Category: Internet

The US Copyright Office has posted four classes of exemptions to the DMCA on its official website. The classes include:

1. Compilations of lists of Internet sites blocked by filtering software (not including those blocked by systems that “operate exclusively to protect against damage to a computer or computer network” or “prevent receipt of email” (examples?);
2. Computer programs secured by dongles where the dongle has malfunctioned or is obsolete (examples?)
3. Computer programs and video games distributed in “obsolete formats” that require access to the original media to operate (e.g. copy protected games or other software that require access to the original disk)
4. E-books, where all e-book editions of the work prevent having the book read aloud and prevent screen readers from reading the book aloud (Sklyarov, anyone?)

These exemptions appear to supersede the previous exemptions, which may be bad news because the new exemptions open some new ground while rolling back others. In particular the first exemption is more narrowly defined than the original version and seems to un-exempt email blacklists.

Additional discussion and anticipation of the ruling: Technorati.

Weblogs.com hit another new high water mark last Thursday. The big peak we hit back in August has raised the bar for new high water marks, so the graph looks a little funky. From here there are two possible outcomes: stable growth resulting in infrequent high water marks that continue the apparent trend started in late August, or a continuation of the pattern to date of big jumps in the high water line. It all depends on three factors: how many people start new blogs; how frequently they update; and how frequently they abandon blogging.

The high water data is an indicator, but I think work being done at BlogCount is more likely to answer some of the key questions. Data, as always, available here under a Creative Commons license.

1. Wired says that Amazon got around copyright concerns by claiming it never built a library at all, just a digital image archive that can’t be permalinked;
2. Matthew Kirschenbaum suggests this upends a few applecarts, particularly with respect to textual studies and the very definition of books;
3. I think Amazon, or book publishers, may be in for some trouble here, given that “ professors and their students have to pay through the nose to photocopy sections of copyrighted works for course packets? Those are images rather than machine readable text too, surely, and you can print the page scans from Amazon” (reprinted from my comment at Matt’s site).
4. Doc Searls says it’s humbling to see how few times your name is mentioned in print. Reverse ego-surfing?
5. Brian Dear points out you can get damn near a whole book for free this way.
6. Dare Obasanjo calls it the “world’s shittiest search feature” for how badly the book search results get polluted now, and says, “If ever a feature needed to be turned off by default it is this one.” That means something coming from a Microsoftie. 🙂

A quick note about my blog writing habits. I usually start the morning by scanning my RSS subscriptions in NetNewsWire. I’m no Scoble, but I currently subscribe to 109 feeds, from friends, Microsofties, an assortment of other bloggers, journals, newspapers, etc. Most days I do a quick hit and run, but there are days like today that I end up following almost thirty links, many from the popularity engine Blogdex.

(Aside: Blogdex is one of the ways that I think we can overcome the mental filter of only looking for blogs and news that support our own biases. Blogdex and Technorati both let you see what everyone has written about a particular link, regardless of whether you agree with them or not.)

So, then, today’s around the blogosphere roundup:

• Man goes over Niagara Falls without a barrel and survives, defying “the laws of physics and Canada” (Greg)
• BBC launches iCan, intended to give Britons collective participation in their government (Boing-Boing)
• Ross Mayfield’s SocialText goes 1.0 with a workplace collaboration package that mixes features of wikis and blogs (Joi)
• Glenn Reynolds says that the Rumsfeld memo shouldn’t have been leaked because the resulting furor will discourage critical thought and examination in the future by the military. Glenn also asks “where are all the people who were screaming about the Plame leak?” Probably it’s too complicated for them to understand it so they aren’t writing about it. Lisa and I talked about this one last night. She thought, at least before the announcement that the memo was leaked by someone other than Rumsfeld, that he was positioning against the growing power that Condi Rice is taking in Iraq. Now it looks like he’s being positioned in another direction… (Blogdex)
• David Pogue reviews Panther in the New York Times and sounds the Microsoft paranoia note: “When you use Mac OS X, you feel like it’s yours; when you use Windows, you feel as though you’re using someone else’s toys, and Mrs. Microsoft keeps peeking in on you” (MacNN)
• Who killed Daniel Pearl? Asra Q. Nomani wonders in Salon whether there was a link between al-Qaeda and the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, now that 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been linked to Pearl’s murder… and to Omar Saeed Sheikh, who masterminded the murder and has been linked to the ISI. (Salon)
• And, finally, since the press is barred from reporting on the arrival of the bodies of our soldiers from Iraq, I’m going to start picking up the slack by pointing to the list of names of those killed in action. Here’s today’s list.

In my email this morning, a link to another blogging Jarrett: Patrick Jarrett of Georgia Tech, who blogs at RoninCyberpunk. Interesting writing about college life and programming.

Second post-mortem piece on BloggerCon, trying to dive into the hype and document why I think blogs are revolutionary.

Most of the discussion at BloggerCon, at least on Day One, focused on ways that blogging and the lowered threshold of entry to self-publication facilitated a more empowered, more aware population. I heard an emergent theory of blog empowerment that goes something like this: voice, connection, power. (For background on this piece, read my strawman definition of blogs from the conference.)

Blogs providing voices

By providing a central place for the blogger’s work, the blog collects everything the blogger writes in one place, in a chronology. By reading the blogger’s past writing, we can discover that the blogger has held the same opinion over time, or has changed it; who the blogger likes, whom he or she distrusts; what subjects engage the blogger’s energy; and (by following links back to the blogger) who has opinions about the blogger’s work. By providing this ongoing trail of words, this rich back history, and links, the blogger creates an online voice with history, chronology, evolution, and context.

More importantly, the act of posting thoughts in a blog on the Internet (as opposed to in a private document) enables others to hear that voice. If the blogger’s words are heard, and others enter into dialog, the blogger has ceased to be a passive observer of the Internet and has instead become a creator of it. This enables people—whether 12-year-old confused adolescents, 24-year-old software programmers in cubicle farms, 30-year-old Iraqi translators in Baghdad reporting from inside a war, or sixty-year-old grandmothers with a passion for presidential politics—who might never have written anything before to be read around the world.

In education, blogs are being used as teaching aids to help students, from elementary school through graduate programs, to learn to express their thoughts, read and evaluate other sources, and to enter into dialog. Seminarians who blog learn to take responsibility for their daily thoughts and actions. Business students who blog learn how to cooperate with others in loosely distributed groups to have open and constructive discussions and defend their views. Students in impoverished nations who find gaps in curriculum for their native languages are encouraged to fill the gaps with their own writing.

Blogs mediating connections

A big conference theme was blogs as mediating transformative connections. By providing alternative outlets for publishing commentary on other materials on the web and for relating first-hand experience, blogs enable individuals to publish opinions and other material that might not otherwise be published—this is empowerment by publishing.

Blogs written by individuals inside institutions also, through their personal nature, offer the readers of those blogs a connection to the institution at an individual level that they would not experience otherwise. This empowers them through connecting them more closely to that institution and enabling them to better understand the institution. This is empowerment by access.

Finally, when the blogger outside the institution publishes a comment and a link to the work of the blogger inside the institution, and the institutional blogger reciprocates with a link, a relationship develops between the two, the outsider and the institution, that helps the outsider to understand, and in some cases affect, the institution. This is empowerment by relationship.

In journalism, the effect of this empowerment is to greatly expand the power of the non-institutional observer of events, formerly only a reader or consumer of journalism, to create and publish his own version of events, to enter into dialog with the institution that published the first version, and occasionally—as in the case of Trent Lott—to change the tone of the institutional coverage and affect the course of events.

This is an expanded version of Jim Moore’s thesis of the Second Superpower, because in this scenario blogs empower the people inside the institution as well. By providing voices to the powerless, and by giving a voice in the same sphere to individuals inside institutions, greater understanding between the two parties can be reached, opinions can be formed and shaped, and change can be effected.

At the conference, Chris Lydon, Doc Searls, and others observed that this is a process that has been going on for a long time, since the printing press became available to Tom Paine as a means of disseminating his thoughts on political theory. Dave Weinberger posited that blogs put the nail in the coffin of “objective voices” and help to expose the myriad of overlapping subjectivities by which individual thoughts become part of the public record, shape policy, and create history.

Me? I think there’s a lot of promise. I think a lot of conference attendees were right to point out that blogging is a limited empowerment that presupposes a level of access and literacy that are by themselves pretty empowering. But there is something about the way this particular method of communication has shaped up that gives me hope.

I’ve been sitting on a few short responses to BloggerCon since last Sunday. I’m not pleased with them yet, but if I sit on them any longer they’ll get even staler, so here goes.

What is a blog?

BloggerCon started by taking an explicitly technology neutral view of blogs, one that discussed the implications of blogs rather than what they were. On Day One (the only day I attended), there was no discussion of the construction of blogs and fundamental operations of blogging. A brief definition, then:

Blogs are personally published documents on the web, with attribution and date, collected in a single place, generally published with a static structure to facilitate incoming links from other sources, and updated with some regularity and frequency from every few days to several times daily. Blogs are generally understood to be subjective, with no authority other than that lent by their author generally. Many blogs consist of links and commentary—comments about something or some entity with a web presence, links to enable the reader to discover the original object being commented on and explore it for themselves. Bloggers leave link trails, hyperlinks back to the subjects of their commentary, and the link trails enable others to go beyond the blogger’s subjective opinion and find the original source so that they can evaluate it and form their own opinions.

Blogging thus differs from general web pages in frequency, intent and practice. Rather than claiming authority, blogs assume subjectivity and let the reader make up his own mind. Rather than a collection of documents that define an object on the Internet—for instance, a company, a university, a person’s family tree—blogs are glosses on those objects, marginal annotations that unlike other forms of web comments such as the “sticky note” feature in IE have permanence of their own on the Web. Unlike a threaded discussion group (web board or Usenet), where there are generally no authoritative methods to find a prior message and no central record of a person’s contributions and opinions, blogs host the author’s comments in a single place, at a personal address, and in a chronology so that others can review the blogger’s thoughts and comments in one location. By keeping a permanent record of the blogger’s writings in a central place, a blog implies a certain amount of accountability for the author’s words and opinions; in other online communities, this accountability is generally left up to the community to enforce.

Leaving aside the high flying theories of blog world domination, for a minute: seen in the New York Times, among other places, Angle Grinder Man. “Wheel-clamp superhero/vigilante.” Complete with gold lamé cape and bikini briefs. And of course angle grinder. Which he uses to remove wheel clamps, aka “boots” in the US, from illegally parked cars.

I find myself thinking more often these days about what blogs should be, even as I spend less time thinking about what I actually blog. Not necessarily a good combination. But I sometimes think that the relative effortlessness with which really practiced bloggers post is less a factor of short attention spans or carelessness (though there are plenty, myself included, who are guilty of both) and more a factor of practice. And, over time, of self-knowledge.

Someone asked me what blogging was the other day. My reply: “It’s an individual’s perspective on life, usually but not necessarily of the online variety.” After taking that thought away, I’m not sure I’m satisfied with it. After all, Real Live Preacher doesn’t blog about online life; neither does Julie Powell; neither (usually) does Tony Pierce. And neither, really, does Dave Winer, not anymore. So that leaves us with “an individual’s perspective on life.” Hmm. Not satisfactory, but let’s start with that.

What does that individual perspective mean? Well, for one thing, it’s personal. Regardless of whether you’re compiling lists of links or writing essays, the blog reflects your perspective. The better blogs are more personal, not less; they put that personality out there and reveal all the subjectivity up front.

So what does this have to do with business? Maybe nothing. But even at large companies like Microsoft, we need to connect to our customers and understand them—and, sometimes harder, have them understand us. Maybe blogging is a way to do that that transcends being there in newsgroups or posting anonymous advice to the corporate website.

Lots of stuff today while I was at work shipping internal products:

• Tony Pierce talks about the show that I should have gone to when it was in Seattle…White Stripes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. All rock goodness, it sounds like.
• Weblogs Inc., dedicated to producing niche “blogs” dedicated to aggregating industry focused content and hosting discussion groups. Sounds kinda like CNET, but Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin posted the link without busting it; maybe they’re on the up and up.
• The Apple Computer History group blog has really taken off; just look at the story list. Current fave: engineer tells Jean-Louis Gassee that releasing the new high performance IIci will break all the NuBus cards currently being made. Jean-Louis says, “OK, that is problem number one. Are there any more?” Apple goes forward with the IIci, they work out a software patch with all existing NuBus card makers prior to release, and it becomes one of the coolest Macs ever released.
• Mail-to-weblog is now released for Manila. If I ever get email working on my mobile phone, I will be taking advantage of this feature.
• A Mac user was improperly caught up in the RIAA’s dragnet, accused of using a KaZaA client that isn’t available for the Mac to download music. The 66-year-old grandmother was accused in the lawsuit of downloading lots of hip hop including works by Snoop Dogg. The suit has been dropped. (NYT.)

Doc Searls responds to Dave Winer’s piece on the dynamics of distortion in journalism with an interesting discussion of the “Opposing View” format and the etymology of “piracy” as applied to sharing content. Great read.

Of course, there are plenty of “opposing views” and arguments in weblogs too. But most of the time we really mean it.

Cool article on Mobitopia about all the uses to which one can put the humble Nokia 3650 camera phone. I wonder when Apple will make iCal sync with the calendar on this phone??? Other capabilities: web browsing (I’ll have to check out the Doris Web Browser), integrated all-in-one chat client (which will probably break as Yahoo and other vendors close their IM networks to third-party clients); file viewers for plain text, PDF, Word, PowerPoint; mobile fax capability; and more.

Looks like the business opportunity here is for a carrier to actually install and configure all the software for you, so you don’t have to burn minutes and time doing the downloads.

Wired: Senator takes a swing at the RIAA. My new favorite Republican senator (a rather short list), Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas introduced new legislation that would return checks and balances to the Internet downloading fracas. The bill would require those who would seek Internet users’ identities from ISPs to sue for downloading to file a John Doe lawsuit, a more complicated process that requesting a subpoena. The lawsuit process would reintroduce some much needed process to the fracas that so far has seen the RIAA blackmail a twelve year old girl and her family out of $2,000.

Of more immediate interest to me, the bill would also require a labeling system for all digital media that are protected by Digital Rights Management. This would be really good to have on CDs (and DVDs, which all have such protection through region code schemes), but I’m not sure how it would work on digital files. Interesting, though.

Everyone’s favorite email worm SoBig F’s clock runs out tonight. Meaning that if I see an email from any of y’all promising a wicked screensaver or my details tomorrow, I’m coming after you myself.

Philip points to this curmudgeonly essay on the topic of what’s wrong with America (latest speculation), which posits that suburbs and SSRIs are the problem. While I’d hate to argue with suburban ennui and angst, being perpetually lost in the supermarket and feeling that this is not my beautiful house, I must point out that the odds that one in three Americans even has a health plan that covers SSRIs is pretty slim, much less that one of three of us are actually taking the happy pills.

There have been days that I’ve thought that all the bloggers around me were closet or public depressives. Of course, that was mostly at the heart of my own Black Dog bouts.