosted, and there you will find some ratings. But we don’t publicize that.

There is more to write on the relationship between ratings & an open project like LibriVox, but the ink in my pen is running out, and I wanted to touch on a couple more of your points.

In particular: “To some degree I think he’s suggesting that Librivox is really more like a blog service where readers can express themselves via recording.”
This is another misreading of what we are up to. LibriVox has a particular objective (quoted above). It is not for self-expression, etc., tho that might motivate some people. It’s got a very particular purpose, to provide a complete library of public domain books, in audio format. So, people are motivated to pitch in for lots of different reasons, but our decision-making about how or why we do things always has to answer to our objective.

“It’s also the case that in reading a published work, the reader puts himself/herself in the position of performer/artist who is interpreting the work of another artist.”
That is one way to look at it. You could also say, “the reader puts him/herself in the position of human who is doing their best to make a public domain text available in audio format.”

Now I know you’ll probably say I am picking at semantic bones there, but the first motivation/role is not the same as the second, and they will result in different approaches to recording, and different results. And you can argue with me about the “value” of the first or second motivation, but in the end it doesn’t matter because I (and, generally, people who buy into what LibriVox is trying to do) disagree with you. And you might further say I (and the rest of the gang) are wasting our time, but it is our time to waste.

Now if *everyone* said: “you’re wasting your time,” I and others might start scratching our heads, and wondering if this open project idea was kind of stupid after all. But we get enough emails & blog comments from people saying: “wow, what wonderful work you are doing,” that it’s easy enough to shrug the shoulders at those who say otherwise. And, amazingly to me, our audio books get downloaded thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of times. For instance, Hobbes’ Leviathan, published by us 2 days ago, has been downloaded 1,671 times! In 2 days! … Which, you, as a writer of books will recognize is the kind of number that DOES appeal to the ego and excitement of the people who participate in LibriVox, for all sorts of non-altruistic reasons. Which is fine, because that kind of excitement helps us with our objective.

Finally, to Puccini and Pavarotti, if I were them, I would be horrified to know that someone was telling people to stop singing in my name. That doesn’t mean I want to listen to bad opera, but there are so many reasons people don’t sing opera any more, so many reasons people don’t read any more, so many reasons people don’t celebrate literature, and I don’t want to be another contributor to all the things that discourage reading (or opera). I would much prefer to find ways to help encourage people to share literature, to discover great books – and mediocre books too – and to spread literature, to get closer to text, to reading, to the sounds of words and the ideas behind them; in the case of LirbiVox those people are behind the microphone, and on the other side of earphones…

And in its essence, LibriVox is not about audio books, it is about people, of all types and all skills, reading and recording public domain texts, and making them available for free for anyone who wants to listen. We work hard to help that happen, and whatever happens next is something we spend much less time worrying about..

A symposium on computation + journalism
Feb 22-23, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Hosted by GVU Center at Georgia Tech.

Panels

* Advances in News Gathering
* Improving Journalism Workflow: Automation & Productivity
* Social Computing and Journalism
* Ubiquitous Journalism
* Participant Journalism & Journalism Participation: Authoring and Interacting in New Media
* Sensemaking & Visualization
* Information Mashups: Aggregation, Syndication, and Web Services
* 21st Century Editor in Chief

[via infosthetics]

Hope you had a good Valentine’s Day. Here’s some tunes to make the moments last:

Sade: Smooth Operator (1984)
Another song I loved as a kid, got embarrassed by as a teen. But now I think Sade was on to something. Smooth Operator indeed.

Barry White: Can’t Get Enough of Your Love Babe (1974)
I knew nothing of the Velvet Voice before this tune was featured on the Simpsons, I think the episode with Michelle Pfeiffer, but not sure. Anyway, after I heard Barry White, nothing was ever again the same.

Marvin Gaye: Let’ Get It On (1973)
This live, lovin performance beat out the slick video for the 1982 hit, Sexual Healing.

I’m supposed to be doing a radio piece for Nora Young’s CBC show, spark. I’m supposed to come up with a sort of mission statement for the piece, maybe you can help.

it’s a problem because I have been struggling with just that since I started getting interested in it a couple of years ago. so, dear internet, what is the thread that ties these together?:
-mass collaboration (open source method)
-giving stuff away (commons, gpl, public domain)
-free access to information (universal access to all human knowledge)

wikipedia, free software, open source, universal access to all human knowledge, the commons… these are all strands of something that’s not quite unified, but comes from the same impulse … so what is that? I call it the “open movement” but that’s not quite right. the free and open movement is clunky, and still not right.

[note, i've been thinking more and more about the negatives that come with this. each step of "liberation" in parts of human society, is usually accompanied by restrictions elsewhere. what are the implications for freeing information and enabling mass collaboration?]

how about: what happens when the network frees information and allows us all to collaborate together? how will this change the way the world looks?

ach. just writing to spur some thoughts. anyone have some thoughts for me?

I am launching a contest: the Worst About Text on the Web. First paragraph only. Comment below with your entry, and a link to the offending text. An expert panel of Judges from Around the Universe will decide on the winner, announced one month from today (if anyone submits anything).

Winner gets a free beer from me, possibly something more exciting.

Here is my entry, from Everyzing.com:

EveryZing is the most powerful digital media merchandising platform available today. Media companies of all sizes leverage our unique ability to drive the volume of online content consumption and create new and powerful revenue streams. Through our speech to text, search and optimization technologies, and consumer-facing website, we create greater opportunities for consumer and advertiser access to online content. The company’s best-in-class technology and comprehensive set of advertising services enable our partners to profit from their content by launching digital channels that deliver the entertainment, news and information that consumers crave.

Join the fun!

The delete-my-Facebook crusade continues over chez Steve:

So, I ask Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and co.: Why don’t you let users leave Facebook when they want to? Why are you so much more adamant about holding on to our data than any other social network? What, exactly, are you trying to hide?

I agree wholeheartedly with Steve, though as a guy with a URL that is: hughmcguire.net, who writes regularly about most of what you need to know about me if you were the secret police, I wonder how we digital privacy advocates will fare when the boots start stomping. Even if I decide to delete everything, you could still go visit the wayback machine to see what I had to say.

So, really, participating in the digital world is probably enough to let em look up your skirt as much as they like. Facebook just makes the modelling easier. Much easier.

I just went to facebook – most everything in my account is deleted, except for my friends, which probably is enough to make a very good computer model about where I am likely to hide when they come after me.

Oh, and, strangely, a previous post of mine about Steve & Facebook continues to get comments on a regular basis.

[PS, on a design note, the traces left in my eyeballs from trying to read steve's bold-glowing-white-on-black-with-red site are still visible, three minutes later, as I write this on my white wp interface ... ah... there.... gone now. Phew.]

I’m always excited when the web starts having an impact on the actual city (or country) we live in. I am unlikely to go to a protest march or city hall to demand meetings with the mayor. I do send the odd nasty email to newspapers and politicians though, and I’ve seen three times online cage-rattling in which I did some banging of the bars seemed to have an impact: with the Parc/Bourassa stupidity; with the latest copyright kerfluffle in ottawa; and a the fed election when a copyright/RIAA lackey was beaten out by the NDP. Who knows whether the online activism did anything, but it sure didn’t hurt.

Well, Griffintown is under attack from the kind of stupid urban ‘”planning” that involves big developers ruining neighbourhoods. If that bugs you, have a look at Save Griffintown to find out more.

earideas wednesday picks, of the best audio of the week, from CBC Ideas with John Gray, TVO Big Ideas with Rory Stewart, and WNYC RadioLab with a bunch of people:

This week, talk of Utopia, and the blood that has flown in its name. Also, an inspiring look at the emptiness of space.

See more details here.

I listen to lots of audio, my preference being radio documentaries while cooking. Yesterday I listened to the best thing I have heard in ages, a piece by WNYC’s RadioLab called Space:

In the 60’s, space exploration was an American obsession. But the growing reality of space has turned the romance to cynicism. We chart the path from then to now. We begin with Ann Druyan, widow of Carl Sagan, with a story about the Voyager expedition, true love, and golden record that travels through space. For a dose of reality, astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson explains the Coepernican Principle and just how insignificant we are

Listen here (on earideas). It’s fabulous.

I think this has been floating around for a while, but I just watched it now, and it’s well worth it. As wfmu blog (where I found it) says:

“Wonderingmind 42″ tells us exactly how global climate change is going to cause the end of the world. Sure, An Inconvenient Truth did it pretty well, but this guy does it without being instantly polarizing (sorry, Al, the right hates you to pieces), and with way more charming dorkiness. But most importantly, he describes the science and facts behind it all in a way that even your stubborn conservative Christian uncle can relate to – and maybe he’ll even pay attention to the facts when they are presented by this nice, clean-cut high school science teacher.

And the point of it all is that deciding what to do about climate change isn’t a question of certainty. It’s a question of risk management.

I might be wrong, but I don’t think ever in the next couple of generations will we see someone like Fela Kuti, afrobeat legend, rebel, dissident, and one-time Nigerian Presidential candidate. Fela seemed to straddle the harsh present of the sixties/seventies, with something ancient … in a way that no one now would be able to do. With television everywhere these days, there are few if any corners of the world left where ancientness grows naturally – all of it has been touched by the modern. Maybe I’m wrong, and I’m no expert in world culture (and, after all, Fela’s mother was a feminist activist, and his father a Protestant Minister); but regardless, no one making modern afrobeat comes close to this kind of raw power. I’m not sure that there is any musician in the world that has this kind of charisma – brutal, violent charisma, but undeniable (see the second vid, especially).

Fela died in 1997 of AIDS.

Fela Kuti: Army Arrangement
“I have death in my pouch. I can’t die. They cannot kill me.”

Fela Kuti: Live in Calabar
Not sure the title of the song. This footage was filmed for a movie by Cream drummer Ginger Baker (which I believe is the source for the previous clip too). This one is intense, check especially the dancing from about 4′00″ and on.

Fela Kuti: U. Be Thief

you know, if i were smarter than I am, i would do something about this email i got:

Dear Webnames.ca Customer,

Gung Hei Fat Choy!

In celebration of Chinese New Year, Webnames.ca has slashed prices on new .CN registrations.

——————————————————–
REGISTER A NEW .CN DOMAIN FOR ONLY $1.99/ONE YEAR (USD).
——————————————————–
Offer expires February 29th 2008, 11:59pm PST.
*Price applies to new registrations only. Renewals at Webnames.ca regular pricing.

Why Register a .CN?
- China has the world.s second largest population of Internet users
- 80% of enterprises with an online presence in China use a .cn domain
- With 5 million+ domains registered, .CN is now the 2nd most popular country code worldwide

GO TO WWW.WEBNAMES.CA TODAY TO SEARCH FOR YOUR .CN

Sincerely,
Webnames.ca Inc

Footloose is surely one of the great cinematic achievements of the 1980s, but these years later it’s not Kevin Bacon “dancing away oppression” that we remember most, but rather the searing sounds of Kenny Loggins’ unforgettable theme song, Footloose, which surely was the soundtrack of a generation of youth who were “yearning burning for some/ Somebody to tell [them] / That life ain’t passing [them] by …” I was one of those youths who yearned. Burned.

I always assumed that the great Loggins wrote that song after a long cocaine bender had eaten up all cash reserves and back taxes were due, but it turns out the story behind the classic songsmithing is much, much, much more inspiring.

Here is a documentary film called: Jimmy Buffet & Footloose.

[via: wfmu]

From New Scientist:

A bunch of sources are reporting on a University College London study into how people born after the arrival of the internet – sometimes dubbed the Google generation – handle information. The top line is, they’re not very good at it.

Although skilled at quickly searching for information they are bad at processing it, the study concludes, mentioning their “impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs”. This worries the researchers who say libraries and educational institutions have to react.

Forgetting “good” or “bad” … what will this mean, I wonder? I notice all these symptoms in myself, and I grew up on books and playing outside.

I know Mitch has a youtube music video problem, just like me (in fact, I may have given him his first taste of the sweet sonic tonic of nostalgia). Anyway, a while back I asked if Mitch wanted to guest curate a youtube mixed tape session. He said: hells ya. Took me a while to post it, but here it is, straight from the Man in Black (and by the way, if you want to find the gold, a little hint, it’s at the end):

Wednesday Guest Tape: Eighties Hard Rock
Definitely one of my guilty pleasures and the music I grew up on (there is still some shame in this, I admit). Here are a few that might be more obscure. You have no idea how many hours I’ve burned on YouTube reminiscing. I’ve found some gold and cheese while on my journey. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which below…

Slaughter – Fly To The Angels (1990)
While Slaughter came after the eighties hair bands (or more like the tail end), you can’t deny that lead singer, Mark Slaughter, had a crazy unique voice as proven in this recent acoustic version of their power ballad hit, Fly To The Angels.

Whitesnake – Is This Love? (1987)
Singer David Coverdale cut his teeth in a later version of Deep Purple before launching Whitesnake. You probably remember the original videos from that era with Tawny Kitaen.

Can’t Wait For The Night – Brighton Rock (1986)
OK, this is not the acoustic version, but when I found this on YouTube it took me waaay back. I think they were from Niagara Falls…

Hear N’ Aid – Stars (1985)
This was the hard rock scene’s response to Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and USA for Africa’s “We Are the World”. There are some great vocal performances and who can deny how metal Rob Halford from Judas Priest is? (look at how he dressed for the studio – really, the metal world had “no idea”?).

Sweet. From New Scientist magazine and Honeywell … comes some fantastic vids of Nobel laureates describing all sorts of yummy scientific stuffs, eg: John C. Mather describing the Big Bang; U of T’s John Polanyi talking about freedom, creativity and science ; and Richard Schrock talking Green Chemistry.

Good for you New Scientist, and good as well to sponsor Honeywell (if they fund this stuff, I’m gonna plug them! I love Honeywell! They make some of my favourite morning breakfast food.)

From an article by Andy Rutledge, about design & martial arts, but applicable to anything related to life, I think:

In short, it is simply not enough to be highly competent under the best of circumstances, when you’re filled with inspiration and all the gears are turning. What matters most—and most often—is how competent you are when things are not going well.

[more...]

Kevin Kelly writes about what values start becoming more important when copies are free:

The internet is a copy machine….

Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order….

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied….

Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy….

From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free…

[more...]

The eight categories are: Findability, Patronage, Embodiment, Accessibility, Authenticity, Interpretation, Personalization, Immediacy.

[via: Open Access News]

DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the Web to Wikipedia data.

Wired reports:

A 23-year-old student journalist in Afghanistan has been sentenced to death for downloading and distributing a report that is critical of the oppressive treatment of women in some Islamic societies.

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh (at right), who is a journalism student at Balkh University and a writer for Jahan-e Naw, was sentenced last October after downloading a report from a Farsi website that criticized Islamic fundamentalists who misrepresent statements in the Koran to justify the oppression of women. Kambaksh was arrested after someone filed a complaint against him. He is accused of blasphemy for distributing the report to other students and teachers at his school.

He was tried by a sharia court (which oversees Islamic religious law) and was not allowed legal representation, according to news reports. The Afghan Senate passed a motion this week supporting the sentence, according to the British newspaper The Independent.

Other journalists have been warned that they would be arrested if they protested in support of Kambaksh.

[via boing]

As we head into the 2008 US Presidential race, here are a few videos to inform the foreign policy debates.

Edwin Starr: War (1969)
The song inspired by the original title of Tolstoy’s War & Peace.

Bruce Cockburn – If I Had A Rocket Launcher (1983)
Apparently, someone once asked Eddie Van Halen: “How does it feel to be the greatest guitarist in the world?” And he answered, “I don’t know, why don’t you ask Bruce Cockburn.” At least that’s the story I’ve heard. I had the pleasure of seeing Bruce in concert in Sudbury once, and it was amazing. Bruce is famous for his lefty protest politics, but he’s also a fantastic song writer, and, of course, no slouch on the ol’ guitar.

This tune is about the dirty war in Guatemala in the 1980s (supported, of course, by the US and Canada); but those face and bodies could be in any number of countries today.

Sgt Barry Sadler: Ballad of the Green Beret (1966)
And, lest I be accused of bias against war, here’s the 1966 hit song, that was number 1 for five weeks on the billboard charts.

So, what I don’t get is this: if you think waterboarding should be legal, then say so. If you think it should not be legal say so. But this non-answer stuff, I find objectionable.

Here, on DemocracyNow!, is US Attorney General Michael Mukasey paddling around and around in circles, at the Senate Judiciary Committee:

> Audio (starts at 9:45)
> Reaplayer (starts at 9:45)

News from the commercial side of audiobooks, amazon dishes out 300 smackers for audible.com.

quick calculation:
-the article indicates that audible’s catalog is roughly 90,000 works
-@$300M for the kit, that’s about 3k/title
-so that makes librivox’s donation to the universe roughly worth (in grubby capitalist terms): 1200*3000 = $3.6 million.

let’s discount by 50% for our quirks, and, which puts us at $1.8 million, which sounds very low to me.

We’re adding about 70 books a month now to our catalog, so next year we should we “worth” twice that!

Not that we’re for sale (now or ever) but it’s … kinda interesting.

I worry for the children …that with all of this information, they will not have the chance to be aware of their own lives… Head for the hills! Go to the woods, get away from all these people! Go to a place where boredom is available to you; there’s where you will start to remember all the things that have ever happened to you.

– Garrison Keillor, on the Book Show.

Indeed. There is so little time to really think these days, what with the constant processing processing processing processing of information. New, surface, ephemeral information, constantly updated and replaced by more.

Mike and I and a few others had dinner with Jon Udell the other night, and Mike raised, convincingly, this big spectral question:What are we really doing, we digital do-gooding evangelists? To what degree will these “improvements” we wish to bring to people’s lives actually bring improvements? Mat’s complainging about the SNR on the web.

Ursula Le Guinn thinks books are doing OK (subscription only), and while I agree with her, I haven’t finished a book in months (this happens occasionally).

So: Is your life improved by the web? By your mac? Your iphone? I mean, I know you love the web and your mac and your iphone, but have they truly improved your life? For me the answer is a very big yes, and a very big no, and they compete furiously. (Though I don’t have an iphone yet, so maybe I should wait to make final judgments).

Oops, forgot to point to this week’s best audio, Wednesday Picks from Earideas: This week: Karl Rove on the presidential race; evolution, the human brain, and economics; and the New Yorker’s new poetry editor, Paul Muldoon, talks music and verse.

[link...]

This, apparently:

When I worked in New York in a financial brokerage house in 2000-2001, my colleagues (I think it was Manus, a short funny Italian from New Jersey; and Bill, my office-mate, from Texas; and probably a few others) told me that in the banking/finance business – at least their end of it – “Canadian” was a code word that actually meant “black.” I had the impression the term had been used like that for years.

I think we were at lunch, and they were all talking about someone or other, and Manus said, “Oh, he’s Canadian,” and I perked up and said, “Oh really, where is he from?…” and of course they all laughed and told me it meant black.

I guess it was so you could say nasty things about “Canadians” without anyone getting pissed off.

I totally forgot about that, till I just saw this in the Boing:

The Canadian National Post looks on with mild horror as American linguists report on the growing trend in the American south to use “Canadian” as a masking euphemism for black people, so that white racists can say socially inappropriate things without tipping listeners off about the cancer in their souls.

I would point out to Cory Doctorow, though, that (I hope) he’s got his definition of euphemism wrong. Since a euphemism is: “the substitution of a mild, indirect, or vague expression for one thought to be offensive, harsh, or blunt….”

I can buy that the term “Canadian” is mild, indirect, & vague; but I think that calling “black people” offensive, harsh or blunt … is not what Cory meant. Presumably he meant Canadian as a euphemism for more offensive words for black people (you know, like the n-one we’re not allowed to write).

But even there, it’s not really a euphemism, but rather a way to disguise direct racial insults, eg. “Oh, don’t work with him, he’s a Canadian.” Etc.

Anyway funny when little quirks of language pop up 8 years later in the newspaper as “new” linguistic habits. Funny in a sickening sort of way.

Montreal movers/shakers Ben and Fred have officially launched Standoutjobs Reception, with a little help from their friend Austin.

Here’s what it is:

The product is called RECEPTION. It’s a suite of web-based tools to power your online recruiting efforts. At its core you’ll find a do-it-yourself, interactive Career Site. The idea is to give companies the power to truly showcase their cultures and teams. Candidates want more information and interactivity from companies, and we hope to provide that. By allowing companies and candidates to build on-going relationships we make the process of hiring a more human one, which is ultimately, what it’s all about any way. Job descriptions and job requirements are nice (or not!) but what candidates really want is an inside view into your company – they want to know if it’s a good cultural and personal fit.

It’d be nice to be in a position to need to use the tools there, cause they look great, but we ain’t there yet.

Anyway, congrats on the launch.

I wrote a long piece partially about how newspapers might be able to save themselves, a while back.

Here’s another thought: advertising is where newspapers make their money, with local ads and classified making up a big percentage of the dough.

What if newspapers leveraged their existing ad networks, to build a localized advertising platform for local web sites and blogs. [Or if a company built such a system to sell to newspapers, to allow them to implement with little or no technical requirements, or just on their own... and finish off newspapers for good].

I’ve long thought that google adsense is a terrible tool for small websites – the ads are mostly irrelevant; the money insignificant unless you are getting thousands of visits a day.

But if there was a good way to get decent local ads on a more local blog, it would make more sense. Newspapers are well placed to provide that service to blogs.

Most local merchants are probably not savvy enough to recognize the need to be advertising online; so probably this service should be offered free to merchants to start; but with a year of statistics, a newspaper could much better quantify the value of such a proposition.

I wonder if the guys at Praized have thought of this business angle? Seems to me there’s a big space for someone to build a good online ad system for meatspace commerce.

Parag Khannan has a compelling piece in New York Times Magazine about the passing of America’s sole superpower moment, and the new multipolar order, with China and the US vying for a share of the global pie, with EU playing both off against each other in the middle, and cashing the checks:

Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury — carrying a big wallet. The E.U.’s market is the world’s largest, European technologies more and more set the global standard and European countries give the most development assistance. And if America and China fight, the world’s money will be safely invested in European banks. Many Americans scoffed at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would bring the collapse of the European project. Yet today, Persian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that OPEC no longer price its oil in “worthless” dollars. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela went on to suggest euros. It doesn’t help that Congress revealed its true protectionist colors by essentially blocking the Dubai ports deal in 2006. With London taking over (again) as the world’s financial capital for stock listing, it’s no surprise that China’s new state investment fund intends to locate its main Western offices there instead of New York. Meanwhile, America’s share of global exchange reserves has dropped to 65 percent. Gisele Bündchen demands to be paid in euros, while Jay-Z drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft power seems on the wane even at home.

and …

And Europe’s influence grows at America’s expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe’s, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn’t educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want — like the International Monetary Fund — while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings — consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas — let alone when it’s not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the region’s answer to America’s Apec.

and…

America’s global dominance: our military spending, our share of the global economy and the like. But there are statistics, and there are trends. To really understand how quickly American power is in decline around the world, I’ve spent the past two years traveling in some 40 countries in the five most strategic regions of the planet — the countries of the second world. They are not in the first-world core of the global economy, nor in its third-world periphery. Lying alongside and between the Big Three, second-world countries are the swing states that will determine which of the superpowers has the upper hand for the next generation of geopolitics. From Venezuela to Vietnam and Morocco to Malaysia, the new reality of global affairs is that there is not one way to win allies and influence countries but three: America’s coalition (as in “coalition of the willing”), Europe’s consensus and China’s consultative styles. The geopolitical marketplace will decide which will lead the 21st century.

[More...]

So, what’s Canada going to do? Should we lobby to join the EU? I don’t know if that’s a good idea, but I bet Quebec would get behind that project!

Some tunes from my days at university.

Rheostatics: Christopher (1990)
I loved these modern Canadian artrock progsters. I’ve seen them live more than any other band, and I guess I have most of their albums too.

Skydiggers: I’m Wondering (1993)
My roommate Matty used to say, “I don’t get why everyone likes this band, it sounds like girl music to me.” (He liked to smoke hash and listen to Pink Floyd and Sabbath). But I always thought they were the Canadian REM, and their live shows were always great. If you wanted to go to a costume party dressed as a Canadian university student from the 1990s, this would be a good video to study.

Spirit of the West: Home For A Rest (1990)
This is the song that unfailingly got every Canadian human who went university in the nineties out on the dance floor jumping up and down and screaming out the chorus, “I’m so sick from the drink, I need home for a rest … take me home!“. What a weird video … they’re a little bit less rock n roll/pogues than the lyrics would lead you to believe.

*LibriVox top 10 books result in about 190,000 downloads per month.
*The zip files for those 10 books add up to 3.8 GB
*Or an average of 380 MB/download
*meaning, per month, our top 10 books alone represent 190,000 * 380MB = 72 TeraBytes

BUT: a download might be just one file, or a whole zip. so let’s say that only half those downloads are a whole zip, meaning monthly downloads for top 10, of 36 TB.

Those 10 books are 10 out of 1,200 books, or 0.8% of the catalog. But assuming that that 0.8% of the catalog = 33% of the downloads, then that makes our monthly bandwidth something like:

108TB/month.

Rough calc, but: Holy Shit.

Heh.

[via Patrick]

I had dinner with one of my favourite web writers last week, Jon Udell (along with a collection of other Montreal datahounds and web citizens). I like Jon’s stuff because he writes not about exploring the outer edge of the snowplow; but rather taking things from the snowplow blade and figuring out how they might make our lives and societies better. I think so much in the world of tech is about making the technology better, and we don’t spend nearly enough time wondering about the impacts or how we can really use these things to imporve lives. He gave a talk, while in Montreal, that I missed, but luckily he put the whole thing up on the web.

Coincidently, Jon’s talk starts with reference to Teilhard de Chardin, who I have been (re)reading about in Annie Dillard’s extraordinary book, For the Time Being (seems to be unavailable in Canada).

In any case, here’s an interesting anecdote from Doug Engelbart, that forms the centre of Jon’s great talk:

On that day, as a young engineer, [Doug Engelbart] suddenly stopped what he was doing and asked himself: Why am I doing this? What is the purpose of this technology that fascinates and compels me?

After wandering around in a kind of revelatory trance for a couple of hours, the answer came to him. He realized that, as a species and a civilization, we were facing serious challenges to our survival.

Now that was sixty years ago, during an era of post World War II optimism, when the limits we’re facing today weren’t so apparent to most people.

Those limits are a lot more evident nowadays, and our political and economic systems are poorly adapted to deal with them. We need to reengineer those systems, in dramatic ways.

To do that, we’ll need to mobilize the collective intelligence necessary to figure out what needs to be done, and the collective will necessary to accomplish it.

So, how do we do that?

Engelbart’s vision is crystal clear. It’s a vision of human augmentation. We need to augment human capability in certain ways. In particular, we need to create — and project our minds into — a shared information space that works like a planetary associative memory.

And we need to populate that shared space with tools that support and amplify and extend our natural ability to analyze, visualize, simulate, decide, and act.

Fifteen years ago that would have sounded nearly as fantastic as Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. Today, if we look sideways at the web and squint, we can see the picture coming into focus.

But as William Gibson famously said, the future is unevenly distributed. In this case, what mostly isn’t here is the part where we come together in shared online spaces, with shared tools and information, to analyze, visualize, simulate, decide, and act — on a planetary scale.

The good news is that we can hack this problem. I absolutely believe that we can. But we’re going to have to hack it at a different level than the one at which the computer and information sciences have historically tended to operate.

And:

Unfortunately we do have a tendency to hack the wrong things. I guess because we tend to think first, and best, about the protocols that enable machines and applications and services to work together, instead of about the protocols that enable people to work together — in a context that is defined, but only partly defined, by machines and applications and services.

Ultimately, the right hacks are the ones that help people make sense of their world, and collectively improve it. And the right level is the level of human cognition, attention, intention, and desire.

And (heh) I just finished reading Jon’s talk, and lo, there was a nice reference to LibriVox and me …

Another example, one that happens to be Montreal-based, is LibriVox, the collaborative project to make audio recordings of public domain books. For quite a while the whole project ran on nothing fancier than an online bulletin board. A lot of us here, me included, would have been tempted to write a soup-to-nuts database-backed application to support that project, because that’s what we’re good at, and that’s what we like to do.

But when I saw how the project really works, I realized that would have been a mistake. Like Wikipedia, LibriVox is actually powered by a set of agreements and protocols and traditions. You can imagine encoding those in software, and the project’s founder — Hugh McGuire — might have wanted to, if he’d had access to the right kind of software talent. But he didn’t, which was almost certainly a good thing. Because the agreements and protocols and traditions weren’t known ahead of time, they had to emerge from the collective. As it turned out, a bulletin board — with its weak structure and loose coupling — was exactly the right way to nurture that emergence.

Over time, those loose structures have begun to coalesce. There’s a database behind LibriVox now, but the project still doesn’t feel like a database application, it’s more like a bulletin board that’s been enhanced with some database features. The real innovation continues to be in the agreements and protocols and traditions that attract, reward, and sustain contributors. LibriVox is a success not because of any particular bit of technical hackery, but because of Hugh McGuire’s inspired social hackery.

Which requires a couple of notes, LibriVox is not really Montreal-based … it lives independently on the web, and almost it’s only Montrealness is me, and the odd chapter read by other Montrealers. Also, while I may have had some inspired social hackery, there sure were a lot of people who were just as inspired.

Have a read of the whole thing here.

So I was on the silly quiz show, Test the Nation, on CBC, as a member of the blogger team (the questions were on 21st C trivia, with a focus on tech, gossip and news … guess which team won?).

It was nice to meet some new cyber scribes from around the country, and I had a good time talking to the fellow-misanthrope cab driver Gord at the pub afterwards. But I just read this review of the experience from James Viloria, a Montrealer with the blog, Gay Person of Colour. It’s strange when you live in one sort of environment, and realize that others – because of who/what they are and who/what the rest of the world is like – have such a different experience of the universe. Says James:

I was apprehensive about wearing a t-shirt that had printed on it the words “gay persons of color,” but I managed to muster up the courage to wear the garment on the show and enter proudly for the first time in my life into a situation where everyone would be immediately aware of the fact that I was gay. Wow! For me, this was significant, and even more important than my insecurities that were somehow resolved was the fact that I was welcomed by so many of my fellow bloggers and other contestants on the show as their equal, as a human being, as me.

I didn’t talk much to James, but I’m glad he had the kind of experience I would expectmost of us take for granted – but clearly is not a given even in liberal cities like Montreal.

[via Teamakers]

This week’s Wednesday Picks from earideas include: the democratization of innovation; the scientific genius of Leonardo da Vinci; and master short story writer Mavis Gallant.

Check it out.

So, one thing that would make OpenID really useful, I think, is if there was a way to track blog comments made across the web, while logged in with my openid.

That is, have an RSS feed of “Comments made on all blogs by hughmcguire.myopenid.net” …

There have been a few of (non-openid) efforts at this over time, but all of them clunky. Mike still tracks his comments by tagging them “mycomments” on del.icio.us … and i think there is a plugin called cocomment or something.

But those are “extra” hacks, and most people haven’t bothered.

If by logging-in (using openid) to leave a blog comment, i were also pinging another server (maybe myopenid.com’s) to tell them that I was commenting *here* … it would be easy, and useful to make a feed. myopenid.com ought to be able to do that because (privacy spideysense tingling) they know every time I have logged in somewhere?

I will be on CBC TV tonight (Sunday, Jan 20, 8pm) on Test the Nation if anyone wishes to watch.

I’m on the blogger team.

The Inevitable Renaissance of Minimum Energy Structures. A Beukers & E V Hinte:

There is a duality between engineering and nature which is based on minimum use of energy. This is because animals and plants, in order to survive in competition with each other, have evolved ways of living and reproducing using the least amount of resource. This involves efficiency both in metabolism and optimal apportionment of energy between the various functions of life. A similar situation obtains with engineering, where cost is usually the most significant parameter. It seems likely, then, that ideas from nature, suitably interpreted and implemented, could improve the energy efficiency of our engineering at many levels. This transfer of technology, variously called bionics, biomimetics or biognosis, should not be seen so much as a panacea for engineering problems as a portfolio of paradigms.

I think of open systems like LibriVox as *abstract* examples of this.

[more...]
[... thanks mir ... oops i mean, thanks mir]

From Matt:

This week, TV theme songs.

Greatest American Hero
I can’t really remember this show all that well, but I sure remember the song.

The Littlest Hobo
To meet my cancon requirements. [Also: another shower favourite] … for my international readers, Littlest Hobo was a Lassie-esque show about a dog that wandered around Southern Ontario, solved mysteries, and then, just when the thankful families were about to put out a nice steak for him, they’d turn around … and he’d be gone again.

Knight Rider
Michael Knight & KITT edged out the Dukes of Hazard in the competition, with the Romanian judge awarding Dukes a shocking 3 for technical merit. Dukes is appealing the decision. [On a personal note, I must say I'd forgotten what a bad-assed theme song this show had. No wonder I loved it].

if you are a teacher, you should watch this.