Free Culture readathon

I joined in AKMA’s "free culture readathon":

Anyone feel like recording a chapter of Lawrence Lessig’s new book?

The license pretty clearly indicates that, so long as we’re not making a commercial venture of it, we can make a recording of (“perform”) the text. There are a Preface, Introduction, fifteen chapters, a conclusion and an afterword.

I recorded the Preface of Free Culture which has me referring to Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace as 'my first book', which is a kind of lèse majesté, or Lessig majesté.

I used the Audacity Open Source Audio editor for this, which works very nicely, and reminds me of SoundEdit from long ago.

Here's a QuickTime version for people on slow modems.

[updated 2014 to fix dead links thanks to Apple being crap] Here's the previously unpublished dance remix I made then:

Life imitates code?

At Technorati, I've been writing 'spiders' - little bits of code that scuttle over the web indexing pages when roused. We normally have hundreds running around at once. So I was interested to see these spider hatchlings in the garden on Thursday, swarming over a web, trying to make sense of it.

Big picture of baby spider cluster

How prior would you like that art?

Jeneane's Phonecon made me smile, but the early days of telephony were full of inventive people trying out new services and business models.

With the Patent Office moving toward rejecting the Eolas plug-in patent on prior art grounds, maybe it's time for them to reconsider the Acacia and SightSound patents that take an obvious idea and add the word 'digital', and then go around shaking down anyone doing rich media online.

Alexander Graham Bell invested heavily in a company to send opera over the telephone for a fee in the 19th Century.

Live music over the phone was happening in 1877, and remote playback by telephone in 1888 and even remote paid playback of recordings over the phone on demand, from 1909.

Black, White, Grey and mediAgora

I know I've been quiet on the mediAgora front recently, but the Grey Album case is in many ways a perfect example of the mediAgora principle of rewarding Creators of both derivative and original works.

Imagine, if you will, a parallel universe where The Beatles 'White Album' and Jay-Z's 'Black Album' had been released under mediAgora licences.

Along comes Danger Mouse, and mixes the two to make the 'Grey Album', and releases it for sale under a mediAgora license too.

So what happens?

He list both monochromatic albums as 'source works'. Everyone who buys 'The Grey Album' has to own a copy of the two source albums too. If they already do, they just pay Danger Mouse; if they own The Beatles but not Jay-Z they pay him and Danger Mouse.

As DM is generating incremental sales in this way, he gets promotion fees from the other two.

And all those bloggers pointing to the Grey Album? They get promotion fees from Danger Mouse, insofar as they generate sales (and have bought a copy themselves).

End result - every Customer has 3 great albums, and all Creators involved get paid the price they set.

And even Glenn Miller and the orchestras George Martin and the Beatles sampled could be rewarded too.

Technorati, Xanadu and other dreams

Tim Oren says nice things about Technorati:

As we all know, Ted Nelson meant hypertexts to have bidirectional links. But due to a laboratory accident in Switzerland, we ended up with this lame thing. Mechanisms such as Google link search and Technorati are just hacks, ways to leverage Moore's Law to ameliorate a fundamental flaw in our hypertext data architecture, crawling the Web faster and faster to aggregate all of our trackbacks.

Yesterday, David Sifry convinced me that's just wrong. What Nelson missed, with his focus on 'literary' architectures, is that networked hypertexts are inhabited by people. Links are not just citations. They are gestures in a social space, parts of conversations or other interactions. There's an inherent value in looking at the dynamics of the record as it is created.

Obviously I agree with the broad thrust of this or wouldn't be working at Technorati. However, I think the one-way nature of links was necessary for the Web to achieve what it did. The globally connected nature of the web as a small world network is built on a scale-free distribution of linkage. If all links are required to be two-way, this rapidly becomes unwieldy and cumbersome - imagine if the front page of Apple.com showed all the inbound links to it. The unidirectionality created the permission-free linking culture the web depends on, and reversing those links in a useful way is an interesting problem we're having fun solving - the hot products page is an example of this.

In fact, that page addresses another issue, if obliquely. Shelley asked how being a community member affects your writing:

[W]eblogging [is] different than Big Media, because it puts publishing in the hands of the people. I have to presume they think this is a good thing because webloggers can write what they want, and aren't censored. Unlike Big Media, we aren't accountable to an editor, or big companies, or important politicians.

But I guess we're accountable to each other, and that's the most dangerous censorship of all -- it's the censorship of the commons.

Indeed. I think this is a good thing. The fact that when blogging we are accountable for our writings and their public history acts, in general, in a good way - it makes us stop to think about our reactions before they 'end upon our permanent record'. Shelley's own campaign against comment spammers that violate community norms in this way is an example. David Weinberger in 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined' put it this way:

A human being raised in isolation would not be identifiably human in anything except DNA. Sociality grants a mute herd of brutes their souls and selves.

The example of what happens when anonymity is allowed in Amazon reviews, leading to all kinds of dubious behaviour was revealed in the NYT , and picked up by auctorial bloggers like Cory and Neil Gaiman. The bloggers' comments show up in context with the rest of their writings, so you can gather whether you are likely to agree with them generally too.

For example, when Lago attacks Vote Links for reinforcing hegemony I can see that he is the same person who threatened to offer Joi a reading list, but then didn't, so I can offer him one instead:

DRM a sign of Disney's malaise

Mitch Wagner:

DRM doesn't work and consumers don't want it, so of course it's very appealing to big business, who are also in a big rush to sell other, equally practical products, such as anchovy flavored ice cream and bicycles with square wheels.

We learned that DRM doesn't work in the late 80s, only back then it was applied to software and we called it 'copy protection.'

Not much to add, but it's good to see the meme spread.

Vote Links

A while back I made a proposal for 'Vote Links' - a way to indicate that just because you are linking to something, you are not necessarily endorsing it (which is the default assumption by search engines and other dumb robots).
My original proposal used a nonstandard attribute which would make it hard to validate.
Tantek has helped me create an XHTML compliant Vote Links specification, which we'll be talking about tonight at the Technorati Participant Session and the XHTML Semantics session at ETCon.

Technorati at Etcon

We've got Dave's talk at etcon this morning. Here's the newest thing - the recent amazon products page

See what amazon products people have blogged about recently.

Power laws and blogs: first, the classic power law chart - note how smooth the curve is - no saturation due to no barriers to entry.

In fact, if you count up the total number of blogs with links you see a different picture - look how the 'little' blogs totally outweight the top few.

Technorati is Hiring

I don't think I've mentioned it here yet, but as Director of Engineering at Technorati,we're hiring.

The Mass Media bubble bursts

Doc and I were taking about this the other day, and tonight I remembered how well Douglas Adams explained the end of Mass media five years ago:

Because the Internet is so new we still don�t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that�s what we�re used to. So people complain that there�s a lot of rubbish online, or that it�s dominated by Americans, or that you can�t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can�t �trust� what people tell you on the web anymore than you can �trust� what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can�t easily answer back � like newspapers, television or granite. Hence �carved in stone.� What should concern us is not that we can�t take what we read on the internet on trust � of course you can�t, it�s just people talking � but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV � a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no �them� out there. It�s just an awful lot of �us�.

Read the whole thing. Regularly.

Orlowski trolls again

In his latest rambling, shambling semi-coherent collection of innuendo, semi-sourced smears and out of context quotes with no attempt at fact-checking or giving anyone the chance to reply, Orlowski says:

"What sort of people go to these?" he asks, rhetorically. The panel on Political Blogging doesn't even include a Political Blogger. We can help answer that one: andsometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. (Taken at the $500 a head BloggerCon conference).

Now that is a picture with me in the middle. Admittedly Adam Curry, Elizabeth Spiers, Jeff Jarvis and Charlie Nesson are there too, but what is he trying to say? That we use laptops in public?

He even repeats his widely debunked Googlewashing hogwash.

Fortunately we don't need to worry about him giving space for responses - you can read the rebuttals here.

RSS Winterfest - I'm speaking

I'm speaking at RSS Winterfest this morning, with Anil Dash and others on 'RSS 2.0 and Atom'

Tune in

Categorising blogs

Why I Write - George Orwell :

There are four great motives for writing:
1. Sheer egoism.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.
3. Historical impulse.
4. Political purpose.

Seems like one way to categorize blogs.

Technorati beta test

Dave Sifry just announced what I've been working on with him: We focused 100% of our time on completely refurbishing our underlying event engine - essentially taking a Volkswagen engine out and putting a Ferrari engine in.

Head on over to http://beta.technorati.com and try it out.

Or recursively see who has linked to it at the beta Technorati beta cosmos

Alienaid: Iowa Caucases

I think these were explained by Lewis Carroll:

What I was going to say,' said the Dodo in an offended tone, `was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.'

`What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.

`Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)

First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?'

This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.'