Still going after all these years.
The Draw Batgirl meme hit Livejournal yesterday, after having started on Monday with a set of sketches by Andi Watson. A few others pitched in, and then yesterday it hit a fever pitch. The final tally is still growing, but right now it’s something over 500 original drawings of Batgirl, most with their own unique character designs, and almost all executed between yesterday afternoon and this morning.
As Jeffrey Rowland says, sometimes the inter net is okay.
Hi folks–an unusual request here. I put my name in the hat over at TechCrunch for a free pass to the South by Southwest Interactive Conference (SXSWi) in March and was selected as one of the finalists, largely on the strength of this blog. Michael Arrington, the author of TechCrunch, is going to give away the pass based on the results of a poll on his site.
I’d like to go to the conference to ask difficult questions about DRM and the rights of customers at every panel. So I’m asking for your help. Between now and midnight tonight (sorry for the short notice–just saw the poll today!), please go and put in a vote for me.
Periodically in the battle against customer-hostile software products, my energy flags. Then another product comes along that flagrantly traduces the bounds of decency, and I am reenergized. Today’s case in point: the Complete New Yorker. Boing Boing captures part of the problem with the product: its design on multiple DVDs makes it difficult to access content in any way but a straightforward chronology.
This is poor product design. One supposes that if the developers had actually thought about how customers might like to use a complete archive of some of the finest short writing of the 20th century, they would have identified the following use cases:
But the team inexplicably failed to anticipate the latter two uses of their product, which are not only completely predictable needs but also arguably represent the bulk of the value of an electronic collection. (Otherwise one might as well truck down to the local library and read the original issues in hardcover collections, the way we did back in the 1960s, or on microfilm the way we did in the 1970s and 1980s.)
Or, worse, they anticipated the customer requirement but ignored it, or argued that it wasn’t important. Which is essentially what the original complainant, Mister Jalopy, found out when he listened to a call in show with the project’s manager, Ed Klaris, also special counsel for the magazine:
…it was a decision… based on the product we decided to come out with, which was DVD’s. We wanted people to have similar experiences, instead of… and the experience we wanted them to have was this one, although I know it can be frustrating to go disc to disc, the way I viewed it is, when you are in a disc you can set your program to look just within that disc and there’s 500 issues in there. Oftentimes, you can spend an eternity just on a single disc…
In my business we call that a technology driven decision, rather than a customer driven decision. We also (at least the more enlightened of us) call it awfully damned condescending. “We know the experience we want you to have, so we’re going to close off all the other experiences you might think you want.” Codswallop.
And then to go over the top and reserve in the license agreement your right to eavesdrop on the private reading of your customers? And to share it with third parties? Oh, that’s more than merely adding insult to injury, and Mister Jalopy does a fine job of elaborating why in his post. And this isn’t even to mention the fact that the supposedly complete collection omits nine issues, eight of which come from 1989, the year of the fall of Communism.
Bottom line: I think I’ll skip it and recommend that others do the same. Perhaps those who own the beast will do the due diligence on what level of spying is actually performed by this product and give us an update. I am available for consulting for anyone who would care to try the experiment.
With the new photocasting capability of the just announced iPhoto update from Apple, which uses RSS as a medium for photo subscriptions, Apple has turned a corner, and so has RSS. I think the day of the monolithic aggregator may be coming to an end. The direction is now toward contextual RSS: feeds of information showing up in applications where they make the most sense. There is no question that iTunes provides a superior experience for subscribing to podcasts–with clear, built-in controls for managing playback and machinery in the form of smart playlists for organizing content.
The other side: Apple is now clearly committed to using RSS as a sharing technology across the Internet, and providing innovative new user experiences for RSS usage. Today’s announcement is in some ways a bigger deal than the iTunes podcasting support. There Apple was hopping on a phenomenon that someone else had created. Today it’s using RSS and the podcasting phenomenon to enrich the sharing experience for its customers.
There’s just one sour note–the out-of-box ability to publish an RSS feed of your own photos from iPhoto requires a paid .Mac subscription. But the same has always been true for the out-of-box ability to publish your own photos to the Web, and it hasn’t stopped innovative developers from creating plugins to allow publishing to arbitrary destinations. And the content that gets published to .Mac is just plain RSS. While I’ll be interested to see what extensions got plopped on this time, this is still really positive.
Update: Even more positive, since you can use iMovie to create video podcasts.
This is what the Internet is for: turning up articles in Canadian medical journals about using SuperSoakers (in lieu of conventional irrigation devices) to remove impacted earwax. With picture (of the procedure, not the actual cerumen, alas).
The article is almost as much fun as the concept, with several keeper quotations, including my favorite: “The patient later reported a resumption in his nighttime ability to hear his infant son crying, which led to his being able to promptly jump out of bed and attend to his son’s needs, excluding breast-feeding” (um, emphasis added).
Last summer’s blogging survey by Cameron Marlow, who created the Blogdex tool at the MIT Media Labs in 2001, has become this week’s backlash story. Marlow promised to publish the results of the research at the end of the summer, then didn’t, and has indicated through an interview with the Bostonist that he’s just too swamped with work at his new job at Yahoo! to publish it. The reaction from the blogging community, who put out a bunch of buttons and banners to encourage people to fill out the survey, has been annoyed at best, angry at worst (as in the headline from Universal Hub above).
I’ve requested a copy of the thesis from the MIT archives. Copyright will prevent me from republishing the whole thing, but I hope to at least get the abstract on line. But I’d like to do better. Cameron, if you’re out there, I’d like to offer my services as a stats savvy MIT (Sloan) grad and blogger to help get the summary of the survey results on line. After all, it’s our collective alma mater’s reputation on the line. Plus I want to see the data too. How ’bout it?
Missed this over the weekend: WordPress 2.0 (née 1.6) has been released. I will be looking at the process to upgrade from 1.5 on the Boycott Sony blog, which is currently on WordPress 1.5. (This blog is on the Manila platform.)
Changelist, and what’s new from a developer’s perspective. I’m most excited about the default inclusion of Akismet for distributed spam blocking, as comment moderation for spam comments takes some time today.
Boing Boing: NSA stops using web cookies on NSA.gov after privacy protests. This after news that whitehouse.gov also drops cookies, these from a third party tracking site. Both actions are in violation of federal directives banning the use of persistent cookies.
Especially juicy quote from security consultant Richard M. Smith of Cambridge, who reportedly “questioned whether persistent cookies would even be of much use to the security agency. They are great for news sites and others with repeat visitors, Mr. Smith said, but the agency’s site does not appear to have enough fresh content to warrant more than occasional visits.” Heh.
Interesting, btw, how many times Richard M. Smith drops a choice quote for stories like these (see his comments on the DMCA and on Sony BMG). He’s becoming the Larry Sabato of computer security stories.
A year and change after announcing his departure from the San Jose Mercury News, Dan Gillmor announced the formation of the Center for Citizen Media yesterday, a nonprofit think tank with a focus on the “grassroots media sphere” and “citizen journalism.” The center starts out with two partnerships–one with Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and one with Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. That also makes Dan a double fellow–an I.F. Stone Teaching Fellow (Berkeley) and a Research Fellow (Berkman).
Institutional support from organizations like the Center for Citizen Media won’t singlehandedly make or break the case for citizens being taken seriously as part of the global flow of news, but it will raise the profile of citizen journalism and bring some much needed balancing perspectives to discussions of the rights of bloggers. This is very good news indeed.
I always remember Christmas as one of the most peaceful times in the blogosphere, and my stats back me up. So why does it seem that major blogging services are dropping like snowflakes right now? On the heels of the Six Apart outage comes a daylong outage at Kinja, the aggregator that powers the consolidated Hooblogs view (and, apparently, the Add to Kinja graphic in my sidebar. Ooops).
I think these folks could use some IT service management software. But that’s just my professional opinion.
(Disclaimer: I’m employed by iET Solutions as a product manager.)
Seen on Scripting News: Google Music Search (see also announcement on the Google Blog). Pretty slick way to organize information about music from around the web. Included: links to album art, organized list of songs, buy links, lyrics (though perhaps not for long). Probably never included: links to MP3 files or torrents.
I wonder what their source of data is, btw. Artists on independent sites like CDBaby aren’t picked up (no Suspicious Cheese Lords, Justin Rosolino’s first album is present but not his latest), but obscure long dead bands like Annabouboula are.
Over at the Sony Boycott Blog, I just posted a longish (albeit first draft) essay called “Using Blogs and the Media for Change: The Sony BMG Case Study.” It tries to analyze the timeline of media coverage around the Sony story together with events in the case to draw some general conclusions on how blogs can change the world. Comments welcome.
Stop what you are doing, right now, and go read Doc Searls’ latest for Linux Journal: Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes.
Key quote:
Of course, at its base level the Net is a system of pipes and packets. But it’s not only packets, or “content” or anything for that matter). Understanding the Net only in transport terms is like understanding civilization in terms of electrical service or human beings only in terms of atoms and molecules. We miss the larger context.
That context is best understood as a place. When we speak of the Net as a “place” or a “space” or a“world” or a “commons” or a “market” with “locations” and “addresses” and “sites” that we “build,” we are framing the Net as a place.
Most significantly, the Net is a marketplace. In fact, the Net is the largest, most open, most free and most productive marketplace the world has ever known. The fact that it’s not physical doesn’t make it one bit less real. In fact, the virtuality of the Net is what makes it stretch to worldwide dimensions while remaining local to every desktop, every point-of-sale device, every ATM machine. It is in this world-wide marketplace that free people, free enterprise, free cultures and free societies are just beginning to flourish. It is here that democratic governance is finally connected, efficiently, to the governed.
It is on and not just through—prepositions are key here—the Net that governments will not only derive their just powers from the consent of the governed but benefit directly from citizen involvement as well.
Why is Doc’s piece important? Key quote from the opposite side, Edward Whiteacre, CEO of SBC:
[BusinessWeek]: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?
How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?
The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!
And Doc’s right about the importance of reframing the discussion in terms of a marketplace, rather than just a transport system. Trivial as the distinction sounds, it matters. All words matter in discussions like this. Think of how important calling the anti-abortion movement the “Right to Life” movement has been in terms of re-framing the debate–instead of arguing about the economic and health effects of denying abortions, we’re talking about when life begins. And it took weeks of stories linking the words “Sony DRM” to the words “spyware” and “rootkit” (and “boycott”) for people to stop talking about controlling “consumer use of media” and start talking about the real threats to individuals—and corporations—that are introduced by the uncontrolled rush toward DRM.
And if we succeed in reframing the discussion, then we have a leg on which we can fight the Broadcast Flag, and the HD Radio Content Act of 2005, and the Analog Content Security Preservation Act of 2005, and clueless broadband providers who want their customers to be “consumers,” and on and on and on.
Enough. Go read. I need to finish reading the piece myself. It’s long, but it might be the most important thing you read this month.
Hey folks. If things are a little quiet here today, it’s because the Boycott Sony blog is kind of getting Slashdotted at present. “Kind of” because there’s no direct /. link, just a link in a comment on a related article that has still steered almost 900 visits here. At the same time the blog has been linked as related to a BBC article about the situation, so things are a bit hectic. Feel free to stop by and join the discussion.
I’m having trouble keeping up with the Sony BMG DRM case. There’s been a post explosion over the last few days, including coverage from Wired, about the implications of Sony’s boneheaded move and the subsequent brouhaha.
Nevertheless, you can catch up with a few new posts at BoycottSony.us, including a discussion of the first known exploit of the Sony rootkit.