technology

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

O, present, we hardly knew ye.

More here: layar via here: Martin Bryant.

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]

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...]

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...]

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...]

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.

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!

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...]

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

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].

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.

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]

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.

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.

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?

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.

Theo Jansen is a kinetic sculptor. Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is a sculpture powered entirely by wind:

See another vid. And from TED.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

I’m not a gadget/gear junkie, but the mechanical engineer in me (I didn’t like much of my engineering courses, but I enjoyed fluid dynamics) thought this photo was pretty darned neat:

A closeup [below], notice the visual distortion caused by the shockwaves… cool huh? The jet is not yet supersonic, but is in the transonic region. The air around the plane is accelerated to supersonic speed when it encounters an obstruction (like a bump on the fuselage). Shocks within the supersonic flow (often causing it to decelerate to subsonic conditions) produce large gradients in air density and index of refraction, bending the light differentially on either side of the shock. Those pressure waves can be seen radiating from specific points on the aircraft (including the canopy). The above was compiled from various people who emailed me!

[photo by BZ]

Jimmy Wales got hammered by Arrington for the launch of Wikia Search.

Jimmy Wales comments on the techcrunch thread, with a salient point:

When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!

Aka: To build a community-driven tool, you have to have a platform to build. They’ve released the platform, and don’t really have the tool yet. Here’s what the about page says:

Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low..

Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

Whether it’ll work or not, I don’t know, but google needs a good competitor. Though I think wikia’s really competing against del.icio.us and stumbleupon… so we’ll see how it goes.

Also, pls: openid. Just gives me less of a headache. I don’t want to register for another site.

I’m batting around this idea, maybe you can help articulate it better. Here’s the basic idea:

The (monetary) value of something is defined by what you can’t do with it; not by what you can do with it.

I’m thinking of this particularly wrt to digital media, and the music biz. The “value” of LP records was defined not by what you could do with it (ie play music), but what you couldn’t do with it: copy it instantly and share it with all your friends. The LP is valuable because it’s scarce: you’ve got one, I don’t … hence it has value. Ditto tapes and CDs.

Thought experiment #1: imagine that in 1888 someone invented a cheap little device that recorded sounds and that also broadcasted sounds to the world; anyone who had such a device could catch those other sound broadcasts and record them … and the device also had infinite storage. If that were the case, how do you think the music “business” would have evolved?

Thought experiment #2: what if our memories were so good that we could hear a song and remember it exactly, and replay it in our minds exactly as we heard it the first time? would musicians go out of their way to try to prevent individuals from hearing their music?

With audiohijack pro I can copy any sound that passes thru my computer, if I so choose. Regardless of any DRM or whatever else you try to stick on your media. Further, I consume 90% of my media on my computer. So if you want me to hear it, I will be able to record it.

I know this is all old news, but I am reminded of my discussions at PodCamp boston with the founder of Select Records (one of the first indie hip hop labels). He was a good guy, an indie trench warrior who worked for many years trying to get little bands popular. But like many record execs sees P2P etc as “illegal downloading.”

But the point is, it doesn’t matter what he thinks. Ditto for Sony and all the rest. (Same for people who complain about Wikipedia… it doesn’t matter if you think Wikipedia is a bad idea, because it’s what people actually use).

It’s just too easy for me or anyone else to copy music. There’s nothing that can be done, it’s over.

Speaking of which, Galacticast did a great little DMCA.ca vid.

I’ve been listening to tons of great public broadcasting on earideas.com.

And here’s a different view about why “good” public broadcasting is important: with the web, and podcasts, the CBC becomes a calling card for Canada. Ditto Deutsche-Welle for Germany and ARN for Australia etc. The broadcaster becomes a marketing tool and a builder of prestige. This is becoming more important in the networked world, where – for many of my peers, for instance – we can be anywhere in the world to do the work we do. Ditto businesses, scientists, writers and other “elites.” We want them here, in Canada, in Montreal, because really smart people make a country more vibrant and innovative.

I believe that a strong public broadcaster with excellent, thought-provoking content, helps build Canada’s image in the world.

While this isn’t all a public broadcaster should do, this is a new kind of rationale, I believe, brought on by the web; and one that might be more compelling to the business-only decision-making that runs our governments these days.

Note, this applies as well to universities: all universities should put a chunk of their marketing budget towards producing a weekly, high-quality podcast that interviews professors doing exciting research (whether in arts, humanities, or sciences and professional disciplines). I’m thinking of a weekly podcast with content as varied and wonderful as the TEDTalks. That is the gold standard for thought-provoking web content … and should be emulated by anyone who wants to build an image as a place of exciting innovation.

I was just talking with Mitch and Julien about this at lunch the other day; and commented on Mat’s blog to this effect.

more semantic web from ground up rather than top down: twitter #hashtags, see hashtags.org … hashtag any twitter post (eg. #montreal) and it ’s trackable and findable on hashtags.org (I think they need to be following you on twitter). smart fellows.

(oh and here is an explanation of twitter)

We’ve been watching the 1978 BBC series Connections on Youtube at dinner time. It is a history of the world thru technology, demonstrating the chain reactions of incremental and quantum jumps in knowledge and tech, and their impacts on how we live. Fantastic television, and you should all watch it instead of the Knight Rider (or whatever is on TV these days). Here are the links to Episode 1 on Youtube:

> Connections, episode 1, part 1 of 5
> Connections, episode 1, part 2 of 5
> Connections, episode 1, part 3 of 5
> Connections, episode 1, part 4 of 5
> Connections, episode 1, part 5 of 5

I think the whole series is on Youtube; as well as the follow-up series: Connections II, and Connections III.

Google is playing around with a new Wikipedia competitor, knol:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

Up to now, Google has won because it is the best way to navigate *other* people’s information on the net. Search, reader, gmail, even maps are all tools to find the best information that others provide on the web. Google Books starts going in a new direction, where Google becomes the repository of information, which already makes me nervous. You can expect that Google Books is likely to be ranked ahead of Gutenberg in searches, for instance. That’s not good, because the others might be *better* sources.

Knol is a whole other level: Google becomes the producer of information.

And one can expect that Google’s search will privilege it’s own content… from that same blog post:

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.

That’s bad bad news for how the google manages knowledge finding & distribution, I think. It puts them in a conflict of interest; exactly the conflict of interest (search engines sending you to information based on where they want to send you, not where you want to go) that Google shunned to become to kings of search.

I don’t know if they have addressed this conflict of interest yet, does anyone have any info? Here’s what they say in the article:

Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledg

That’s some wishy-washy language. What does “appropriately” mean? “So that we will get the most amount of traffic?“

With the success of Wordpress – free & GPL – that other blogging platform, MovableType was on its way out. But SixApart has just released MovableType in GPL.

Good for everyone I think – throw some competition into the mix.

Heri’s got a map of Montreal tech start-uppy things going on, if you’ve got a project to put in there:

I’ve been using the Defensio anti-spam plugin on here for a couple of weeks now. I’m a happy man … and I believe it’s superior to the defacto wordpress spam blocker, Akismet. Why?

1. Defensio seems better at learning what’s spam and what’s not – and it admits its mistakes. there’s an nice little performance tracker in the admin panel that looks like this:

* Recent accuracy: 99.35%
* 2191 spam
* 42 legitimate comments
* 10 false negatives (undetected spam)
* 4 false positives (legitimate comments identified as spam)

2. Because of the above, it feels like you have more control over it – Akismet rules your blog’s comment section with an invisible fist of iron… Defensio seems much more laid back – like you can hang out with it and say, hey man, that wasn’t spam, and defensio will be like, dude, sorry about that, i’ll try to remember that next time!

3. It ranks by spaminess … and obvious spam gets hidden, so you don’t have to go thru the hundreds of spam comments that Akismet makes you sift thru (if you want to bother), only the “possible” spam that might be legit.

4. The interface somehow feels friendly and inviting (maybe because I know some of the guys involved in the project?)

So good job Mat & Carl.

Videotron’s *online* account management service is unavailable from midnight to 5am. (Videotron is my ISP and mobile carrier). I thought this was strange, so I sent an email to them asking why. Here is the response:

Thank you for having taken the time to write us.

The on-line services on our web site at Vidéotron.com are not available
from midnight to 5:00 a.m. Since the on-line services have a direct link
with our customers’ accounts, this period is essential in allowing us to
update the data and make sure the information is the same in both the
customer accounts and the on-line services.

The on-line services allow you to change some services, as well as see your
billing information, your Internet usage and your services. If there were
no updates, the information would not match with your Vidéotron account
number. Since the dossiers of all our clientele must be updated, the
length of time taken cannot be diminished. During the updates, the
affected services on the site cannot be used.

We hope this information has been helpful. Thank you for your
understanding.

Lyne Gagné
Vidéotron administrative services
serviceclient@videotron.ca
Our web site: < http://www.videotron.com >

Montreal: (514) 281-1711
Quebec: (418) 847-4410
Chicoutimi: (418) 545-1114
Outaouais: (819) 771-7715
Elsewhere in North America: 1-877-380-2511 (toll free)

Does this make sense to anyone?

I replied:

that is the strangest online customer service policy I have ever heard. are you aware of any other major company in the world with a similar policy for online accounts? i am not. In all my experience with banks, telcos, credit cards, financial services etc etc. I have never seen such a policy.

it’s very … strange … and annoying.

Michael Geist writes a worrying article about how the web is starting to look more and more like cable.

Until recently, the Internet was precisely the opposite [of cable], offering unlimited user choice, continuous interactivity, and technological capabilities to copy and remix content. That is gradually changing as broadcasters seek to re-assert greater geographic control over their content, ISPs experiment with cable-like models for prioritized content delivery, and some creator groups lobby the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission to adapt Canadian content regulations to the Internet.

one thing that’s starting to happen more and more is geographical blocking:

…NBC and Fox recently unveiled Hulu.com to some critical acclaim, while Comedy Central created a new site for the popular Daily Show that features a complete archive of eight years of programming.

Canadians, alas, are generally locked out of these sites due to licensing restrictions. Canadian broadcasters have been scrambling to buy the Internet rights to U.S. programming, both to protect their local broadcasts and to beef up their online presence. U.S. broadcasters may eventually decide it is more profitable to stream their content on a worldwide basis and to remove longstanding geographic restrictions, however, for the moment they are parceling up the Internet as they would a broadcast destined for multiple cable markets. This geographic bordering extends beyond just blocking streamed content. The new Daily Show site is off-limits for Canadians since the U.S.-based Comedy Central recently took the unprecedented step of redirecting Canadian visitors to the CTV-owned Comedy Network site.

I don’t like the sound of all that. But what’s even *worse* is that cultural groups – in the name of “protecting Canadian culture” are thinking along the same lines. If commercial broadcasters in collusion with ISPs (who sometimes are commercial broadcasters) can shove their content at us, and keep us away from other content, then can’t we make sure that “Canadian culture” (chosen by us) gets precedence too … that is, can’t we start deciding what you watch and read again, all the better to *improve* our bottom line and country?

Uck.

And in other news youtube launches a Canadian version, Youtube.ca (which redirects to ca.Youtube.com)… Oilman has some complaints, for instance about this sentence from their blog: “In developing territory-specific YouTube sites, we wanted to bring YouTube to you, in your language, while making local talent more visible and getting closer to our users around the world.”

The rest of the complaints there seem to miss the point, ie he wants Youtube Canada to be more representative of Canada – bigger flag etc. Why? Why would you want Youtube Canada any more than … oh … say Sympatico Video (shudder). What’s wrong with just leaving the Internet as it is, (mostly) borderless?

[Incidentally, why do Canadians have to be such a bunch of insecure whiners? See the comments on Oilman's post].

From one end, Youtube.ca doesn’t make much sense, as good content on youtube should win the good old fashioned way, because it gets linked to and people like it. Youtube.ca probably makes it harder to find good stuff, tho maybe all these geo-youtubes will feed into the main youtube.com site? Hope so.

But putting Geist’s article together with Youtube.ca – it’s obvious that they want to do more geographically-targeted advertising. Just like TV!

I already find it annoying that google searches search differently on different computers – depending on, for instance, where you are and what language your browser is set to. I don’t want Google to filter searches “just for me” based on where I am etc… I want to know what’s at the top of the listing.

But now it looks like the rest of the web is shifting in this direction too.

The enigmatic Mat Balez announces the official beta release of Defensio, a new anti-spam plugin for blogs:

There’s a bunch of things to love about Defensio, including the ability to sort by “spaminess” (bubble those false positives up to the top of your spambox!), RSS feeds of your spam and ham, and individualized performance statistics. But I’ll let you read the “official” announcement to get all the juicy details.

Developed by Carl Mercier & Mat. Read the official announcement here.

I use Defensio instead of Akismet on a couple of my blogs (not this one … though I plan to change), and I do like it better – it’s got a bit of a personal feel, and you feel you have a bit of control over it, unlike Akismet that rules your blog like a dictator.

Defensio will have a hard time breaking the Akismet stranglehold on the Wordpress world … Akismet doesn’t go great job but it does do a good job. Usually that’s good enough for most people not to bother installing a new plugin, unless they are setting up a new blog.

UPDATE: this looks interesting:

One of the first applications of Defensio’s spam filtering service has been the blogosphere — but it doesn’t end there. We’ve built an easy-to-use public API that is perfectly suited to handling comment traffic from any social web application that might be subject to spam

I’m watching a session at Podcamp Boston on teen podcasting, by kabren levinson of nerdnewsradio.com (started when he was 15, 2 years ago)… the intro was pretty interesting, about Kabren’s experience of NOT getting his session accepted in the original schedule (read his blog post here and the follow-up here… Podcamp, being run by good folks, addressed the issue and gave him a slot).

Did you know there’s a TeenPodcastNetwork.

Quote: “How come teens are never involved in planning teen centres?” … good question. Cool kid.

With reference to this post, kara pointed me towards: Jumpcut, which is

an application that provides “clipboard buffering” — that is, access to text that you’ve cut or copied, even if you’ve subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut’s interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard’s history.

Seems to be working well. Not quite the one click FF plugin I wanted, but better than what I was doing previously, with the added advantage of working as a general clipboard enhancer, not just a FF bonus.

Two recent examples:
1. it helped me find an accountant
2. it confirmed for me that dreamhost was acting crazy for others, not just me.

Michael Wesch of Kansas State University is probably the most famous university prof in the world, or at least he will be soon. Millions have read seen his articles videos in academic journals on Youtube, most famously, Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us, and more recently Information R/evolution.

The latest looks at students and their strange relationship with our academic institutions and models, which were designed before the telephone, not to mention the iPhone.

A Vision of Students Today:

[Link... to class blog; link to French translation]

How new is it, I wonder, that teachers can’t understand the world their students inhabit? It’s always been true to a certain extent, but the disconnect previously was mostly cultural … here it seems to me more environmental, and so fundamental. The mechanisms for communicating are changing, has changed (communicating the big ideas, facts, thoughts, as well as the minutia of of daily lives), and with pervasive computing and constant connection to the web, the way we think is changing too. For better or worse doesn’t really matter, it just will change.

Questions/comments (these have all been kicking around for a while, but still):
1. fact-learning: what is the value of memory when all the facts we might need to remember are available at our fingertips?

2. collateral damage: given the long success of fact-learning, what happens if that fades away as a prime method of educating? what else do we lose (eg, powers of focused concentration, the brain-training that memorizing things does)

3. plagiarism: copying is so easy now. instead of demanding that people not copy, maybe we should raise/change the standards of what we expect work to look like, assume it will be copied and pasted, and require that it be relevant in more important ways (see #1 above) … I see the parallel with with wikipedia/britannica question. if the info itself is free and available on wikipedia, then if britannica wants to be relevant, maybe it’s just going to have to think harder about what it can do better than wikipedia. ditto with schooling. maybe we need to move *beyond* “plagiarism is bad” to something more meaningful.

4. lecture halls: what are big classrooms for? i rarely went to many of my big lectures when I was in university – all that info was in the textbook, so why attend a dry lecture with a bad prof? it didn’t make sense to me then, and it seems crazier now. in the case of small classes I have a different opinion.

5. discipline: here I mean mental discipline. I notice this myself, with online distractions everywhere, I often find it hard to concentrate and apply the long-term discipline needed to Get Things Done. Part of how I have adapted is by trying to harness that lack of discipline, a prime example being LibriVox … which I once joked should have as a motto, “powered by procrastination.” This is the area that “worries” me most, because it’s the thing in my own life that concerns me. maybe we need to start thinking more about how to use unfocused, ambient mental energy for important things?

6. radical changes: while I think the changes in technology mean we need some radical rethinking of education, radical changes are always dangerous, you never know what other side-effects might overtake the initial effects. we need to be careful. if only someone would invent a way to have instantaneous feedback from multiple sources in an open intellectual system, it would make things easier!

7. The most important things an “education” can provide are:
a) critical thinking: ability to think critically about problems, this means ability to see a problem, to understand it’s context and history, and to be able to analyze various options and decide on the one that seems most likely to “work”. this is as true in science as in humanities and arts.

b) clarity: are we becoming less clear in our thinking and writing? losing the discipline of writing clearly, for instance, is bad news. the open web results a enormous amounts of unclear/undisciplined writing … so, are we really losing that skill, or is it just that there is far more writing and thinking being captured than ever before, and hence we see more of the unclear stuff – where before only the clear stuff got into writing? does clarity really matter? (yes). what’s to be done? or does that ask the wrong question?

Just some notes to ponder.

And also, more out of curiosity, I wonder how humans will adapt to these big changes that are only scratching the surface?

… I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the “Soviet ministries.” Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them…

From the wall street journal.

for various reasons, I just landed on this page by Will Johnston, from August 17, 2004. thoughts on the ipod:

This brings up a topic for discussion that I’ve been contemplating lately. What is the ‘hype’ with the iPOD about. Some say it’s the design, some say the memory capacity and others say it’s the cachet of being seen with one. From what I understand the Sony equivalent has it beat in all of these areas. Steve Jobs is a brilliant marketeer, but I really don’t see the incredible innovation with iTunes/iPod. Where I would see great consumer value and utility is with the storage + PVR type functionality for radio/Internet. There is a lot of broadcast radio (Al Franken, NPR, Gilmour Gang…) which would be great to pre-program recording and then be able to listen when I want and skip ads. Give me that kind of functionality and I’ll buy one right away.

two things: ancient history is funny; and we still have yet to produce an ipod that’ll do what he wants without the hassle of having to plug into your computer.

BBC reports:

A single hard drive with four terabytes of storage (4TB) could be a reality by 2011, thanks to a nanotechnology breakthrough by Japanese firm Hitachi.

In a way, this becomes less exciting as we move to a decentralized/online storage model.

Nora Young is my favourite CBC radio journalist – she mixes contemporary pop culture with intelligence in just the right doses. She’s been particularly interested lately in technologies – web-based and otherwise. She’s just launching a new show, called Spark:

Spark is your guide to the Next Big Thing. On-air and online, join Nora Young for a surprising and irreverent look at tech, trends, and fresh ideas. Host Nora YoungNora Young has a love hate relationship with technology, culture, and armchair sociology, which she pursues on CBC Radio, on television, in print, and online.

Broadcast Times, CBC Radio One:
Wednesdays at 11:30 a.m. (12:00 NT)
Saturdays at 4:00 p.m. (4:30 NT)

Podcast URL: http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/spark.xml

Nora’s also a blogger, podcaster, librivox contributor (mp3), and she even set up a Facebook group for Spark.

Hey, sweet. Montreal video maven Casey McKinnon, of Galacticast and A Comic Book Orange, has an article in the (UK) Guardian, How Do You Beat Youtube, about what needs to happen in the online vid platform space.

Congrats.

UPDATE: Mat has an interesting response, from a consumer’s point of view. And he’s right on.

Michael Geist on HMV’s decision to drop the price on back-catalog CDs:

This week, HMV announced that it was reducing the price on hundreds of back-catalog CDs generating a surprising amount of news coverage (Post, CBC). The move is good for everyone – the recording industry gets an important retail outlet to reduce prices on increasingly hard-to-find CDs (their largest retail outlets such as Wal-Mart do not carry many older titles), HMV gives a boost to music sales at a time when digital downloads, DVDs and video games command a growing share of the market, and consumers may find that the $20 sticker shock on some older CDs disappears. Yet leave it to CRIA to use the opportunity to spin this as a copyright reform story. HMV said absolutely nothing about the issue, because high-priced, older CDs have little to do with P2P file sharing or copyright law. CRIA’s Graham Henderson claims, however, that “it’s an effort to stem the tide of illegal downloading that threatens retailers and everyone else in the recording industry” and argues that other countries have reduced P2P through copyright reform while “a succession of Canadian governments have sat on their hands and done nothing.”

[more...]

So from a Canadian perspective in all this music biz debate about P2P/copyright/downloading, the real question ought to be not: how much money are record companies making/losing? but rather: how many active “professional” music artists are there in Canada now? Is that number increasing or decreasing? If it’s increasing (which I think it must be) then we should ask why? As in: does rampant P2P have a positive or negative impact on the number of professional musicians in Canada? And if it’s positive, then you’d have to conclude that there is an overall benefit to P2P, regardless of what the CRIA and others on the business end have to say, since really copyrights are theoretically about creating incentives to make art. Negative, and you’d have the opposite conclusion. (Assuming you could get the “right” conclusions out of your data).

I have no idea what the stats are on professional musicians (do any of you?). And how would you define that? The number of musicians who make money from their work (many)? Or the number who live off their work (fewer)? Or the number of millionaires (very few)? It would be interesting to see these stats.

Does anyone know of such stats?

All this data we are putting into the web – say, into our blogs and into facebook and elsewhere, could be used for much more than just figuring out what kind of sneaker ads we’re likely to want to see.

If you have a big enough and powerful enough database, and you felt like tracking more complex things than ad click-thru rates, you could start figuring out how different cues actually affect decisions, actions and opinions of specific people or groups of people. Let’s say you had a captive portal where all sorts of data about an individual (oh, say, interests, education, religion, location) and relationships (the people in that person’s network) and actions (causes they support, pictures they comment on), AND further more sophisticated content started going in there (say, blog posts – even a feed from a blog), then you could (and probably would) start analyzing what a person actually does.

And you could start correlating profiles with actions. Which in effect is what pollsters do, but with tiny bits of bad data from surveys and focus groups, from a discrete moment in time, and without any way to measure how responses correlate with actions. Whereas the net – and places like facebook – are enormous databases of detailed info about specific people, tracking not just static points of what they like or don’t like, but also some of the things they actually do on the net, over weeks, months or years.

And that means, if you have access to that database, you might have a good platform to craft a strategy to make people do what you want them to do.

While that’s a bit creepy when you think about Facebook and Myspace etc, let’s face it: as the semantic web evolves (linking content with context), as bandwidth and database processing power grows, the web itself might as well be considered a captive portal, and we *will* continue to put all this data into the system. Much that you might wish to know about me, including my opinions on various political issues and the news that inspires my outrage or laughter, can be found on my personal blog, for all to see, catalog, measure and track. Probably it’s a bit early for databases and modeling systems powerful enough to manage this kind of complex data – but it’s coming.

So the worries about privacy and your data are much bigger than just targeted marketing … there are much more sophisticated uses for our information.

Oh, and while I’ve been thinking this for a while, the spur that kicked me to think about it again, was the “about” page on Justin Hall’s website that says:

The web and video games are merging. All of information space is a shared multiplayer adventure. I am working to make that merging happen faster by developing “Passively Multiplayer Online Games” where your history of web browsing defines your online character.

Check the website of the research project: passively multiplayer.

Cool for vid games. But useful, and worrying, for all sorts of other applications.

UPDATE: check also wefeelfine.org and imagine the other sorts of text-strings, say, governments would like to track with such a pretty tool. (For instance: “I hate Bush”).

Michael Geist is optimistic:

Jim Prentice, Canada’s new Industry Minister, has been on the job for less than a week, yet his appointment has already sent a buzz through the business community. With a member of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s inner circle now at the helm, promoting Canada’s global economic competitiveness promises to become a core priority on the government’s fall agenda. While some political commentators maintain that the issue rarely translates into voter support, my weekly Law Bytes column (Ottawa Citizen version, homepage version) argues that the good news for Prentice is that reforms focusing on digital issues represent both good policy and smart politics. By prioritizing three issues – communication, copyright, and consumer confidence – he has the opportunity to establish a forward-looking framework that can serve as a model for other countries and provide a payoff at the ballot box.

[more...]

Sometime-Montrealer, occasional yulblogger, and fiction-writer Jon Evans has an article in the Walrus, called: Apocalypse Soon: The Future of Reading, about books, ebooks, the Internet, and publishing.

Starting para:

A few years ago, my first novel was published. It did pretty well, won an award, was translated and sold around the world; the movie rights were even optioned. Now I want to put it online — no charge, no hook, no catch. My motivation is simple: greed.

My publishers are resolutely opposed to this idea. They fear it will “devalue the brand” and set a dangerous precedent. They fear, intuitively but wrongly, that fewer people will buy a book that is also given away for free. But most of all, they fear the future — and with good reason. Book publishing is a dinosaur industry, and there’s a big scary meteor on the way.

The Canadian press is all over the brutal mobile data rates Canadian carriers charge (compared with reasonable rates elsewhere). An editorial in the Gazette; an editorial in the Ottawa Citizen, now a big article in the National Post.

I agree with them, and I’ll wager that CanWest (who owns all three papers) has some big business plans involving mobile data.

Or maybe the editorial boards just *really* want iPhones.

Says da boing:

The New York Public Library has just installed an Espresso book-on-demand machine and they’ll print any of over 200,000 public domain titles from the Open Content Alliance free of charge for any patron.

[more...]

From Marc Andreessen: Why Facebook is an important, perhaps revolutionary step in the evolution of the web…and what plugging into the platform means (great, long article, and here are some juicy bits):

Metaphorically, Facebook is providing the ease and user attraction of MySpace-style embedding, coupled with the kind of integration you see with Firefox extensions, plus the added rocket fuel of automated viral distribution to a huge number of potential users, and the prospect of keeping 100% of any revenue your application can generate.

The leadership that the Facebook team is showing here rivals anything that the large and established software and web companies have done in this decade.

…

Fourth, and perhaps most significantly, when your application takes off on Facebook, you are very happy because you have lots of users, and you are very sad because your servers blow up.

…

This is happening in an environment with 24 million active users — active users defined as users active on the site in the last 30 days. 50% of active users return to the site daily. 100,000 new users join per day. 45 billion page views per month and growing. 50 million users, and a lot more page views, predicted by the end of 2007.

…

An application that takes off on Facebook is very quickly adopted by hundreds of thousands, and then millions — in days! — and then ultimately tens of millions of users.

…

Translation: unless you already have, or are prepared to quickly procure, a 100-500+ server infrastructure and everything associated with it — networking gear, storage gear, ISP interconnetions, monitoring systems, firewalls, load balancers, provisioning systems, etc. — and a killer operations team, launching a successful Facebook application may well be a self-defeating proposition.

…

The implication is, in my view, quite clear — the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways

According to a Russian hacker team called “web-hack,” Apple’s much heralded and overly hyped iPhone contains “a built-in function which sends all data from an iPhone to a specified web-server. Contacts from a phonebook, SMS, recent calls, history of Safari browser” can be hijacked, as the VS iPhone blog reports.

[more...]

The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.

From NY Times’ Paul Krugman.

More from Business Week.

The Mirror’s got an article on the Atwater Digital Literacy Project, nicely done. Here’s the lede:

Give a kid a video camera and they’ll fiddle around with the buttons, but teach a kid how to make movies and they’ll be feverishly posting to YouTube in no time—or at least that’s the idea behind the Atwater Library’s Digital Literacy Project.

[more...]

Thanks Tracey!

[ramble]

This is probably old hat for many, but it occurs to me that what LibriVox and many of the other successful web aps and projects out there are about is helping people do things, rather than helping people get things. The best web providers (say google, flickr, wikipedia) these days all help you do the things you want to do, rather than help you buy the things you want to buy (an older model of what “commercial” means). In the case of LibriVox, providing audio books to the public is almost an incidental fringe benefit to the real thing we do, which is help people record audio books. And that’s one of the reasons LibriVox has been successful, our focus is on the readers not the listeners; and if you want to measure the value of what we have done to date, measure it not by numbers of downloads, but rather by the number of hours of audiobooks that are planned, but not yet recorded. That’s the true measure of the success of our efforts: efforts other people will make in the future.

So as you are contemplating your next big business venture, try thinking about it this way.

not: how can i sell more widgets?
but instread: what kind of widget can i build to help people do X better?

(NOTE: why is there a word for “widget” but not for the X?).

I guess this is what software, and shovels, and innovation has always been about in many ways… still, the language we use if so often skewed in the direction of selling things rather than doing things. Even those “things” are different: amazon provides books. engineering schools provide the ability to build bridges. would you rather provide a widget or an ability? which do you think is more valuable?

For instance, the old saw about bad inventions is: “tried to build a better mousetrap” (suggesting that the old-fashioned ones work as well as any new ones, so you’re wasting your time). But you could also say, “tried to help people catch more mice.” OK, so it doesn’t sound as good, but the point is that increasingly with the web, we need to focus less on the tools and more on what people can do with them. The shovel does not really matter; it’s the hole that is important.

This came up in as I was applying, on behalf of LibriVox, for the Stockholm Challenge Awards … there was a section in the application for Impacts. In some email exchanges with one of the organizers, he said to me, in reference to a badly-filled out section (I hope it’s OK that I am quoting him):

Impact is more about the effects in the wider world. So downloads are good, but instead of a broad measure, I would aim to get data on what is being downloaded (top 50 list perhaps) and who is downloading (geographic distribution by domain and whether it is institutional or private) but also providing the jury with some feedback about teachers using the resource in class because they can’t afford hard copies, or students, researchers etc who can get searchable access to the content of a book for reviews etc etc.

Think of impact in terms of a new drug. The company meets its objectives if it sells millions of doses, but the impact is whether it changes the rate of cure, life extension or quality etc in the patient. That’s what we want to see.

and I kept thinking, and ended up writing, that the real impact of LibriVox is not about who downloads our books, but that we have enabled thousands of people across the globe to participate in a project together that does something important. we have provided a platform to let people read audiobooks (something, it turns out, a number of people wish to do). our most important impact is not about how many people downloaded our free books (after all if that was the criteria, bit torrents would beat us out by a landslide), but about the construction of the project itself, and how we have built a platform that helps people do things they want to do, and do them for others.

this might be a good definition for that term I promised never to use again: web 1.0 helps you get things; web 2.0 helps you do things.
[/ramble]

The OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) just released their Communications Outlook 2007 report, that gives an overview of member states’ communication (mobile, broadband, broadcast, telephony etc) infrastructure, usage, pricing, etc.

Michael Geist gives a brief review of the report, and extracts these key points:

• Canada ranked second last in the OECD for the total number of mobile subscribers. For medium mobile users, Canadian plans ranked among the most expensive in the OECD.
• Canada placed far behind other countries for innovation. For example, Bell Canada was the only Canadian telecom provider to obtain patents in the United States with four since 2003. By comparison, AT&T, British Telecom, NTT, France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, and Korea Telecom have all obtained dozens (or hundreds) of patents in that same time frame.
• Canadian investment in telecommunications was average, trailing countries such as the US, Australia, Japan, and the UK.
• The OECD found that, on average, mobile revenue per subscriber dropped from 2003 to 2005 due to increased competition. In Canada, revenue increased during that period.
• The report reconfirms Canada’s sinking ranking in broadband subscribers along with its relatively high prices for broadband (18th in both monthly pricing and per MB pricing)

All are worrying, but I find #2 (lack of patents) the most indicative of long-term problems on the horizon in Canada.

And, in related iPhone news, Patrick links to an article that says:

Until Canadian companies can offer cheaper [mobile data] plans so that everyone will want one, iPhone won’t be coming to Canada.

The Canadian military, specifically the Directorate of Land Strategic Concepts , has put out a novel called Crisis in Zefra (pdf) to explore how emerging technologies might impact on combat. Written by Karl Schroeder
.

Here’s a quote from the novel, for Boris:

“A number of young men and women are approaching your position,” shesaid. “They appear to be unarmed mobloggers,” she added.

“Video scavengers,” said Monet. “This will be all over the world in five minutes.”

They also talk about news aggregators, smart mobs, text-messages, among other things (no mention of Collectik tho).

From the digital dust jacket:

Crisis in Zefra is a fictional narrative designed to illustrate emerging concepts and technologies that could become part of Canada’s Army of the Future. Set in 2025, this story follows what starts out as a routine patrol mission through the streets of war-torn Zefra, but the situation quickly degrades into a ‘three-block-war’ scenario.

The aim of this publication is to stimulate both interest and debate on the conceptual development of Canada’s Army.
Readers are encouraged to refer to the Canadian Army publication Future Force when reading Crisis in Zefra,
although it is not required to enjoy this publication. This publication presents a fictional scenario only and should not be quoted as an authoritative source for any detail of policy, doctrine, technique or procedure in the Canadian Army.

Find more Canadian military scifi here.

warning to you kids at home: don’t do it when you are exhausted. what should have been a 5 min little job was a 2 hr ordeal. I did so many things wrong, so many times, i can’t really believe it. but looks like everything is ok now. x-fingers.

painless replacement of my lemon of a macbook pro. just transfered all my data in a couple of hours to the new machine, everything appears to be in the right place, working smoothly.

specs: old –> new:
model: MBP 1,1 –> MBP 2,2
processor: intel core duo –> intel core 2 duo
speed: 2 GHz –> 2.33 GHz
cache: 2 MB –> 4MB
memory: 1 GB –> 2 GB
bus: 667 MHz –> 667 MHz

It definitely seems faster, it’s quiet as a churchmouse, seems relatively cool.

so cross fingers for a successful collaboration.

So it seems that the recent kookooery around Facebook in my digital network is not a totally isolated blip of the Montreal geek world. Says Facebook Blog:

If you were to check out the Toronto, ON network page, you’d notice that the Toronto network has over half a million members—a huge chunk of the explosive growth Facebook has recently seen in Canada (2 million Canadian users—or 10% of the Facebook population—and counting).

I understand Facebook now (it’s about the groups) but I don’t particularly like it. I mean, I don’t dislike it, but … anyway.

For those looking for me … I am listed under: Hugh McGuire (of Montreal, QC).

iTunes DRM-free music is GREAT move in the right direction, right? Yeah, as long as they don’t embed 360k of secret data including your name and email address … the better to see who’s buying what music … wherever that music ends up on the net. It appears that their DRM music is the same.

See: BBC, boingboing, and the original EFF warning.

In other bad news about iTunes, the new version, apparently, won’t let you convert from ACC to mp3.

One step forward …

The Atwater Library, where I serve on the Board of Directors, is looking for a techie. The pay is not great, but the atmosphere is interesting. Here is the rough job outline (for details see here):

Job Description
The Computer Centre Manager’s primary job is:
* to maintain a small network of 30 workstations, two servers (one Windows 2k, one Linux), and wireless access
* to ensure the smooth day-to-day operation of the Computer Centre staffed by a team of 12+ volunteers of varying computer skill levels and
* to oversee a small computer classroom with 6 computers.

Required Technical Skills
* tcp/ip networking
* Basic linux administration: apache, mysql, squid, postfix and backups
* Basic windows server administration: active directory and backups
* Basic php programming, mysql connectivity
* php application installation and security updates (specifically updating drupal: www.drupal.org)
* Workstation troubleshooting and maintenance

Beneficial Technical Skills
* Access VB

Other Skills
* Excellent customer service and people skills including dealing with people from different cultural and linguistic background
* Self-starter and able to work independently on projects
* Interest in or experience working in a community organization
* English (fluent oral and written), French and/or Spanish an asset

[More ...]

If you start to notice me being hyper-productive, it might be because I have started using a neat little productivity/management software, iGTD:

The software uses the Get Things Done productivity methodology, which apparently will solve all my constant procrastination problems and turn me into a man of unlimited energy and robot-like (almost frightening) efficiency, while allowing me to maintain space for creativity, to cuddle my wife, improve my cooking, my on-field rugby performance, take up opera singing.

The nice thing about the approach, and software, is that it separates tasks into both projects (eg, LibriVox, Writing, Collectik), and contexts (email, phone, outside, inside, online, urgent).

Two great little aps:

Page of Text
Nice simple little aps are such a pleasure. Page of Text is a brilliant little wiki environment – so easy and clean. I’m not quite sure what it’s good for, but if you want a page of text on the net, without having to host anything or do any fancy formatting (say, directions to your birthday party, or, maybe to make an editable list of players for your rugby match), page of text by Gordon McCreight is just what you need. It’s a perfect little gem of undetermined usefulness. (Speaking of useful, the wikiclock is run on a page of text platform).

ReCaptcha
ReCaptcha uses the human brainpower put into solving captchas to good use – and helps digitize public domain books.

If you run any forums or anything like that, you know what a pain spammers are, and in parallel, what an annoyance captchas are (captchas are usually those little weird numbers/letters you need to fill in to prove you are not a spammer). Captchas are either too good (keeping many legit people out) or too bad (letting all the spammers in). Usually both.

I can’t vouch for ReCaptcha’s effectiveness, but I can sing the praises of brilliance behind it. Firstly, there is an “audio” captcha included for those who can’t see so well (and the many frustrated eagle-eyed people who get foiled by really “good” captchas). Secondly, they estimate 60 million captchas are “solved” every day, at about 10 seconds per “transaction”, resulting in 150,000 hours of work each day, or 54 million person*hours of work a year! What if, instead of wasting that aggregated effort, captchas were used to do something useful? Say, helping to proofread badly-scanned, public domain digital books? That’s what reCaptcha appears to do, though I still can’t quite figure out how. Here’s what they say:

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

In any case, it’s worth having a think about what other such otherwise wasted human processing time could be used to productive ends, and what sorts of projects might benefit from such an approach. I imagine that reCaptcha’s system could be used for other things, tho looking thru their literature, it appears they’re not GPL.

Wireless tracking systems could be used to protect patients in hospitals and students on campuses, backers of the technology said.

[more...]

It’s also good for tracking the movements of political agitators, enemies of the state, socialists, copyright infringers, vegans, software pirates, environmentalists, and other pariahs and undesirables.

[comic by Joshua Porter, found by Patrick].

Says Evan:

Most technology startups I’ve been in have been run by charismatic sociopaths with no actual management or technology experience. They make wild, ignorant, unfounded promises to both employees and potential customers, then get increasingly anxious and unpleasant as their unsupportable predictions of schedule and market share don’t come through.

[more...]

Ha!

A long while back I posted (on th old blog, dose) about how, by default, when you are logged into a google account (say gmail), google tracks your searches (ostensibly to serve you “better” search results) … and allows you to review your “search history.” You can un-default that, but it’s pretty creepy whatever way you look at it.

So I undefaulted that option… but I noticed a funny thing the other day. I set up my rugby club’s website recently, and wanted to check google rankings. Here’s how we’re doing, I thought, on my browser for search terms “Montreal Rugby”:

Sweet. #1 on the web, not bad. As I set up the site, and I’ve been updating it pretty often, I’ve been visiting the site frequently. I told a friend to check out google, and see how well we were doing. We were #10 on “his” google. So I checked on safari, a browser I rarely use, and guess what? #2, not #1:

So, clearly google is:
a) tracking what I do with my browser
and
b) deciding what search results I will “prefer”

Both of which really pisses me off. So, google, if you are listening (which you certainly are), stop following me around. You are really starting to creep me out.

Both Intel and Professor Negroponte’s not for profit organisation, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), have developed a low cost, robust laptop aimed specifically at school children in the developing world.

Classmate PC
Intel’s Classmate PC runs Microsoft Windows and Linux

There are various differences in both the hardware and software, but Professor Negroponte believes the main problem is that his machine uses a processor designed by Intel’s main competitor, AMD.

[link]

Interpretation of the data is to be discussed, but the data itself is … astounding:

from Maurizio.

I did a podcast interview with Jon Udell about LibriVox, for ITConversations (I’ll let you know when it’s available). Was a great talk, and part of our discussions were about the still-significant barriers to accessing good audio on the net. There is great stuff out there, but for many not-so-net-savvy people there exist many problems with knowing about audio, finding it, choosing it, downloading it, getting it into a media player (and then getting it into a portable media device).

all of these processes are harder than they should be still (collectik is an effort to solve some of them), and I’d wager that the main audience for audio (especially the LibriVox, public interest, public radio type) is not as tech savvy as most net video watchers. Yet this is an important market – in part because of the value of the information available this way. This is a new sphere for public discourse, and should be made as simple as possible.

With LibriVox we often get people wondering how to get the mp3s they have downloaded into their ipod. A simple task for most of you, but not obvious to many people who would like to listen to LibriVox books. There’s an easy solution to this problem: generate an xml file of our catalog pages, that will be read as a podcast feed by iTunes, and allow for the one-click iTunes “subscription” to that book.

So Jon whipped up a python script that can do the job, eg. click on this:
itpc://jonudell.net/librivox/the-hound-of-the-baskervilles-by-arthur-conan-doyle.xml

iTunes will open, & you’ll get subscribed to this book – you may have to “get” all the files to download them. This eliminates some complication for people.

We’ll have to figure out how to integrate this – ideally the script could work in tandem with a wordpress plugin, that would work in our catalog page template. So that each page would generate the right link.

Evan did something similar a while back, with his PodPager… but the tool seems to be disabled.

I just made the switch to NeoOffice, the Mac version of OpenOffice, which is free software versions of Microsoft Office products (word, excel, powerpoint).

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long. When I first tried to get OpenOffice running on my mac, it required the dreaded “terminal” … and was beyond my minimal geekdom. I later tried NeoOffice, but it was buggy, and crashed a couple of times while I was writing novel chapters, so that was the end of that. Probably 2 years ago?

I’d heard the new versions (well, probably for a year or more), were stable, slick and nice-looking. And it is. The transfer has been totally painless.

I’ve had a few conversations lately with people about Ruby on Rails as a development framework. My understanding (as a non-programmer): “it’s a fantastic and flexible way to build a new webapp, but scaling might be an issue.” The Rails fans I know say, nonsense.

Well, Twitter is apparently the busiest Rails site on the net, and here is what they have to say about it:

2. How has Ruby on Rails been holding up to the increased load?
By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right
now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues -
issues that any growing site eventually contends with – far sooner
than I think we would on another framework.

The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling
Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem
is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel
cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this
point in time there’s no facility in Rails to talk to more than one
database at a time. The solutions to this are caching the hell out
of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases,
neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it’s not just
cost, it’s time, and time is that much more precious when people can[’t]
reach your site.

None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing
for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that
makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely
punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of
traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that
Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move
the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.

It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s
mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people
are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right
now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application
and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby
will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big
Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of
those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.

See the rest of the interview: here.

(from Pat)

This is a very scary thing. Canada’s mobile data rates are anywhere from 4 to 39 TIMES more expensive than elsewhere in the world.

What? What?

If you don’t live in Canada but you or your small business depends on mobile connectivity or net neutrality in general, don’t come here.

Here’s a nice little graph displaying our leadership in the field:

[more ...]

I think this is worthy of a: please blog about this.

(from Pat)

Maurizio has a great post about the dismal quality of mp3/ACC audio, and the parallels in crappy video. Actually the problem – for audio at least – is far worse than just the final format:

Dynamic range, warmth and depth have all but disappeared it seems in today’s music recordings. Music is compressed in recording, in mastering, in broadcast; often at all three stages. The loudness effect is ubiquitous. Broadcast audio is so pumped that it never seems to vary more than a few db. What results is music that is shallow, cold, harsh and without any kind of imaging or space.

[more ...]

Tues, April 10 @ 9am, at Bistro Etc.:

Bistro Etc.
1291 Avenue Mont-Royal Est
Montreal, QC H2J 1Y4
(514) 525-1895
Map

Details chez Ben.

And hey, let’s see some more women at the event. It’s casual and relaxed.

I presented collectik last week at Montreal’s second Democamp. It was much bigger than I thought i would be – and there were more suity-looking folk than I expected. I guess there were about 100 people in the crowd to watch 5 of us present our projects. I showed off Collectik, and the other presentations were KakiLoc, iotum, BumpTop, and OpenSourceCinema. I’ll talk about Collectik first, then the others, finally some thoughts about Democamp Montreal.

(PS Josh, at Yashlabs, has the best overview of the even, including some vids; simon has a great bunch of pics)

I was really happy with the response to Collectik. In some ways it’s been such a frustrating project – I know we have built a good and useful tool that no one else has built. But due to some rookie mistakes, one of the main ones being trying to fix user interface problems by throwing more features into the mix, the site has been too dense for most people to get into. We have pretty healthy traffic, but we have very minimal stickiness. We have a handful of pretty passionate users – but for the most part we’ve not yet convinced people why this is useful to them. And yet I am still convinced it can be. It is for me, and for others.

I went over these ideas in my presentation – in part trying to share some advice to developers out there, the main thing is: figure out what you DO and do that well. Then look at other features. I think it took us eight months or so to really figure out the real core of what we do. We’re there now, and need to rebuild the site to reflect that.

But if you do not know your core function, and if you are not certain your core function is useful, then you probably don’t have a product.

So to distill the most important stuff:
1. figure out your core function
2. build your design & UI around your core function – make it obvious and easy
3. if you have design & UI problems (see #s 1 &2 above), you cannot fix by adding new features

Another problem for us, I think, is the word “podcast.” I really find the jargonny nature of that word turns people off: “I don’t have an ipod;” “I don’t have time for podcasts,” etc. And yet when you tell a science nerd that New Scientist and Nature magazine both have podcasts, well, they get all excited. Had some nice post-event conversations about that.

In any case, I got tons of great feedback on Collectik, and that was so refreshing. So many people said: great that looks like a really useful tool. So it’s reenergized me on the project, which is nice because we’ve had some long delays on some other good news we’re waiting on.

Even better, I had a great talk with Alistair about a really intriguing idea about how to generate revenues out of collectik while doing some important good too. That one really excited me. I’ve obviously thought about Collectik – but I’ve thought about the other side of this top-secret proposition too. It never even occurred to me to put the two together. So that is extremely exciting; I’ll keep mulling whether there’s actually a business in there.

Here are quick thoughts on the other presentations.

KakiLoc
I’ve seen these guys before, and they’ve got a great mobile phone/web technology to let groups of people know each other’s location. It looks like great tech, and works like a charm. It’s complex though, and is it a compelling enough function? My gut is that they will need to find some really specific applications for it. I don’t even own a mobile phone, so I’m not the market! End-game, though, must be to sell to mobile service providers.

iotum
Another mobile device technology, iotum (if I got it right) lets you define your availability based on relationships to other people. Having a job interview, and your tennis partner calls? It won’t disturb you. Out with your friend John for a coffee, and the love of your life calls? You’ll hear it. The service works well, and the usefulness is clear. The one question is, again, is it compelling enough? Probably yes, and I guess the end-game here is to sell to mobile service providers.

BumpTop
Super slick graphic desktop environment. See the vid here. Lots of fun … tho I don’t want to add all that chaos to my desktop. You definitely get the sense that there’s some great applications in there, though I am not convinced the desktop is the best place. God knows I’ve been wrong before.

OpenSourceCinema
Brett’s film project, a documentary on creative commons and copyright. Opensourcecinema is the place where you can help him remix the movie. Patrick did the design. Sylvain, Josh, and I helped out with the site during Beercamp #1.

After the event, Austin threw a little shindig at his carrraaaaazy bachelor pad. Beautiful loft in the industrial zone of St-Henri (out by MacAuslan). Had a couple of good chats there, mostly (as usual, with me, with people I know already).

Now some thoughts on DemoCamp:
1. very English. would be nice to see some more French there.
2. god, I wish this movement was around back in the summer when we were fist launching alpha/beta collectik
3. lets face it: iotum is from Ottawa; Bumptop is from Toronto. Where are all the montreal developers?

I presented Collectik at Democamp Montreal#2 … a great evening and I got some really great response and feedback. Josh, at Yashlabs, has an excellent review of the event, including some vids. I’ll be posting more on this soonish, I hope.

Austin hosted a great post-event cocktail party at his pad for presenters and an assortment of techies, investors etc.

Next up, I’ll be presenting about some of the mistakes I think I & we have made & lessons learned to the next Barcamp Montreal, on Saturday, April 28th, 2007.

Thanks to Evan for the .htaccess/redirect kungfu code.

Thanks to Boris for the .htaccess/redirect kungfu implementation.

Now if you follow a google link to the old dose, say: http://dosemagazine.com/2007/04/01/librivoxs-madness

You should get redirected to the equivalent page on hughmcguire.net … google & other search-engines, apparently, will follow the links too.

Now I will see if I can do something similar from dosemagazine.blogsome.com … But I don’t think that I have access to .htacess on that hosted site. Which is another reason to change from a hosted site to your own. You have so much less control of your data on a hosted site, and that sucks.

once again, for all you kids, some advice:

1. choose your URL wisely and soon (why not go register your name in .com, .net, .ca right now…you may not want to use it now… but i bet eventually you’ll want it).

2. get off your hosted service asap (blogger, blogsome, livejournal, etc etc), and on your own site:
-dreamhost.com is about $10/month (ie 4 coffees), and they offer one-click wordpress installs
-dreamhost will even let you register URLs for free, or use Julien’s codes at godaddy, it’ll cost you $6.95 to register for a year.

3. get to know .htaccess kung fu artists – it makes life easier.

Great little ap for mac users who have huge hard drives that are … full all of a sudden. Where are are those big files? What are they? How can I find the stuff I want to dump?

Try GrandPerspective (only for OSX I think).

It scans your hard disk and gives you a graphical representation of your files – small squares are small files, big squares are big files. You can click on the big ones, get info on them, decide if you want em or not, and reveal them in Finder …So you can trash em.

Very nice. Just freed up 20 G on my hard drive.

Thanks Kara.

Oops I forgot to mention, I am presenting Collectik at DemoCamp Montreal on Thursday. DemoCamp is a free (un)conference, where local tech folk present their alpha, beta, or operational software, to local interested tech folk (other developers, angels etc). I’m on the bill with 4 others I think. Deets:

Where : Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent [Google Map]
When : Thursday March 29th, 2007. 6:30pm to 8:30pm.

You can register here, or just show up. And don’t worry that it’s going to be too techie! These are good events to just hang out with people working in tech related stuff in Montreal, but if you are reading this, you are geeky enough to come by, for a few minutes anyway.

It’s free, and should be fun.

I was hping to have a revamped Collectik ready by then, but unfortunately, no. I hope my sore throat/laryngitis will be cleared up by then.

Barak O got flickr, but Johnny Edwards got twitter.

Hillary C got youtubed (ouch).

Meanwhile, none of the top dogs in the Bush administration uses email anymore.

I had a discussion with Steve about the term web2.0, and whether or not it is useful. Steve wants it kyboshed.

For me, the term was very useful, because it marked the time when new tools (eg wordpress) made it possible for me to publish to the web, without knowing anything about html. So:

web1.0=passive
web2.0=active

Justin calls for death of 2.0 as well, and I started writing a comment to object, but realized: it makes me a dinosaur. The usefulness of 2.0 to me is to refer to a web that is already gone. web 2.0 replaced 1.0 … and is now… just the web. and there’s no point in saying 2.0 anymore, unless you are interested in talking about how the web used to be, way back when. Waaaay back in early 2004.

So I am on board. Web2.0 is officially stricken from my vocabularity. The web is dead. Long live the web.

Sylvain has launched the Montreal Tech Entrepreneur $100 Challenge. He’s calling on Montreall tech entrepreneurs to donate $100 to the Atwater Digital Literacy Project (name change coming, I think):

The Atwater Digital Literacy Project, a project of the Atwater Library, gets kids and community groups using creative web technologies (blogging, audio, video, digital photos) to find new ways to talk about things important to them, and to help them build their communities.

If you are interested, you can find out how to donate here. $100 would be great. $10 would be great too. You can also help out in outher ways.

I’m on the board at the Atwater Library, and I’ve been pushing for this digital project for a couple of years (Sylvain was around in the early days).

We should make this a quarterly thing: 4 times a year get the Montreal Tech community to ralley around a particular cause and try to raise some money for something.

Upgrading to 2.1.2 … and getting a mysql error, which you can likely see to the side here:

WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1]
SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM

any ideas anyone?

I might have a few other themes here in the mean time.

UPDATE: OK I upgraded the fheme to Tarski 1.2.3 (from 1.1.3), and that seems to clean out the mysql problem. Now re-customization etc. Gah. This was supposed to be 15 minutes. Bye bye day.

The free software upgrade craze is all good and well, but man. Not looking forward to the next one (by the way I upgraded because another blog of mine, textosolvo, got hacked).

UPDATE UPDATE: Everything OK except the sidebar on the index page isn’t right… but it’s ok on posts, and pages. strange. any ideas anyone?

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: It works. I don’t know why, but everything, more or less, in place now. As you were.

A couple of events to attend:

• democamp: local techies show off their alpha software … Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent, Tuesday February 27th, 2007. 6:30pm to 8:30pm.
• beercamp: a beer-fueled collective programming party, to help Brett get his opensourcecinema.com site firing on all cylinders before the SXSW conference in March. Objective: “A quick hack of a Drupal 5.1 install to create an Open Source documentary website (for Brett’s upcoming OpenSourceCinema movie).” Needed: CSS/html hackers, some php stuff, designers, UI peeps, text writers, and alpha testers, etc. Come along, have a drink and help Brett build his site. Karma points like crazy… and the film is going to be a famous feature-length documentary about remix culture, creative commons and the like, so the medium here is the message. see Sylvain’s post for more info.

  Oh, it’s Thursday, here: 4475 St Laurent, #202 (coin Mt, Royal) … not sure what time.

Moons ago, Sylvain & I were talking about building a digital media school for kids-at-risk at the Atwater Library. Well, a couple of years later, we’ve got some funding from Heritage Canada, a fantastic project co-ordinator, a bunch of very keen partner groups; and a gaggle of great volunteers and organizers. The plan in this pilot phase is a series workshops, tailored for each partner group, from late February to April 2007.

Here is the project blurb:

The Atwater Digital Literacy Project, a project of the Atwater Library, gets at-risk kids and community groups using creative web technologies (blogging, audio, video, digital photos) to help them express themselves, find new ways to talk about things important to them, and to help them build their communities.

We need some more cash for digital equipment (about $5000). Here’s how you can donate some money (can you spare $25? $100?), or some working equipment:

SUPPORT THE ATWATER DIGITAL LITERACY PROJECT.

You can also help by blogging about this, by sending out some emails, or by volunteering. If you work for a company, especially a tech or media company, maybe you can ask them to sponsor the project? If you want more info, shoot me an email.

And thanks to all who have helped with this project, of course Mir who has done the lions share of the work, the organizers, coordinators, and volunteers, and the great Advisory Committee: Julien Smith, Jen Schultes, Austin Hill, Brett Gaylor, Anuradha Dugal, Sylvain Carle, Paul Shore.

I love wikipedia, but there’s a glaring problem, something I’ve noticed more of late: the writing is often terrible. If you wanted to learn how to write good clear prose, Britannica is as good a model as any. Wikipedia is … not. Or, usually not. On the surface that doesn’t matter, since the primary objective of both Wikipedia and Britannica is to deliver information. As an information-delivery system, wikipedia wins out for me, because it is free and accessible. Britannica loses because it is not free, and therefore inaccessible. And for my purposes, Wikipedia is usually a good place to get what I want, or at least to find out where to get what I want.

But as a model for good clear writing it is a miss, with the occasional hit. To some degree this is true on the net in general. I am certainly more sloppy in a blog post, a forum post, an email than I would be with a document that will be printed. I let mistakes go that I would never consider letting go in physical writing.

I wonder if this matters? Does “writing well” matter? Yes, I think that it does. In my life experience, in engineering, in corporate policy, in finance, in fund-raising, in project management, and of course in writing, one skill I think I have is the ability to express ideas clearly and well. That still has great value, and that, I think, is why good writing is important, even if it is not really valued as such by our market society. Most writers, for instance, get paid pennies. But probably people who can express ideas clearly often move beyond “mere” writing, to use that skill for other things.

So this is one area where Wikipedia might cause harm: it is a bad model for how to write.

Still, the blogs I read – the very few professional ones, and the handful of blogs by friends of mine – tend to be well-written and clear. Mistakes are rare. Is that because their writers are products of a time when books were important? Or is the value of good writing inherent in the net where, despite the technology used, we’re still mostly writing words for people to read? Will the grown-up MySpace & Wikipedia generation pay as much attention to grammar and (yikes) spelling, as us older folk? (Even if we are often, like me, more careless on the net than we would be elsewhere? especially with spelling).

These thoughts were spurred on by some bad writing in wikipedia, not sure what, but there is much to choose froml; and by this curious video, which I loved, and which was in response to the now famous: the machine is us/ing us.

Welcome to the new dosemagazine … I moved from the old one, for a number of reasons: mainly, I am an adult now and thought it was about time I got my own server space, and officially launched the domain name I bought in 2002. Blogsome was a fine home for a long while, but I was constrained by the version of wordpress they are running, the available themes, and especially their limited number of plugins. On the other hand, if things go pear-shaped here, I am on my own, so I better figure out how to back-up my posts.

I’m still fiddling a bit, but things are more or less how I want them. I don’t like the way the header graphic looks here tho, so I’ll have to figure out what to do about that. I’ll likely be testing a few options.

Anyway, comments welcome etc.

UPDATE: if anyone knows of a tool that will let me get all the info out of my old blogsome.com blog, please let me know.

Technorati Profile

Michael Geist has a nice long bit on Canada’s take on Net Neutraity, and here he summarizes the Conservative position:

We think blocking or prioritizing content may be acceptable, we recognize it is inconsistent with the recommendations of the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel, and we don’t care because we plan to the leave the issue to the dominant telecommunications providers. This is not – as some suggest – about letting freedom reign. It is about leaving Canadian consumers and the Canadian Internet vulnerable to a two-tier Internet and providing tacit approval to those telecommunications companies that actively engage in network discrimination.

Some time ago I sent out emails asking about positions on net neutrality to the Conservatives, Liberals (federal), Bloc, NDP, Liberals (provincial), and PQ. Here are responses I got:

Conservatives:

Dear Mr. McGuire:

The Office of the Prime Minister, has forwarded your electronic correspondence of November 9, 2006, concerning net neutrality to the Honourable Maxime Bernier, Minister of Industry. I am pleased to reply on behalf of the Minister and I regret the delay in relying to you.

The Minister of Industry is responsible for the Telecommunications Act, which sets out the objectives of Canadian telecommunications policy, while the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), an independent public authority, is charged with implementing these objectives through its regulation of the telecommunications industry.

The CRTC determined that the market for retail Internet access was sufficiently competitive to forgo economic price regulation. Nonetheless, the Commission has residual authority to address some issues of discriminatory and anti-competitive behaviour with respect to such Internet services should they arise.

The issue of net neutrality is also being deliberated in other countries. Industry Canada is monitoring domestic and international developments to determine the need for future domestic policy initiatives.

I appreciate your having taken the time to bring this important matter to our attention.

Yours very truly,

Leonard St-Aubin
Director General
Telecommunications Policy Branch

Parti-Quebecois:

Monsieur McGuire,

Au nom du chef de l’opposition officielle, je confirme que nous avons bien reçu votre message. Je vous en remercie.

Je me permets de le transmettre à Monsieur Daniel Turp, porte-parole de l’opposition officielle en matière de culture et de communications, afin qu’il en prenne connaissance.

Je vous souhaite une agréable fin de journée.

Mélanie Malenfant
Conseillère politique
Cabinet du chef de l’opposition officielle
Assemblée nationale
418.643.2743
mmalenfant@assnat.qc.ca

The other parties (NDP, Liberal-fed, Bloc, Liberal-provincial) did not answer. Which tells you how high this issue is on their priority list.

(tip to patrick)

J’ai l’intention de participer à ces evenments:

• WikiWednesday (aujourd’hui, 16h30)
• Yulblog (aujourd’hui, 20h00)
• petit déjeuner des entrepreneurs web Montrealais (le 13 fev)
• podcamp toronto (le 24-25 fev)
• democamp montreal #1 (le 27 fev)
• democamp montreal #2 (le 29 mars)
• barcamp montreal #2 (april 28)

Net Neutrality: A Public Discussion on the Future of the Internet in Canada

Date and Location:
Tues, February 6, 2007 , 7 pm
Admission: Free
Ottawa Public Library Auditorium
120 Metcalfe St.

Moderated by:
Pippa Lawson: Executive Director, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa

Panelists:

* Michael Geist: Professor of Law, Research Chair of Internet and E-Commerce Law, University of Ottawa
* Ren Bucholz: Electronic Frontier Foundation Policy Coordinator, Americas
* Andrew Clement: Professor, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto; Principal Investigator, Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking
* Bill St-Arnaud: Senior Director, Advanced Networks for CANARIE, Inc.

For the hardcore info junkie, there was no better feed for your veins than diggdot.us: a feed of the purest quality, distilled from a mix of digg.com, del.icio.us/popular, and slashdot.org.

Cease and desist letters sent. diggdot.us is now doggdot.us. No harm done I guess, but digg are jerks.

Explains what the hell is going on on the web in a pretty compelling way. If you know all this, its fun to watch. If you don’t know all this, it might be too fast to follow. But entertaining nonetheless.

So it’s registered and up and running: http://visiblepolitics.org/

VisiblePolitics is a project to create a complete listing of Canadian federal politicians, parties and ridings, with information about policies, funding, voting records, public statements, press, among other things. VisiblePolitics is a source of information; it is NOT a source of, or forum for advocacy of any kind.

A totally open project if anyone wants to join in to help out. Doesn’t have to be wiki I guess, but I just cant see another way to get the info in so easily. I guess project discussion should happen here: About the Project. There’s a short list of things that could use some help, but I didn’t think very long or hard about it. No idea if this’ll work or not…

The one thing I REALLY want is someone who can help me install/figure out how to use this:
XFeed-RSS Aggregator

HOW YOU CAN HELP:
1. Find out who your Member of Parliament is
2. Visit the site: http://visiblepolitics.org
3. Add some info about your MP (you can copy some stuff from Wikipedia, some from the Canadian Parliament website, and ideally from the mess that is Elections Canada’s financial info site).

OR:
4. Help with layout, wikiness, project direction, and tools (RSS aggregator in the wiki!!)

I haven’t written a ramble in a while. Here’s one:

I had an impromptu drink with Boris the other night – unfortunately the other brain I seem to be feeding off of a lot lately wasn’t there.

We rambled about art, data, open source, society, flexibility, stability, evolution to touch on a few things.

My experience with the open project LibriVox has been very interesting, and has influenced my thinking about a lot of what we talked about: it started small, and grew and grew; in about four places it encountered major environmental challenges – mainly having to do with putting together the structures to let the project accomodate more volunteers, and more projects. At 10 people and a couple of projects it was OK with me running the thing, and some help on the website design; then it went up to 50 volunteers and 10 projects, and I needed help, and a new mode of managing people and projects; the help appeared. It cranked up to 250 volunteers, and 40 projects; more help & organization was needed; it appeared. We’re now up to 1000+ volunteers and something like 150 active projects. Needing more structure and more support. It came.

Because the project was open everytime a major problem presented itself, someone seemed to be there who had just the skills needed (designing the site for clarity, setting up a forum, cataloging, documenting, setting up a wiki, a promo poster, catalog software). Like an organism encountering environmental challenges, LibriVox was flexible and open enough to easily evolve into something able to handle the new demands. One hopes it will continue to do so.

Is there anything in the little microcosm of LibriVox worth thinking about in a bigger context?

Boris gave this interesting visualization about society. (Boris can you draw it so I can link to a pic?) Imagine a bell curve, moving from left to right along a time axis. Stick a couple of wheels under the middle of the curve: the wheels are industry – driving things forward; the big hump is regular society who go along with things; and the front angle part of the bell-curve/snowplow are the out-there artists at the far tip, and then creative types who interact with industry making up the rest of the angle. There’s some interaction between the two. The artists are at the forefront, are misunderstood, and suffer the greatest amount of attrition because they are battling directly against the universe – in a way they both lead the way for the rest of society, and introduce us to, and protect us from, the new. You can go on about this metaphor, but probably there’s an optimal steepness of the curve – steeper meaning more arty & creative types.

I’ve seen two arty shows recently: Marie Chouinard’s dance show Body Remix/Goldberg Variations; and Anslem Kiefer’s Heaven & Earth. Neither was “beautiful” in any standard sense, but in both cases my mind was flying the whole time I was experiencing them. I don’t know what I was thinking about, but these two big shows — both very intellectual, and very abstract — had my mind whirrling around at top speed. There was something about the depth of the data transfer to me — chaotic and not really articulable by me — that influenced me in profound ways both times. And I think this is what Boris was talking about, about art, especiallly challenging art, communicating information about the universe that we are not really able to comprehend in any systematic way: we can take a bash at it, we can define & systematize, but the chaotic and big nature of out-there art is precisely powerful because we can’t describe it properly. By it’s nature it’s beyond a complete intellectual definition; so much data referring to so much, interacting with our own particular data processing systems. But somehow there is great value in that process, because it forces me to *try* (we are, after all, so earnest we humans) to process the data, and in doing so I reform my brain paths, and evolve my brain to try to cope with a changing universe.

And this, maybe, is why the free software/open source and open data movement is actually of huge importance. An open source approach to problems, along with an open data approach to the world will allow “us” to a) have access to the data we need to solve problems and b) allow all of us to contribute to the solving of these problems in open source projects.

I have a feeling that the world will become more chaotic soon. Two things in particular make me worried: climate change, and oil supplies. Those two issues are catastrophic in ways that most people aren’t willing to admit: human civilization has developed over a small band of time, the last 10,000 years, with relatively warm & relatively stable climate (scroll down to chart: “Temperature of Lower Atmosphere Last 400,000 years“). If things get unstable, we’ll be in trouble. As for oil everything in our modern world is based on cheap available oil, particularly our food-supply system. Without cheap fuel for farm equipment, and food transport, we’re in big trouble.

So if you consider that:
a) major environmental challenges (ie. global upheaval) are on the way
b) successful organisms are those that best adapt to environmental challenges
c) providing the maximum amount of data to maximum number of people will allow maximum adaptibility
d) and supporting open source solutions to problems is the most flexible & adaptable approach

Then any society that does not support open access to civic data; and open source solutions to problems … is likely to have major troubles soon. This is the next level of democracy … data democracy, and is I think crucial for our survival. Maybe that’s too much; but a country (say Canada) that embraces data democracy, will inevitably become more flexible, more nimble and more innovative in its solutions.

Do you think our politicians are at all ready to think about this? There’s a new, not yet public project, called civicaccess.ca, that will try to convince governments to start. Good work Mike.

IT conversations, a site that broacasts talks by leading thinkers on all things informational-technology-y, brings this (awe)-inspiring talk which argues that everything, every book and every song & movie, every recorded lecture, everything ought to be, and can feasibly (!) be put online, for anyone to access.

Brewster Kahle, currently leads the Internet Archive (and various previous successes), a repository of everything media, which, among all sorts of amazing things, offers stogage space, for free, for life, for anything published under a Creative Commons license. Among the many many great things in this very brief talk, Kahle mentions, the IA’s collection of lego movies.

If you worry about your ideals, and think the Machine is too big to fight against, listen to this and have some hope. Universal Access to All Human Knowlegde. A worthy, and you will be convinced, possible goal. The question is how many of you will help push for it? (Me included).

The amazing thing, though, is imagining how anyone could argue against this project…but I am sure the lawyers are lining up.

Kahle gets extra points for suing the US goverment to allow out-of-print (but copyrighted) books to be scanned and put online, but even without extra points, he makes it to the top of my “most exciting audio streams” list for 2005.

this is just one of those cool things that the universe likes to throw out at us to remind us that everything, in the end, is related to everything else: Flickr Tokyo Photo Surpise.

Update: O! Ye non-believers, with hearts of cold and minds closed to the Truth, behold: Evidence.

Says one fella in the thread, eloquently and with a hint of the pargmatic philosopher about him:

Whatever your thoughts about coincidences, there appears to be a broad consensus that they occur more frequently on Flickr than they do in our day-to-day lives. I think that says something very interesting about the structure of Flickr, the way it allows those connections to happen. And it has potentially profound implications for Flickr-like systems in general.

It may just be that flickr helps us notice coincidences more often — but that doesn’t make them any less coincidental, now, does it? and maybe it even makes flickr interesting for new and different reasons.

I am slow to get used to blogging, where I should probably be putting out more thoughts, half-cocked if need be, rather than just letting them simmer, trying to get them right. Well, here are some neither fully-formed, nor coherent, but what follows is the begining of some thoughts on Nietzsche and Art and blogging:

Friedrich Nietzsche in Will to Power, fragment 853, outlines the importance of Art in an existence that Neitzsche calls “frightening,” where Truth (God is dead) has been toppled, and we struggle comprehend what it means to live in a world where we have no objective (God) to appeal to in questions of consequence. Says Nietzsche:

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, then 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.

OK now all this has something to do with blogging, I think. Nietzsche’s general gist is that with the loss of faith in anything beyond human consciousness, humans can go down two paths: one is pessimist, and sees disaster (chaos will result); the other optimist (sort of), the path of the overman (Übermensch), who sees this loss of objective Truth as liberating… a realization of the creative power of humans to form truth (small-T) around principles of their making. He sees this as a sort of Art — not just artistic art, but life as art, where forming the principles of one’s own morality becomes a creative exercise, and living itself becomes Art. So if you live your own life as a kind of artistic creation, then you manage to acheive a life Nietzsche would be proud of (well probably not, since he was Nietzsche…).

This process of transforming life into art is a magical sort of thing: anyone who has written a brilliant poem after being spurned by that cute girl in calculus class–no matter how poorly the stanzas stand-up to time–can attest to the power of that creation. In producing Art we transform our own existence into something more, and somehow that enables us to turn “suffering into great delight.”

And more, we take even greater pleasure in sharing that with others. I was discussing capital-A Art with with a writer friend over coffee, and he said, more or less, “Art just is, don’t worry about whether it’s important or not. Birds sing, people paint and write and make art. We are creatures who make art, so don’t spend time humming about why that is important.” I agree, though I think Art is important for specific reasons (another post sometime) … but the relevant thing is that humans like to create, we derive benefits from creating, and we like to share our creations with the world. Anyone who has built something, anything–a bookcase, a great script to track who’s bookmarking urls in del.icio.us, a newly landscaped garden, or a novel–can attest to the pleasure not just in looking at one’s own work, but having a close friend admire it as well. Strangers are even better.

Blogging is particularly important because it allows, and encourages, anyone–as long as they have access to technology, never guaranteed–to easily transform bits of their lives into Art which they can share with others, a life-affirming sort of thing that Nietzsche might be happy about. Particularly since blogging by its nature tends to diffract the capital-T Truth that other forms of controlled media try to sell us. (The subject of a future post).

All this is just more rambling, except that it provides some context for a couple of specific projects I am developing, and I encourage any blogger to consider as well: working with groups of people who are often marginalized to help them find the pleasures, and the Nietzschean benefits of blogging, of finding Art in their lives, and finding an audience for their Art in blogging. More on these projects later.

As part of the evolution of the mycomment blogging discussions started by Mike L, here is a quick how-to post your comments on other blogs, back to your own site, using an rss feed of:
del.icio.us/YOURNAME/mycomments

(scroll down on this page, in sidebar on the rt to see what that looks like, a dynamic blogroll of blogs you’re commenting on, and your comments).

There are probably more elegant ways to do this, but here’s how I did it:

-create del.icio.us tag mycomments
-whenever you comment on someone else’s blog, post it to del.icio.us and tag it mycomments … cut&paste a bit of it into “extended” field if you want some of the content to come up on your page in the rss feed you create
-to generate javascript of your rss feed goto rss-to-javascrip
-in the URL box put “http://del.icio.us/rss/YOURNAME/mycomments”
-if you want to show content, click “yes” to “show descriptions”
-generate javascript
-now post the script into your blog twemplate, in the sidebar section and voila, you have your comments elsewhere appearing on your own blog.

To refine the hack, you can tag all your comments mycomments, and the ones you want to post to your site mycomments + public.

Also, if you would like to help keep track of the spread of this tool, salp a commentblogger delicious tag on any blogs (including your own) that do this.

also props must go out to fling93 for being the first known species of mycomment poster found in the del.icio.us habitat.

I have been thinking about Free Software as a uniquely successful anarchist project, and one which may well–through its success–have impacts beyond the tools we use on our computers.

By “anarchist” I mean of course the actual definition, rather than reference to black-masked Molotov-cocktail-throwers, namely: a project based on the voluntary cooperation of free individuals, without hierarchy or imposed authority.

What makes Free Software exciting is its ability to propagate itself: that is, if you intend to make use of Free Software, you must agree to play by the rules of Free Software. You may use it, change it, copy it and share it as you like… but whatever you do with it, you must provide to the world on the same terms. The rest of the world must be free to use, change, copy and share. This is the beauty of the GNU General Public License. The ideal of the Free Software (anarchist) project is spread each time it is used.

One of my most infuriating reads as an undergrad was Robert Nozick. His 1974 philosophical text, Anarchy, State and Utopia underpins much of the right-wing movement of the past 30 years, along with work by free-marketeering economist Milton Friedman and the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Nozick argued strenuously that redistribution of wealth (the basis of the welfare state) is fundamentally unjust: taxation and redistribution of wealth (through, for instance, social programs) is on par with forced slave labour. No one, he claimed, has the right to take from a person goods which they have acquired or produced justly through their own work.

Nozick’s main premise is that justice can be defined through three actions:

1. how things not previously possessed by anyone may be acquired;
2. how possession may be transferred from one person to another; and
3. what must be done to rectify injustices arising from violations of (1) and (2).

His argument is that as long as 1 happens justly, 2 can only be achieved justly if the owner agrees – so no forced redistribution can be just.

I was looking over some of Nozick’s work (not much is available online, by the way) for other purposes, but was struck by how pleased Nozick would have been (I think) to see the Free Software movement emerge. While I have been interested in FS mainly for reasons from the left (an alternate way of organizing innovation and collaboration, outside of the traditional commercial framework), I realized that the FS movement is classic Nozick in its definition, and provides a true, real-life “test” of the justice principle. (This is often a failing in political philosophies of distribution, since in many require thought experiments to “test” a moral hypothesis, such as Hobbes‘ imagining the “social contract” development, one must to postulate a time before any civic rigths and resposibilities existed, and see what reasonable ageements may have been made).

In any case, FS offers a starting point to watch as a free system, based on a set of ethical principles, develops in real-time. Ownership here is completely redefined, through the GPL, and one can only claim ownership of free software if one relinquishes the traditional rights associated with that ownership. No government is needed to redistribute, since FS ingeniously makes redistribution a necessary condition of any FS transaction between two “agents”: the commons, which “owns” in a sense Free Software, and someone who wants to use and or modify the FS. That is, if you wish to use FS to build something new, whatever you build, you must allow to be redistributed freely in the same way the original FS was.

Here is a commons that is unlimited, and so far looks to be very far from tragedy. The thing to watch is how nervous the big corporations get, and how our apparent freed trade-loving governments move when it becomes clear that the world of proprietary software is feeling real pressure from the proliferation of FS.

So proponents of FS must be vigilant to watch what our governments are doing to find unjust ways of limiting the growth of this most innovative, and so far enromously successful, social and technological experiment.

This is the start of my thoughts on copyrigh/left, IP and free software.

My pal devlin who works on biotech/agriculture IP issues, sent me a Globe and Mail story about Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy. M$ of course is leading the charge, worried about pirate copies of Window XP funding terrorism (etc.).

My response was: “Rats scurrying on a sinking ship.”

To which Devlin, the consumate marxist, replied that one would have thought the same about corrupt capitalists in the 20th Century but look how well they’ve done. My answer to that, which is the seed to a longer (planned) article, was:

The difference is that in the beginning of the 20th C, capital was concerened mainly with producing objects (you can include food in there), and in the end the capitalist system is very rational (except that it is incompatible with physical limits of the world/environment): the objective is to make enough people rich enough to want to preserve the system. In that way, organized labour was a useful tool to keep the system going, because it ensured that enough people were content with the system. That’s why people didn’t rebel (draconian laws and police-state tactics were used in US & Canada in the teens and 20s, but it was New Deal policies that saved capitalism from itself). For the most part, for the majority of people the system seemed to give them a life comfortable enough not to rise up & overthrow the Man.

But back to the question, 20th C capitalism, and its laws, governed things which cost money for good reason: You need to produce raw materials, transport them, reshape them, and sell them again. At each stage there is work that needs to be done, and most agree that that work should be rewarded; furthere there is a built-in mechanism to keep it functioning that way — if someone fails to get paid somewhere in the line, then the system breaks down.

IP is a different kettle of fish. Music companies want to get paid for things they don’t have to do anymore (because of technology): distribution. And software companies want to protect monoplolies on their software, but what they can’t fight is BETTER, free software. Windows controls the market now because they cornered the distribion market early on, and they produced products that became the standard, and tho people complained, there was no real reason to fight it cause the other products weren’t necessarily much better (wordperfect was just as annoying as M$ word). But now it turns out that there are better opensource operating systems (GNU/Linux), and better opensource office software (openoffice.org) and better email clients and browsers (thunderbird and firefox), plus all sorts of amazing new technologies that are making the power of the internet open to all in ways it never was (wiki, blogging, collaborative bookmarking del.icio.us, php, etc.). As time goes on the tools will become more powerful and more and more accessible to the average joe.

So for the majority of work people do, there are better technologies available, free, and developed in a collaborative open format, easily available to anyone with an internet connection. How do you fight against that? Boo hoo that there are pirated versions of Wiindows XP everywhere. The product is shit, and soon there will be just as many computers with GNU/Linux instead. why priate a crappy product when a free version of a better product is available?

the beauty of the hacker culture is that it is: 1. egalitarian (quality of work is arbiter), 2. collaborative (the idea of sharing is wide-spread) 3. anti-establishment (coonstraints on 1 & 2 are viewed with hostility), and 4. superior in product to other modalities.

as for music & movies, I think as the “means of production” become cheaper and more accessible, and same with means of distribution (internet radio taking place of blogs) no one will cry if britney spears’ albums cost $50 while many new innovative bands take new approaches to making a living. again boo hoo if Sony and U2 sue everyone in sight, I think more and more people will turn to creative commons approaches to art & its distribution, and just cut out the cob-webby middle men, who do nothing but cut out a huge slice of pie, now doing an irrelevant thing: marketing stars. If the new system is separated and parallel to the Hollywood productions of Pearl Harbour and Master and Commander, well so much the better for the people who chose the other route. If people want to pay lots of money for crap that’s their perogative, but we are coming to a time when art and culture will be disseminated free by people who think that ideas should belong to the people, not the corporations that own the rights.

This means, in my view, that these companies (M$, Sony-Universal, MegaArtProduct Inc and Mega Software Giant Inc) are fighting irrelevancy, because the means of production are being put into the hands of the collective masses, and the means of free distribution already exists.

This is the kernel of the story I am planning to write on Free Software and the coming anarchist technolution.

COMMENTS FROM DEVLIN:

I don’t see IP as a different kettle of fish. I don’t think capitalism has survived because it is the most efficient system or because it has distributed the world’s resources in a fair way. Look at the world– would you say that there are enough people living comfortably from capitalism? Most people are surviving despite capitalism not because of it. It was a very small minority from the working class that was able to secure some comfort for itself and this is and will always be precarious for that minority– and for the world since the model is entirely unsustainable.

Capitalism began with a brutal enclosure of the commons and the brutal destruction of alternative economic systems and cultures. There is no reason to believe that these alternative systems could not have developed to be much more comfortable for a much larger number of people than what capitalism has offered. Just look at the industrialisation of agriculture, which is still progressing and which therefore gives us a clearer sense of how things could have evolved much differently.

Capitalism has never been about “free markets” or about rewarding work. Sure there are elements of both, but this is not its essence and there could easily be more of both in other systems. Capitalism is fundamentally about property rights (ever expanding privatisation) and accumulation (ever expanding commodification). Capitalists are always trying to make more profit while doing less. This is the whole point of owning or monopolising the means of productiuon– it allows you to exploit labour (and nature) as much as possible. IPRs are a means to expand commodification and privatisation– whether its seeds, software or music.

David Harvey, in his book New Imperialism (which you really must read), explains how capitalism has really always functioned by way of accumulation by dispossession. With the system now in a crisis (that got going in the 1970s) capital will look for more ways to accumulate (i.e. Make profit) by increasingly dispossessing people of any non-capitalist forms of wealth.

I think it is very dangerous for the potential movement to try and separate what’s happening today from the more general exploitation that capitalism has wrought and continues to wreak on people everywhere (but particularly in the South). Look at the struggles of indigenous peoples. Look at the struggles of peasants. These are long-standing struggles by people against the imposition of a capitalist model that is not defeating them because it offers something better. So, while I think it is very important to foster and encourage the hacker/free software movement, I think that it is very important to see how this struggle is intimately connected to other struggles.

MY RESPONSE TO DEVLIN COMMENTS

IP is a differenet kettle of fish in that it represents commodification, and privatization, of limitless and non-tangible “goods,” ideas. This compares with commodification of tangible “goods” such as land, sheep, oil and monkey wrenches. More on this distinction in a moment.

You are right on many points about capitalism, its approach to alternatives, and especially the North/South dichotomy, which I skirted on purpose… I am talking about mature capitalism in say North Amercia, but yes there is brutal (armed) maintenance of exploitative relationships between North and South, but this is acheived (more or less consciously) with the support of a relatively comfortable western population. while there is poverty here, most people think the system is “fair” in that the majority of people think they have access to affluence, at least enough to keep them from rising up. This does not discount the extereme poverty, and repression, of certain populations here (first nations, for example, and to a large degree the black population in the US). But generally people are happy with the system (as they imagine it). But things ARE changing (mostly for the worse not better).

Also I realize that the economist’s view of capitalism (free markets and managed employment stats) have nothing to do with the real tools used, but the concepts are not empty. Capitalism, or rather commerce, is generally a decent way to exchange goods and services; the problem is abuse of the system (which is inherent in the system itself). Yes it tends to monopoly and control and brutality, in order to maintain its unsustainable aims: constant increasing profits.

And YES the free software movement should see itself in the context of other struggles. Certainly. And, we need to put these different movements together (alternative software, alternative agriculture, alternative commerce, alternative art … need alternative energy and we’ll be all set).

The difference between IP and traditional goods is the cost of production and the means of distribution. A monopoly capitalist can control all the pineapples by buying all the orchards. But he can’t control all the ideas of the hungry pineappleless people. Writers do not need publishers to decide what to publish, musicians do not need Sony to package and sell their discs.

What I see is a ballooning movement, which is in fact held together by the success of the free-software movement, and the potential it provides for open inforamtion exchange, open exchange of goods and services OUTSIDE the mainstream. For instance: Knowledge is controlled to a certain extent by universities. why? because you had to go there to hear professors speak on a topic. were they the best speakers? the smartest people? prob not… but what if you had access to the smartest speakers on a topic, over the web? access to all thieir books free over the web? access to textbooks etc. (see wikibooks.org to imagine how it might be possible). Ditto with radio waves. Enter internet radio (yes they are getting hammered by royalty fees, but what if 5%, 10%, 50% of musicians start publishing their music on their own, outside of Sony?).

Anyway there is much work to do, and unifying these movements (say labour(?) free software, agriculture, culture, energy) is the grand anarchist project of the future, and one that to me, for the first time, seems possible due to advances, and the incredible SUCCESS of free software.