b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Book Reviews
Recently
Private Client Web Sites Restored
Evolving P2P Infrastructure
New Sci-Fi Today News Feed
Atlanta Schools to Lose Millions
R.R.Bowker and BookSurge to Offer Sales Kiosks to Libraries
Body By Swingline
I Can Hear You Now
Congressional e-Mail Works
RosettaBooks 'Wins' e-Book Case with Settlement
Copyright Fails to Make 93% of Films Available
The Value 0f Offline Publishing Tools
Friday, December 6, 2002
Radio as Embedded Training Tool
Radio's unique integration of news aggregation, desktop CMS, and multi-site/category publishing are a powerful combination for creating learning-directed web sites. But we still need a solid P2P framework to manage the bandwidth requirements of really effective training materials.
Embedded Training via Weblogs.The military has always been a great source of ideas for business strategy and planning. In the Future Combat System, an ambitous DARPA/Army contract to develop the next generation of information and network intensive first deployment forces, a key component is Embedded Training. [...]
There are two interesting parallels of this concept with business: learning while doing and downtime activities that contribute to learning. Learning while doing means while performing a task, do so in a way that contributes to your own knowledge and that of the organization. Similar to klogging an activity. Our downtime is our chance to explore the world outside the organization to reveal complementary linkages and patterns.
I think of Radio as my Embedded Training system. The power of this client to aggregate and share, both while doing and in downtime, enables a learning process for me and others. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
Private Client Web Sites Restored
I recently changed hosting providers and have been reorganizing the tfrazier.org and terryfrazier.com domains. In order to better manage security I have begun using terryfrazier.com as my primary "public" domain, with tfrazier.org reserved for a variety of private uses.All proprietary client sites will continue to be hosted at tfrazier.org and any previous URLs and login info is still valid. It's taken a while to get this back up and I apologize for any inconvenience.
Evolving P2P Infrastructure
John Robb provides a brief analysis of P2P, including current problems and likely options for solving them. Improved P2P services will be a core component of new, small-scale intranets, personal networks, and the growing communites of Internet-only workers. Centralized document management systems have already become impediments to effective sharing among widely dispersed groups. If the Net is to foster the next-generation communities it will need better P2P architectures than those currently available.
Technologic Partners. Economical P2P distribution of large files. Will a system ever arrive that isn't tied to copyright infringement activities? Of course. This newsletter takes a look at the opportunity both in the enterprise and consumer markets.Glowing brightly in the distance, of course, is the vast, largely untapped consumer market. There, potentially millions of people might one day be requesting endless quantities of bulky video and music files, quite likely with help from distributed and even P2P-based delivery systems. Indeed, video-on-demand has become a reality for the growing cohort of broadband-connected PC users who regularly stuff their hard drives with video programming from the Net.
Unfortunately, most of the P2P systems in the marketplace today are merely shared hard-drives. This poses multiple obstacles to utilization:
The key to solving these problems is to tie weblog publishing to a P2P system. This will provide the following:
The end result of this integration will be a system that enables enterprise customers, small businesses, schools, non-profits, and individuals to publish/share large files with thousands of readers at a fixed cost. My guess is that it will open the floodgates to all of the digital content that is currently being produced by individuals inexpensively using new low-cost digital media equipment. Finally, we are starting to see the emergence of a true "personal broadcast network" where individuals can vie with professionals in the production and distribution of media. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Thursday, December 5, 2002
New Sci-Fi Today News Feed
I'm officially an addict: Sci-Fi Today is news subscription number 110 on the old b.cognosco subscriptions list. Many thanks to Kit and myRadio for making the whole thing manageable.
Sci-Fi Today.Sci-Fi Today. Drog just alerted me to a relatively new collaborative news site that I hadn't seen before, in the tradition of Slashdot and Kuro5hin: Sci-Fi Today. The users are the creators. Good stuff -- check it out, especially if you're a fan of science & technology (75%) or science fiction (25%). [JD's New Media Musings]
And they have a syndication feed at http://www.scifitoday.com/backend.rdf for those of you like me who want your news to come to you, instead of having to go out and hunt it yourself. Isn't that what computers are for? [McGee's Musings]
Atlanta Schools to Lose Millions
Ouch! Georgia is cutting $165 million from school funding next year. Is there a way to turn these lemons into lemonade? Can EduBlogs fill gaps, replace missing services, or help districts do more with less?
Schools look for ways to cut spending. AccessAtlanta Dec 5 2002 9:21PM ETThe two districts [Clayton Co. and Henry Co. ISD] could lose as much as $8 million as the state seeks to slash $165 million from the allowances due school systems across Georgia.
This latest wave of spending reductions to Georgia's $16 billion budget applies to all state agencies and is expected to continue through the next fiscal year. [Moreover - Atlanta news]
R.R.Bowker and BookSurge to Offer Sales Kiosks to Libraries
Will public libraries sell books as well as lend them? The idea of book kiosks refuses to die, but at least this time there is no attempt to actually produce the book wiith the kiosk.
book vending kiosk. R.R.Bowker and BookSurge will be introducing their library based book vending kiosk at ALA mid-winter. This will bring libraries into a retail service sector and may well leverage an important new relation between the library collections and PoD technologies. [future of the book news]
Librarians might use the Books-In-Print kiosk to purchase print copies of backlisted or OP items, but I wonder how much appeal this will have to the general public. How different is it from ordering via the Internet on a library PC? I don't see much here but I will be interested to see what reaction Jenny Levine at TSL has to this latest kiosk effort.
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I Can Hear You Now
American cell phone etiquette is changing for the better, except for the one place where you really don't want to hear from me.Rick Klau decries the rising cacophony of cell phone use in airport bathrooms.
Can You Hear Me Now?
I've flown close to 100,000 miles this year, and am alarmed at a trend that I've witnessed in dozens of airports: men talking on cell phones while in the bathroom. Do women do this too?It's bad enough that you have to hear their conversation echoing throughout the walls of the bathroom - but I can just imagine the poor folks on the other end. Surely they're catching at least part of the cacaphony surrounding the caller? [...] [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
Now a study, conducted by Wirthlin Worldwide, has found that the percentage of American cell phone users who think it's appropriate to talk on a cell phone in the bathroom has risen from 39 percent in 2000 to 47 percent in 2002. Thankfully, they seem to find cell use less acceptable everywhere else.
Congressional e-Mail Works
The post at Politech suggesting politicians are turning off e-mail is a whine about a problem that doesn't exist. How hard is it to go to your Senator or Congressman's web site and submit a query? Why is a practice used by dozens of service companies -- that of having a support form rather than an open e-mail address -- deemed threatening when used by a politician?I've used the e-mail forms for my Senators and Congressman dozens of times. Almost every time I've gotten a response -- sometimes an e-mail response, sometimes a written response via USPS. But I've always gotten some sort of response. The e-mail queries do not go off into a black hole. The complainant should try the system before whining about it.
Congress makes it even harder to reach out and touch 'em. Congresscritters are sick of hearing from their constituents, so they're shutting down or obscuring their email addresses and replacing them with forms that route the mail to god-knows-where. Of course, physical mail and Congress don't get along -- that's thraxpanik for you -- and their fax machines are usually out of paper. [Boing Boing Blog]
RosettaBooks 'Wins' e-Book Case with Settlement
Controversial e-book publisher RosettaBooks has settled it's long-running suit with Random House over who owns the e-book rights to previously published works. RosettaBooks secured its rights directly from authors, who claimed that earlier contracts with Random House, which made no explicit mention of e-book or digital publishing, did not cover RosettaBooks work. Random House disagreed.Lawsuit Over E-Books Settled. Washington Post Dec 5 2002 2:08AM ET[...] RosettaBooks began issuing the e-books in early 2001 and was quickly sued by Random House, the world's largest English-language trade publisher.
But a federal judge rejected the request for a preliminary injunction. U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein ruled that the publisher was "not likely to succeed on the merits of its copyright infringement claim and cannot demonstrate irreparable harm."
Last March, an appeals court reaffirmed that decision.
Under the agreement reached today, Random House will grant Rosetta exclusive e-book rights to "mutually agreed-upon titles," both old and recently published. Random House Inc. authors include Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, John Grisham, Anne Rice and Donna Tartt. [...] [Moreover - Book publishing news]
But I'm left wondering just how Random House granted exclusive e-book rights when it failed to prove in court it owns such rights. I suspect this isn't over, but the total dollars involved have turned out to be so small it just isn't worth fighting anymore.
Wednesday, December 4, 2002
Copyright Fails to Make 93% of Films Available
Facts on movie availability disprove argument on copyright benefits to public access.
The trouble with pesky data.chaos II -- these numbers are AMAZING!. Jason Schultz has done more amazing work calculating any "chaos" that would come from striking the 1976 Act. Using the Internet Movie Database, he confirmed the Copyright Office's numbers that about 37,000 movies were released in the period 1927-46. (IMDb reports 36,386). Of those, only 2,480 are currently available in any formay, or 6.8%. 93.2% of the films during that period are are commercially dormant. Another way to put this: Jack Valenti's crowd says exclusive rights are the only way to assure content get's distributed. So we have a nice experiment: For the films between 1927-46, exclusive rights fails to make available 93.2% of the content produced. Does anyone really doubt the public domain wouldn't do better? Jason's email is here. [Lessig Blog]
Don't you just hate it when the data gets in the way of such a nice rhetorical argument? Arguments over the impact of Napster and its offspring on music sales are in the same vein .
One of the most useful little books I've read in the past few years has been Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent by Garrett Hardin. Hardin is an emeritus professor of ecology at UC Santa Barbara and is perhaps best known as the originator of the Tragedy of the Commons meme. In Filters, Hardin argues eloquently himself that we're all responsible for thinking critically about the incomplete arguments put forward by those claiming to be experts, whether those arguments are wrapped up in words, numbers, or systems.
It probably wouldn't hurt to spend a few minutes with Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics and John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy : Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences as well. Or you can simply decide to trust what the experts tell you. [McGee's Musings]
The Value 0f Offline Publishing Tools
I remain uncomfortable with the idea of a totally on-line publishing and information system -- that's one of the reasons I like Radio Userland. There are still too many places where I can't connect -- where my laptop is a standalone work platform -- for me to get over the uneasiness I feel about having to be connected to be able to work. Using Radio allows me to work in all the places I love to hang out -- cheap hotel rooms, sleazy coffee bars, and third-rate airports -- without worrying about connectivity. Whenever I get connected I can let Radio handle all the publishing and news gathering.I could achieve the same ends by creating offline files in other, separate, apps and handling the publishing to an online system with cut-n-paste, etc. But isn't that the point of these tools -- not to have to do that anymore? I haven't really experimented with the on-line tools yet so I may be missing something. I'm just now really getting past the novice stage with Radio (a program designed to be used by people with no web publishing skills.) New on-line experiments starting soon. Film at 11:00.
Online vs. Offline publishing.Carol Tucker brought up an interesting scenario (see below for a quote). A similar thing happened to Jim McGee at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management recently:
http://www.kellogg.nwu.edu/faculty/mcgee/htm/blog/
Luckily Jim was using a desktop K-Log tool. That allowed him to keep posting even when the publishing conduit (the University's network) was down due to an attack. When it went back up he could publish everything that he had entered into the system while disconnected in one easy step. BTW, Jim is a pioneer in the use of K-Logs, having taught a course at Kellogg this spring (Kellogg is often ranked the #1 business school in the nation by Business Week) on knowledge management with Radio on each student desktop.
This scenario could also become a disaster if you are using a K-Logging service and it either suddenly goes out of business (as we have seen with many Web companies) or has a catastrophic failure. While the site itself may be saved if it is published to a third party or safe location, the fact that the data and logic used to build your K-Log is stored in a database that is now unavailable would make your work a stranded artifact. The solution is either to publish from the desktop and keep a back-up of the files on CD, tape, or back-up drive -- or -- to set up your own hosted solution on a server you own in order to make sure the database is back-up (this is easy to do). Keep it in a place you can control.
This also brings up another note I saw recently from Dody Gunawinata. He is running a K-Logging vertical community for AIESEC (an organization of 50,000 members devoted to cultural exchange through global internships). He is using a mix of Manila hosted sites -- and -- Radio sites published from the desktop. This allows people to select the type of tool they feel most comfortable with. You can see his community here:
Dody brought up the fact that for 80% of the world, per minute Internet access is too expensive for extended time online. That means that if you are working with individuals in countries were cost of Internet connections are expensive relative to income, the best way to extend K-Log publishing to them is through an online/offline publishing. This will allow them to keep costs down (I know there are lots of NGOs and non-profits out there that are looking at this, this info may help). For example: a person working in the Philippines can work for hours on several K-Log posts offline and then connect for a couple of minutes to publish them and collect news items from subscriptions. Dody expands on this with:
"Any software that allows offline-online usage will do well in this type of environment. That's why the rest of the world can afford to use email (POP). Radio will do well."
[John Robb]I agree with most of the things that are said in this post. John Robb only fails to mention that downloading an entire Manila database is rather quick and simple, thus making it possible to save locally the "data and logic" of your site. What I don't understand is the lack of integration of Manila and Radio. Why can't we really use Radio to feed posts to a Manila site? The Radio tool that was presented a couple of months never got beyond beta and simply didn't do the trick in my point of view. My dream scenario would be a Manila site with all its power of shared content management and design for the more static parts, and Radio managed news feeds where posts can be categorized using shared Manila departments... or something like Matt Mower's liveTopics. [Sebastian Fiedler] via [Seblogging News]
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