Congress bans MySpace and blogs in Schools and Libraries

This law is like outlawing restaurants and bars in DC because Congressmen get bribed in them. DOPA is an example of the 'poison gas' view of the internet cloud - it contains odd legislative language like:

The Congress finds that--
(3)with the explosive growth of trendy chat rooms and social networking websites, it is becoming more and more difficult to monitor and protect minors from those with devious intentions

It then defers definition of 'social network websites', but implies that it could include all blogging platforms, webmail and Wikipedia:

In determining the definition of a social networking website, the Commission shall take into consideration the extent to which a website--
(i) is offered by a commercial entity;
(ii) permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information;
(iii) permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users;
(iv) elicits highly-personalized information from users; and
(v) enables communication among users.'

Note that this is using the corrupt Universal Service Fund as a way to circumvent the First Amendment.

More from danah, TechCrunch, ZDNET and Technorati.

Technorati Tags: blogs, digital rights, DOPA, law, net neutrality, politics, rhetoric, USF

Heads or Tails? No, Heads and Tails

I'm seeing a lot of debate over power law distributions in the wake of Chris Anderson's Long Tail book, most recently debated by Lee Gomes in the WSJ. Chris's rebuttal is on point, but there are more subtleties here; Chris is primarily addressing retailers in his book, so even the longer tails of books and music he discusses are choked off by the original publishers. If you include the lovingly created media from amateur creators, such as we see in the weblog world, the tails extend still further. (The chart dates back to February 2004.)

At dinner after AlwaysOn tonight, I was chatting to Nik Cubrilovic of Omnidrive and Peter Pham of PhotoBucket. They both have businesses hosting data online, for individuals. These are pure Long Tail businesses - as I said in my Symmetry argument, we are moving to a world where we upload as much as we download. As JP discussed, and Peter confirmed, having lots of photos and videos viewed once or zero times makes caching near the client useless.

However, that doesn't mean there aren't still some big hits, and if you have a power law relationship that extends over a few orders of magnitude you do need to cope with both ends of it, often with very different mechanisms. Desiging for an average case fials in a long tail world. Satellite broadcast is the ultimate big head method, blanketing whole continents with identical signals, with broadcast TV a close second. Building out networks with only emulating this model in mind will fail.

As I said before:

The net extends the range of the power law distribution.

If you look at relative popularity on the web, using something like Technorati, you get a power law curve that goes all the way down smoothly, to the bottom where you see pages that got just a single link.

If you look at popularity in the publishing world - movies, chart music or books - the curve starts out with a power law, but soon drops like a stone. That's because in order to get a movie made, a recording contract or a book published, you have to convince somebody that you're going to sell a million tickets, a hundred thousand CDs or tens of thousands of books.

You end up in a zero-sum game, where people pour enormous resources into being number one, because number two is only half as good. The promise of the net is that the power of all those little links can outweigh the power of the top ten.

So what are the long tail businesses? You can be a commodity business catering to the tail (commodities are good - they mean people will pay you a known price). You can be fashion business, joining the zero-sum game for top place. Or you can create with love, and see if you can get paid for it over time.

Technorati Tags: long tail

Calling off the Search, continued

A couple of years ago I wrote:

The great thing about weblogs is when you discover someone. Someone who makes sense to you, or someone who surprises you with a viewpoint you hadn't thought of. Once you have found them you can subscribe to their feeds and see how they can keep inspiring or surprising you.

The continuity of viewpoint within a blog is key - you can see more about them than just the one comment, and you can keep discovering and growing with them.

Blogs are about people. The Technorati redesign unveiled yesterday makes the people behind the blogs much more visible, and draws together the connections they make amongst themselves. One thing that has been noted is that we link blog names to profile pages on Technorati, (like this one for my blog), instead of to the blog home page. As always, the search result links go directly to the blog posts, but profile pages give an overview of the blog as we see it, and give more context to the favorite this link featured there.

As well as featuring bloggers' faces more prominently on the homepage, they are brought in many other places too - if you look at a tag results page, like technoratifeedback, or a blog tag like San Jose you'll see the faces of people who use that tag on their blogs, helping to create the community consensus the tag represents.

You can also see who has listed your blog amongst their favorites, again helping you find more people joining in the conversation, or to add to your own favorites reading list.

All these interconnected conversations give us much more to discover, so we don't have to search so hard.

Technorati Tags: blogs, favorite, tags, technorati, web 2.0

Inspired mashups - Star Trek/Python and more

While exploring the latest things my spiders have uncovered - often an interesting journey through the collective cosnsciousness - I found my way to a collection of inspired mashups. These artists have taken songs with a cultural resonance, and mixed them with video from another genre entirely to create something new and striking, but that partakes of both.

OK, that sounds pompous, especially when I'm talking about Star Trek characters acting the Camelot song from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (also seen in a lower quality YouTube version), but there is a deeper point here. In Lessig's Free Culture, Chapter 8 Transformers, he writes:

In February 2003, DreamWorks studios announced an agreement with Mike Myers, the comic genius of /Saturday Night Live/ and Austin Powers. According to the announcement, Myers and DreamWorks would work together to form a "unique filmmaking pact." Under the agreement, DreamWorks "will acquire the rights to existing motion picture hits and classics, write new storylines and--with the use of state-of-the-art digital technology--insert Myers and other actors into the film, thereby creating an entirely new piece of entertainment." The announcement called this "film sampling." As Myers explained, "Film Sampling is an exciting way to put an original spin on existing films and allow audiences to see old movies in a new light. Rap artists have been doing this for years with music and now we are able to take that same concept and apply it to film." Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying, "If anyone can create a way to bring old films to new audiences, it is Mike." Spielberg is right. Film sampling by Myers will be brilliant. But if you don't think about it, you might miss the truly astonishing point about this announcement. As the vast majority of our film heritage remains under copyright, the real meaning of the DreamWorks announcement is just this: It is Mike Myers and only Mike Myers who is free to sample. Any general freedom to build upon the film archive of our culture, a freedom in other contexts presumed for us all, is now a privilege reserved for the funny and famous--and presumably rich. This privilege becomes reserved for two sorts of reasons. The first continues the story of the last chapter: the vagueness of "fair use." Much of "sampling" should be considered "fair use." But few would rely upon so weak a doctrine to create. That leads to the second reason that the privilege is reserved for the few: The costs of negotiating the legal rights for the creative reuse of content are astronomically high. These costs mirror the costs with fair use: You either pay a lawyer to defend your fair use rights or pay a lawyer to track down permissions so you don't have to rely upon fair use rights. Either way, the creative process is a process of paying lawyers--again a privilege, or perhaps a curse, reserved for the few.

After all, what is the impact of these amateur (in the true sense of lovingly made) remixes? I want to share them with people. I showed it to Andrew, and realised that though he knows Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he hasn't seen the original Star Trek, so guess what's on my Netflix list now.

I hope the Pythons and Paramount (or whoever owns Star Trek these days), are smart enough to turn a blind eye to this kind of cherishing of cultural icons.

I just finished reading Don Quixote. Not only was it a moving and subtle work, but I was amazed at the playfulness with unreliable narrators, and the way the characters meet people who've read the first book in the second one. Cervantes, 400 years ago, played the kind of games with storytelling that Charlie Kaufman does now. Our culture is truly built on interlocking references to itself, and we need ot encourage them.

Technorati Tags: art , auctorial, copyright, creative commons, culture, digital rights, mashup, meme, remix, rhetoric, video

Rip, Mix, Burn

The Economist on iTunes:

Because the music store is only compatible with the iPod, a customer who wants to abandon Apple's player in favour of something else must replace all the music he downloaded from the store. It is as though a person's entire record collection worked on only one brand of gramophone. Hence with each song a customer buys, he binds himself a little more tightly to the iPod. Apple offers its customers a 'Trojan horse', according to Mr Shope. Customers embrace its iconic device, and then, like the hapless Trojans, find they have fallen into the hands of the gift-givers.

This thesis is only supportable if you ignore the original feature of iTunes, it's ability to burn CDs. Long before the iTunes Music Store, Apple ran the Rip, Mix Burn ad campaign, saying 'it's your music - burn it on a Mac'. When they introduced the iTMS, they retained this feature, so you can burn Red Book, uncompressed, unencrypted CDs of your iTunes Store purchases.
This is in fact the only reason I buy music from iTMS - if you do, make sure you burn the CDs as backups. And don't buy the videos - you can't burn them to DVD.

Rocketboom sputters?

Amanda Congdon announces by video on her dormant blog that she is leaving Rocketboom, due to differences with her business partner, Andrew Baron. Both Rocketboom and "Amanda Congdon" popped into Technorati's top searches this morning. Now all the 'make money from videoblogging' spin will need a new poster girl.

Technorati Tags: blogs, podcasting, Amanda Congdon, Rocketboom, video