There was an article some time ago in the New Yorker called 'The Social Life of Paper' which talks about some of the things we can do with printed documents that we can't do with electronic ones. Paper documents take up physical space (so can be searched for and understood in different ways), they can be marked up easily, transferred to anyone, not subject to destructive viruses, trojans and system failure.
In A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools, Eugene Eric Kim begins by telling us that although there are lots of tools for electronic document sharing, the way most people share documents is to email them back and forth to one another. Often in this situation we tend to assume that it's the users--resistance to change or fear or just plain ignorance--that keeps people from adopting the new technology, but, while these are factors, the main reason what appear to be perfectly good applications don't get adopted is because they don't actually do something that most users consider key to the task of sharing and working with documents (or whatever other application is under discussion at the moment).
In addition, Kim says tools can't just be good, they must be tools that do what people want to do, interoperate with each other, and advance the 'conversation' or interactive part of document sharing:
- Be people-centric. This applies both to how we design our tools, and how we market them.
- Be willing to collaborate. We all belong to a community of like-minded tool developers, whether or not we are aware of it. Working together will both strengthen this community and improve our tools.
- Create shared language. Our tools share more similarities than we may think. Conversing with our fellow tool builders will help reveal those similarities; creating a shared language will make those similarities apparent to all. As a shared language evolves, a shared conceptual framework for collaborative tools will emerge, revealing opportunities for improving the interoperability of our tools.
- Keep improving. Improvement is an ongoing process. Introducing new efficiencies will change the way we collaborate, which in turn will create new opportunities to improve our tools.
The BBC will be basing their Creative Archive licensing on Creative Commons:
In a significant step forward towards the opening of a portion of the BBC's archives, the BBC today made their intentions for the Creative Archives clearer to other UK broadcasters and public sector organisations. The Creative Archive, originally announced by Greg Dyke in 2003, plans to offer the British public free access to some of the BBC's audio and video programming.
Via Phil Windley's blog, Utah has a Bill Tracking page which also includes an RSS feed. Utah can also create a custom RSS feed for the legislative committees you select. Good stuff.
I'm interested in intellectual property and particularly in how things are playing out in the realms of technology, law, business and creation. I haven't had as much time as I'd like to track the discussion and debate. I do think it's extremely important to remember that creative effort doesn't spring forth in a vacuum, it builds from context, culture, and the creative efforts of earlier artists. It has to build from and access other creations because otherwise we have no tools within ourselves to understand and appreciate it.
Here are some current writings on intellectual property (not comprehensive or anything--things I can across today). Since this is a longish post itself (pointing to even longer things) I'll summarize the links up front:
If you're not familiar with Creative Commons licensing, find more info here.
Suw Charman writes about Lawerence Lessig's new book, Free Culture, which was published simultaneously by Penguin and free online as a PDF file. After publication a group of random interested people decided to create an audio version of the book.
How has all this affected sales of the book? No one really knows yet although it looks successful. However:
Lessig makes the point in Free Culture that easing up on copyright control would result in more creativity. AKMA's audiobook project proved this point clearly and emphatically. Given the legal right to do so, people will build upon a work in unforeseen creative ways. More concisely than any argument within the pages of Free Culture, the audiobook illustrates exactly how much our society loves to create and how impoverished we are when copyright stops this productivity.As AKMA says, "It confirms what Prof. Lessig argues: that there's great positive potential for a culture in which works flourish apart from the throttling constriction of corporate eternal, universal copyright control."
So what does this mean to people who aren't creators:
Of course, you could have come this far and now be thinking 'But, I'm not a writer, I'm not a novelist. How on earth does this affect me?'.Well, if you read books, you're affected by this. If you watch films, you're affected. TV. Radio. All media is affected by this. Trouble is, when the effect in question, the harm, is a matter of what's missing - the work that is not created because the difficulty of clearing rights prevents it - it is harder to measure and quantify. You can't miss what you've never had.
"This is what's so wrong about the view that says 'asking permission is simple'," says Lessig, "because the reality is that clearing rights as such an extraordinary hassle, that most people would never even think of doing it. So that's why making clear the freedoms that are associated with the content first is a great way to get people to participate, and when they do they begin to recognise why the existing system is flawed."
Suw Charman has more good stuff to say in this longish post so go read and ponder.
Timothy Wu has a really long but reportedly really good (I haven't read it all yet) paper on Copyright's Communication Policy which begins:
There is something for everyone to dislike about early twenty-first century copyright. Owners of content say that newer and better technologies have made it easy to pirate. Easy copying, they say, threatens the basic incentive to create new works; new rights and remedies are needed to restore the balance. Academic critics instead complain that a growing copyright give content owners dangerous levels of control over expressive works. In one version of this argument, this growth threatens the creativity and progress that copyright is supposed to foster; in another, it represents an "enclosure movement" that threatens basic freedoms of expression. Copyright, these critics argue, has wandered beyond its proper boundaries. They contend that the balance must be restored.What all these arguments have in common is a focus on copyright's "authorship" function. Copyright policy, in this view, is fundamentally about providing a balance of incentives for authors to effectuate one of several possible goals, such as progress of science, democratic governance, or the sytem of free expression. Few disagree that these are the goals: the main disagreement is over what means serve these ends.
And, finally, Mark Lemley discusses Ex Ante versus Ex Post Justifications for Intellectual Property:
The traditional theory of IP is that the prospect of future reward provides an ex ante incentive to innovate. An increasingly common justification for longer and more powerful IP rights is ex post - that IP will be "managed" most efficiently if control is consolidated in a single owner. This argument is made, for example, in the prospect and rent dissipation literature in patent law, in justifications for expansive rights of publicity, and in defense of the Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Taken to an extreme, this argument justifies perpetual protection with no real exceptions. Those who rely on this theory take the idea of IP as "property" too seriously, and reason that since individual pieces of property are perpetually managed, IP should be too. But IP isn't just like real property; indeed, it gives IP owners control over what others do with their real property. The ex post justification is strikingly anti-market. We would never say today that the market for paper clips would be "efficiently managed" if put into the hands of a single firm. We rely on competition to do that for us. But that is exactly what the ex post theory would do.
Good article in eWeek about the disruptive nature of collaboration tools:
The most recent problems came to light when a network failure cut off e-mail and Web access throughout the company's far-flung operations.Instead of simply calling it a day, creative employees quickly implemented workarounds. One group installed a quick and dirty Wiki to enable team communications.
Another took advantage of America Online Inc.'s Instant Messenger application to route files and messages between geographically remote employees. Others used Web e-mail and wireless networking to keep the company's business flowing.
The CIO's response was predictable: He moved quickly to lock down corporate desktops and laptops to prohibit users from installing unapproved software or accessing unsupported Web services.
It's not the first time I've seen such a dramatic, knee-jerk response to user-supplied productivity tools. In fact, the rise (and attempted squashing) of new collaboration tools, social networks and wireless connectivity today has eerie parallels to early PC adoption. And despite the best intentions of corporate IT, the results will be the same.
Chad Dickerson, CTO at InfoWorld writes about using internal weblogs at Infoworld:
Our internal use of Weblogs has greatly accelerated, and we're beginning to see more tangible benefits as we've begun to reach a critical mass of internal contributors. At the end of March, my team held an off-site retreat and created a rolling six-month plan for IT initiatives at InfoWorld, which we posted to a Weblog available to all employees. For each month in the plan, we created a checklist of projects we would be working on and noted which ones would be completed in that month. We also scheduled what we call "fire drills" our internal term for the intentional failure of a specific key system to test fail-over capabilities in the event of an unexpected outage of that system. Posting this plan on a Weblog made three key things happen. First, it forced the team to strategically organize its IT initiatives into a coherent roadmap fit for broader internal consumption. Next, it created a sense of accountability for these initiatives within the IT team because we had collectively agreed on the initiatives and documented the process. Finally, posting our plan for the entire company to see helped foster a sense of accountability to our non-IT colleagues within the company.
Tame the Web: Technology and Libraries offers Ten Tips for Technology Trainers in the Trenches including:
Movable Type's recent announcements have created much interest in other blogging software. Here's a Blog Software Breakdown from Asymptomatic.
The table includes software that's user/server installed and not services or service/software combos like Blogger and Radio Userland.
for marketing, that is.
Alex Barnett provides a list of pros and cons for using email or RSS for marketing and distributing information.
Jason Schultz, the LawGeek has a set of three posts here, here , and here discussing Penn State's decision to ban students from having servers. Edward Felten also comments at Freedom-to-tinker.
Everything cannot be locked down. When we try to do it, we get lost in a tangle that usually ends up leading us somewhere that begins to remind us of Charles Dickens and Hard Times:
'You are to be in all things regulated and governed,' said the gentleman, 'by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use of ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don't find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use,' said the gentleman, 'for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.'
Thomas Grandgrind found, much to his dismay that this approach didn't work out all that well. And yet, it's not an easy task, keeping systems up and running, making sure the universities don't get sued and allowing things to happen that might not be specifically accounted for. For universities that manage and continue to do these things we all owe a debt of gratitude.
An exercise in clarity: RSS (Signal vs. Noise)
OS News has an interesting piece on why, with all the Sassers and Netsky's and other Windows security issues more companies don't just go with Apple:
This isn't the first time that those widely-publicized Windows security issues have bitten this company. When you think of both man-hours trying to fix the problem, and the combined loss of productivity in a company this size, the cost must be amazing. So the question must be asked: how can this company -- indeed, any large corporation -- rationally choose to support a Windows infrastructure?The answer is complicated, and has as much to do with inertia, ignorance and comfort level as it does with dollars and cents.
Among the reasons cited: Enterprise IT hates surprises, Apple doesn't have a dedicated enterprise IT sales force, enterprise IT wants solutions not 'stuff.'
Learning Lab Denmark has created Hazardcards a learning game that looks at the outcomes of technological disasters.
Learning Labs Denmark is a research organization interested in learning, competence and knowledge building. Looks like they have other interesting projects too, but the site is kind of slow so I'll have to go back another time and browse.
Freedom-to-Tinker's Ed Felten intiates a discussion on end-user liability for security breaches
The Webby Awards: 2004 Nominees & Winners are available. As always, it's a nifty look at what people are doing on the web in a variety of categories.
Some years ago, Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram introduced the idea of the 'familiar stranger.' Familiar strangers are those people that you see often but don't know--the woman who's always at your bus stop in the morning, the man who shops at the grocery store early Saturday morning when you do.
Mark Frauenfelder writes about Jabberwocky an application that uses Bluetooth to track familiar strangers.
I'm not completely sure what the application is for all this. For one thing, familiar strangers ought to be people that you see (how else do they become familiar) not so much people you don't see but who are around all the time. But it's interesting nonetheless.
Strategy+Business relates the 10 principles for chanage mangement. Most important is to remember that not just processes, but people have to change. Everyone needs to be involved, needs to understand the changes, and needs to 'belong' to the process if the change is to be real and lasting:
Most leaders contemplating change know that people matter. It is all too tempting, however, to dwell on the plans and processes, which don’t talk back and don’t respond emotionally, rather than face up to the more difficult and more critical human issues. But mastering the “soft” side of change management needn’t be a mystery.
...via elearningpost
JD Lasica has written a book called Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television which he is now inviting others to help him edit online via a Darknet wiki and a Darknet blog:
I'm nearly done writing it, so we're at the stage where it's time to bring in "the former audience," as Dan Gillmor puts it, and invite the blogosphere to participate in the book's editing (before it makes its way to its final editor).
Darknet, the book includes interviews with such new media power houses as Larry Lessig, John Perry Barlow, Howard Rheingold, Cory Doctorow, Mike Godwin, Clay Shirky, and Ed Felten, along with Jack Valenti and many others. It's about the rise of personal media and the conflict between traditional entertainment media and the digital technology available to the individual.
From the Introduction:
Darknets refer to underground or private networks where people trade files and communicate anonymously. But there's a deeper meaning as well. Darknet serves as a warning about a world where digital media become locked down, a future where the network serves not the user but the interests of Hollywood and the music industry. The Darknet is where many of us may wind up if current trends continue.The next few years will prove pivotal in the war on creative expression. As Joe Kraus of the public interest group DigitalConsumer.org warns, “This battle will affect consumers’ rights for the next fifty years.”
In this culture war, the major entertainment companies and their allies on Capitol Hill are trying to exert control over digital technologies, while users do everything within the law—and sometimes outside the law—to escape those restrictions. The clash, intensifying by the day, is playing out in legislative chambers, courtrooms, and increasingly in the design of the consumer electronics devices, media players, personal computers, and digital television sets coming into our homes.
Only one player’s voice has not been heard: yours. The sensible middle ground has been lost in the noise. But now that the battle has been joined in our living rooms, the public is beginning to stir. A vanguard of online activists and others have started to push back against digital restraints. What once was an obscure set of public policy discussions may be burgeoning into a populist movement.
Darknet will draw you into the secretive world of the movie underground, where bootleggers and pirates run circles around Hollywood and law enforcement. But piracy and file sharing are only subplots. Instead, this book profiles people from the future. To see where society is heading, futurist Watts Wacker once advised, find people from the future and study them. You will meet many people from the future in these pages—early adopters of the digital lifestyle, pioneers of next-generation television, game-makers creating virtual worlds, all of them wrestling with the law or confronting powerful forces seeking to maintain the status quo.
Shelter.nu has a good writeup on what topic maps are:
We keep trying to create technological solutions that resemble human nature so that the information can be processed and handled as good as possible by both man and machine. Sometimes the abstraction happens in the user interface, where we create a cute icon for a complex computation or write the word "do" when what really happens is "do, fiddle, tweak, load, count, compute, save, tweak, squiggle, save again, spit and you're done." Other times the abstraction happens on a data model level, creating tables in such a way as to make human sense. Maybe the abstraction is on a hardware level. And, in fact, bits of abstractions are everywhere, from the inner CPU out through software to the keyboard you type on and the screen you're viewing. Unfortunately, all these bits of abstractions don't necessary make it easy to grasp what is going on, because they are - surprise, surprise! - bits that more often than not speak their own parables, and don't form a complete story.Topic Maps is an abstraction that tries to bring together quite a lot of these bits, from the data model to the user interface, making an effort to try to tell the same story across the many layers we have in computers. And as such, it not only permutes through the technical layers of "data model" and "user interface", but also the people involved in using it, from designers and developers, project managers and general management, to users and interested parties. John the developer can now speak in the same language as the user, which is no small feat in itself and one that should lower the cost of miscommunication.
...via elearningpost
Wired News article on whether RSS Readers will eventually clog the web
The British Library has an interesting new application called Turning the Pages, which allows you to look at old manuscripts like Leonardo's Workbook page by page:
Turning the Pages is the award-winning interactive program that allows museums and libraries to give members of the public access to precious books while keeping the originals safely under glass. Initially developed by and for the British Library, it is now available as a service for institutions and private collectors around the world.
...via elearningpost