CS182

The Web 2 cult -- time for heretics to apply some sense?

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The amorality of Web 2.0

Nicholas Carr starts this seminal article in the manner which you realise will stir some pots :

“From the start, the World Wide Web has been a vessel of quasi-religious longing.”

In this New Age (or New Order??) “We become free-floating netizens in a more enlightened, almost angelic, realm.” Yes, I can see the icons smashing before my eyes. But there’s more. In the ‘New New Age’ the web becomes a mystical presence with almost transcendent qualities. The ‘cult of the Amateur’ encapsulates the pretensions of the shared knowledge of the Wikisphere (I made that one up). And ‘Scary Economics’ wonders about the future of real encyclopedias written by people who really do know what they’re talking about. The backlash has begun

The comments about Encyclopedia Britannica are what’s worth reading on this commentary blog entry

In The law of the wiki he writes about inverse relationship between collectivism & intelligence in the ‘collective intelligence’ operating in the Wikiverse. Another must-read.

And in Trouble in Wiki Land (Oct 24^th) he discusses the putative commercialisation of Wikipedia and the storm of controversy surrounding his previous articles.

All these are great places to cover the Wikipedia story — what constitutes real information in the virtual universe of the web? If no one knows you’re a dog can you redefine a bark?

Declaration of InDRMpendence

Posted by David Berlind @ 2:41 pm

great article about striking out from DRM.
See also:

• We the Sheeple
• DRM technology has its first two major trainwrecks

Links about Folksonomy

Folksonomy

Folksonomy – Wikipedia

adaptive path » metadata for the masses — good short intro read

an interview with flickr's eric costello — Flickr has been described as "massively multiplayer online photo sharing."

The site where the term 'folksonomie' was coined:
Folksonomy: social classification / Atomiq

Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata

"There is a fundamental difference in the activities of browsing to find interesting content, as opposed to direct searching to find relevant documents in a query. It is similar to the difference between exploring a problem space to formulate questions, as opposed to actually looking for answers to specifically formulated questions."
THIS IS INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT

Exploring a problem space to formulate questions — what we are doing.

Merholz, Peter. Metadata for the Masses October 19, 2004.

Wired News: Folksonomies Tap People Power

How to format Web References

Formatting web references with Textile2.

References

¹ Musical Geeks Mine 8-Bit Sound

Christopher Null, Wired News, 02:00 AM Oct. 13, 2005 PT
Resurgence of interest in 8 bit digital sound by avant guard techno-musicians.

² Dark Underbelly of Technology

Tony Long, Wired News, 02:00 AM Oct. 13, 2005 PT
Man gets cranky thinking about what technology is doing to the world.

or try using the printable link instead

Who needs a record label

The Myth Of The Rock Star And Of The Need To Sign-up For A Major Recording Label - Robin Good’s Latest News

This is a useful article about the sheer economics of a band not signing with a record label. Great resource.

“
III. Rich And/Or Famous

Let’s take a look at some figures real quick, and maybe you’ll see why “online distribution and marketing” provides artists with remarkable opportunities.

Let’s say that you’re signed to a label. You get the industry-standard 12% royalty on album sales, meaning you get 12% of the profit from each album.

We’re going to simplify this and not even deal with the weird little percentage markups and subtractions that the record industry usually throws into these contracts, or the whole issue of retail vs. wholesale — we’ll just say that you get a straight 12% of what the guy at the cash register pays for your album.

If your album retails for $15, that means you make $1.80 off each album sale. That means that if your album sells 100,000 copies, you stand to make $180,000. Sounds pretty good, right?

But the reality is that most albums sell less than 5,000 copies over a period of months and years. If you did even that well, you’d make $9000 in that time period. Plus, if you got any sort of advance from your label, you’ve got to pay that off before you even see a dime in actual profit.

So if your label gave you a $10,000 advance, you’d probably never see another penny — and you’d be liable to the label for any difference between the amount of advance you got and the actual amount sold. So you’d end up owing your label about $1000.

Now, let’s look at what you can do online by using an online music distribution service.

With some of the best ones you could sell your work on a song-by-song basis. Let’s say you’ve got 10 songs, priced at $1.00 each.

The online service takes a 30% cut of all of your sales. 15% of that goes to BitPass transaction fees, and the other 15% goes towards the online service costs of doing business. Certainly that’s a lot less than a record label would take.

Let’s say you sell 100 copies of your big hit song in a week. That’s $70. Not a whole lot of money.”

podcast centres

A quick review of Yahoo! Podcasts… (plasticbag.org)

From the above blog entry comes:

• Yahoo! Podcasts
• Odeo: Play, Download, and Create Podcasts
• Loomia

ID card site

National ID Cards « FAQs & Resources « CIPPIC

Good overview of what ID cards are.

Also the section on Biometrics is worth reading.

More on 99c iTunes songs

iTunes: 99 cents across the board or mix it up? - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

This guy said it all :

“I think a major factor for me is that I am willing to waste 99 cents. I may never have heard of song or maybe I’m not sure if this is the track I want. But I buy it anyway. If it’s the wrong one, oh well. If I don’t like it, oh well. But if it were any more, I honestly wouldn’t ever chance it. iTunes is the only way I buy music now. I’ve never been a big music buyer. I had a couple CDs that I really liked and that was it. Same with my wife. But for a year or more, we’ve been buying steadily from iTunes because the price is forgiving. Raise the prices and in many ways we will go back to being satisfied with what we’ve got rather than trying out something new.”

OK, hands up — for all you oldies out there, how many albums have you purchased and later regretted? For me, only about 1 in 3 or maybe even 1 in 5 albums I bought without knowing the songs ahead of time, were a success. Just recently I bought two Stereophonics CDs from Amazon on the basis of reviews thinking I’d like them and I didn’t. What a waste! Dave Lyon is right — 99c per song is forgiving . The only drawback is that iTunes does not have the ‘long tail’ that Amazon has that suits us oldies. But I do think that people end up buying more music overall because of this safety factor.

Neil also makes a good point about exchange rates :

“For example, here in Canada tracks are 99 cents Canadian, which at current exchange rates means each track is actually 85 cents US. In the UK each track is .79, which converts to $1.40 US.”

Josh Williams comments :

“The problem is that the record companies are still in the old mindset of selling “albums” which typically contain a few hit songs, and a bunch of crappers.”

“The answer is not to raise the price of the hits to subsidize the crappers. The answer is to stop paying bands up front for the crappers they put on an album — which can simply be accomplished by paying less money up-front, and going to a full-on royalty get-up with less advances.”

and ends with :

“in 10 years, do you think iTunes and its competitors (as a form of distribution) might replace labels altogether?”

Hmmmm. interesting thought that.

and from Tom Coates:

“Apple isn’t the only music retailer on the internet (although I will concede they have a fair amount of lock-in). If the market is going to operate effectively then another supplier that gives the record companies flexibility will come along, and if that supplier is a success, then Apple will have to follow suit. If the record companies in the meantime don’t want to use Apple, they don’t have to. I suspect that most of these models, which make the whole experience more confusing and complex to consumers, will fail - but that’s just my opinion.”

“It’s not Apple’s responsibility to change its business plan to meet the needs of the record company”

This is the crux. It seems to me that the RIAA has been so used to having it’s own way with the legislature (DCMA act etc) that when they come up against a company with a forward looking and functional business plan they start throwing a tantrum. Fact is, as Maggie T has said, there is no alternative to Apple iTunes simply because the competitors have cowtowed to the demands of the Labels, made their downloadable offerings hard to use, expensive and ringed around with noxious DRM restrictions, and the market is voting. Innovation and ease of use are winning out in this capitalistic competition and the record labels just have to suck it up.

Intro to blogging

Summary of Blogging : An Introduction

Why Blog?

• Find readers for your work
• Encourage daily writing, which can stimulate your creativity
• Improve your writing by writing regularly
• Have a creative, open space to write to an audience
• Reflect on and organize on your own writing, research, and career goals
• Organize/extend your responses to other texts (Web sites, magazines, books)
• Receive responses to your ideas and writing
• Read blogs by other students, faculty, and professional writers
• Share your reflections and insights
• Offer a place for other students to respond to your work
• Create a dialogue about texts
• Archive URLs, readings, and online resources
• Experiment with a new genre of communication
• Become comfortable writing online, using links, images, and talk-back features
• Collaborate on projects
• Receive responses to your ideas and writing

Diverse Rhetorical Situations

Purposes

• Reflect on interesting personal experiences
• Respond to readings or popular/ cultural events
• Network with other bloggers
• Identify and archive worthwhile Web sites
• Collaborate in a group blog
• Persuade
• Inform
• Analyze
• Argue
• Explain
• Satirize

Audiences

• Other students in a class
• Other bloggers
• People who subscribe to your blog
• Mass market audience

Voices

• Thoughtful
• reflective
• Personal
• Collaborative (refer to other bloggers)
• Dialogic (discuss Internet sites or events with others)
• Objective
• Subjective
• Informed
• Opinionated
• Humorous

Distribution

• Internet
• Intranet
• Course Management System (visible to course only)

Analysis of Key Features

1. Emphasis on the present. Past articles archived. Use of blogs for sustained discourse? Examples.
2. Connected. Rich substrate of links to engender connectedness. Strong response to news events — provide challenge to traditional mass media.
3. Frequent updates. Build strong interpersonal relationships with readership.
4. Tend to be monological — refelct one person’s thoughts / feelings. But strong interactions by means of comments, trackbacks (referrals from quoting blogs), and RSS feeds.
5. Popularity — which blogs do you read. Blog roll is a list of other blogs regularly read — form ‘blog ring’ and maybe get on an ‘A-list’ blogroll.

Focus

• identify your audience, purpose, voice, and context and stick to it.
• specific & snappy title for blog. Informative subtitle.
• informative titles on postings. Categories & tags.

Development

“blogs gain power over time, showing how the writer’s (or writers’) mind (or minds) works. Over time, bloggers become known for being informative about a topic or set of topics. Bloggers attract readers by researching their topics, by providing evidence for assertions, and by creating a tone and persona that readers find informative or entertaining.”

• Successful bloggers gauge their success by reviewing who reads their blogs and how the blog space can be used to foster ideas.
• sound development gets readers interested. Each post provides details, information, examples, and links to other resources.
• blogs are characterized by a strong, personal voice but attract a loyal audience because they develop their material well — success can be measured by comments and trackbacks.

Early history of weblogs

rebecca blood :: weblogs: a history and perspective

“I strongly believe in the power of weblogs to transform both writers and readers from “audience” to “public” and from “consumer” to “creator.” Weblogs are no panacea for the crippling effects of a media-saturated culture, but I believe they are one antidote.”

Innocent in London -- how to get arrested for being a geek

Innocent in London

from NTK email of Oct 7th:

It’s all gone a bit Le Carre around here. Most have now
heard the story of DAVID MERY, the techie arrested and
searched for being geeky in a terroristic manner, and later
documented on the Guardian front page and Slashdot.
Initially, we thought Mery’s treatment was a cover for the
police to confiscate a BeBox for themselves, but now we’re
growing more concerned. Few know the pivotal role the
notorious pataphysicist Mery has played in the seedy
underworld of tech journalism: editor of the samizdat .EXE
Magazine; one of the few to have ever met that Mata Hari of
TurboPascal, Verity Stob; rare familiar of both NTK and
Andrew “Spart” Orlowski. Was Mery’s handling a warning to
the British IT journalist community to keep their mouths
shut? And if it wasn’t, is there any way we can get them to
do it anyway?
http://gizmonaut.net/bits/suspect.html
- careful logical deconstruction also sign of guilt, apparently

Comprehensive blog glossary

Glossary | Samizdata.net

possible the best and most humorous blog glossary I’ve seen.

Hacking Cisco routers

Privacy? What privacy? | Samizdata.net

Building communities with software

Joel on Software - Building Communities with Software

Building Communities with Software

How software design makes a big difference to community

Social Networking s/w

Thoughts on Social Networking Software

Useful article this.
Interesting :

“but the future success of Friendster is not going to be determined by the response time or the reliability of their website. What is going to drive Friendster’s success is their ability to grow their audience while providing sticky services that keep them coming back. Once you have the demographics of this captive audience, the advertising money will follow. Friendster has the audience and the demographics, what they need to do now is figure out the sticky services.”

from Friendster: The Next Big Media Company

Social s/w ideas

A Whole Features: Social Software ideas

December 30, 2003

I put this in the Web Mashing area cos it’s a great example of creative thinking about services.

Good General blogging article

Mindjack - Linked Out: Blogging, Equality, and the Future

questions to ask:

• What’s this article about? Does it have an axe to grind?
• One of the most heavily cited online documents on the topic of equality and blogging is Clay Shirky’s Power Laws, web logs, and inequality
  Do you agree with Shirkey’s conclusions?
• What’s the ‘A’ list? Would you want to be an ‘A’ list blogger?
• What’s the take on marginalisation of some blogging voices?

Web Mashing for iPod

Wired News: IPod Maps Draw Legal Threats

The site is run by New Yorker William Bright, who said he fell into
transit bureaucracy crosshairs after posting a digitized copy of the
New York City subway system map on Aug. 9. “I got it on Gawker the day after it started, and the site exploded,” he said.

Plus: Wired News: A Disaster Map ‘Wiki’ Is Born

Podcasting Gold Rush Is On

Wired News: Podcasting Gold Rush Is On

Podcasting Gold Rush Is On

commercializing RSS

Wired News: RSS: Show Me the Money

Also:

• Why RSS Is Everywhere
• And Feedburner has a great article about About Syndication, RSS, and Other Web-Altering Chemicals

“RSS is a standard for publishing regular updates to web-based content.”

Online Communities: Focusing on sociability and usability

“Online Communities and Other Social Cyberspaces”:http://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/paper/7%20Handbook%20v1.7Final.pdf

Mashing the blogosphere

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Remixing the blogosphere

also BBC’s Creative Archive project:

“The Archive puts its own video material online and invites the public to remix and republish it.”

web mashing and power of tags

hackdiary: Stemming tags, and one website to the tune of another

UPDATE: I had to demo this to a mixed audience at the BBC this afternoon, so I put together some quick slides to help me explain the step-by-step process that goes on behind the scenes. Perhaps someone else will find them useful too.

First P2P casualty, post Grokster??

Fallout from Grokster case closes down eDonkey

and

“Just last month, a study by Internet analysis firm CacheLogic found that BitTorrent’s popularity was waning in favor of eDonkey,”

The latest format war

DVD dispute burns at PC makers | CNET News.com

also : Inside Microsoft’s decision to back HD DVD

“HD DVD has been supported by a Toshiba-led consortium [intel& Microsoft], while Blu-ray has backing from Sony and the PC makers.”

“The format wars began in earnest with VHS vs. Beta in the video tape arena but can also be seen in more recent divides, including the DVD+R vs. DVD-R split.”

“This particular battle is interesting in that it pits Intel and Microsoft against several of their largest customers. The battle has also divided the Hollywood studios.

Twentieth Century Fox, Vivendi Universal and Walt Disney have backed Blu-ray, while HD DVD’s supporters include New Line Cinema, Paramount Home Entertainment, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Warner Home Video. “

FAQ: HD DVD vs. Blu-ray

---

From Inside Microsoft’s decision to back HD DVD

“Making copies of a DVD is technically illegal in the United States, because circumventing access controls is forbidden by the US Code, except in rare instances. The problem with this, of course, is that it violates our Fair Use rights as citizens, and it punishes those of us who abide by the rules, while the real pirates (organized crime) go on largely unabated.”

“Microsoft, among others, wants to see this changed.” interesting ….

But there’s more :

“Currently, HD DVD is the only next-gen format to provide for the ability to legally make copies of optical content. Dubbed “Managed Copy,” HD DVD implements part of the AACS control mechanism to allow for things such as putting digital copies of a disc on a hard drive, transferring a movie (legally) to a portable player, or streaming content on a home network.”

Wow! [ for cold water on AACS see HD-DVD Requires Digital Imprimatur ] But there’s more gobsmacking surprises in store:

“Furthermore, HD DVD makes Managed Copy mandatory : all content provided on HD DVD must give users the option of making at least one copy.”

Apparently the studios have the option of charging for this (but will consumers tolerate that? I think not). “The take-away, at least, is that studios have to offer something “

go Microsoft go

Blu-Ray now:

“What about Blu-ray? Currently, Blu-ray has announced no such mandatory support. … The Blu-ray Disc Association so far has adopted AACS conditionally; it is still subject to review.”

and :

“Furthermore, Blu-ray to date has adopted content protections above and beyond AACS, adding BD+ and ROM-Mark to their arsenal. Such added protections appear to be part of an appeasement plan: the studios want more than AACS protection, at least least some of them do. “

Hybrid mode — the consumer friendly way forward

“Ribas also emphasized that HD DVD’s hybrid support was ideal for consumers. As I noted yesterday, the idea is simple: if HD DVD discs can play standard definition content in already-existing DVD players, then the entire industry could theoretically switch to HD DVD printing quickly, and kill two birds with one stone. As you may know, a DVD is comprised of two discs that when bonded together are 1.2mm thick. Toshiba’s current plan is to put SD content on one side of the disc, and HD content on the other side. In theory, this eliminates problems with older DVD players having difficulties focusing on dual-layer content on one side of the disc. With the costs of converting existing DVD production lines to HD DVD lines being significantly cheaper than supporting Blu-ray, HD DVD proponents see HD DVD as being a no-brainer. The “future proofing” of the format means everyone goes home happy, including consumers who buy DVDs next year that will play back in HD whenever they get around to upgrading their players two years from now.”

Wikipedia works?

[print version] Esquire wikis article on Wikipedia | CNET News.com

A.A.Jacobs from Esquire magazine authored an article on Wikipedia about the wikipdia itself and put it up with a request for the Wikipedia community to edit it, sticking to a similar format and wordcount. The result was astounding. Read and wonder.

Before community editing

After community editing