b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Why TrackBack -- Mower Responds
Indexing the Universe
Check Out activeRenderer's FAQ.
KM Needs Technology and People in Balance
Is Economy Really Picking Up
Jon Udell Explains the Real, and Simple, Solution to Trusted Computing
Barr on Right Side of Privacy Issue
A Publisher's Spin on Palladium
Error: Can't Find (categoryName)
More on TrackBack
Possible Community Server for Intranet
From the Department of Redundancy Department
TopicRolling Update
Best is New CEO at Lightning Source, Inc.
Update on e-Book Industry
Asian Piracy the Real Threat
Publishers Should Embrace Multi-Modal Publishing
Using Jabber IM for Weblog Change Notification on System Status
Blogs for System Status
recent Titled Blog Posts macro
Right-thinking on Copyright
FileMaker Goes XML
How To Think Out Loud
Success and the Private RSS Feed
Technology Review -- Do Readers Matter and DRM
Udell on Where DRM Fits
Weblogs Are Disruptive Technology
Inter-link for Multi-User Weblogs and Intranets
e-Bay Seeks PayPal Purchase
Taking the Long View on e-Books
Weblog Compendium.
Wednesday, July 10, 2002
Half-terrabyte of Storage for Under $4,500
Networkable storage for less than $10 per gig looks like pretty decent answer for big image databases.
IBM plans low-cost storage appliance. NAS 100 with close to half a terabyte of storage will support ATA [InfoWorld: Top News]
Terry Frazier at 12:00 AM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Future of Print, Technology
Why TrackBack -- Mower Responds
Yesterday I asked for more info on TrackBack, and some explanation of just how it aided in KM and klog scenarios. Here's what Matt had to say:
Why TrackBack?.» I didn't get it at first either, and nor has everyone I've mentioned it to.[Curiouser and curiouser!]What makes TrackBack so important is, I think, the following:
Imagine that I read someone like Jon Udell (which I do) and I find an item of his particularly noteworthy or relevant to me. I post it from my news page and add some editorial content of my own.But if, like me, you are a relatively new blogger then maybe very few people read my item and nobody bothers to click through to Jon's original. My item never appears in his list of referrers.
This means Jon, likely, will not know that it exists. We could imagine further that Jon would have liked to know what comments I made but he never gets the opportunity.
TrackBack addresses this problem. It allows me as the author of an item to "ping" the original during the act of publishing. This ping does not require someone to read my item and then click through to his. Simply by publishing he is notified that someone has referenced him.
I think this is a very powerful idea and will help to get new bloggers into the space. For those with interesting things to say the time to migrate from the fringe to the centre will be drastically reduced.
Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!
My take (a first pass at understanding an amorphous structure and subject to change) -- This is potentially both useful and a major distraction. Someone like Udell, who has a near cult-like following and is doubtless linked by thousands of readers, will be swamped by public TrackBack pings -- rendering them almost useless. OTOH, people with small, faint voices can quickly discover who (if anyone) is listening. This is a useful service, one that could shorten the time it takes to find one's audience.
But what I think is more important is the KM/klog aspect -- where employees who are well below the radar screen but critically important to actually getting a solution -- never get heard or informed. It seems to me the TBping has potential for real improvement here.
Indexing the Universe
I've long been a curious tester of non-linear thinking tools -- mindmapping, concept maps, etc, and have an off-again/on-again relationship with tools such as MindManager and Personal Brain. I've had only a little exposure to XML Topic Maps -- first seeing them at a Seybold show a year or so ago -- and don't really know where they fit in the great KM schema. But if they manage to create a sharable visualization of how topics relate to each other I'm interested in seeing how they work.Interestingly, I've found the UK and western Europe to be far more accepting of these alternative thinking methods than the US. This post originated with Ron Lusk but I found it via Matt Mower who, as luck would have it, is from the UK. I'll be following this train of thought closely...
The Tao of Topic Maps.The TAO of Topic Maps. The TAO of Topic Maps introduces topic maps, a new ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources. [Ron Lusk: Ron's K-Logs]
» Wow cool. More reading for tomorrow![Curiouser and curiouser!]
Check Out activeRenderer's FAQ.
Check Out activeRenderer's FAQ. I've added a number of topics to aR's Frequently Asked Questions. Among other things, I included an explanation of how to have liveTopics work with aR's outlined weblog style. [read more] [Marc Barrot: activeRenderer]KM Needs Technology and People in Balance
KM as a technology issue. What if knowledge management actually is a technology problem? Current thinking holds that knowledge management's problems come from too much focus on technology when the key problems are about organizational processes and practices. I've said as much myself on many occasions. But this formulation risks perpetuating the myth that problems are either organizaitonal or technological. We know the real world isn't that simple, of course. We shouldn't contribute to the confusion by oversimplifying our discussion Technology drives knowledge management issues on two dimensions. The first is the dimension of organizational scale and complexity. Knowledge management is a non-issue below a certain scale. Leveraging and sharing knowledge within co-located, reasonably small groups can be done without resort to technology. Geographic dispersion and numerical scale create knowledge management problems that require the intelligent application of technology. This doesn't mean there are silver bullets to be found with technology, simply that technology is a necessary component of any solution. This perspective suggests that technology's primary organizational contribution to knowledge management is in establishing a uniform infrastructure and contributing to a consistent language and terminology environment. The second dimension of technology is as the primary personal tool for the creation of knowledge work outputs and intermediate results. I've touched on this before in knowledge work as craft work. Despite all its troubles and limitations, the PC is an essential tool in the creation and management of knowledge work. Remarkably, organizations and most individual knowledge workers provide little insight or guidance in how to use this tool in a way that creates knowledge work products effectively. Sure. Bill Gates keeps making promises about how great things are going to be (think Information at Your Fingertips or the Digital Dashboard). All of these visions skip over the niggling details of what you as knowledge worker need to be doing to organize and manage all this lovely data/information/knowledge. The unstated assumption in most of these visions is that someone else will take care of them (either the software vendors or the magicians in the IT department). Some researchers are working on radical technology visions for how to do this. David Gelertner, for example, would have us replace our existing file systems with his scopeware. Great concept and Gelertner is a brilliant thinker. But I'm not holding my breath. To me K-Logs represent the most interesting recent effort to address this need with a simple solution available right now. They offer a starting point that a knowledge worker can understand and build from. [McGee's Musings]Is Economy Really Picking Up
Are more trademark applications really a sign things are picking up, or just a sign more people are unemployed and sitting around trying to capture some intellectual property they can exploit when things actually do pick up?
Bump in trademark applications may signal economic rebound, some say. Nando Times Jul 10 2002 7:06AM ET[Moreover - IP and patents news]
Jon Udell Explains the Real, and Simple, Solution to Trusted Computing
Jon Udell takes a look at Palladium and explains, succinctly, how we create a real Trusted Computing environment -- using technologies that are mostly available today plus a little personal accountability. Jon's scenario is where we should all be headed, and quickly, lest this whole digi-Nazi/Palladium thing gets out of hand.
O'Reilly Network: by Jon Udell - Control Your Identity or Microsoft and Intel Will.I've been mulling over the list of features touted for the Microsoft/Intel/AMD security scheme called Palladium.
[ ... ] We can choose accountability, or we can let the unholy alliance of Hollywood, Microsoft, Intel, and the government choose for us. The alliance, cleverly, pretends to solve problems that really annoy us, like spam and email worms. But these violations of trust won't yield simply to trusted motherboards and operating systems. People have to assert (and prove) their claims of trustworthiness, and other people have to make judgments about those assertions. [...] [Privacy Digest]
Barr on Right Side of Privacy Issue
Georgia Congressman Bob Barr can be infuriating -- he often comes out on the opposite side of issues from where I stand. Even so, he is one of the few people in Congress who ever (and I mean ever) calls the federal bureacracy to task for infringing the basic civil liberties of American citizens.This is not the first time Barr has come down on the side of privacy advocates. Having served with both the US Attorney's office and the CIA, Barr knows something of the damage that such government entities can cause. And when he speaks about privacy issues, politicos have no choice but to take him seriously.
I disagree with Barr on many issues, but on this issue he deserves our full support. Those who oppose Barr across-the-board because of particular personal agenda items are doing themselves a disservice in the battle to maintain some level of privacy against our War-On-Terror-crazed government.
New York Times - free registration required Privacy Officer Is Possibility at Security Department.Under Congressional pressure, the Bush administration said today that it was open to the idea of installing a chief privacy officer in a new Department of Homeland Security to make sure it weighed issues of confidentiality and the secure handling of personal information.
"If you bring us a proposal, I think we'd look at it very carefully," Mark W. Everson, controller of the Office of Management and Budget told Representative Bob Barr, Republican of Georgia, who heads the House Judiciary subcommittee on commercial and administrative law. "Privacy is a very important function."
Mr. Barr opened a subcommittee hearing by asking Mr. Everson what steps would be taken "to ensure the privacy of personally identifiable information as the new agency establishes necessary databases that coordinate with other agencies of the government." [Privacy Digest]
A Publisher's Spin on Palladium
In the current Seybold Bulletin (e-mail subscription so no link) Bill Rosenblatt uses his editorial to take the publisher's view on how Palladium is good for all of us. Many of his points are reasonable and, to be fair, he also notes the risks to users and to Microsoft in the Palladium strategy.Where Rosenblatt errs is in his underlying assumption that what publisher's want is what the rest of us need. We have ample proof that, left to their own devices, most publishers (regardless of media and like most entrenched businesses) view customers as little more than tokens from which revenue can be extracted and would choose all manner of user-hostile control and revenue generation schemes -- while doing little to improve their business models or increase the value they provide.
A robust, ubiquitous control mechanism that enables this sort of dreary, burdensome business practice hardly deserves support. There is no question the protection of copyright and intellectual property must be preserved, but Palladium-like architectures shift the balance of power totally to entrenched businesses, and do so in a way that is far more invasive and damaging to creators, innovators, and users than is called for.
[...] In the end, Palladium seems like publishers' best hope for DRM functionality that is as transparent, robust and ubiquitous as they would like it to be. Microsoft seems to have realized that it's very difficult to make money from DRM functionality per se, yet such functionality is necessary to support the various software and services from which Microsoft (and other vendors) could make money; therefore, it's necessary to build DRM technology and give it away as a way of moving things along. If publishers want DRM, they should take an open-minded attitude toward Palladium and find ways of working with Microsoft to ensure that it meets their needs.Bill Rosenblatt is lead consultant at GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies. [Seybold Bulletin]
Error: Can't Find (categoryName)
What happens when you delete a Category before you take all the messages out of it? Why, you get an ERROR message, of course. But only under certain circumstances.I was working on my Category structure. I decided I didn't like some of the things I had done so I went through and deleted (I thought) all the posts from it. Then I deleted the category.
I have Radio set to use the 3-button option (Post, Publish, Post & Publish) and I have upstreaming set for "Only on Publish". (Both these settings are in the Prefs and are explained in the Help.
With these settings I have more control over when Radio spews my ramblings out into the blogosphere (i.e. I get a second chance to correct my errors, but I digress...)
It turns out I had not actually gotten all the messages out of the deleted Category, and if you click the "Publish" button under those circumstances, you get this:
[Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "categoryName".]
It was very confusing and this thread on the Radio discussion group will point you to the solution. But hopefully, you'll never need it. After all, I do lots of stupid things so you won't have to.
Tuesday, July 9, 2002
More on TrackBack
If Gammel and Mower both think there is something useful in TrackBack who am I to argue? I don't understand it, but I'm open minded about it.
KMpings & Trackback. The KMpings Experiment.I created a little blog called KMpings that allows any blogger writing about knowledge management to ping their post to a tracking page (if their software supports it). Think of it as a themed www.weblogs.com for the knowledge management community.
I wanted to try out this experiment since I think the TrackBack function created by Movable Type has a lot of potential for aggregating blog posts within communities of practice on the web or an intranet. Please post any feed back you have to this message or shoot me an e-mail. [High Context]
[Curiouser and curiouser!]» I really want TrackBack for Radio.
And KMpings sounds like a great idea.
Possible Community Server for Intranet
An announcement from Macrobytes on a server-side security product for Frontier and Radio Userland. I'm looking into Macrobyte's Conversant community server as a framework for Radio-based collaboration.
Macrobyte Resources: TLS 0.3 for Frontier and Radio UserLand. "TLS provides client side tools for making secure HTTPS requests, and server side tools for running a secure web server."[Frontier News]
From the Department of Redundancy Department
Hey Dude! You read my mind. I was found redundant a month ago (although not redundant enough to be let go immediately) and I came the same conclusion. I still like my future-former employer and wish them well. With their changes I truly am redundant. It's not their fault.But I'm going to make some changes here. For the first time in my life I am not going to look for a job. I'm going to build one.
Okay so what's next?.Strangely enough being made redundant on Monday was not the most unnerving that has happened to me this week.
What is more unnerving is my decision not to look immediately for another job. Instead I have made the decision to see if I can make an adhoc mixture (as I see it now) of blogging, k-logging, knowledge management, intranets, collaboration and communities into a compelling business proposition and make a living from it.
For some time now I have wanted to strike out in my own direction. To lead rather than be led. It seems fate just handed me my chance. This is not a risk-free strategy, and I'm just beginning to admit to myself what I'm letting myself in for.
So from here onwards I will happily entertain any offers of work, suggestions about what works (and what doesn't). Ideas, novel solutions, novel problems. It's all good. I've also got an acre of understanding to do, here goes!
Suddenly I feel like I am growing into my weblog title.
Matt [Curiouser and curiouser!]
TopicRolling Update
I still have trouble visualizing some of these interBlogatary referential rolling efforts, but I'm learning to trust a few of these Radio guys. We'll see where this one goes.
TopicRolling 101.A feature that I have planned for the next release of liveTopics (the finishing touches go on the 1.0 release this week, for definite) is the topicRoll.
In the same way as a blogroll represents your subscription to other what other people are writing, the topicRoll represents your subscription to what other people are writing about -- their topics.
Whenever you add a topic to a post it is added to your topicRoll and (optionally) published automatically to your weblog. In turn you can subscribe to as many other topicRolls as you like. This means that as soon as someone uses a new topic, it is automatically added to the topics that your copy of liveTopics has ready for you to use. In the same way other users can see & re-use the topics you are using.
When combined with the idea of topicMiner (also due in version 1.5) this will allow you to thread together existing archived discussions in a completely new way. Mining topics allows you to find existing topics in archived posts. You will be able to mine other peoples topics from your own posts and vice verca.
I'm hoping this will enable some interesting cross-blog exchanges. [Curiouser and curiouser!]
Best is New CEO at Lightning Source, Inc.
More changes at Lightning Source, Inc.
J. Kirby Best has been named president and CEO of Ingram's Lightning Source subsidiary. Best takes over as CEO from Lightning chairman John Ingram who had been serving as president and CEO since the resignation of Ed Marino this spring. Best will report directly to John Ingram.Since 1997, Best has been chairman of Publishing Solutions, Inc., a data collection and sales tracking service for the publishing industry. Prior to launching PSI, Best had been president and CEO of Royal Book Manufacturing. [PW NewsLine]
Update on e-Book Industry
A quick update on e-book business that mentions eBook.web, which I wasn't familiar with. I note the growth stats are all quoted in percentages, a sure sign the numbers are really small. Still, it's good to see a little growth.
Promising Chapter in E-Book Story. Wired News Jul 9 2002 5:42AM ET[Moreover - Book publishing news]
Asian Piracy the Real Threat
This Salon.com treatise on Chinese piracy points out how serious and pervasive the problem is. And it isn't just intellectual property, it's clothing, hard goods -- everything from MacDonalds to Starbucks -- that gets cloned within the Chinese borders.I used to do some work in Shanghai. Long before DVD burners were widely available here in the states, kids in Shanghai development houses were burning digital copies of new DVDs that came in from the outside. They had the hardware, the software -- an entire infrastructure -- available to them for the sole purpose of copying stuff. And they had the technological wherewithal to supercede any silly copy-protection or encryption scheme the MPAA, RIAA, or DEA can come up with.
This is where the real focus on piracy needs to be. Microsoft knows it. Everyone in the software industry knows it. There are probably people in the RIAA who know it, but it's far easier to treat average Americans like criminals and to dupe (or pay) ignorant Congressmen (see: "Berman Proposal A Publicity Stunt" and "Legislation from the Hot-tub Party") into passing ill-conceived, over-arching legislation that criminalizes all sorts of normal, rational activity.
This certainly isn't an easy problem to solve. China has been working on it for years, as the article points out. But it is where the real focus on piracy needs to go. Not toward the average customer for music, films, and other media.
posted by Bag Man » July 8 2:16 PM | 10 comments. "Piracy sure beats manual labor" Can China's Piracy industry be stopped? Should it be stopped? Will this be the fate of all copyrighted material? Lisa Movius offers few answers, but gives a pretty good overview of the situation.[MetaFilter]
Publishers Should Embrace Multi-Modal Publishing
An interesting Q/A quote on multi-modal publishing from Terry Fisher speaking at iLAW last week.
[...]"When you finish writing a book (ILAW casebook), would you consider different models for publishing? The answer is yes. Foundation Press turns out to be reasonable about us releasing a version online, for free. Why is Foundation Press happy about this? As long as we don't make PDF files available in same pagination of the book, law students will be happy to have the book in "real" form. So yes, it's a little bit of experimentation."[...][Copyfight]
Using Jabber IM for Weblog Change Notification on System Status
Windley is over my head here, technically, but he makes reference to relevant discussions on the use of IM in the enterprise and points to some experimentation going on with Jabber. Windley thinks Jabber may be the right IM tool for the enterprise and there's more about it on his site.If we're to have properly automated print manufacturing, then we clearly need easy, simple system notification that can be used in many ways. There is nothing in the industry today that makes reporting, notification, and status updates as ubiquitous or accessible as this simple idea of RSS feeds, weblogs, and a little IM.
IM and REST: First Class Events?.[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]After posting the previous piece about IM and REST, I happened to see a reference to work http://www.pipetree.com/qmacro/2002/Jul/3#weblogspubsub">DJ Admans is doing with weblog updates and Jabber on Scripting News. The basic idea, as I understand it, is to use Jabber in lieu of something like MQSeries or JMS to notify people of changes to weblogs. I see the usefulness of that: remember those discussions in your undergraduate architecture class about polling vs. interrupts? [...]
Blogs for System Status
Phil Windley is CIO for the state of Utah and this guy is thinking like I'm thinking -- a $40 enterprise reporting system. I found Windley's Enterprise computing Weblog via David Gurteen and Windley has some great stuff.
Blogs for System Status Communications.[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]My organization operates hundreds of servers in several data centers and a network that connects over 250 separate locations. One of the problems we have is status communication to various interested parties. Tonight I decided we should have a system status blog that uses categories with separate RSS feeds for various severity levels and systems. For the low price of $40/year we could have:
- One easy spot to post status announcements, which would be ordered in exactly the right way.
- A web-based record of status.
- Multiple RSS feeds of the various systems and severity levels.
- Easy integration into the personalization feature of our intranet; RSS feeds would show up as gadget boxes for people who want them.
- The ability to easily subscribe to RSS feeds and digest them in various ways for people with special needs.
How could you not like that?
Monday, July 8, 2002
recent Titled Blog Posts macro
Link to instructions for displaying a list of recent posts on a Radio blogRight-thinking on Copyright
Congressman Rick Boucher is for real and one of the few people in Congress who understand copyright well enough to draft intelligent laws (for unintelligent law see: "Berman Proposal A Publicity Stunt.") Boucher is the first sign of Intellectual Property intelligence to show up in DC since 1997. Read on through to the end of Jenny Levine at TSL's post and then contact your Congressman to support this idea.
Boucher To Fight The Good Fight. Rep. Boucher Outlines 'Fair Use' Fight "U.S. Congressman Rick Boucher, moving to strengthen 'fair use' provisions under federal copyright law, said he is introducing a bill that would essentially restrict the record industry from selling copy-protected CDs....During a keynote address to the seventh annual Plug.IN digital music conference sponsored by Internet research firm Jupiter Media Metrix, the Virginia Democrat urged the record industry to reconsider int... [The Shifted Librarian]
FileMaker Goes XML
FileMaker to push universal information exchange. Upgrade focuses on XML data interchange, app integration [InfoWorld: Top News]How To Think Out Loud
In this post "Jon Udell" takes an example of a quality weblog post and, in his typically cogent fashion, points out some of the most useful products of this activity.I don't always agree with Jon -- sometimes he's so far out in front of the technology that I can't connect -- but I believe his points on the value of effective weblog usage are sound. William Zinsser's Writing to Learn is a classic text on how putting ideas to paper -- in an appropraite fashion -- clarifies thinking. (Sadly, I can't tell that such skills are any longer taught in public schools.) What Dave Winer calls narrating the work is a prime example of this. Jon's other points about the impact of a weblog are equally valid.
For any company to succeed at knowledge management -- or have an effective virtual company since they are artifacts of the same process -- there must be an emphasis on getting people to think out loud effectively. Virtual collaboration and knowledge management are not about application training, or technologies, or protocols.
They are about getting people to expose their thoughts to one another, and to do so in a way that is both useful and inviting. This does not come naturally to most people. It takes work. It takes guidance. And it takes some encouragement and support -- along with the right technology. But in the end the technology matters little, be it a weblog, a discussion group, or even e-mail. It is the human factors that are most important in trying to build dialogue.
Jeffrey P Shell thinking out loud about Zope. Here's Jeffrey P Shell thinking out loud about a Zope optimization puzzle: [...]Although Jeffrey reaches no conclusions in this posting, I find his thinking-out-loud process incredibly valuable. Writing is a way to clarify thinking. Doing such writing on a weblog is the primal act of knowledge management. Here are some of the useful outcomes:
- Jeffrey thinks a little harder about this bit of analysis, because he's making it public.
- The fact that Jeffrey is wondering about these issues creates the possibility that, by manufactured serendipity, answers will come to him from people made aware of his interest.
- Now that I know Jeffrey's on the case, I'll remember to check his weblog (or contact him personally) when I next encounter a similar problem.
Thinking out loud isn't always useful, of course. You have to think about interesting things, and articulate them in useful ways, as Jeffrey always does. Dave Winer calls this "narrating the work." Knowledge management is really just about cultivating that habit and that skill. [...] [Jon's Radio]
Success and the Private RSS Feed
Great heaping gobs of success! I love it when a plan comes together. After many niggling errors and fubars -- caused by a loose nut connected to the keyboard -- I have finally succeeded at How to publish a category to a different FTP server, published that Category into a separate password-protected directory, and managed to get my News Aggregator to suscribe to Private RSS with User Authentication in Radio.Woo Hoo! Big day at the races.
This is cool, as it has all sorts of implications for KM apps, client relations, etc. Very nice. Thanks to everyone on the Radio discussion group who helped me over the steep end of the learning curve.
Technology Review -- Do Readers Matter and DRM
This article from TR relates to the Do Readers Matter approach to DRM. Clearly to the networks the answer is "only as much as you watch the commercials." Just as the broadcast industry has come to see viewers as lifeless commodities, we should return the favor -- holding no interest in their survival, profitability, or long-term prospects.No argument can be made that the broadcast industry is critical to any national or social interest and people like Kellner deserve a rude awakening to marketplace realities. Their investments are irrelevant, their history of import only to academics, their job base relevant only to the extent it produces something of actual value to the consumer.
In Kellner's world networks exist only as a delivery vehicle, transporting the sheep of a viewing audience to the slaughterhouse of advertisers. This model is of questionable value to society -- to the extent that Kellner thinks it should drive legislation it is a detriment.
Broadcasters, record companies, and (to a large extent) newspaper and book publishers have grown over enamored with their past success and lost sight of who's in charge. They have lost the sense of serving the customer that all their founders embodied.
There are certain technical advantages to, and justifiable uses for, specific DRM protocols and applications, but we should demand they justify themselves in the open market and not tolerate the subversive use of legislation to sustain outmoded, counter-productive business practices.
MIT's Technology Review - Treating Viewers as Criminals. Networks say watching TV without the ads is theft. Will blipverts be next?The 1980s science fiction series, Max Headroom, depicted a society "twenty minutes into the future" ruled by powerful television networks locked in ruthless competition for viewer eyeballs. Concerned by the growing trend towards channel surfing, the blipvert was developed as a rapid-fire subliminal advertisement which pumped its commercial messages directly into consumers' brains before they had a chance to change the channel.
Unfortunately, the blipvert had the unanticipated side effect of causing spontaneous combustion in a certain number of overweight and chronically inactive couch potatoes. This outcome was viewed as an acceptable risk by the networks, even though it potentially decreased the number of viewers for their programs.
I could not help but think about blipverts the other day when I stumbled across the recent comments of Turner Broadcasting System CEO Jaimie Kellner, who asserted that television viewers who skipped commercials using their digital video recorders were guilty of "stealing" broadcast content. Kellner told an industry trade press reporter that "Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots." He conceded that there may be a historic loophole allowing us to take short breaks to go to the bathroom but otherwise, we are expected to be at our post, doing our duties, watching every commercial, and presumably, though he never said it, buying every product.
Kellner's intemperate rhetoric is, alas, characteristic of the ways that the media industry increasingly thinks about, talks about, and addresses its consumers in the post-Napster era. Napster may--and I stress, may--have been legitimately labeled piracy, but now all forms of consumerism are being criminalized with ever-decreasing degrees of credibility. Once going to the bathroom or grabbing a snack on a commercial break gets treated as a form of theft, the media conglomerates are going to be hard pressed to get consumer compliance with their expectations, making it impossible to draw legitimate lines about what is and is not appropriate use of media content.
[ ... ]
If the networks stopped at name-calling, that would be one thing, but they didn't. Last fall, the networks sued SONICBlue, the manufacturer of ReplayTV, and convinced a Federal Magistrate to force the company to collect data on thousands of individual consumers: what shows they watch, what commercials they skip, and what--if anything--they forward to their friends. Not content to wait and worry, the networks are now invading our privacy to ensure that we make good on Kellner's imaginary contract. Thankfully, the order was subsequently stayed by a higher court.
Confronting such hostility, consumers are increasingly committing acts of passive resistance (flush often!) and forming organizations, such as DigitalConsumer.org, which is making the case that consumers have rights and interests in the negotiations that occur between media producers, technology companies, and policy-makers. To borrow a line from Network, "we are mad as hell and we aren't going to take it anymore." [Privacy Digest]
Udell on Where DRM Fits
Jon Udell, who worked on O'Reilly's leading-edge Safari digital content store, says ubiquitous DRM is not going to help e-Book sales, or better the market. I have to agree. Continued efforts to create Trusted Computing environments that essentially treat all computer users as criminals will not provide any rational basis for growth, nor will it enhance the computing experience for anyone.To be of value, the e-content has to be as freely usable as a book, not less so. e-Paper is a first step, but one that is still years away...
DRM, active paper, and the future of publishing. Lack of good, ubiquitous DRM is the only thing holding us back from some really cool advances. More than two years ago, Microsoft started making some big bets on e-books... ...[Jon's Radio]
Weblogs Are Disruptive Technology
Another take on Clayton Christensen's disruptive technology spectrum
Weblogs are to CMSes as pcs are to mainframes. I came across a slightly-too-long but ultimately interesting article called Blogs as Disruptive Tech. The thesis: weblogs are to big, expensive content management systems (CMSes) as the PC was to the IBM mainframe. Very interesting read.[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]
Inter-link for Multi-User Weblogs and Intranets
Not sure where this fits. It isn't specific to Radio -- I don't think the Moveable Type TrackBack even works in Radio -- but I wanted to capture the thought about automatically linking certain entries to different logs, i.e. a project team working on customer service systems might want to link to the log kept by the CSRs for problem resolution, etc.
Using MT TrackBack for Cross-functional Team Blogs.Just yesterday Glen and I were talking about what balance to strike between multi-author weblogs and individual weblogs on our intranet. I think that eventually we would evolve our blogs on the intranet to single-author but enable some way to port or otherwise indicate certain of their posts for diffferent teams the writer might be on. We use MovableType and had not yet come up with an elegant way to do this that still met our needs (it is partially a taxonomy challenge, of course!).
The new MT TrackBack might fit the bill:
Multiple "authors" without author accountsSay you want to have your readers contribute to your blog, but do not want to add them as an author; either because you want to limit the number of authors or you don't want the work of having to add new people each time someone wants to post something interesting. Or, you may not want their posts to "weigh" as much as your official set of multiple authors.
With TrackBack, you can set up a section of your site to receive pings.
Kristine, one of our beta-testers, used her site, The Red Kitchen, as an example:
"If I had a category named 'Red Kitchen Guests' and allowed pings to it... then anyone with an MT blog could post a recipe on their page and ping my guest category. Then it could automatically list a ping link and excerpt on the Guest category page."With this we could set up team weblogs that just gather TalkBack pings from team members who are writing klog entries. Ideally I would like for individual writers to set one or more of their categories to auto-ping relevant team klogs when a new entry of that category is posted. I'm not sure that TalkBack supports category auto-pinging right now but maybe we could do it somehow via category templates.
I'm looking forward to experimenting with this. [High Context]
e-Bay Seeks PayPal Purchase
Interesting business model -- start out by becoming the world's largest flea market, end up being the world's largest e-commerce banking service. Out of all this may come the only dot.com that belongs in the S&P500.
eBay buys PayPal. $1.5bn in stock[The Register]
Taking the Long View on e-Books
Jenny Levine at TSL certainly understands e-Books. I've seen a lot of money and effort get poured down the e-book drain in the hysterical hope that some paperless book revolution was going to make everybody rich. As usual both the naysayers and zealots are wrong. Jenny has her feet planted firmly in the middle, which is where we all belong.
Ebooks Don't Need To Fly Off Shelves. E-Books Not Exactly Flying Off The Shelves "But a couple of months ago, BookExpo America 2002 in New York was virtually devoid of e-book chatter. The two-year-old International eBook Award Foundation folded this year due to lack of funding -- and interest. About the only time you hear the topic mentioned in publishing circles these days is when this question comes up: Where have all the e-books gone?There are those in the industry who continue to emote about the e-book and prais... [The Shifted Librarian]
Weblog Compendium.
Weblog Compendium. Here's an interesting list of tools and weblog-related stuff: the Weblog Compendium. All kinds of stuff, and you can add your own resources. [Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]
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This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
