Category: Internet

Links of the undead

More links that have hung around for a day or so, but refuse to get stale:

  • Adam Curry’s mom has been diagnosed with cancer. Our best wishes go out to her.
  • William Gibson on conservatives and fans who are surprised when he reveals his politics: “If I were to put together a truly essential thank-you list for the people who most made it possible for me to write my first six novels, I’d certainly owe as much to Ronald Reagan as to Bill Gates or Lou Reed. Reagan’s presidency put the grit in my dystopia. His presidency was the fresh kitty litter I spread for utterly crucial traction on the icey driveway of uncharted futurity. His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.”
  • A website that perfectly characterizes the zeitgeist: RegretTheError.com, a blog that picks up all the corrections of all the newspapers, news sites, and stories about media accuracy.
  • A Frolic of My Own writes about dangerous cheese. “Every since 9/11 it’s been harder to get. They will hold up an entire shipping container if they think it contains even a few rounds of unpasteurized cheese,” he said. Those damned French, trying to destroy our pasteurized way of life!
  • Slashdot interviews Neal Stephenson, and the author comes back in a seriously funny way. I’m waiting for William Gibson to take the bait on his blog regarding Stephenson’s claims of mortal combat: “Our third fight occurred at the Peace Arch on the U.S./Canadian border between Seattle and Vancouver. Gibson wished to retire from that sort of lifestyle that required ceaseless training in the martial arts and sleeping outdoors under the rain. He only wished to sit in his garden brushing out novels on rice paper. But honor dictated that he must fight me for a third time first. Of course the Peace Arch did not remain standing for long. Before long my sword arm hung useless at my side. One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble, uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that split off a sizable part of Canada and created what we now know as Vancouver Island. This was the last fight between me and Gibson. For both of us, by studying certain ancient prophecies, had independently arrived at the same conclusion, namely that Sterling’s professed interest in industrial design was a mere cover for work in superweapons. Gibson and I formed a pact to fight Sterling. So far we have made little headway in seeking out his lair of brushed steel and white LEDs, because I had a dentist appointment and Gibson had to attend a writers’ conference, but keep an eye on Slashdot for any further developments.”
  • Speaking of Stephenson and his recent obsessions: he, along with James Gleick, probably would have a lot to say about the New York Public Library’s one-sidedly idolatrous portrayal of Sir Isaac Newton.
  • Doc, again, nails the point home about the difference between Internet users and “media” “consumers.”
  • Donna Wentworth at the Copyfight blog gives an update on the progress (or lack thereof) of the INDUCE Act in committee. It sounds like some good strong points in favor of technological innovation have been made in the hearings; hopefully they’ll be heard over the din of the industry crying out as its business model shatters around it.
  • Microsoft scales back Passport. Remember Passport?
  • Excellent. The brainwashing program is working. Incidentally, we’ve always been at war with Oceania.
  • And our media is liberal, of course.

Blogging the presidency: pros and cons

Some reflections on blogging, journalism, and my last post. A common cry of bloggers is that journalists don’t touch investigations with lots of hard work, uncertain payoff, and that are politically sensitive. A complaint from many liberal bloggers was that the press parroted GOP criticisms of Kerry’s war record while staying silent on George W. Bush’s service—spotty attendance and all—in the Reserves. When CBS went after the story in a big way, I cheered—until one of the memos proved a forgery. Then I fumed. Once Big Media was burned, I figured, they wouldn’t touch the story again and it would die down—even though the rest of the allegations about Bush’s record were provable.

Thankfully, this is where bloggers come in. Paul Lukasiak, aka The AWOL Project, has been collecting information and going after Bush’s Reserve record using regulations, publicly available documents, and hard work to uncover the meaning behind the codes. This is a thankless job that few journalists would touch, especially after CBS’s embarrassment; but bloggers have continued to chase the story and are turning up some valuable findings.

So what’s the problem? I think there’s a danger that a lot of us spend a lot of energy on issues like this one precisely because they’re bloggable and lend themselves to being addressed by individuals with time on their hands, rather than looking at less personal issues about the president like his health care policies and education strategies. The problem, which the Kerry campaign appears fortunately to have identified, is that health care and education are two of the three hot-button issues for voters this election. So where are all the health care bloggers? That’s something I’d like to be reading about.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the AWOL Project is doing great work, and it’s a kind of work I’ve done in the past as well (see “Hunting for the Halliburton Contract” and “How to Spend $2 Billion”). But we need to get the blogosphere past the point where we focus on one or two issues at the expense of others that might be equally valuable to explore.

Links that wouldn’t go away

So how do I deal with those links that won‘t die? In a word: bullet lists.

Bing!: Sub Pop goes RSS

Seattle label Sub Pop, home to the Postal Service, Low, Wolf Eyes, Sebadoh, the Shins, Damien Jurado, Iron and Wine, and other great bands with impeccable indie cred, has gone RSS, offering RSS 1.0 feeds for the following content:

This is a brilliant and as far as I know unprecedented move—I don’t know of any other label that is doing this in a consistent way like this. Bravo, Sub Pop.

Except… because the downloads/media feed is RSS 1.0 and not 2.0, it doesn’t appear to work with iPodder. This is unfortunate; I’d love to subscribe to that feed in iPodder and have all the latest Sub Pop releases automatically hit my iPod. Ah well, hopefully this will be cleaned up soon. Until then, this is a pretty good way to keep on top of what’s happening across the label or with your favorite band.

Journalist-casting: is it just noise?

Some people think David Coursey’s latest column on Podcasting, in which he swoons over having Bob Edwards on his iPod but turns up his nose at the notion that someone might want to listen to a podcast from the technology’s originators, is really silly, and if you limit your imagination to audio versions of people’s egomaniacal columns for eWeek, that seems perfectly reasonable. But if you look at it as another failing gasp for air by the demigods of the mass media world, who don’t understand the social impact of the technologies that surround them and the emerging world of independent content creators, it becomes really interesting.

—Please pardon the above riff on Coursey’s column, in which I’ve kept most of the last paragraph intact and substituted the targets of his spleen with my own italicized interjections, but he was too pompous not to deflate. What is it about print journalists—not all of them, thank God, but enough of them—that they all want bloggers to dry up and blow away? They seem so, I don’t know, threatened. I guess they can’t help it; they bought the hype that attention is scarce, and any attention paid to the likes of me (and Adam and Dave, or even Larry) somehow invalidates their existence.

Interesting proposition, that last one. Do print journalists and other media magnates still have authority if people stop believing they do?

Inspired by a link on Scripting News.

Famous for fifteen people

The piece I wrote last week on The Long Tail of blogging and the myth of attention scarcity has found some resonances in the blogosphere. Jim McGee pointed to my piece in a riff on the topic that extends to the question of attention scarcity and knowledge dissemination inside corporations:

Sure, [attention is] a problem to the mass marketer/distributor who thinks they are entitled to a portion of my and everyone else’s attention. And initially, it’s a problem for me as I learn how to find and connect to that unique mix of sources scattered throughout the entire distribution that warrant my attention. When it settles down, however, my attention ends up better spent with that unique set of trusted advisors than it does filtered through the classic lens of mass market distribution.

One of my particular interests lies in what all of this means for doing knowledge work inside organizations. The mentality of mass market distribution manifests inside organizations as a concern for control. In a mass market world or organization there is room for only one message and, frequently, only one messenger. From this industrial perspective, attention management looms as a grave threat. If I insist on routing all decisions about attention through a central node, then, of course, that node suffers from attention overload. But it does so at the expense of wasting potential attention capacity distributed throughout the organization. The only hope of tapping the available attention capacity of the organization is to give up the attachment to conventional notions of control. Put another way, the biggest obstacle to success remains the emotional needs of senior leadership to stay in control.

And Scott Rosenberg, while not explicitly referencing my piece, makes many of the same points and posits a future without blockbusters, but one in which more creators may be able to make a living:

For Klam, as for so many of us media pros, “the blogs that succeed” is synonymous with “the blogs that reach a wide audience.” But publishing a blog is a nearly cost-free effort compared with all previous personal-publishing opportunities, and that frees us all to choose different criteria for success: Maybe self-expression is enough. Or opening a conversation with a couple of new friends. Or recording a significant event in one’s life for others to find…

…[I’m] impressed by the unflagging explosion of memorable new blogging voices and contributions to the burgeoning pool of human knowledge online. This is the dark matter of the Web universe, the stuff J.D. Lasica is writing about in his book. Collectively, it outweighs all the “bright” matter of the more commercial Web sites with their vast traffic…

There’s an old saying in the land of the Broadway theater, where once I tarried, that you can’t make a living there, but you can make a killing. Perhaps the Internet’s fate is to transmute the worlds of publishing and entertainment and even global trade from the hit-or-miss nightmare of a Broadway-like lottery into something more hopeful — a world where it’s a lot harder to make a killing but a lot easier to make a living. Is there anyone, outside of a few boardrooms, who’d find that a loss?

Finally, I think, we get to the bottom line. Our society has been so warped by the “mass market” and the phenomenon of the “hit” that we think that everything that is not a hit is a miss, and that the only things that create value—whether in music, film, theatre, or online—are the hits. I would argue that that’s a destructive philosophy, and one that becomes profoundly untrue as the cost of production diminishes. I think Google shows that the value of “hits” to the general Internet user is a hell of a lot smaller than the value of all the “long tail.” And NetFlix and Amazon prove it from an economic standpoint. So at some point you have to take a step back and ask: If hits are an increasingly smaller share of the total revenue opportunity, why do they get all the investment? Isn’t the multi-million-dollar blockbuster, or the record album that never recoups its production costs, an unwise investment when you consider all the other smaller successes you could have invested in?

Economics of the Long Tail in the Blogosphere

It appears the most interesting article in the last print edition of Wired is now online. “The Long Tail” talks about movie and music consumption in terms of the power law (i.e. there are a few very popular releases followed by an infinitely long set of steadily less popular ones), but explores the economic implications of being able to provide immediate access to everything, not just the most popular releases:

What’s really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see “Anatomy of the Long Tail”). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: “The biggest money is in the smallest sales.”

The same is true for all other aspects of the entertainment business, to one degree or another. Just compare online and offline businesses: The average Blockbuster carries fewer than 3,000 DVDs. Yet a fifth of Netflix rentals are outside its top 3,000 titles. Rhapsody streams more songs each month beyond its top 10,000 than it does its top 10,000. In each case, the market that lies outside the reach of the physical retailer is big and getting bigger.

When you think about it, most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another. Google, for instance, makes most of its money off small advertisers (the long tail of advertising), and eBay is mostly tail as well – niche and one-off products. By overcoming the limitations of geography and scale, just as Rhapsody and Amazon have, Google and eBay have discovered new markets and expanded existing ones.

But that’s not all. You can extend this to Clay Shirky’s infamous “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality” article. Shirky posited that online, the most famous bloggers get attention—incoming links—in something that looks like a power curve. But by extension of the principle of “the long tail,” once you get over the idea that there is a scarcity of attention online, everyone else’s blog looks more and more valuable. Why are there blog entries for just about any search you can do in Google? It’s not a bug. The individual voices of bloggers, even if they think they’re writing for no audience at all, can provide an infinite amount of interesting and valuable insight, provided someone helps you find it (that’s Rule 3 of the “long tail” phenomenon).

That’s why the most valuable services for blogs haven’t been authoring platforms—you can write a blog in Notepad and FTP it up, or you can choose from probably about a hundred different platforms written with varying degrees of professionalism—but services like Kinja, LiveJournal, Feedster, Technorati, feeds.scripting.com, and of course Google itself that help you find the valuable and interesting content.

Around the ‘sphere

Other stuff:

Win some, lose some

When you’re challenging the draconian DMCA, there are good days and bad days. Yesterday was both. On the good side, a federal judge issued a smackdown to Diebold for misusing the DMCA in trying to bully Swarthmore students into taking down links to material that was critical of Diebold’s voting machine security.

On the bad side, a St. Louis court ruled in favor of Blizzard in their DMCA suit, in which Blizzard sought to suppress the open source BnetD, a clone of Blizzard’s Battle.net service that enabled multiplayer options for Blizzard customers who didn’t want to use Battle.net.

What’s the commonality? Other than the DMCA, very little. Yesterday’s rulings in a nutshell say that the “safe harbor” clause of the act should not be misconstrued as an excuse for companies to send infinite numbers of takedowns, but the core anti-circumvention portion of the act stands. Even though the BnetD team was doing reverse engineering to enable compatibility with their free product.

Aaron Swartz, College Student

Aaron Swartz has been such a key part of the blogging (and web services, and XML syndication) world(s) for so long that it’s always a shock to remember that he’s so young. To wit: he’s starting undergrad at Stanford this month. Today’s update finds him making some of the discoveries many of us made ten years ago, like how professors don’t always understand your insights; parties are sadly funny when you look at them as anthropological rituals (and don’t participate); and how phony patriotism is used to build group identities.

(I will note, however, that it’s grimly funny to find a leading proponent of RDF, the leading (and still mystifying) XML-based semantic taxonomy, and of Atom, which proposes an alternate notation and representation for the syndication data presented by RSS, totally baffled by the transition from the Dewey Decimal System to the Library of Congress system.)

But the series is still highly readable. The alienation of a smart autodidact confronting his peers in the brew of the most intense period of peer interaction—well, it’s awfully familiar to me, and I suspect to many of my readers as well.

Linkolalia

It’s been a while. Here’s a quick collection of things going on across my narrow part of the blogosphere:

Overprotective SonicWall

Hmm. Apparently Panera’s content filter blocks Chris Baldwin’s Bruno comic strip as being in the forbidden category “cult/occult.” Um, huh? Blocking Bruno and not, say, Sluggy Freelance for that category seems a bit odd.

Also odd: the comic strip Questionable Content and Scary Go Round (“adult/mature content”) are blocked and Least I Could Do and Diesel Sweeties are not. Errant Story is blocked as “pornography” (better cool it with the naked elf stuff!). And Achewood is passed through scot-free.

Their filter is SonicWALL. I haven’t heard of them before but it’s the same old story. Do I need to point out the obvious? Content filters are brain dead. They don’t work. They end up blocking legitimate sites and harming their reputations. And there’s no appeal.