CS182

Symposium on Free Culture and the Digital Library

Symposium on Free Culture and the Digital Library 2005

FAQ about The Anarchist in the Library

SIVACRACY.NET: FAQ about The Anarchist in the Library

This is a useful addition to the chapters of the book we are discussing.

More on Weblogs

• differences between message boards and weblogs
• Weblog as Online Community Management Tool
• Guidelines for Evaluting Classroom Blogs

Useful Table:

I don’t think the “Guidelines” will be that useful for me because I am going to be quite intentional about what and when I wanmt students to make comments. The author doesn’t mention Trackbacks which I think are a more powerful mechanism for thoughtful commentary. But I do like his idea of ‘Xenoblogging’ the taxonomy of which I list here:

• “comment primo” (which launches a discussion on someone else’s blog),
• the “comment grande” (a long comment posted on a peer blog, which you can then advertise via a cross-blog posting),
• the “comment informative” (in which a commenter uses his or her particular knowledge in order to flesh out a general or incomplete statement made in a peer’s blog entry), and
• the “link gracious” (which draws attention to the source of an idea or to a good conversation happening on someone else’s blog).
• “Wildcard” — students get credit for being creative and taking risks with form and/or content. It can be related to the course subject matter, or not. My feeling is that if more students post material that interests them in the community weblogging space, then the whole community will benefit.

Useful Essays

What Business Can Learn from Open Source

CyberFashion

SIGGRAPH :: CyberFashion 0100 Program

Say no more!
[Fashion - David Bowie]

Digital Rights

Guardian Unlimited | Online | Danny O’Brien: The right to digital freedom

Social Machines - redux

Tech Coast - ‘Social Machines’ Enters the Blogosphere

Google and copyright

TechnologyReview.com - Google and Copyright Issues — ‘do no evil but make a fast buck’. Google is flexing it’s muscles by suggesting that copyright owners do the hard work of opting out of their ‘scan everything printed’ programme. Amazing what you can get away with after an IPO ….

Also, Google’s response to privacy issues — TechnologyReview.com - Google’s Pettiness — leaves something to be desired.

Lawrence Lessig blog

The Lawrence Lessig blog is currently being maintained by Jimbo Wales. Wales’ mantra is ‘free the:
* Curriculum’
* Encyclopedia’
* Ten things’
* culture’

In ‘How shall we avoid looking silly’ one of the posters on this page (Nelson Pavlosky) makes a point about having a sense of proportion. Holding a vigil for innovation is rather frivolous compared to issues of life and death such as AIDS.

Similarly in ‘Ten things that will be free’ the author explicitly excludes issues like health care. And yet free health care would arguably have a greater and more far reaching effect on US society than any of the ‘free’ things we’re concerned with there.

Lessig thinks that the Grokster vs MGM decision will be the end of innovation as we know it. For a more measured view read the Guardian’s Should I buy this?

Beeb : Podcasting?

The Beeb gets into podcasting:
BBC webslinky:podcasting and BBC Radio MP3 takes off

Worth keeping an eye on

Catablast! Media LLC

But NO bleedin RSS feed!!

'Long Tail' revisited

The Big Picture: Are CD Prices Getting More Dynamic? has some interesting commentary on dynamic pricing of CDs and DVDs.

[Also take a look at Amazon discusses its Long Tail strategy which discusses Amazon’s growth in third party business and their unafraidness (for want of a better term) to cannibalize their own business]

But the most interesting are comments by danny @ Catablast! Media :

Nope, the real reason DVDs are squadering movie theatre revenues is because of something we at Catablast! Media have talking about for months.

Long tail.

Long tail is the term Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson coined in 2004 to describe the economic model best suited for our times.

Because today, it’s not about the hits —it’s about the misses.

Long tail basically says that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can “collectively make up a market share that rivals or even exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.”

The long tail equation spells that the total volume of low popularity items is greater the volume of high popularity items.

pretty much sums up the long tail business equation. Also :

Long Tail is also useful for understanding the relationship between sales distributions and storage costs.

Look at it this way.

If the cost of storage is too high, long tail is absent.

Brick and mortar shops, who have much less shelf space to allocate than their wired up, online storfront rivals (most of which follow a hub-and-spoke distribution system) cannot afford to hold assets that they may or may not sell.

On the other hand, because of low opportunity costs, the online business has the luxury of catering to minority tastes and shelving whatever they damn please.

and finally:

Longtail, which screams “One size does NOT fit all,” kills categories.

Re-evaluating Amazon's tail

After detailed correspondance with Morris Rosenthal, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, and author of The Long Tail recants his rather heavy estimate of 57% of Amazon sales being in the ‘tail’ and discusses a new methodology and results : The Long Tail: A methodology for estimating Amazon’s Long Tail sales

Still, the revised figure of 20% - 30% is noteworthy and the conclusion :

But the Long Tail still appears to be somewhere between a quarter and a third of Amazon’s book business, which is a significant fraction by any measure.

is certainly justified.

This is incredibly important because it’s a direct consequence of Amazon & Netflick’s business model and serves to illustrate how online commerce can provide a qualitatively different, deeper and more expansive service for ‘consumers’. Add to this the ingredient of customer choice matching (‘based on your choices we think you’d like …’ — [find URL]) and you have a heady mix.

Same search -- different results

Is this genuine results manipulation or just a silly speculation — you decide : David Farber :

It is quite a remarkable thing for someone to assume that if a search engine doesn’t yield the documents he expected based on the keywords he randomly chose, then therefore the engineers are engaged in a conspiracy theory.

Imagining the Internet

Brilliant site with a database of early 90s predictions Imagining the Internet - Predictions Database

Sony make CDs easy to copy!

Copyright Crackdown - Yahoo! News

Sony continue to make their systems easy to use … not :

Sony BMG and EMI have begun shipping compact discs using technology that limits the number of copies you can make of any disc to three. And you can’t port songs from affected CDs to Apple IPod players unless you request a workaround from Sony.

Also in this article a consideration of ‘fair use’ and Sony’s attempt to move the goalposts.

IN Court Sets File-Sharing Limits a consideration of the implications of the Grokster decision, plus Technology on Trial: What’s at Stake
Then some interesting stuff on how multiple components from different vendors are screwing the ease of use for for Apple players.

Advertising with Search engines: click fraud

Interesting article which references ‘click fraud’:

Search Engine Pioneer Raises $10 Million (Euro 8.3 Million) for Latest Quest

As Snap gears up to shift out of test phase, the search engine’s parent
company — Pasadena-based Perfect Market Technologies Inc. — has
raised $10 million (euro8.3 million) in a venture capital round led by
Mayfield, a Menlo Park firm. Gross and Snap CEO Tom McGovern intend to
use some of that money to spread the word about a system that he
believes can deliver better value for advertisers.

Online Ticket Scalping

Innovative use of the Internet:
ONLINE TICKET SCALPING