Jeremy Hunt hates the Digital Economy Bill - will he block it?

I watched the Digital Economy Bill Second Reading debate yesterday, along with enough other twitter users to make #DEBill a global trending topic and many MP's names UK trends as we discussed it.

It was an interesting debate to watch, with good contributions from many backbench MPs who had clearly been listening to all sides of the discussion.

However, no amendments were moved - that happens today. Due to the 'washup' procedures in Parliament the Conservative front bench has an effeitive clause by clause veto over this bill. As Jeremy Hunt described the bill as:

"a weak, dithering and incompetent attempt to breathe life into Britain's digital economy.[...]We have examined this Bill clause by clause, and we agree with the hon. Gentleman that it could have been massively improved had this House been able to give it proper scrutiny in Committee. The Government have had plenty of opportunities to allow such scrutiny, and it is a matter of huge regret that we have not been able to provide it.[...]I want to say plainly to the Government that, while we recognise that some parts of the Bill will have to be let through if we are to avoid serious damage to the economy, other parts of it are totally unacceptable, and we will use every parliamentary means at our disposal to remove them.

Peter Luff put it more strongly:

Nevertheless, this is the most profoundly unsatisfactory constitutional process I have engaged with in my 18 years in the House. In his opening remarks the Secretary of State promised my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon and East Chelmsford (Mr. Whittingdale) that he would write up a list of precedents, but I do not believe-I could be proved wrong-that there is a single precedent for giving a major and controversial Bill a Second Reading once a general election has been announced. It is a scandal that the House is being asked to agree that tonight.

I have given the matter careful consideration and I make this commitment: if there is a Division, I will support the Bill because, under a true constitutional process, it deserves a Second Reading; it does not, though, deserve what will happen to it thereafter. However, I broadly support the aims and objectives of the Bill and will vote for its Second Reading should there be a Division-but I shall do so under duress and protest, because I hate and loathe the process in which I am forced to participate.

Adam Afriyie summed up:

It has been a very interesting debate, with a single theme unifying the contributions from Back and Front Benches across the House-that the Government appear to be rushing through an important piece of legislation without due scrutiny in the House of Commons. After 13 years of digital dithering, this Bill is all they have to show on the digital front. It is a missed opportunity of massive proportions. Not only is it discourteous to rush such a significant measure through Parliament in the dying days of a failed Government, but it is also incompetent.

Now given these opinions, they should use their veto wisely to get rid of the muddled clauses.

The new clause 18 is most egregious and is simplest to remove - all it does is handwave about how the Secretary of State can make some rules that then have to go before Parliament anyway. It's making up a new process that is almost as complex as passing a bill properly, but with upfront constraints.
Dump it, promise a copyright reform Bill.

The existing clause 18 is clearly bonkers, as it doesn't define 'internet location' or any of its terms, and surely violates the 'mere conduit' principle.

Clauses 10-17 have mushroomed into a complex parallel court system, with a presumption of guilt, not innocence, and an appeals model. They now have (thankfully) added the need to pass a resolution through both houses for all regulations.

Jeremy Hunt, cut the Gordian (Gordonian?) knot. Drop these rococo clauses and propose a sensible copyright reform bill for the next Parliament that reforms copyright and the net sensibly.

The Statute of Anne, the Digital Economy Bill and the Red Flag Act

This week marks the Tercentenary of the 1710 Statute of Anne - the world's first Copyright law. It also marks the first discussion of the Digital Economy Bill in the Commons. And in 1865, the Locomotive act was being discussed in the Commons too. How do they compare?

The Statute of Anne opens like this:

Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books;

In other words, its goal was to prevent those who have Printing machines from exploiting the creative Authors. Sadly, this aim went astray over the years, with Macaulay opposing extension in 1841 by saying:

At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouth of deserving men. Every body is well pleased to see them restrained by the law and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men of a character very different from that of the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?

The Digital Economy Bill is full of language designed to chill the self-publication that empowers authors online.

To me it most resembles the 1865 Locomotive Act, which attempted to protect the horse and carriage trade from meachanical locomotives by requiring that each one was preceded by a man on foot, 60 yards in front, carrying a red flag, and that speeds be limited to 4mph in the country and 2 mph in town.

The Digital Economy Bill, like the Locomotive Act, seeks to prevent what is in its title by constraining it to the limitations of pre-existing businesses that lobby the hardest. It should not pass.

Further Reading:

• Digital Economy Bill the Final Countdown - last plea to MPs before wash up by Lilian Edwards
• Call Your MP
• Three reasons why the Digital Economy Bill will damage British biz and what to do about piracy
• BBC: Call for 'fuller' debate on Digital Economy Bill
• The Digital Economy Bill: Thinking further about copyright by JP

The BPI's China-like clauses in the Digital Economy Bill

In January, Bono from his self-described bully pulpit in the NY Times, called for China-style net censorship to protect 'over-rewarded rock stars':

[...]the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.

We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content.

Rebecca MacKinnon today released her prepared Congressional testimony on the effects of Chinese net-blocking - I recommend reading the whole thing, but as the British Phonographic Industry took Bono up on his challenge, and wrote internet blocking by BPI fiat into the UK Digital Economy Bill, I thought I'd look at the parallels. A previous draft of the Bill compared poorly to Magna Carta; how does it line up against Chinese practice?

Rebecca MacKinnon:

Filtering or “blocking:” This is the original and best understood form of Internet censorship. Internet users on a particular network are blocked from accessing specific websites. The technical term for this kind of censorship is “filtering.” Some congressional proceedings and legislation have also referred to this kind of censorship as “Internet jamming.” Filtering can range in scope from a home network, a school network, university network, corporate network, the entire service of a particular commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP), or all Internet connections within a specific country. It is called “filtering” because a network administrator uses special software or hardware to block access to specified web pages by banning access to certain designated domain names, Internet addresses, or any page containing specified keywords or phrases.

Digital Economy Bill, Clause 18:

18 Preventing access to specified online locations for the prevention of online copyright infringement
In Part 1 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, after section 97A insert—
“97B Preventing access to specified online locations for the prevention of online copyright infringement
(1) The High Court (in Scotland, the Court of Session) shall have power to grant an injunction against a service provider, requiring it to prevent access to online locations specified in the order of the Court for the prevention of online copyright infringement.[...]
the Court shall order the service provider to pay the copyright owner’s costs of the application unless there were exceptional circumstances justifying the service provider’s failure to prevent access despite notification by the copyright owner.

Note the insidious allocation of costs there, which is designed to ensure that ISPs block access or remove content on accusation, before an injunction is applied for. Here's Rebecca again on how this works in practice in China:

Deletion and removal of content: Filtering is the primary means of censoring content over which the Chinese government has no jurisdiction. When it comes to websites and Internet services over which Chinese authorities do have legal jurisdiction – usually because at least some of the company’s operations and computer servers are located in-country – why merely block or filter content when you can delete it from the Internet entirely? In Anglo-European legal parlance, the legal mechanism used to implement such a system is called “intermediary liability.” The Chinese government calls it “self-discipline,” but it amounts to the same thing, and it is precisely the legal mechanism through which Google’s Chinese search engine, Google.cn, was required to censor its search results.[7]

All Internet companies operating within Chinese jurisdiction – domestic or foreign – are held liable for everything appearing on their search engines, blogging platforms, and social networking services. They are also legally responsible for everything their users discuss or organize through chat clients and messaging services. In this way, much of the censorship and surveillance work is delegated and outsourced by the government to the private sector – who, if they fail to censor and monitor their users to the government’s satisfaction, will lose their business license and be forced to shut down. It is also the mechanism through which China-based companies must monitor and censor the conversations of more than fifty million Chinese bloggers. Politically sensitive postings are deleted or blocked from ever being published. Bloggers who get too influential in the wrong ways can have their accounts shut down and their entire blogs erased. That work is done primarily not by “Internet police” but by employees of Internet companies.[8]

The language of clause 18 reflects this implied goal of "self-discipline" too:

(2)(b) the extent to which the operator of each specified online location has taken reasonable steps to prevent copyright infringement content being accessed at or via that online location or taken reasonable steps to remove copyright infringing content from that online location (or both),
(c) whether the service provider has itself taken reasonable steps to prevent access to the specified online location,

(3) An application for an injunction under subsection (1) shall be made on notice to the service provider and to the operator of each specified online location in relation to which an injunction is sought and to the Secretary of State.
[...](4)(b) the owner of copyright before making the application made a written request to the service provider giving it a reasonable period of time to take measures to prevent its service being used to access the specified online location in the injunction, and no steps were taken,

The Chinese government has also used its control over the domain name system to block dissent. Here's Rebecca's summary again:

Domain name controls: In December, the government-affiliated China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) announced that it would no longer allow individuals to register Internet domain names ending in .cn. Only companies or organizations would be able to use the .cn domain.[16] While authorities explained that this measure was aimed at cleaning up pornography, fraud, and spam, a group of Chinese webmasters protested that it also violated individual rights.[17]

Authorities announced that more than 130,000 websites had shut down in the cleanup. In January a Chinese newspaper reported that self-employed individuals and freelancers conducting online business had been badly hurt by the measure.[18] Later in February, CNNIC backtracked somewhat, announcing that individuals will once again be allowed to register .cn domains, but all applicants must appear in person to confirm their registration, show a government ID, and submit a photo of themselves with their application. [19] This eliminates the possibility of anonymous domain name registration under .cn and makes it easier for authorities to warn or intimidate website operators when “objectionable” content appears.

Up to now, the UK registrar has been broadly neutral and independent of the Government, but Clause 19 of the DE Bill grabs new broad powers:

19 Powers in relation to internet domain registries
After section 124N of the Communications Act 2003 insert—
“Powers in relation to internet domain registries

124O Notification of failure in relation to internet domain registry
(1) This section applies where the Secretary of State—
(a) is satisfied that a serious relevant failure in relation to a qualifying internet domain registry is taking place or has taken place, and
(b) wishes to exercise the powers under section 124P or 124R.
(2) The Secretary of State must notify the internet domain registry, specifying the failure and a period during which the registry has the opportunity to make representations to the Secretary of State.
(3) There is a relevant failure in relation to a qualifying internet domain registry if—
(a) the registry, or any of its registrars or end-users, engages in prescribed practices that are unfair or involve the misuse of internet domain names, or
(b) the arrangements made by the registry for dealing with complaints in connection with internet domain names do not comply with prescribed requirements.
(4) A relevant failure is serious, for the purposes of this section, if it has adversely affected or is likely adversely to affect—
(a) the reputation or availability of electronic communications networks or electronic communications services provided in the United Kingdom or a part of the United Kingdom, or
(b) the interests of consumers or members of the public in the United Kingdom or a part of the United Kingdom.
(5) In subsection (3) “prescribed” means prescribed by regulations made by the Secretary of State.

In other words, the Secretary of State gets to decide what counts as misuse, and reputational damage. Clauses 20 and 21 give further powers to take over management of a registry and change it's constitution, again by fiat.

What else does China do? It selectively disconnects people from the net. Here's Rebecca again:

Localized disconnection and restriction: In times of crisis when the government wants to ensure that people cannot use the Internet or mobile phones to organize protests, connections are shut down entirely or heavily restricted in specific locations. There have been anecdotal reports of Internet connections going down or text-messaging services suddenly not working in counties or towns immediately after local disturbances broke out. The most extreme case however is Xinjiang province, a traditionally Muslim region bordering Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan in China’s far Northwest. After ethnic riots took place in July of last year, the Internet was cut off in the entire province for six months, along with most mobile text messaging and international phone service. Nobody in Xinjiang could send e-mail or access any website – domestic or foreign. Businesspeople had to travel to the bordering province of Gansu just to communicate with customers.[20]

Internet access and phone service have now been restored, but with severe limitations on the number of text messages people can send on their mobile phones per day, no access to overseas websites, and even very limited access to domestic Chinese websites. Xinjiang-based Internet users can only access specially watered-down versions of official Chinese news and information sites, with many of the functions such as blogging or comments disabled.[21]

Clause 10 of the Digital Economy Bill makes Localized disconnection and restriction possible through 'technical obligations' imposed on ISPs:

10 Obligations to limit internet access: assessment and preparation
After section 124F of the Communications Act 2003 insert—
“124G Obligations to limit internet access: assessment and preparation
(1) The Secretary of State may direct OFCOM to—
(a) assess whether one or more technical obligations should be imposed on internet service providers;
(b) take steps to prepare for the obligations;
(c) provide a report on the assessment or steps to the Secretary of State.
(2) A “technical obligation”, in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against some or all relevant subscribers to its service for the purpose of preventing or reducing infringement of copyright by means of the internet.
(3) A “technical measure” is a measure that—
(a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber;
(b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use;
(c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or
(d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.

These clauses are in the Bill as it currently stands. They are not scheduled to be debated properly in the Commons. Harriet Harman, as leader of the Commons gets to decide if they are debated. The Open Rights Group has ways to take action, including writing to Harriet Harman and joining the protests in London on Wednesday 24th March.

Steve Jobs calls HTC Great Artists?

In 1996, in Bob Cringely's documentary Triumph of the Nerds, Steve Jobs said:

Picasso had a saying, he said "good artists copy, great artists steal". We have, you know, always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Here's the video:

Today, Apple's press release says:

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

Apple has suffered through many patent trolls over the years, and should understand how software patents limit innovation, indeed their consistent position on supporting Open Source Codecs in HTML5 has been that they are afraid of patent lawsuits. So this action can only be seen as an attack on innovation.

Twitter Theory applied to Google Buzz

I wrote a post last year about Twitter theory, and presented on it too so I thought I'd compare how Google Buzz fits in with them or not.

Flow

Buzz is a flow but it does show an unread count, and it's in your email inbox so the implicit pressure to read is there. You're not cued to dip in and out. Also, all replies come to your main inbox, privileging them over the flow from those you chose to follow.

Faces

There are faces of people next to the root Buzzes, tapping into the subtle nuances of trust we all carry in our heads, but not by the replies, making those 'comments from strangers' even more alien.

Phatic

The phatic feel of Twitter is partially there, but at the launch there was much talk of Google 'hiding the irrelevant' so the social gestures where we groom each other may be tidied away by an uncomprehending machine.

The replies from faceless strangers flooding your inbox if you respond to anyone with a large following will put people off interacting socially. The feeling of talking intimately to those you know is replaced by something closer to the 'naked in the school lunchroom' nightmare.

Following

Buzz does pick up Twitters asymmetric following model, and indeed adds a way to create private Buzzes for small groups, both key features. However, these are undermined by the confusing editing process. The Follower/Following editing is only in pop-up javascript dialogs on your Buzz in gmail and Google Profile pages, and because of the auto-follow onboarding, rather opaque. The groups editing is in Google Contacts, but that doesn't show the Followers, Following, Chat Friends, Latitude or other subgroups. There is also no way to see just conversations with those groups.

The overall effect makes it feel more like a Mornington Crescent server than Twitter. I made a Mornington Crescent Buzz account; it seems to fit.

Publics

Twitter's natural view is different for each of us, and is of those we have chosen. We each have our own public that we see and we address.

The subtlety is that the publics are semi-overlapping - not everyone we can see will hear us, as they don't necessarily follow us, and they may not dip into the stream in time to catch the evanescent ripples in the flow that our remark started. To see responses to us from those we don't follow, we have to click the Mentions tab. However, as our view is of those we choose to follow, our emotional response is set by that, and we behave more civilly in return.

Buzz reverses this. The general comments from friends are in the Buzz tab, but anyone can use '@' to mention you, forcing the whole conversational thread into your inbox. Similarly, if you comment on someone else's Buzz, any further updates to the web show up in your main email inbox. The tragedy of the comments ensues, where annoying people can take over the discussion, and their replies are privileged twice over those you choose to follow.

This is the YouTube comments problem yet magnified; when all hear the words of one, the conversation often decays.

Mutual media

By bringing in Twitter,blogs, Google Reader shared items, photos and other Activity Streams feeds, Buzz has the potential to be a way to connect the loosely coupled flows those of us who live in the listening Web to the email dwellers who may left behind. By each reading whom we choose to and passing on some of it to others, we are each others media, we are the synapses in the global brain of the web of thought and conversation. Although we each only touch a local part of it, ideas can travel a long way.

If the prioritisation of secondary commentary and poking over collated ideas can be reversed in Buzz, this could be made to work.

Small world networks

Social connections are a small-world network locally strongly-connected, but spreading globally in a small number of jumps. The email graph that Buzz taps into may be a worse model of real world social networks that articulated SNS's like Facebook, but it could be improved if the following and editing models are fixed.

Buzz's promise is that it builds on Activity Streams and other open standards, so it could help encourage others to do this better.

Standards are the links of the Social Web

Mike Arrington wrote a plea for better social software on Sunday:

The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.

Everything is decentralized, and no one is working to centralize stuff. I’ve got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook (and even a few on MySpace), reviews on Yelp (but movie reviews on Flixster), location on Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, status updates on Facebook and Twitter, and videos on YouTube. Etc. I’ve got dozens of social graphs on dozens of sites, and trying to remember which friends puts his or her pictures on which site is a huge challenge.

What enabled Google to solve the search problem was a common standard for expressing pages and the links between them, so that they could index the webpages and derive a metric for which ones were more important. They didn't do this by replacing the web with a structured database that they curated, they worked with the standards in use to make sense of it.

To solve the social conundrum we need the equivalent - agreed standards in widespread use so that we can generalize across sites. Fortunately, we have these. We have OpenID and OAuth for delegated login; we have XFN, other microformats and Portable Contacts for public and private people connections; we have Feeds and Activity Streams for translating social actions between sites.

This enabling social infrastructure means that we'll be able to have a new generation of sites that enhance our web experience through social filtering without our connections being centralised in a single company's database.

Once we get used to the experience of being able to delegate login, personal connections and activity updates, we'll look askance at developers who insist we create yet another profile and invite all our friends by email to experience their site; it'll be like a website without links.

iPad is the web made physical

What I wanted from the iPad—a very high-pixel-density HD screen in a small device—didn't happen. But in the commentary of my techie colleagues like David, Alex and Tim, I'm seeing another disappointment. They're saying 'this isn't a computer like I grew up with'. It's not the generative machine that can be bent to our will to do anything, it's a display device.

Now this is true, but it reminds me of programmers complaining about the Web, as opposed to native applications. The Web is something that started out as a display medium, but is now the platform we all expect to build our applications on, precisely because it is an abstraction that comes between us and the particular hardware our users are running. The web is an agreement on how to phrase things.

The iPad picks up this agreement and delivers on it in a new form, but exceptionally well. When the iPhone was launched, I said that the web was the one standard even Steve Jobs can't ignore. This is reinforced by the iPad - it opens with web browsing, and the Book format adopted, ePub, is built on HTML.

I would prefer it if anyone could distribute native apps for the iPad, but we all can create websites.

The big difference the iPhone brought, and that the iPad builds on is the pervasive ability to zoom in and out easily. I think that this will lead to a change in how we think about user experience, with the deep zooming experience we are familar with from Google Maps and now Prezi becoming natural in more and more apps.

Audio, Video, HTML5 and standards

The chaps at Mozilla, Christopher Blizzard and Robert O'Callahan reopened the HTML5 <audio> and <video> debate yesterday, with a spirited defence of their decision to support only the patent-unencumbered* Ogg format and Vorbis and Theora codecs in Firefox releases as part of their HTML5 support.

Now, I understand their motives here - back when I was at Apple, I spent a big chunk of time trying get permission to add support for Vorbis to QuickTime, but didn't manage to get it past Apple management's fears. However, all the browsers I use now claim to support HTML5 <audio> and <video>, so I thought I'd try it out. I made some simple test pages using mp3, .au and WAV files, to see how they were supported.

What I found was a bit disappointing - it seems that the way that the spec is written, you can support <audio> but no file formats or codecs at all (my Droid does this), and if you can't play the file you're not supposed to show the fallback HTML contents

This means that Firefox, Droid won't show the link to the audio file below:

though browsers that don't support <audio> at all will. Here's the markup:
<audio src="http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/dystopia.mp3" controls><a href="http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/dystopia.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"> Looking Up From Dystopia </a></audio>

However, if I use a direct link or an embedded <iframe>, Firefox will use available plugins to play the file (both Flash and QuickTime happily play mp3's). Thus using <audio> give me less compatibility with current browsers.

On phone browsers, odder things happen - iPhone gives a clickable button for the <audio>, but auto-loads an <iframe>; Droid ignroes iFrames, Palm Pre doesn't have <audio> but <iframe> behaves like the iPhone.

Smarter behaviour with declarative audio would be nice here.

*Submarine patent trolls keeping periscopes down may exist.

Publics, Flow, Phatic, Tummeling and Out-groups - New Words You Need to Know to Understand the Web

Kevin Marks
Originally uploaded by O'Reilly Conferences

Last week at Web2expo I gave a 10-minute keynote on the new vocabulary needed to understand where the web is going - most of this comes from sociology and anthropology. If you've been following my blog, you'll recognise this inculdes ideas from my Twitter in Theory post, from the Flow Past Web, from one on Digital Publics and of course from the Tummler post. Here's the video:


And here's the presentation, which uses Prezi's mindmap-as-presentation software:

We'll be Fruitful, Virile and Fertile, they can keep Viral

This weekend, Adam Penenberg wrote a post at Techcrunch Let’s Kill “Viral”: It’s Time For a New Word in which, after being ridiculed by radio hosts over the title of his book 'The Viral Loop' he says:

The problem, I think, is the word “viral,” which comes from biology and was retrofitted to cover the phenomenon of word-of-mouth—or on the Web, so-called “word-of-mouse”—dissemination of ideas. I propose we kill it and replace it with something better.

Now this is a topic I've spoken and written about before, but I think Adam is missing the point again.

As I said then, if you behave like a disease, people develop an immune system. I don't think changing the name is enough - we need to change practice too. Viruses are exploitative - they hijack normal reproduction to propagate their genes at the expense of the host. This is an accurate metaphor for the kinds of scammy social applications that Mike Arrington described in his Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell post this weekend, aimed at the same app developers I was talking to originally in 2008.

When I read Adam's interview with Caterina Fake it was obvious that Caterina's expert Tummling was key to Flickr's growth, and it didn't fit Adam's 'Viral' framing. Caterina says:

But a game built for adults, where communication could come more freely, would mean the social interactions would be much more fruitful.

They also have this exchange:

Penenberg: There's both a good and bad side to virality. Products with viral hooks that are so strong they coerce people to sign up--in order to achieve a huge initial viral rush--are obviously bad. Not only do they alienate users, they don't lead to a sustainable business. On the good side, you have organic growth, which comes as a natural byproduct of something that spreads simply because people like it--eBay, Hot or Not, and Flickr. I can't think of an antonym for it.
Fake: How about brute force growth?
Penenberg: That's good. Maybe we should trademark the term.

Clearly Adam is struggling with his stale metaphor here, trying to come up with better terminiology. When I mentioned this on twitter, Caterina responded with

Things on the internet grow fungally, not virally. The metaphor is completely wrong.

and

I was a former member of the SF Mycological Society. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of mycelia, underground...

Which fits perfectly with my organic reproduction metaphors.

So lets keep the term 'viral' for explotatative applications that violate trust to reproduce against the interests of their hosts, and we can use organic terms like 'fruitful', or if we insist on alliterative euphony, 'virile videos', 'fertile films' and maybe even 'philoprogenitive photographs'.

Baron Mandelson and Magna Carta

Almost 800 years ago in 1215, a group of Barons pinned King John down and got a written list of rights, some of which are still British Law. This week, by contrast, Baron Mandelson plans to revoke rights by government fiat. Lets compare. Magna Carta:

(20) For a trivial offence, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offence, and for a serious offence correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive him of his livelihood. In the same way, a merchant shall be spared his merchandise, and a villein the implements of his husbandry, if they fall upon the mercy of a royal court. None of these fines shall be imposed except by the assessment on oath of reputable men of the neighbourhood.

(38) In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.

(39) No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

(40) To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.

(61)[...]We will not seek to procure from anyone, either by our own efforts or those of a third party, anything by which any part of these concessions or liberties might be revoked or diminished. Should such a thing be procured, it shall be null and void and we will at no time make use of it, either ourselves or through a third party.

The Digital Economy Bill is not so clearly written, but:

(1) This section applies if it appears to a copyright owner that—
(a) a subscriber to an internet access service has infringed the owner’s copyright by means of the service; or
(b) a subscriber to an internet access service has allowed another person to use the service, and that other person has infringed the owner’s copyright by means of the service.
(2) The owner may make a copyright infringement report to the internet service provider who provided the internet access service if a code in force under section 124C or 124D (an “initial obligations code”) allows the owner to do so.

Which sounds like it's 'own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it' to me.

124H Obligations to limit internet access
(1) The Secretary of State may at any time by order impose a technical obligation on internet service providers if the Secretary of State considers it appropriate in view of—
(a) an assessment carried out or steps taken by OFCOM under section 124G; or
(b) any other consideration.

Not 'lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land' or 'proportional' or 'assessment on oath of reputable men of the neighbourhood', just 'any other consideration' the Secretary of State feels like.

302A Power to amend Part 1 and this Part
(1) The Secretary of State may by order amend Part 1 or this Part for the purpose of preventing or reducing the infringement of copyright by means of the internet, if it appears to the Secretary of State appropriate to do so having regard to technological developments that have occurred or are likely to occur.
[...]
(5) The power may be exercised so as to—
(a) confer a power or right or impose a duty on any person;
(b) modify or remove a power, right or duty of any person;
(c) require a person to pay fees.

Again, the Secretary of State can make anyone do anything, or pay anything, without due process, preserving livelihood, lawful judgment. It's the exact opposite of the 'anything by which any part of these concessions or liberties might be revoked or diminished' being 'null and void and we will at no time make use of it' clause.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'll take the drafting of Geoffrey de Mandeville and the other 24 Barons from 1215 over Peter Mandelson and Sion Simon.

For a thorough legal discussion, read Lillian Edwards post, then sign the petition and join the Open Rights Group.

T-mobile's Contacts Roach Motel loses them all

I've had a Sidekick since 2004 when I was at Technorati - it's great keyboard and integrated support for web, email, instant messaging and the built-in app store that meant I could add an SSH terminal was perfect for being on call to fix servers while commuting by train.
Another great innovation was storing all contacts, calendars, emails etc in the cloud, so upgrading phones—even to new models—meant that you just turned it on and it quickly synced up.
When I switched to Android last year, I kept the Sidekick contract (and my wife's) because the info was there. It didn't have an export option, and I put a 'write a GreaseMonkey export for t-mobile's website' on my to-do list, but never quite got to it.
Now, they say we've lost all of this data. The moral of the story is not to trust data Roach Motels that only import and don't export. Demand that your contacts store supports the Portable Contacts API, or at minimum vCard export. Check it today, before you lose yours.

in reference to:

"Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low"
- Sidekick™ - T-Mobile Forums (view on Google Sidewiki)

Tummling, SideWiki, Twitter and the Tragedy of the Comments revisited

Says Marshall Kirkpatrick in Twitter is More Likely to Be Meaningful Than TV

In one of those conversations, Kevin Marks (formerly of Technorati and Google, now at British Telecom) told me the following: he believes that Twitter is more likely to be interesting than television because we opt-in to particular streams of other peoples’ updates that we find interesting. That creates a positive feedback loop that encourages us to contribute something interesting in return and thus the ecosystem trends towards higher quality content. Do you agree with that?

Marks also said this was an advantage that Twitter and other opt-in subscription-stream formats have over things like YouTube comments. What of the “I don’t care what you ate for breakfast” critique of Twitter? Marks says that’s just people who have an antiquated view of what belongs “in public,” based on a time when content had to go through expensive publishing processes before being broadcast to the public and thus had to be unusually important to be worth it.

I had a great conversation about RealTime and attention with Marshall, but I think he has coalesced two separate thoughts of mine into one here, in an interesting way. I do find Twitter more interesting than TV, but I realise that may not be a common view.

The first point I was making was that 'realtime' is a mistaken emphasis - what is really interesting is the interplay between the formerly required-realtime technologies like radio/TV and telephony that are now able to be buffered, and the formerly delayed response media like writing, blogging, emailing that are now moving to lower-latency modes. I discussed this in The Flow Past Web

My second one was that the other thing that Twitter makes obvious is the value of semi-overlapping publics - that we all see a different web, and that the default assumption that everyone should read every comment on a forum is an idea that fails at scale too, as one troll or disruptive person can spoil everyone's reading - the Tragedy of the Comments.

Twitter's 'Following' model is powerful here for both its first-order and second-order effects.

The first order effect is that by default we see interesting and friendly comments from people we have chosen to follow, which makes us more likely to want to read on. That people favour and retweet and repeat what they find interesting helps us expand our circles of trust outward to new people.

The second-order effect is that as what we see is mostly interesting, funny, polite and so on, we respond in that vein too (assuming that is what we are reading; certainly there can be self-reinforcing intolerance too, but it is more contained).

Conversely, it is possible to have intelligent and thoughtful conversations in a public, read-everything space too, but for this to work there needs to be someone there setting the tone and establishing the norm - being a Tummler. This week Heather Gold, Deb Schultz and I piloted a show on Leo Laporte's podcast network called Tummel Talk about this important skill and phenomenon, with Jerry Michalski as our first guest. We'll be talking about the idea some more on Social Media Hour with Cathy Brooks on Tuesday 29th September

The skill of Tummling is important, and we need to hold it in mind as we build social tools on the web. Which brings me back to Google SideWiki.

At it's heart, SideWiki is yet another blogging tool, where the blogposts happen to be hosted on your Google profile page. However, as it is deployed inside Google Toolbar, you can see the posts attached to the pages that they are written about as you browse to them.

Google attempts to show the 'most important' comments first, using a combination of voting and other ranking algorithms, but it is still attempting to show everyone the same comment ordering, not taking personal 'following' into account. For SideWiki to succeed, I think this will need to change.

Sidewiki does another interesting thing - it matches comments to the same words elsewhere on the web. For example, my comment on Douglas Adams excellent 1999 piece also shows up in SideWiki on JP Rangiswami's blog where he quotes Douglas Adams too.

This hints at a greater possibility for SideWiki - to weave the web together by better by showing commentary across the web from all places that quote and cite each other, correlating by textual quotation and adding annotated links to the commentary from people we trust most.

This is a way Google could use it's scale of indexing to weave a better web for us to read, through our own chosen trusted sources, rather than funneling commentary into being hosted on its own pages.
(original Google Sidewiki comment)

In 1999, Douglas Adams got it right

"How to stop worrying and love the internet" is a prescient essay on how the web has evolved since, because it gets to the heart of the transition back to interactivity from mass media. It touches on the nature of trust and how that is realised on the net, and how the net makes clear that the institutional shortcuts to trust no longer hold.
What we need is to connect what is said on the net to people. If we see a face next to a comment that we recognise, we can apply the trust models in our brain to it, which is far more subtle than anything a computer can decide for us, and is also unique to each of us.

in reference to:

"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’."
- DNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet (view on Google Sidewiki)

Pear Analytics Study Missing the Phatic Wood for the Qualitatative Buckets

A while back we embarked on a study that evolved after a having a debate in the office as to how people are using and consuming Analytics. Some felt it was their source of news and articles, others felt it was just a bunch of self-promotion with very few folks actually paying attention. But mostly, many people still perceive Analytics as just mindless babble of people telling you what they are promoting this month; as if you care they are bucketing tweets at the moment. (See our last post on Analytics: Is Anyone Paying Attention?).

So we took 2,000 Analytics reports from the public timeline (in English and in the US) over a 2-week period from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and captured Analytics reports in half-hour increments. Then we categorized them into 6 buckets:

News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value.
Results

The results were interesting. As you may have guessed, Pointless Babble won with 40.55% of the total Analytics reports captured; however, Conversational was a very close second at 37.55%, and Pass-Along Value was third (albeit a distant third) at 8.7% of the Analytics reports captured.

Conclusion

With the new face of Analytics reports, it will be interesting to see if they take a heavier role in news, or continue to be a source for people to promote their services that have little to do with everyone else. We will be conducting this same study every quarter to identify other trends in usage.

Since Analytics reports are still loaded with lots of babbling that not many of have time for, you should check out the Twitter filter, following people you trust, and linking to great blogposts.