web

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.

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

Here is the full interview.

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.)

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Datalibre: is driven mostly by Tracey.

The Atwater Digital Literacy Project: is run by Miriam.

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

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

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

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

But back to Danielle Zaïkoff.

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

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

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

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

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

LISTEN HERE: Media Hacks: Episode 5

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

LISTEN HERE: Media Hacks: Episode 4

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...]

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

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

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

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

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!

From MagCulture:

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

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

Wonderful…”we” ought to do the same.

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

My advice is:

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

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

• be prepared

The other attendees/presenters included:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find in a library

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon Udell on the NYTimes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[via Teleread]

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

Pretty neat, eh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mitch has some thoughts on the topic too.

[cross-posted at the Book Oven Blog]

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

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

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

Says James:

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

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

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

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

More of this to come, no doubt.

[via Publishing2.0]

[cross posted at the Book Oven Blog]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publishing is dead. Long live publishing.

After a long hiatus due to a wordpress hack, datalibre is back up and running. I did a full reinstall of wp, a full update of the theme files, and put in most of the customization (I think).

So we’re back to agitating for data freedom in Canada, to whit:

datalibre.ca is a group blog, inspired by civicaccess.ca, which believes all levels of Canadian governments should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens. The data is collected using Canadian tax-payer funds, and we believe use of the data should not be restricted to those who can afford the exorbitant fees.

If you’ve got an opinion on that, maybe you’d like to write a post for datalibre?

From Usenet, circa 1991 [Link via Karl]:

From: timbl@info .cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee)
Newsgroups: alt.hypertext
Subject: WorldWideWeb: Summary
Date: 6 Aug 91 16:00:12 GMT

In article <6...@cernvax.cern.ch> I promised to post a short summary of the WorldWideWeb project. Mail me with any queries.

WorldWideWeb – Executive Summary

The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.

The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.

Reader view

The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents which, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is another (”virtual”) document containing links to the documents found. A simple protocol (”HTTP”) is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword search by a remote information server.

The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.

To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire world of data.

Information provider view

The WWW browsers can access many existing data systems via existing protocols (FTP, NNTP) or via HTTP and a gateway. In this way, the critical mass of data is quickly exceeded, and the increasing use of the system by readers and information suppliers encourage each other.

Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your existing data. Making it public involves running the FTP or HTTP daemon, and making at least one link into your web from another. In fact, any file available by anonymous FTP can be immediately linked into a web. The very small start-up effort is designed to allow small contributions. At the other end of the scale, large information providers may provide an HTTP server with full text or keyword indexing.

The WWW model gets over the frustrating incompatibilities of data format between suppliers and reader by allowing negotiation of format between a smart browser and a smart server. This should provide a basis for extension into multimedia, and allow those who share application standards to make full use of them across the web.

This summary does not describe the many exciting possibilities opened up by the WWW project, such as efficient document caching. the reduction of redundant out-of-date copies, and the use of knowledge daemons. There is more information in the online project documentation, including some background on hypertext and many technical notes.

Try it

A prototype (very alpha test) simple line mode browser is currently available in source form from node info.cern.ch [currently 128.141.201.74] as
/pub/WWW/WWWLineMode_0.9.tar.Z.

Also available is a hypertext editor for the NeXT using the NeXTStep graphical user interface, and a skeleton server daemon.

Documentation is readable using www (Plain text of the instalation instructions is included in the tar file!). Document

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

is as good a place to start as any. Note these coordinates may change with later releases.

The National Film Board of Canada has launched their beta player, with a cornucopia of wonderful documentaries, shorts, animations and abstract films. Established in 1938, and then reincarnated in the 1950s, the NFB was one of those great Canadian enterprises from a time when Canada was interested in doing new and challenging things. The NFB explored new territory and set the standard in documentary-making and animation. So we applaud their efforts to get these treasures in front of people again. Congrats to Matt & the team.

Here are some of my recommendations:

• Golden Gloves, Gilles Groulx, 1961, 27 min 43 sec
  A beautiful documentary about a young black Montreal boxer, Ronald Jones, and others in the Golden Gloves competition. Main problem: this is the English dubbed version, not the original French. wtf?
• Bill Reid, Jack Long, 1979, 27 min 50 sec
  A film about Haida sculptor, Bill Reid.
• Le merle, Norman McLaren, 1958, 4 min 39 sec
  The master experimental animator, playing with a Quebec folk song.
• Debout sur leur terre, Maurice Bulbulian, 1983, 54 min 19 sec
  Life in three Inuit villages in Quebec.

And of course, The Big Snit:

See some more recommendations at MetaFilter.

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].

Jeff Jarvis asks 10 questions of newspapers… Probably these should be asked of anyone who has anything to do with:
a) information
b) the webbernet

Here are the questions, and some teasers… see more here.

1. Who are we?
“I’m going to start with an existential question. It’s a fairly ridiculous one but I don’t think any newspaper has really decided what they are,”…

2. A new relationship?
Jarvis said news organisations need to decide on the appropriate relationship with their audience…

3. Are we generous?
Generosity could take many forms, according to Jarvis – sharing technology, supporting people with the Guardian ad network, allowing people to be stars in the outside world…

4. Do we know who’s smart?
“I’ve changed my mind – I used to be Mr Everything Should Be Open but I have read CiF comments too,” Jarvis said, adding that he was not picking on CiF in particular. “We need to figure out who the smart people are – it’s not just about creating content but also curating people.” …

5. Are we findable?
The idea that people will come to us is changing, and news websites “can’t be findable enough”, according to Jarvis…

6. Are we a platform?
The Guardian had already moved towards becoming a platform with the launch of Comment is Free and the fact that commenters have their own profile, Jarvis said…

7. Are we inventing new narratives?
Jarvis said reporters should go out with audio equipment all the time just to capture what might happen….

8. Are we in data layers?
“Data can tell you things if you find a way to listen,” Jarvis said…

9. Are we having fun yet?
Jarvis said it was essential to experiment and “play” with new ideas in order stay ahead of the competitors…

10. Are we agile?
“The Guardian is the best in the world but others are catching up,” Jarvis warned….

Tourism-Montreal has just launched, according to Patrick, a $1.5 million web site. I just violated their terms of service, because incredibly (that word is too weak), their terms of service indicate:

You are prohibited from creating links in other Web sites leading to this Web site without prior express authorization from the Site Owner.

????

UPDATE: Martin Lessard has news (from Emmanuelle Legault, Directrice des communications, Tourisme Montréal) that all shall be well on the Tourism-Mtl site, and the crazy anti-linking terms will be taken away (apparently it had something to do with porno sites!?!).

This looks pretty important: CRTC, Canada’s communications regulator, is doing a consultation on “New Media Broadcasting.” Here is a CBC story on it. Here is the consultation overview doc. Here is the e-consultation site.

[via Michael Geist]

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.

Busy night tonight.

First, pal Nora Young, of CBC’s Spark, will be at the Blue Met, hosting a panel, 7pm at DELTA CENTRE-VILLE – RÉGENCE A:

OUT OF THE BOX: ADVENTURES IN ELECTRONIC LITERATURESince the computer was invented, writers have been using it to forge new literary forms. From the early days of hypertext fiction to the latest in narrative gaming, these authors write beyond the book and way outside the box. – Hosted by Nora Young.

J. R. Carpenter
Jason E. Lewis
Jeff Parker
Alice Van Der Klei

Next, impresario Boris, will be presiding over the 5th installment of Pecha-Kucha Montreal, 8pm at SAT:

What is Pecha Kucha Night?

Pecha Kucha Night, devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham (Klein Dytham architecture), was conceived in 2003 as a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.

Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.

Dan Hill has a wonderful posting of Monocle design notes. There’s much good and thought-provoking stuff in there, particularly if you are interested in text as a medium, and the thinking behind the next generation of media, which sees web and print as different, and complementary, and builds both accordingly. This struck me particularly for some reason:

In terms of user generated content, or user discussion of Monocle pieces, my view was that we didn’t need comments on the site as people increasingly have their own spaces to talk, discuss, comment – whether that’s blogs and discussion fora, or the social software of Facebook et al. So a more progressive approach would be to ensure that everything is linkable and kept online – with clean, permanent URL structures – thus encouraging people to point to articles from the comfort of their own sites. At some point, we could begin to aggregate responses to Monocle editorial, Technorati-style, perhaps (it’s a development of a strategy I’d outlined at the BBC, which there was also predicated on ‘tear-off strips’ of content as well, enabling people to grab BBC media and build a blog entry around it).

Adam Greenfield wasn’t so taken by Monocle, which echoes my reaction years ago to Tyler Brulé’s previous magazine venture, Wallpaper: basically, a fancy mag for rich people who like to covet well-designed, and really expensive, things, and travel to exotic places to have experiences other people aren’t smart/rich/good-looking/adventurous/enlightened enough to contemplate. (Which is fine, but usually doesn’t interest me for all that long).

I’ve never read Monocle, and though I admire the web site, it’s never pulled me in for whatever reason. It might just be because the bespoke tailoring is for a kind of suit I don’t like to wear.

This is great: internetisshit.org.

Of course in lots of ways it isn’t shit, but in many ways it is. So, what do you and I do about it? We can either: a) cut back our time on/commitment to the web, or b) find ways to make it less shit; find good, important things to do on the web, and do them.

From the New Scientist:

Scientists who want to describe their work on Wikipedia should not be forced to give up the kudos of a respected journal. So says a group of physicists who are going head-to-head with a publisher because it will not allow them to post parts of their work to the online encyclopaedia, blogs and other forums.

[more...]

Leaving aside the problem that posting about your own work on Wikipedia, violates two policies (no original research, and don’t edit articles about yourself or your work) … this is an interesting showdown.

Open Access journals, free and open to web linking, is the way science publishing has to go, for the same reasons NYTimes can’t keep its articles behind registration walls. Value is increasingly defined by network authority (is there an agreed term for this, or can I claim coinage of “network authority”?), aka google juice; and if you are out of the network, you are out of the authority. Scientists realize this – hence the desire to get their stuff on Wikipedia … Journals realize that it chips into their control of information, which it does. But like all other businesses, fighting it won’t make it go away, and the sooner they rejig their business models, the better.

Which opens the question: with the web as publishing platform, is there really a need to have academic journals running as businesses? Or is there a better way?

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.

I am launching a contest: the Worst About Text on the Web. First paragraph only. Comment below with your entry, and a link to the offending text. An expert panel of Judges from Around the Universe will decide on the winner, announced one month from today (if anyone submits anything).

Winner gets a free beer from me, possibly something more exciting.

Here is my entry, from Everyzing.com:

EveryZing is the most powerful digital media merchandising platform available today. Media companies of all sizes leverage our unique ability to drive the volume of online content consumption and create new and powerful revenue streams. Through our speech to text, search and optimization technologies, and consumer-facing website, we create greater opportunities for consumer and advertiser access to online content. The company’s best-in-class technology and comprehensive set of advertising services enable our partners to profit from their content by launching digital channels that deliver the entertainment, news and information that consumers crave.

Join the fun!

you know, if i were smarter than I am, i would do something about this email i got:

Dear Webnames.ca Customer,

Gung Hei Fat Choy!

In celebration of Chinese New Year, Webnames.ca has slashed prices on new .CN registrations.

——————————————————–
REGISTER A NEW .CN DOMAIN FOR ONLY $1.99/ONE YEAR (USD).
——————————————————–
Offer expires February 29th 2008, 11:59pm PST.
*Price applies to new registrations only. Renewals at Webnames.ca regular pricing.

Why Register a .CN?
- China has the world.s second largest population of Internet users
- 80% of enterprises with an online presence in China use a .cn domain
- With 5 million+ domains registered, .CN is now the 2nd most popular country code worldwide

GO TO WWW.WEBNAMES.CA TODAY TO SEARCH FOR YOUR .CN

Sincerely,
Webnames.ca Inc

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.

Kevin Kelly writes about what values start becoming more important when copies are free:

The internet is a copy machine….

Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order….

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied….

Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy….

From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free…

[more...]

The eight categories are: Findability, Patronage, Embodiment, Accessibility, Authenticity, Interpretation, Personalization, Immediacy.

[via: Open Access News]

I worry for the children …that with all of this information, they will not have the chance to be aware of their own lives… Head for the hills! Go to the woods, get away from all these people! Go to a place where boredom is available to you; there’s where you will start to remember all the things that have ever happened to you.

– Garrison Keillor, on the Book Show.

Indeed. There is so little time to really think these days, what with the constant processing processing processing processing of information. New, surface, ephemeral information, constantly updated and replaced by more.

Mike and I and a few others had dinner with Jon Udell the other night, and Mike raised, convincingly, this big spectral question:What are we really doing, we digital do-gooding evangelists? To what degree will these “improvements” we wish to bring to people’s lives actually bring improvements? Mat’s complainging about the SNR on the web.

Ursula Le Guinn thinks books are doing OK (subscription only), and while I agree with her, I haven’t finished a book in months (this happens occasionally).

So: Is your life improved by the web? By your mac? Your iphone? I mean, I know you love the web and your mac and your iphone, but have they truly improved your life? For me the answer is a very big yes, and a very big no, and they compete furiously. (Though I don’t have an iphone yet, so maybe I should wait to make final judgments).

So, one thing that would make OpenID really useful, I think, is if there was a way to track blog comments made across the web, while logged in with my openid.

That is, have an RSS feed of “Comments made on all blogs by hughmcguire.myopenid.net” …

There have been a few of (non-openid) efforts at this over time, but all of them clunky. Mike still tracks his comments by tagging them “mycomments” on del.icio.us … and i think there is a plugin called cocomment or something.

But those are “extra” hacks, and most people haven’t bothered.

If by logging-in (using openid) to leave a blog comment, i were also pinging another server (maybe myopenid.com’s) to tell them that I was commenting *here* … it would be easy, and useful to make a feed. myopenid.com ought to be able to do that because (privacy spideysense tingling) they know every time I have logged in somewhere?

From Matt:

Goodhart’s Law:

Once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role.

Translation: once people know what you’re measuring, they start to game the system. Read about it here.

All sorts of institutions are in big trouble because of the internet, and they’re scared as hell. Newspapers can’t figure out how they’ll keep making money; the music business is terrified that its business model is evaporating. Britannica has faded to irrelevance for anyone with an internet connection. I think that’s the tip of things, and anyone who has anything to do with information (schools, governments, book publishers, television, public broadcasters, among others) are all going to see their apple carts upset with fruit rolling all over the place in the next decade.

I’ve been thinking about this particularly in my role as President of the Board of Directors of the Atwater Library, where we are struggling (as many libraries do) to try to articulate why we are important, why we should get funding.

The big problem, I think, is that institutions tend to be wrong about what they are actually for.

That is, they have defined their existence by various functions they perform within a given ecosystem. In the context here, these institutions grew up in an ecosystem where information was scarce, and information distribution limited. The ecosystem has changed (info distribution & access is abundant), and institutions are having a hard time adapting. So: music labels think they sell CDs to people; newspapers think they get writers to make news articles, and get people to read them; libraries think they give people access to books and computers; universities think they provide a place for people to learn and do research; governments think they try to improve society by implementing policies wanted by the people … etc. But I think they are all wrong.

All those kinds of definitions get you tied up in the functional stuff you do, and they don’t really get to the core of what’s important, what the real thing is that you are doing. I don’t have answers, but any business/institution that thinks like this is going to get creamed in the next ten years, unless they take a look at what they are really for.

It seems to me the porn business, one of the most profitable businesses in the Universe, gets this in a way no one else does. Because the porn biz understands exactly what it is for:

Pornographers don’t sell pornography; they provide orgasms.

Looking at it that way, they don’t seem to care much about how they do it – they’ll just find ways to give people the orgasms however people want them given. Dirty postcards, magazines, prono theatres, VHS and Betamax, phone sex, online photos, online videos, chat lines, webcams, cybersex and God knows what else. You don’t hear the porn business whingeing about Intellectual Property and illegal downloads, and consumers as thieves, because they don’t have time: they’re too busy trying to give the world what it seems to want, more orgasms.

So, stepping out of the peepshow and back to the respectable world, why are newspapers, for instance, having such a hard time? I think it’s because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what they do.

The value of a newspaper is not that it gives me information; the value of a newspaper is how it selects information – what it puts in and what it leaves out.

So: Newspapers are not for providing information; newspapers are for selecting what information I should get. (And maybe: for helping me make decisions? – not sure about that one).

And the problem is that newspapers, for the most part, are in a tizzy because they ask: how can we compete as information providers in a world where there is unlimited information available on the web? And the answer, I think, is that they should stop competing as information providers, and start focusing on their real skills and usefulness, which is information selection. Note, by the way, that this does not mean that newspapers should stop providing information, but rather that that task might necessary in order to do a good job of selecting information.

I keep coming back again and again to something I heard Joi Ito say a couple of years ago on some podcast or other:

mp3s are just metadata associated with a musician.

That’s pretty big, pretty heavy. I don’t think I quite have it fixed in my brain yet, but the idea is that a thing’s value is defined by how well people know it, and how highly they consider it. Mp3s are meta data that allow people to “find” an artist, and allow them to determine how much they value that artist. (What that means for the music biz I’m not sure, but we’ll find out in the next ten years).

For newspapers, you might say the same thing: news articles and columns are just metadata associated with the newspaper. But the real value a newspaper performs is not giving me good articles, it’s putting it all together. The mere provision of information is worthless now, because anyone can do it (even me).

This is why blogs – at least in the techno-intelligencia – win. Blogs are excellent selectors of information, while newspapers are pretty clunky at it – because for the past 300 years they existed in an ecosystem where information was scarce. Now information (and access to it) is abundant. So a site like BoingBoing becomes one of the most popular on the net: their craft is not providing information, it’s selecting it. And they’re good at it.

And given the huge overabundance of information on the web, we need all the help we can get in selecting. So newspapers need to work harder at providing that service, bringing that core skill (which they have always had – the Editor is the God of the newspaper) to bear on the web. Have a flip thru the Gazette, or, God help you, visit their web site, and is it any wonder they’re having a hard time? Half of it is the same generic wire-service information that’s in any other paper or news site on the web. That’s not giving me much value. It’s lazy selection and boring, and lazy and boring are a dime a dozen these days. So work harder at finding and selecting interesting content (from the web, there’s tons of it), take down you stupid registration system down, put up a decent navigable web site designed by someone who understands the Internet, and get on with things and stop whingeing.

This was the idea behind earideas: that what’s missing is not good audio out there, but a really good way to find and hear the good audio. (I hope we’re succeeding … anyone have any comments on earideas? Have you checked it out yet? Do you like it?).

There is lots of work to do, and I guess you and I and many other people will be busy for the next few years figuring this all out.

Oh, and any ideas about what a library is truly for? Some help would be much appreciated in deciding that – I’ve got some suggestions, but it hasn’t quite crystalized in the old brain yet.

UPDATE: Interesting proposition about wordpress and learning, that suggests a way education might start changing. [via blogsavvy; via bentrem twitter]

UPDATE II: Stemming from a debate about the value of political groups on Facebook, Mat’s started thinking about political platforms on the web.

I’m pretty sure openid (a centralized, secure sign-on) is a good idea. evan has a post explaining it, addressing some security worries (but his server seems to be down now, so i’ll have to link later) and here it is.

anyway, i’ve just installed the wordpress openid plugin, so you can leave comments here using openid.

let me know if you find it useful.

UPDATE: I’m still uneasy about openid. a little birdie pointed me to this article, that says i should be.

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.

fake steve jobs writes a blog i’ve read very occasionally, funny satire on all things tech, apple and jobsy. the real steve jobs, apparently, has had enough. the fake one got a letter from apple lawyers, and how’s this for scary:

And then, I swear to friggin God, there’s a list of my assets with an estimated value for each and I suppose the implied threat that I stand to lose them. Which kinda scares the living shit out of me, to be honest, since they’ve got a pretty thorough list, which means they’ve been doing some research on this and the offer didn’t just come out of thin air. Their lists includes my home address, most recent assessed value of my house and all the information about my mortgage; a rental property that we own; my bank accounts and investment accounts, including the college funds for our kids, whose names are used; and our boat and two cars.

Of course this is a satire blog, so not totally sure if the story’s true, but if so …

UPDATE: appears this, like the rest of the blog, is a hoax (see Chris’ comments below and …check on the Internet).

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)

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’m just fiddling with Amazon ads for another web project soon to be launched (stay tuned). If you scroll down on the left-hand sidebar (on my homepage, here), you’ll see some amazon.com ads on this blog (they won’t last long). Here’s one too:

As I’ve been playing around, it occurs to me that a revolution in how we approach advertising is about to happen … maybe it’s already happened, I don’t know.

Traditionally, publishers (eg TV stations and Newspapers) courted advertisers to get their business. This meant that content producers worked for the advertisers – with all sorts of implications for what kind of content was allowed.

Now, it seems to me – on parts of the web at least – that advertisers will increasingly have to do the courting, and it’s the content-makers and publishers who will decide what sorts of things they want their content (writing, music, movies) to help sell.

Looking at the ads I just put up here, I have a list of 12 items – 2 gadgets (the sexy itouch I’m dreaming of, and a the mic set that helped me get LibriVox rolling), and 10 books, 3 of which were written by friends of mine (Umm, Regret the Error, and Abandon). The other 7 books are books I’ve read and enjoyed this year, and I would recommend them to anyone.

It costs me nothing to put these ads up. And I am happy to help sell these things which I believe in (though as mentioned, I will soon take the ads down – I don’t want to have a commercial relationship with you here; though I have a couple of explicitly commercial projects where I am/will be putting ads).

In effect, here I am really just recommending to you some books that I really loved this year, and that I think you ought to read, and giving you a mechanism to buy them – and support the authors. While Amazon gets their cut, I don’t care about Amazon, but I do think that these writers should be supported and rewarded so that they will write more wonderful books. Few people read this blog, but if I had a big readership and wanted to put ads up here, I would have to work to put ads here for products that will really sell to my audience. That is, ads for things I think my audience will want.

Now it turns out the only things I can think of to tell you to buy at the moment are books, and a couple of gadgets. If I put my mind to it I could come up with any number of things I think you should spend your money on (maybe some good Scotch, for instance). But I would refuse to sell you things I don’t believe in – things I don’t think you want or need.

In the old model: a publisher (say, NBC TV) tries to convince the advertiser (say, Kraft Dinner) that his audience will buy the product, so that the advertiser will give him money to show Kraft ads on NBC TV.

In the new model: the publisher (me) has to try to figure out what kind of products the audience (you) actually wants, and then advertise them.

Further: the old model was pretty inexact, I convince you to give me money to advertise your product, and no on knows really what the effect is.

New model: I decide what I sell, and I see if it’s selling well or not – which I can tell by clickthrus etc. If it is, I keep advertising it; if it’s not, I’ll start advertising something else.

That’s a pretty significant difference.

Now it so happens that Amazon is the de facto commercial mall these days – but they are just the middle man, and I think their stranglehold on this space might be … well … getting commodified. The value of Amazon as online seller will decrease in coming years, I think, even if their volume increases. In part, maybe for the reasons above: if I am going to sell things, I’d like to sell things I like, and Amazon *has* to carry them if they want my business… because otherwise there is a good business figuring out how to help me sell those things. A business that is overdue I think.

We are in the netherland right now, between states. We haven’t got to the kind of advertising market I’m thinking of. Now, more or less, the Google model says: we’ll read your stuff, and serve ads I think are relevant. Which they almost never are. (For instance, I have Amazon on one of my test sites, and it keeps trying to sell an mp3 download of “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina & the Waves … wtf?)

Adbrite and similar services say: tell me what your site is, and we’ll try to find advertisers who want to advertise there.

But as publisher, what I want is a good advertising clearinghouse so that *I* can find the ads *I* want to have near the stuff *I* am publishing, ads I think *my* audience will respond to. And all I ask in return is a cut of the sales you make from people I send your way.

Again, I think there is a big business opportunity here to make such a clearinghouse. Or maybe someone is doing this already.

Just posted a comment on Dan Misener’s blog (Dan now runs CBC radio, from what I can tell), that I thought was worth repeating here. Dan’s post was about connective tissue, says he:

On Spark, we’re trying really hard to make the show’s connective tissue live up to its content. That comes in the form of story treatments, editing techniques, music choices, sound design, scripts, segues, and all the other tiny little bits that go into making a radio program.

My comment was about the need to find the “core” of information-provision institutions:

i’ve been thinking about this lately: the changes on the web mean that many prized institutions are afraid of becoming obsolete. but i think the real problem is that the function they serve is not the one they thought they served … and they haven’t figured that out yet.

for instance, “providing information” is just one thing that say britannica, and mainstream media, and universities do. but it is not the *core* of their existence – and the core is where their importance and relevance lies. these institutions were fooled in the past century into thinking provision of information was the core of their existence, because information used to be scarce, and it’s distribution limited. now info is cheap and plentiful, and distribution ubiquitous … it turns out they aren’t all that valuable as providers of information.

and yet I feel deeply that professional media, britannica, and universities etc still have crucial roles to play in the world, they just haven’t adjusted yet to what that is.

they have to stop thinking of themselves as “providers of information” … they are something more (not sure what) and when the can confidently figure that out, they will find solutions to their angst about the future.

maybe your ideas here touch on something about where that core might be for radio.

I’m usually dismissive about complaints about “bloggers,” because the usual complaints (boring, stupid, half-assed) don’t apply to the ones I read. But this interview (text and audio) with BBC documentary maker Adam Curtis talks not so much about bloggers in general, but about the actual impact popular bloggers have on media (particularly in the USA), which puts things in a different perspective. Mind you it says as much about Media as it does about bloggers.

On simplification:

It’s a wider thing than the internet, but the internet sums it up. It’s that on the surface it says that “the internet is a new form of democracy”. So what you’re seeing is a new pluralism, a new collage, a new mosaic of all sorts of different ideas that’s genuinely representative.

But if you analyse what happens, it simplifies things.

First of all, the people who do blogging, for example, are self-selecting. Quite frankly it’s quite clear that what bloggers are is bullies. The internet has removed a lot of constraints on them. You know what they’re like: they’re deeply emotional, they’re bullies, and they often don’t get out enough. And they are parasitic upon already existing sources of information – they do little research of their own.

So far not so interesting, but:

What then happens is this idea of the ‘hive mind’, instead of leading to a new plurality or a new richness, leads to a growing simplicity.

The bloggers from one side act to try to force mainstream media one way, the others try to force it the other way. So what the mainstream media ends up doing is it nervously tries to steer a course between these polarised extremes.

and on weak-willed media and the bloggers that frighten them:

I’ve talked to news editors in America. What they are most frightened of is an assault by the bloggers. They come from the left and the right. They’re terrified if they stray one way they’ll get monstered by bloggers on the right, if they stray the other way they’ll get monstered by bloggers from the left. So they nervously try and creep along, like a big animal in Toy Story – hoping not to disturb the demons that are out there.

It leads to a sort of nervousness. The moment a media system becomes infected by nervousness it starts to decline.

and on atomisation:

So over here is the part of the internet – and therefore of the world – where there are people who think the invasion of Iraq was all about oil. Over are people who think it’s all about stopping Muslim hordes taking over our culture. And over here, it’s the neo-conservative lot who think it’s all about ideas.

Do you remember that book about intelligent buildings, how buildings work out how to stand up? That’s what’s happening now. They’re working out how to hold each other up. So you get a Balkanisation where there is no movement forward – everyone just publishes their position, stands up, and that’s it. Everything is so static.

I’m just reading a great book about the mind, called The Brain that Changes Itself about the plasticity of the brain. One interesting thing that I had never quite thought of, is that “old-style” education (a focus on memorization, on memorizing poetry, on hand-writing etc) actually has a huge impact on all sorts of things, including the brain’s ability to reason, to remember, to think in complex ways, in addition to facilities with languages and symbols. Mike wrote about inchoate blog posts recently, and while I don’t agree with the whole idea, I do think the loss of discipline, the loss of the applied, dogged intensity to make a truly important work, is a real problem. For myself, I can write a long, “interesting” blog post and feel I have contributed something intellectually worthwhile to the universe, but it’s a different matter altogether to write a reasoned complete and coherent article, as I have done a couple of times with reviews for Books in Canada. It’s painful to write something like that, and rewarding. A 40-minute blog post takes a day to transform into a really worthwhile “lasting” piece of writing.

True of all forms of art. Compare, for instance, Nora Young’s podcast Sniffer (a sort of audio sketch book of some ideas), and her CBC radio show, Spark (a 2027 minute show packed with interviews and compelling ideas). How much time do you think goes into Sniffer? How much into Spark? (Nora or Dan, if you are reading I’d be curious about the person-hours required to make a 20-minute spark episode).

It’s not that Sniffer is bad and Spark is good, but that we need to keep clear what we want out of the net and our information vectors in general: a vibrant place for exchange of ideas, AND the careful, reasoned deliberation necessary to come to nuanced conclusions about complex problems.

I have been trying to re-inject more discipline into my working life. I feel happier when I am disciplined, but man is it hard in this hyper/disconnected world I live in. Easier to whip off a few blog posts and hope that someone else finds a good use for the ideas, than sit down and write this proposal for a book about LibriVox that I have been avoiding for six months.

Back to work.

Mike announces that free community wifi group ilesansfil is proposing a project to the City of Montreal for a million dollars over five years to increase hotspot coverage. Kudos and good luck. Article in La Presse.

In a related idea, Jon Udell talks about the cities and the creative class:

…the creative class values place above employer. To a 25-year-old European marketing or software professional, the choice of Barcelona over some less desirable city is now more decisive than the choice between working for IBM or Microsoft.

You still need to make your city attractive to IBM and Microsoft, because these companies help create and sustain the quality-of-life conditions that attract the creative class. But companies don’t have a direct interest in those conditions, people do.

It was fascinating to see how these cities are now thinking explicitly about competing — in terms of their housing, transportation, safety, culture, and IT enablement — to attract the creative class. Success produces a compound benefit, because the creative class is an engine of prosperity. Not only does it spend money, it also germinates new businesses. And those tend to be just the kinds of businesses that appeal to the creative class, so it can become a virtuous cycle.

Is it elitist to focus on the needs of the creative class? I don’t think so. Every citizen cares about housing, transportation, safety, culture, and IT enablement. If cities do better in those areas in order to attract the creative class, everybody wins.

From my personal experience, ISF has been a prime driver of much of the creative interaction among the people I know (which is a small group, granted) … hanging out and working at Laika — with free wifi — helped germinate many of my ideas about the web … at least one of which (LibriVox) has been successful.

Patrick’s co-working project is nearing launch, so that’ll add some good spice to the creative mix.

Another related thing that I’ve been thinking about (without doing any analysis) is that the web and small start-ups are egalitarian employers, and hence could be important for integration of new communities in Montreal.

In the (mostly ill-making) Bouchard-Taylor Commission, one of the things that came up recently was the inability of trained professionals (doctors, teachers, engineers) from other countries to get work in their domains in Quebec – despite a shortage of doctors, teachers and engineers. That’s the nice thing about the web – I can say, talking from experience as a small (unfunded) web start-up, that I couldn’t care less about official qualifications, where you’re from (indeed, where you live) … all I want to know is: can you do the things that I’m hoping can be done (which you’ve learned just by hacking, and can demonstrate by showing me things you’ve done on the web), and do I think we’ll get along?

That’s important since one of the big problems for immigrant communities is finding good work. So finding ways to support small start-ups (whatever that means) *could* be one way to give more interesting avenues for employment for young, keen immigrants. Helping people in general become hackers is another way to give avenues to prosperity, without having the mainstream constraints that our traditional education systems impose.

Montreal is ideally attractive to the creative class — funky, cheapish, fun, mixed, vibrant etc — but there are all sorts of problems here. For pros and cons, see the discussion from a while back over at Heri’s MontrealTechWatch.

I wonder how City of Montreal’s planning & policies compare with other hubs of innovation?

After a whole lot of work, the Collectik Team is very happy to announce the official (soft) launch, of the Canadian Cultural Podcast Directory, a project of the National Arts Centre, and Culture.ca (a site run by the Department of Canadian Heritage) … coding, design and implementation by Collectik.

Here is the about:

Welcome to Culture.ca’s cultural podcast listing. This unique collection, curated with the expertise of the National Arts Centre, brings together Canadian audio and video podcasts that reflect Canada’s vibrant arts and culture scene. We collect podcasts produced by Canadians in French, English, and other languages on a variety of cultural topics.

We strive to be a complete collection, and if you feel your podcast qualifies for inclusion, please let us know through our submit form.

Big thanks to Chris (the programming maestro), Marie-Eve (the graphic wrangler with the eyes of gold), and Madeline (the html artiste/pound-IE-into-submissioner).

More projects to come soon! Stay tuned…

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.

ShiftSpace looks to be a cool project, it changes the Read-only web into Read/Write web, by letting you add notes, highlight, rate, and even modify source code of sites, in a “second layer” … that is the site stays the same, but by pressing shift+space, you see the notes etc of other shiftspace users, and you can add your own. Check the video.

To use it you need to have greasemonkey installed in Firefox, and then install the Shiftspace add-on. It’s still buggy, so I wasn’t able to add a note when I tried on Sylvain’s blog.

But it looks pretty neat, I think.

Reading the shiftspace web copy tho, I am reminded of how important it is to write clear concise text. The first two paragraphs of the About page are meaningless mumbo-jumbo:

ShiftSpace is an open source layer above any website. It seeks to expand the creative possibilities currently provided through the web. ShiftSpace provides tools for artists, designers, architects, activists, developers, students, researchers, and hobbyists to create online contexts built in and on top of websites.

While the Internet’s design is widely understood to be open and distributed, control over how users interact online has given us largely centralized and closed systems. The web has followed the physical transformation of the city’s social center from the (public) town square to the (private) mall. ShiftSpace attempts to subvert this trend by providing a new public space on the web.

I don’t know what creative possibilities are, much less online contexts; and when I am evaluating a tool I *never* care why you built it (”ShiftSpace attempts to subvert this trend…”), until I have decided whether or not I want to use it. I can provide my own whys. Just tell me what the damn thing does.

Para 3 gets close to the meat, but is still garbled by jargon (”contextualizations and interventions,” “utilitarian,” “context-based public debates”):

By pressing the [shift] + [space] keys, a ShiftSpace user can invoke a new meta layer above any web page to browse and create additional interpretations, contextualizations and interventions – which we call Shifts. Users can choose between several authoring tools we’re working to develop – which we call Spaces. Some are utilitarian (like Notes and Highlights) and some are more interventionist (like ImageSwap and SourceShift). Users will be invited to map these shifts into Trails. These trails can be used for collaborative research, curating netart exhibitions or as platforms for context-based public debates.

And I love this sentence:

Notes is a Space that allows a ShiftSpace user to leave post-it annotations on websites.

How about:

Notes is a Space that allows a ShiftSpace user to leave notes on websites.

Or something equally clear.

Anyway, nice project, and I would have added my comments in the spaceshift layer of the site, but couldn’t quite make it work. But, again, nice work.

I’m noticing my self-selection of how I’m using my different digital publishing/networking tools:

• twitter: i use this as i would the old water cooler – comments about my day, pleasantries, links to little jokes, thoughts about life and everything. My twitter feed is open, but I only follow a few people, based on whether over time i find i enjoy reading their twits or not. this is a mix of friends and a few professional “colleagues,” a number of librivox people. i check twitter in downtimes, probably 5 times a day (for about a minute each time). twitter’s like cubicle banter. a great place to get tech questions etc answered.
• facebook: i don’t really use facebook. I have a profile, I accept every invite to connect from anyone I remotely know. why do i keep my facebook profile? not sure. i check in a couple of times a week, and usually spend about 2 minutes on the site. it’s been useful mainly for notes about events i want to attend.
• linkedin: I use this to keep track of people I know who are related to my professional life. i use it maybe once a month, or after conferences etc. Probably I check in for 5-10 minutes.
• weblog: my weblog is used for a) philosophical writing b) notes about projects I am working on, or friends are working on c) links to things of interest that I wish to comment on, or that I think ought to be public d) political stuff e) stuff of personal interest (eg friday mixed tapes). I probably spend 20 mins a session, at least twice (probably 3 times) a day… sometimes more.

That’s about it I guess.

Because I love good radio, I get very angry with CBC for their bad radio, of which the examples are abundant.

However…I must offer a big public congrats to them for two new shows:

• Spark, a great show about tech and trends hosteb by the so very excellent Nora Young; and
• Search Engine, another fine show about the web and how it’s impacting society, hosted by Jesse Brown

I just listened (on my collectik player, check the sidebar here) to CBCRadio3, Spark, and then Search Engine all in a row… and thought, whoa, is it possible that CBC is actually cool and with it? Well done programming decision-makers (ps when are you going to cancel these shows!?)

I have no idea when they are on the radio, but the podcast urls are:
http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/spark.xml
http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/searchengine.xml
http://www.cbcradio3.com/podcast/radio3/

Globe columnist Christie Blatchford wrote an article about blogs … with the tiresome old complaint, “blogs are like little girls’ diaries” etc etc. and ended: “I do not blog, I have not blogged, I will not blog and, furthermore, I do not care to read blogs.”

So, being the old crank that I am, I sent her an email:

you probably have many emails from angry “bloggers” already, but i always bang my head against the table when i read things by writers who don’t read blogs explaining why blogs are bad. “blog” is a stupid word that defines this: a way to transfer text from one set of typing fingers to a number of eyeballs. some of that text is crap, some of it good, some of it extraordinary; but a text’s goodness or crappiness is not determined by the mode of transportation (ie blog vs newspaper vs book vs magazine).

goodness and crappiness are traits independent of the mode of transportation, and i will lay down a challenge to you: you provide 5 examples of excellent pieces of newspaper writing and I will provide 5 excellent pieces of blog writing, and we do a blind taste test on some famous smart people, and see which they pick as the better text. i suspect there will be no difference.

best,

her response (which I was surprised to receive):

such a contest would be fair only if we confine the parameters…in other words, no fair if i offer five great bits of toronto writing, and you pick five from the web. let’s say five examples of good newspaper writing from Toronto writers and/or bloggers. what say you?

and my reresponse:

ha! well, that was a surprise.

so the problem with your premise is that you’re nixing one of the great distinctions between the web and print: while you are stuck with whatever the Star & Globe editors want to give you in their pages, I have the full universe of the net to choose from. score 1 for blogs. though I think it’s a big mistake to see these two means of transporting text in opposition. they aren’t, they are complementary (as are books, magazines and newspapers).

further, i don’t really read toronto web writers that i can think of. and since the globe is a national newspaper, how bout we limit the geography to canada? and i think we also have to further constrain things for fairness: no “hard news” articles … instead it should be commentary/columns/op-ed etc.

by the way, can i blog about this? including quoting your email?

no answer after a week, so i blogged about it anyway.

There are many web stores out there, many affiliate advertising programs (amazon etc), and an increasing number of web ad services (google adsense, amazon etc) that you can put on your site to make some bucks. google gives you whatever ads that usually are irrelevant, and amazon gives you their products.

Proposal: a “meta” affiliate program that allows me to manage ads from many different affiliate programs. This allows me, on my blog or site, to:
a) manage web ads from many different webstores (amazon, indigo, futureshop, worldrugbyshop.com, lulu.com, etc) through one account/interface
b) choose *exactly* what products get advertised on my site (gilbert rugby balls, specific books i like, gadgets I endorse, organic soy milk that’s tasty etc)
c) add in PSAs for causes/URLs I like (atwater library, project gutenberg, my pal’s blog etc)
d) *and* provides affiliate management for small webstores who can’t implement their own service.

Benefits to me (site owner):
a. ads are for exactly the things I want to advertise
b. ads chosen for my specific target audience – better conversion rates
c. rather than choosing between different afiliate programs, I can use all of them
d. can advertsie for things that right now can’t be advertised in any sensible way

Benefits to existing affiliate programs:
a. probably none… this will take away their cornering of the market
b. but maybe that I target the audience better, so can sell more stuff thru me

Benefits to webstores:
a. provide affiliate service where none prevously exists
b. advertising to just the right audience … site owners who have chosen your goods to advertise (note this is the opposite of the trad model where advertisers choose their audience; here the audience is choosing their advertsiers – much better).

Does this exist? If someone implements this and makes millions, can i please get preferential client treatment? Thanks. Also, if you want to hire me as a consultant, I am willing to consider it.

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

The people who comment here tend to be thoughtful and interesting even if I don’t agree with them, so whenever I see discussions about commenters on blogs acting like tools, I think, oh well, don’t seem to have that problem here.

Then every once in a while I post something that seems to attract attention from strangers. This post about Steve’s experience trying to delete a Facebook account, for instance, keeps getting new commenters (four months later), some of them apparently clueless, and some of them just jerky.

I’m glad I don’t have to deal with jerky commenters every day

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.

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.

for any of my developer friends who have good connections with the firefox gods, here is what i would like to add to the plugin wishingwell (or maybe it exists already – pls send URLs):

copy/paste extra:

an enhancement of the copy/paste functions (ctrl-c/ctrl-v) that allows you to:
copy: to copy the text you want from a page *and* copy the URL of the page it comes from

paste: when you paste the text elsewhere (eg in the window of your blog editor), it pastes the text AND the URL underneath the text. Then linking to the URL will be much easier.

Could be tweaked in various ways, but I just want to avoid having to go back to the same tab twice, once to get the text, and a second time for the URL.

Maybe there’s already a way to do this – pls let me know.

UPDATE:
Kara suggests Jumpcut, a utility for macs 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.

And it works like a charm; will solve many little niggles I had beyond the original problem described above.

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?

Citation-mania on wikipedia has had a really negative effect on the style and fluidity of many of the articles I’ve been reading of late. There was a time when you could count on wikipedia articles for a roughly-neutral, often slightly idiosyncratic, sometimes really clunky summary of whatever you were reading about. But there was a certain unfinished, wild charm to it.

But it seems more and more articles I’m reading are just lists of citable, and cited facts, and wishy-washy “he-said/she-said” quotations, footnotes, and little annoying “citation needed” superscripts.

Which is fine as far as information goes, but hell to read. To whit (those little bracketed numbers are citations):

John Francis Anthony “Jaco” Pastorius III (December 1, 1951 – September 21, 1987) was an American jazz musician and composer widely acknowledged for his virtuosity of the fretless bass,[1][2] as well as his command of varied musical styles.

His playing style was noteworthy for containing “dazzling solos in the higher register”[3] and “fluid machine-gun-like passages that demanded attention,”[1] often featuring his instrument in lead rather than rhythm section.[3] His unique innovations also included the use of harmonics[3] and the “singing” quality of his melodies. In 2006, Pastorius was voted “The Greatest Bass Player Who Has Ever Lived” by reader submissions in Bass Guitar Magazine.[2]

Yuk. Maybe it’s just the citation notes, that make it feel like bullets? But it makes me think, for some reason, of this.

Boris wants me to stop complaining about the web. So I guess I’ll stop here. Except to say: remember the good old days of revolution and anarchy? (which for me is 2004, but what the hell).

I’m as much of a copyfighter as the next guy, and have some street cred in public domain, free culture circles. I think that big companies abuse copyright, and that draconican copyright systems stifle innovation and creativity, and further are no good for artists and creators. But I’ve never argued that copyright should be discarded, especially as it relates to commercial applications.

I’ve heard about Google Books, and despite my thoughts on copyright, it always seemed a little bit … gauche … to me. A multi-gazillion-dollar company like Google saying: “Hey everyone, we’re going to scan all you books and make them available to the world.” And tough turkeys, to you publishers, writers and your copyrights. We are Google and you shall submit. it seemed to me that they were bullying publishers, and deserved all the lawsuits they got for copyright infringement.

But, actually, I’d never landed on Google Books, never really looked at it.

I just did.

I did an old fashioned Google Search for “wallace stevens domination of black harmonium” (actually, to find it’s copyright status) and then I followed this link to the Google Books scan of the 2003 Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, by Christopher Beach.

I was kind of shocked. The whole bookMuch of the book is there online for anyone to read.

Some thoughts/questions:
1. does Google have an agreement with the publisher?
2. wow … search for any phrase in any book is soon to be reality.
3. are *all* books really going to be available through the graces of google?
4. what’s google’s deal with big publishers? little publishers? poets, little writers?
5. what do publishers/writers think of google serving ads underneath the scans of their books?
6. will google privilege google books links over, say, gutenberg in their search results?
7. … more, questions, …?

UPDATE: some answers, from Google Books:

For books that enter Book Search through the Library Project, what you see depends on the book’s copyright status. We respect copyright law and the tremendous creative effort authors put into their work. If the book is in the public domain and therefore out of copyright, you can page through the entire book and even download it and read it offline. But if the book is under copyright, and the publisher or author is not part of the Partner Program, we only show basic information about the book, similar to a card catalog, and, in some cases, a few snippets — sentences of your search terms in context. The aim of Google Book Search is to help you discover books and learn where to buy or borrow them, not read them online from start to finish. It’s like going to a bookstore and browsing – with a Google twist.

Here.

(some familiar faces in there).

Interesting story about bin Laden, the net, and a bungle.

Apparently, a private US security company, SITE Intelligence Group, breached Al-Qaeda’s internet system a couple of years ago. And in September they intercepted that video of bin Laden (before it was public)…and passed it along to US intelligence services, with the warning: don’t make it public till the video comes out, or the breach will be found.

But the video was leaked to press, and George Bush was talking it up in speeches. Perhaps coincidentally, General David Petraeus was about to give testimony to Congress about things were going in Iraq (”well,” he reported).

Al-Qaeda apparently shut down the breached internet channels immediately afterwards, realizing that there were security holes in their system.

From the New York Sun:

But the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda’s internal security division that the organization’s Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised. This network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda’s production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world.

While intranets are usually based on servers in a discrete physical location, Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda.

One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America’s Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda’s internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America’s intelligence community saw. “We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak,” the official said. “We lost an important keyhole into the enemy.”

See details: washington post, attytood.com, New York Sun.

A court in the US has ordered a woman to pay $222,000 (£109,000) in damages for illegally file-sharing music.

The jury ordered Jammie Thomas, 32, from Minnesota, to pay for offering to share 24 specific songs online – a cost of $9,250 per song.

[link...]

UPDATE: Here is the playlist:

* Guns N Roses “Welcome to the Jungle”; “November Rain”
* Vanessa Williams “Save the Best for Last”
* Janet Jackson “Let’s What Awhile”
* Gloria Estefan “Here We Are”; “Coming Out of the Heart”; “Rhythm is Gonna Get You”
* Goo Goo Dolls “Iris”
* Journey “Faithfully”; “Don’t Stop Believing”
* Sara McLachlan “Possession”; “Building a Mystery”
* Aerosmith “Cryin’”
* Linkin Park “One Step Closer
* Def Leppard “Pour Some Sugar on Me”
* Reba McEntire “One Honest Heart”
* Bryan Adams “Somebody”
* No Doubt “Bathwater”; “Hella Good”; “Different People”
* Sheryl Crow “Run Baby Run”
* Richard Marx “Now and Forever”
* Destiny’s Child “Bills, Bills, Bills”
* Green Day “Basket Case”

I hope all these artists are ashamed of the companies they work for, and it would be nice if some of them said so publicly.

Just reading about Alive in Baghdad’s funding woes (a project of Small World News). They are a news video service, that gets close to issues no one one in big media cares about: for instance, how car bombs actually affect Iraqi families and individuals.

So why is it so hard to get funding for good projects? We’re having a similar problem with the Atwater Digital Literacy Project.

There are a number of micro-pay philanthropy sites now, and alive in baghdad, for instance has paypal subscription buttons … to try to get people like you and me to support them.

But it’s not really taking.

What could we do to make this easier for those of us who want to pay, and those in need of financial support?

I’ve often though about something like my Internet Support Bank Account – with an easy button. So I put in, say, $250 at the beginning of the year to my “micropay account”, and as I surf the web, finding projects I like, I drop, $5, 10, 25 or whatever to the cause. Until I run out of money.

In order to make this work there would have to be some kind of standardized payment system – that could work for instance on different platforms. I guess paypal works something like that – but I want something more dedicated to this idea, less corporate.

Probably there has to be some fun component too? I’m not sure.

I pay a couple of bucks a day for coffee, and i’ll buy a pint of beer without thinking twice. Why so hard to support projects I care about I wonder?

[tipped off by twitter Julien]

Truthout.org is a lefty news agreggator, and a non-profit org. They send out newsletters and the like to subscribers. Recently, apparently, AOL and hotmail have stopped delivering truthout emails to hotmail and AOL email users – or have labelled truthout.org as spam, so the emails are not going thru. Says truthout:

While AOL has been largely evasive and silent about their reasons for blocking communications, our server logs and complaints from subscribers illustrate a clear pattern of interference. Microsoft-Hotmail, while not being forthcoming about their actions to the subscribers involved, have stated to our administrators that they are in fact “throttling” and “blocking” our communications. Further, the Microsoft-Hotmail administrators inform us that they are blocking our communications to Truthout subscribers on their systems due to what they describe as our “reputation.”

For some reason, Truthout has not published the specific correspondence from the services, which would be helpful. Right now the reports on Truthout seem a bit fishy.

Anyway, this is something I’ve never heard of before: an email provider apparently blocking emails from a politically disliked site. Anyone know other instances of this?

Just had a recent spate of flamey acrimony on LibriVox (which is usually an oasis of kind and pleasant discussion). It’s amazing how draining these things are for people. I didn’t get too worked up personally, tho I spent too much time trying to convince people to stop being so … imflamatory. And I did lose my cool at one point and violated my How to Deal with Difficult People tract.

But: I wonder why it is that the Internet flame war/acrimonious debate is *such* an emotionally intense experience. I certainly never in my daily life get involved in such stuff, I can’t remember the last argument I had with someone in real life. But on occasion I’ve been in some pretty tense internet stuff. I understand why they happen (the missing subtext, humour missed, inference of mean-spiritedness, when often humour was the intent etc).

But it’s curious that they are so …well…enraging.

Often when you think/look back at them, you ask yourself, why was I so riled up about *that* discussion? What was it about that sentence that made steam come out of my ears? Or at least I do.

And when your involved in these things, you craft these long-winded, debate-ending, brilliant pieces of unanswerable prose. And then wait panting for the response! And the whole thing starts over again. I’m ususally pretty reasonable in my approach to these things – I rarely lose my temper – but still, they are really emotionally draining.

What is it about text, and especially internet/forum mediated text, that makes the hot debate so so so emotionally intense?

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.

MoveMyData looks interesting:

Your content and data should be yours to manage and do with as you please. Your images, writing, tags, profile, blog entries, comments, testimonials, video, and music should be yours to download and move anyplace you want.

We will help ensure that no website ever holds your data hostage.

[link...]

I have not played with it yet, but I love the idea. Has anyone taken it for a testdrive?

PS I love the graphics on the site. A site that looks like that just *has* to be made by good people.

Every year there is a big digital/social/web etc conference in austin called south by south west interactive.

I have proposed a LibriVox talk, based on the presentation will I did at Podcasters Across Borders (slides and audio + transcript )

I think panel selections get made by votes from interested people like you. so… it’d be appreciated if anyone who feels inclined could vote for the panel, here.

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”).

Any ROR developers looking for some work? A friend has a contract coming up, 3 months, decent money. Probably needs 2 sets of hands. Let me know if you want me to put you in touch.

Things appear to be working fine today, but I guess it was touch and go for a while:

Reminds me a little of downtown Montreal.

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.

In the LA Times, journalism prof Michael Skube writes a meaningless and silly article that argues… well nothing really … or sort of that bloggers are all opinion, no fact, and that’s a waste of everyone’s time. Title? “Blogs: All the noise that fits: The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters.”

His conclusion is:

The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.

Which I agree with, except the implication that bloggers provide top-of-the-head, but not reasoned, argument. Some do, some don’t.

But check out this outstanding logical leap:

Moulitsas [of KOS] foresees bloggers becoming the watchdogs that watch the watchdog: “We need to keep the media honest, but as an institution, it’s important that they exist and do their job well.” The tone is telling: breezy, confident, self-congratulatory. Subtly, it implies bloggers have all the liberties of a traditional journalist but few of the obligations.

How do you get from the quote, which says, “someone needs to keep the professional media honest” to the conclusion, “bloggers want to be called journalists but don’t want the obligations” ??

The point is, professional journalists have done a dismal job of covering important issues (eg, WMD in Iraq) in the past, say, 5 years. And blogging has given us new mechanisms to call journalists to account for their failures. This is not breezy or self-congradulatory. It’s reality. And if anyone wants to see substantial political debates, it’s the bloggers at KOS who, so far, have hosted the best example, see: Yearly KOS Presidential Forum for a substantive understanding of how the Dem field is positioning itself.

The best part is that the Skube article mentions Josh Marshall’s TalkingPointsMemo as an example of an all-opinion/no-fact blog. TMP does tons of original reporting, and in fact Skube says he’s never read the site! (It’s in the top 5 of political/news blogs on the net, you’d think he would have read it at least once before writing an op-ed about what a waste political/news blogs are). Apparently, an editor added TPM to the piece, which Skube signed. Ha! Nice patient sifting of fact, Mr. Journalism Professor, what an excellent acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence.

Perhaps he was being ironic?

See more commentary chez TPM.

UPDATE: letter sent to LA Times:

Dear Sirs:

Re: “Blogs: All the noise that fits: The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters,” by Michael Skube, if you replace the word “blog” with “op-ed,” and the word “blogger” with “blowhard op-ed writers like me,” Skube might be on to something.

Best,

Hugh McGuire
Montreal, Canada.

Mathew Ingram reports that the Wall Street Journal and NY Times may drop their paid registration wall, that keeps some content closed except to those who pay a yearly subscription fee ($50 for NYTimes). Says Ingram:

But if both the Times and the Journal are making money from their online subscription services – which they reportedly are – why would they do away with them? The simple answer is that opening their content up to a broader audience could provide even more revenue in the form of advertising, and more growth potential (since neither service is growing very quickly, if at all).

For those not paying attention (such as the Globe and Mail), no registration and fees means I was able to read Ingram’s article, and you can click the link to go visit the Globe to read the whole thing. But if it’s behind a wall, I can’t read it or link to it, so there are fewer eyeballs able to read it (and see the ads on the web).

And in other news, the world is apparently round, and not flat.

[more...] … [via Geist]

KOS hosts a yearly convention for progressive political bloggers. This year most of the Democratic presidential candidiates attended. If you are sick of the crap that passes for debate in mainstream media, have a look at where all the biggies in the Dem field stand on the issues, courtesy of the KOS event, and PoliticsTV:

Daily KOS Presidential Forum (videos).

Notes:
-a blog brought together all the heavy Democratic presidential candidates for a useful debate. That’s impressive.
-in the long run, I think more and more citizens will seek out this kind of information
-MSM doesn’t want to sell substance like this, but the politicians do … and maybe the net is the only place where we’ll find it
-will the Right have a similar event?
-I was impressed by Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, and John Edwards … Clinton and Obama seemed pretty light-weight, and the other guys up there (Kucinich and someone elseMike Gravel) are probably too far out of whack for the US, but I agree with most of what they have to say.

By the way, the right-wing blowhard Bill O’Reilly, I guess worried about the influence of the YearlyKOS convention, calls KOS “a hate site worse than the Ku Klux Klan.” Watch an edited vid of Bill’s greatest hits. (Oh, and even Michelle Malkin agrees!).

Next time you host a big party with many different people, why not set up a web page with URLs of attendees, so people can figure out if there is anyone they’d like to talk to?

Was just at a wedding this weekend, and luckily ended up chatting with Jason and Kirsten … (whose blogs I found only afterwards, merci google). But I would have liked to pop by to say hello to Todd Swift: I knew he was a poet, but even better, I just discovered that he writes a weblog called Eyeware: Poetry, Politics & Culture in the Digital Age, which sounds like it’s right up my alley.

How many other people at that event, I wonder, have interesting web presences that would have helped me emerge from my usual “sit in corner with Christine and consume alcohol with a wry smile” approach to big events?

1. World Cup Tickets
I am going to France for a couple of weeks in September…”coincidently” during the Rugby World Cup. We confirmed our trip after all the legit tickets for matches I would like to see had sold out. But I’d like to go to a game… so I searched on Craigslist, found someone selling a ticket. Sent emails. She’s in San Fran … We’ve emailed. The thought crossed my mind, for about 2 seconds: hmm, it’s safe, right, to send money and wait for the tickets in the post? Surely this nice-sounding person isn’t a scammer. It was a back of the mind thought, nothing serious.

I did some Googling, found the seller’s blog. I read a little bit, checked out some pics of her family, her university friends… I don’t *know* her, but I trust her completely. Her presence on the web allows me to *know* with 100% certainty, that she is honest etc. And if she checks this blog, I expect she’ll see the same. So not the least little scrap of worry about doing a transaction on the web with someone I will likely never meet.

2. Amazon
I was recently contacted by Amazon.com about LibriVox. I did a web search on the name of the contact there, found the same name in a MySpace page for a band…didn’t think that could be her. But in our conversation she mentioned she was in a band, I said: “Is it so-and-so? Cause I’m looking at your Myspace page right now!” The conversation was different then … I knew, if nothing else, she was a hard working musician, and that helped me to trust her in a way I couldn’t have otherwise. The discussion may or may not continue, but we *know* each other in a way that makes it so much easier to discuss honestly now than if she was just a random name, representing a company I am wary of.

3. Fred
I posted about Vancouver 2010 copyright issues. “Fred Smith” left a comment, but no URL link. I read his comment, it sounded reasonable. But I cannot trust him, because there is no link to a web page where I can learn about who Fred Smith is. Does he exist? Does he work for the government? For a PR company? For the Vancouver 2010 committee? Is he an anarchist? A creative commons lawyer? No idea. He has no URL, and while I can take his words at face value, they have zero context, so I am hesitant to trust him. (No offense, Fred).

4. Problem at LibriVox
We are having a problem at LibriVox. The person in question has no digital identity that I know of. How am I give context to my evaluation of this person without more information online? I have nothing to go on.

SUMMARY:
If you don’t have a presence online, how can I know whether or not I should trust you?

For this.

Money well spent.

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

Straight from our government:

UPDATE: Safari doesn’t work either, despite what it says here.

Steve explores what it takes to delete your Facebook account (and all the data in there). Says the helpful Lucy of the Facebook Team:

Hi Steven,
If you deactivate, your account is removed from the site. However, we save all your profile content (friends, photos, interests, etc.), so if you want to reactivate sometime, your account will look just the way it did when you deactivated. If you do want your information completely wiped from our servers, we can do this for you. However, you need to remove all profile content before we can do this. Once you have cleared your account, let us know and we’ll take care of the rest.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Lucy
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

This means there is a function to “deactivate” your account, leaving all info intact… but there is no standard function to delete your account. For that you must a) remove all profile content*, and b) contact Facebook directly.

*Now what Lucy doesn’t explicitly say here, though she informs Steve later in the conversation, is that “removing all your profile content (friends, photos, interests, etc.) means deleting, one-by-one every single thing in on your facebook page (minifeed items, little widgety things like movie reviews, friends, etc). Which, if you’ve been at it for a while, could take hours and hours.

Thanks, Facebook.

Read more about Steve’s adventures with Facebook’s privacy policy.

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.

For those of you who want to make millions (or even 10s) on your blog, by pimping for faceless internet corporations on the digital equivalent of your soul, Amazon has added “Context links” to its affiliate program, aping google, but this time with a more targeted product base. Says Amazon:

Context Links is a tool to automatically identify and link contextually relevant phrases within your content to Amazon products. Links can be configured as conventional links or so that when a user hovers over any of these links, a small window appears showing a preview of the appropriate product from Amazon. We believe this product will unlock new ad inventory for you by identifying linking opportunities that you previously had not identified. It will also allow you to control the location and number of links on each page. In addition, Context Links can save you the time needed to manually create text links within your content.

See: Amazon Context Links

Brief interview with Rami Tabello of illegalsigns.ca, over at datalibre.ca.

Heri whipped up a great little map of montreal’s web scene, surely missing all sorts of stuff, but it’s still a great visualization of many of the people I rub shoulders with, drink coffee with, and occasionally quaff the odd pint or two with. Missing, I note, is Collectik (tho we are in quiet retooling mode, so that’s OK):

Would be nice if the stations and lines were live links.

Pledgebank.com:

What is PledgeBank for?
PledgeBank is a site to help people get things done, especially things that require several people. We think that the world needs such a service: lots of good things don’t happen because there aren’t enough organised people to do them.
Can you give me some examples?
Sure. ‘I will start recycling if 100 people in my town will do the same’; ‘I will organise my child’s school play if 3 other parents will help’; ‘I will build a useful website if 1000 people promise to contribute to it’.

[more...]

My pledge:

I will think of a good pledge to make. but only if 10 other people with internet access will do the same.

Sign up here to fill my quota: think of a pledge.

Some updates on the story of Zeke & Mr. Tremblay (see my previous post for background). The court session was held June 21, arguments were made, and now … we wait again till September 7.

• For a good review see: Fagstein: Zeke maintains status quo in court.
• Also interesting, Pierre-Antoine Tremblay has reached out to the blogosphere, here: Michel Leblanc: Affaire Zeke’s Gallery, le point de vue de Tremblay

I’ve had a few discussions with people about this and, there are a few points worth considering:

1. be careful how you phrase things: the case here seems to turn on Zeke suggesting that Pierre-Antoine Tremblay was associated with the mafia, for which I gather there is no evidence. that’s a serious (and dangerous) sort of thing to suggest. my understanding also is that the original post was unclearly written, which is where the problem may be. bad syntax … but just pay attention to your words, you are responsible for them. morally and legally.

2. It’s interesting to note the power of blogs now. As Julien said in his Podcasters Across Borders presentation, you are who Google says you are. And for someone who isn’t online, and doesn’t have some google linkjuice protection, one post from a relatively well-ranked blog might just end up defining who google thinks you are.

3. Mr. Tremblay’s plea to the blogosphere, (linked above) goes like this:
-he’s not rich, just a guy who works in a gallery, is a writer, poet artist [relevant for PR, but not the case]
-he’s sad to see people write nasty things about him (quoting some blogger, not chris) [relevant as proof that some people are jerks, but not the case]
-he’s upset that zeke brings up the lotto quebec forgery case [this is the one that gets my goat: this lotto quebec forgery case is IN THE PUBLIC RECORD ... if the charges were all untrue, if the case was settle out of court, it sucks that mr. tremblay got tarred by the story, but Zeke is fully within his rights to say: Mr. Tremblay got taken to court for (allegedly, counsels my lawyer to write) selling forgeries to Lotto Quebec. That it's a chapter Mr. Tremblay wishes to forget is unfortunate, but it's still a fact, and you can still read about it at Devoir, Radio-Canada and a Lotto-Quebec press release!
-he's upset that zeke suggests he was linked to the mafia [for this he would have a legitimate beef, if indeed zeke did so]
-he states that zeke should have contacted him before writing [this is just odd...]
-he states that this has nothing to do with free speech [a bit more on this below ...]

so, to me, all the stuff about who zeke is and who tremblay is… is beside the point. The question is, why should Zeke be forced to take down posts that state and link to facts that are in the public record?

The answer of course, is that the court injunction serves as a means to stop any potential “crimes” until such a time as the court can decide (now delayed to September 6). again, i’ll bet that zeke made some wrong moves in the early days … and i’ll bet the whole thing more or less goes away without much impact on you or me.

but it’s not irrelevant, and it is important, and it’s worth paying attention to.

so good luck chris.

This presentation is not actually about podcasting, it’s about data…but it was presented at podcastersacrossborders, and LibriVox is the inspiration for these thoughts.

Yulblogger, podcaster, ilesansfiler, and art gallery/space guy Chris Hand, aka Zeke, has had his blog shut down (UPDATE: possibly permanently???) by a court injunction.

The Montreal and Canadian blogging, free speech, rational people communities ought to be up in arms. I urge everyone to at least write about this to get this info out. It’s a real danger to all of us who write what we think online.

The story, as I understand it, is this:

1. Radio Canada, National Post, and Le Devoir ran stories about alleged art forgeries sold to Loto-Quebec by a local art dealer whose name will remain unwritten, lest I too get sued …all links still live.

2. Loto-Quebec issued a press release about the incident … link still live.

3. Zeke, who runs a blog about art in Canada, wrote a number of posts about the incident, linking to the articles above (the posts have since been excised from the web – tho the articles he based his posts on are still up). Also, due to some vague language, suggesting that the man in question had been somehow affiliated with the mafia.

4. The fellow mentioned in articles (still available online) by Le Devoir, Radio-Canada, and Loto Quebec sued Zeke for $25,000 in damages.

5. Zeke was told to change the wording of the posts (he did).

6. Zeke posted about the threats from the other guy’s lawyer.

7. A court order required Zeke to take down the relevant posts (he did).

8. Zeke posted about the court order.

9. A second court injunction appears to have shut down Zeke’s blog altogether
UPDATE: it seems as if this injunction may only last “until after the next court hearing, June 21″

10. Zeke is no longer posting.

Here is a Globe and Mail article about the events.

Those who know Zeke know he’s loud, opinionated and something of a loose cannon. He’s also a stalwart of Montreal’s blogging/podcasting/art/arts scene, and a good guy.

But regardless of Zeke’s personality, and given that:
a) the articles Zeke linked to, and based his posts on, are still on the net in the public sphere, and
b) Zeke is now under threat of $25,000 in damages, and
c) Zeke’s blog has been shut down by court order

how do you, as a reader of blogs and citizen of Canada and Quebec, feel about freedom of speech in your country?

Chris, what can we do to help?

MORE UPDATES:
- Heri’s take
- Fagstein’s review

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.

if you love facebook, you’ll love this:
http://www.albumoftheday.com/facebook/

After seeing this, I decided not to import my blog into facebook anymore. I prefer not to give them unlimited and total rights & access to everything I write on my blog, thanks.

UPDATE:
cf. zura’s comment below, i am careful about what I would or would not put in facebook, but the main issue I have is with this clause:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

see: Facebook Terms of Use.

They may be paid by Canadian citizens, and they may work for Canadian citizens, and letting citizens know what they say may legitimately be considered an important component of a functioning democracy … but no no no, you can’t post to the net vids of Candian politicians talking in Parliament, without getting PERMISSION FORM THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS!:

Says Geist:

The Cable Public Affairs Channel (CPAC) is the primary source for Canadian Parliamentary debate and discussions, including the House of Commons Question Period and Committee hearings. CPAC broadcasts hours of Parliamentary hearings each week, yet … it does not assert copyright over the broadcasts. Instead, the broadcaster maintains that copyright in the House of Commons Proceedings rests with the Speaker of the House, while the Senate of Canada owns the copyright in the Senate Proceedings.

(found at BoingBoing)

And, being the shit disturber that I am, I sent this to the Speaker Himself (email: SpkrOff@parl.gc.ca):

Dear Mr. Speaker,

Considering that Canadian Parliamentarians are paid by Canadian citizens, and that they work for Canadian citizens, and that letting citizens know what Parliamentarians say is an important component of a functioning democracy … should we citizens not be allowed, without the permission of the Speaker of the House, to post videos of Parliament to the internet when and how we wish?

How could Parliament reasonably argue that copyright should apply?

see:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1943/135/

Thanks,

etc…

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.

I think I’d better do a post on something other than US generals, so: I got an invite to Freebase.com, which looks to be a very cool project:

Free + Database = Freebase
It’s about film, sports, politics, music, science and everything else all connected together. Our contributors are collecting data from all over the internet to build a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data. It’s a big job and we’re just getting started.

and:

Share, reuse, remix.
We want to make it possible for you to add high quality structured information to your websites, mashups and applications without worrying about restrictive licenses. All data is licensed Creative Commons Attribution. We only ask that you link back to us.

It seems to be a commercial operation, run by Danny Hillis of MetaWeb.

I’ve got a couple of invites if anyone wants.

link.

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)

Boris (with help from Jer) has just launched the redesign of GlobalVoicesOnline, which:

…aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore [more ...]

The site is jam packed with info from blogs all over the world, and this new design is much cleaner & easier to get at than the previous incarnation. One can only assume that simplicity belies some mean-ass wordpress hacking in the background.

by the way, I would recommend they change their tagline:

aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online

that’s some pretty jargony words.

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.

some visitors here are being asked to register for twitter … could it be because I am running the twitter thingy on 2 sites at once, also on dosemagazine.com??? Any thoughts anyone?

need to do a 301 redirect to send dosemagazine.com folks over here. evan suggested it, boris said he’d gimme a hand.

dreamhost one-click install; uploaded theme and plugin folders by ftp; exported Dose xml file; imported dose xml file. a couple of tweaks left, and bob, as they say, is your uncle.

for whatever faults wordpress has, it’s a pretty fantastic tool.

welcome to my new and final abode, everybody!

UPDATE: jeeze-bazeeze: opened the doors here 2 hrs ago, and already 81 spam messages caught by Askimet. wtf??? (oh, maybe those were imported from dose? hope so).

Yesterday, I had coffee & a great talk with Matt Forsythe. He was the 5th? 6th? person in the last two weeks to make a comment about dose, dosemagazine, and the really awful CanWest rag, Dose.ca. His comment was something: “It took me a long time to read your blog without cringing because I always thought of Canwests’ dose.” Other comments I’ve had were, “Oh, you write for dose?” and “Hey, are you going to lose your job? I heard dose was cutting back on writers.” etc. etc. Enough is enough.

The last nail in the coffin. I guess. I just moved here from dose.blogsome.com (tho I have owned dosemagazine.com since 2002), but I just have to move again. I can’t take the association any more.

I’ve registered: hughmcguire.net … and will be moving there shortly I have moved. I’ll keep you all posted.

which means starting all over again, but at least it’ll be done with for once and forever.

(by the way, hughmcguire.com is a lawyer in New Jersey, and has nothing to do with me).

Let this be a lesson to all you kids: Choose your URL wisely.

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.

I have been touring the net of late looking at podcast sites, and I have a few suggestions (some of this is relevant for bloggers too). I’m not talking about what you do in audio, but what your site looks like. Chances are I’ll come to your site before I hear your stuff, so what you do on your website is as important as what you do in audio. Here goes:

1. about. please, put an “about” section on your page. If I land on your page and I don’t know what it’s about, I’m gonna leave. Gimme a sentence at least: “music and talk,” “sports and politics”… just tell me where I am.
2. flash player. one of the most interesting things I learned at Podcamp, was that by far the majority of website visitors will press a “listen-now” button, rather than downloading, or subscribing (RSS or iTunes). Here is a great free plugin player if you are using wordpress: podpress
3. feeds. this drives me nuts. make subscribing to your podcast obvious and easy. put those subscription icons right at the top of the page where I can see them. See here for a good description of podcast icons… and here is where you get your nice orange RSS icons.
4. itunes & rss. also drives me nuts. not everyone uses itunes. so please, give me the option to subscribe in iTunes, but also give me the plain vanilla RSS feed. don’t let apple own your distribution. the RSS format is open for a reason, and that apple has closed it off in the iTunes-only feed format should jab you in your freedom-loving heart. Give me both.
5. rss icon. the organge RSS icon is for one thing: a link to your RSS feed. It is NOT for:
   a) a link to mp3 files
   b) a link to an iTunes store feed
   c) anything other than an RSS feed
6. no flash. if you have a flash site, kill it. or at least set up a nice CMS site in parallel – wordpress or something – and make it clear how to get there away from your stupid flash site.

Dammit. I don’t even have a phone. I can’t get it into my sidebar for some reason. But, in any case, here I am:
http://twitter.com/hughmcguire

God help me now.

(PS thank you Mitch; and can I make a suggestion for a killer business?: digital rehab centres, to cure people of addiction to digital information).

(PPS: Mitch is doing a new podcast with Harper Collins, about business books, called: Foreward Thinking; which makes two people I know doing podcasts for Harper Collins, the other is Cathi Bond, who does interviews with fiction writers at the Prosecast.)

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.

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.

Julien, a Montreal podcaster (longest active Canadian podcaster, most popular DIYer in Canada etc) & satelite radio man, just told me that his show, In Over Your Head plays on SIRIUS satelite radio in the USofA, but not in Canada. CBC owns 40% of SIRIUS Canada. Presumably interested in playing CanCon? But not interested in Mr. Smith.

Wha???

A while back (on the old dose), I wrote some climate change posts, that attracted the attention of a couple of commenters, who I suspected of being flacks. We had a detailed exchange.

My theory for which I have zero proof, is that some people are paid to go around making climate-skeptic comments on blogs. I met Nicolas Ritoux (through Evan), and we talked about it. He writes for La Press, did some more digging, and wrote a couple of pieces that are in the paper today:

• Des «éco-sceptiques» à l’assaut du Web
• Une campagne organisée?

Cool.

And here is an article, from NY Review of Books, about where we are on climate.

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.

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