broadstuff

Upgraded to version 0.7 because a little prompt wanted me to...and then the f*cking thing wiped 2 years off my calendar.

B*st*rds - why didn't it say !!!!!!

Apparently it tells you in small print on the website, but it really, really should notify you when you see those little upgrade things on your PC.

That is my lifeline, it shows my past activities, I use it to fill in time spent consulting on each project, as well as holding my forward schedule.

Who made the decision to update without very clear warning that data would be scrubbed - what do they think people do with calendars?

(Apparently the only way out is to roll back to version 0.5)

The Lane Hartwell / Richter Scales thingy rumbles on....a Hartwell friend and lawyer (Jason Schultz) has now weighed in with an opinion, which is that it may have been uncouth to not credit her, but it was OTT to take the video down and probably would not stand in court.

The issue hopefully can therefore move on to discussing the general case, ie, as Jason says:

If we, as an online society, want people like Lane to succeed in their work, to be successful and profitable photographers, we need to take care to promote them in a way that feels respectful and supportive. We need to make sure they succeed so that they will continue to provide us with amazing photos and make them available online. Equally, if we want people like TRS to be able to make funny videos about the Bubble quickly and easily so everyone online can enjoy them, we must take care to allow creative uses of material without imposing draconian requirements before publication.

He goes on to think about how the creative commons might create common wealth:

However, for me, the idea of attribution and promotion have strong appeal. They respect who the artist is and try to help them thrive in their work. I also think ethical online users should consider tithing any financial gain from the use of other people's works back to the original creator -- in essence voluntarily offer to post-date royalties if the project amounts to anything profitable. Such steps would, IMO, go a long way to building a stronger online creative community rather than tearing it down or apart.

I agree with this idea, but I also think there needs to be a materiality test, as in practice this can be unworkable - the issue is where does accreditation stop, at what level of minority rightsholder?. I have worked with content rights over the last 10 years, and nothing mires a production down in treacle and pushes up costs like having to deal with minority rights holders, especially if they have veto powers, which a takedown essentially is.

This is why I am so against the outcome here - a commodity good (a photo of someone else that could have been obtained from a number of sources), used in a collage with a whole lot of similar, can be used to take down an entire piece of creative media.

I think there have to be some tests for what sort of media can qualify for takedown, as Fair Use is not a given, the takedown occurs first (it's automatic) and then the defendent has to go to the cost and effort (and lost value) of proving Fair Use applies - thus the game is distorted to the complainant, no matter how material the piece of IP at issue.

Also, as Kathy Sierra noted, the current interpretation of Fair Use rewards parody but does make it very hard to engage in positive building of new content.

There is also a misconception re Copyright law - it is not designed to give the creator total rights over distribution, as that would stifle all future innovation, it is designed to balance old creation with new.

Thus there comes a time to draw a line that says "this is not a material piece of IP" when new takedown requests occur, and I would argue that a photo of a commodity good that is in the public domain (loads of other photos are available), that constitutes less than 1% of the media being taken down is not material and thus should not qualify for takedown. Failure to do this will lead to increasingly frivolous examples, that can be done at little cost to the complainant and great risk to the media creator.

I don't know if you've been following the Richter Scales / Lane Hartwell saga, but this post by Kathy Sierra on Tara Hunt's blog, articulates my views on this issue very well:

While accepting Lane's right to earn a living via selling her IP and keeping it fully copyrighted, and her similar thoughts re her book, Kathy notes:

On the other hand, there are probably a zillion things in my books which have been at the least inspired by things (examples, metaphors, ideas, etc.) which were often in the copyrighted work of others (standing on the shoulders of giants and all that). The more difficult it is to build on the work of others, the less progress we make. Giving credit seems like an easy thing to do until/unless you’re in a situation where it becomes “credits all the way down.” So things like what Lane is doing could contribute–as others have suggested– to the ‘chilling effect.’

Kathy also makes a very insightful point re the path Fair Use has taken in recent times:

On the third hand, I also see a huge inconsistency and in some cases hypocrisy or double-standard over what constitutes fair use. We incent/reward/encourage the use of someone’s work as long as it’s used to mock/criticize the creator (especially someone we don’t agree with), but we discourage/punish the use of someone’s work to create something new. It’s almost as though the legal and ethical encouragement of fair use becomes, “if you can’t say something mean, don’t say anything at all (with that person’s work).”

And nails the general case worries as opposed to the specific:

I think there are a lot of folks who agree with her about deserving attribution (especially after requesting it) in this particular case but disagree with what she did in general because they are worried about the issue on a meta level.

Kathy, you have to start blogging again !

Update.....Lane Hartwell has put up some more details of her pov here:

Scott Karp asks (hypothetically) if Blogging can do Journalism, and fairly quickly concludes it can - after all its just another channel which helpfully has a digital CMS attached to it (and getting a flexible CMS is non trivial in Medialand, believe us...).

But that is not the real question one should be asking...the real issue, the billion dollar question, is whether Journalism can do Blogs?

Not Journalists I hasten to add - individual Journalists are doing fine as bloggers, and some - the NYT Bits, UK Grauniad, the BBC - actually do a good job (though a no-commentwall policy would be nice)

However, judging by some recent grumblings in Journoland, one wonders if the overall Ecosystem has got it even now. I am referring to these amusing vignettes:

Some still feel that Citizen Media should be monitored and regulated

Supporters of "citizen journalism" argue it provides independent, accurate, reliable information that the traditional media don't provide. While it has its place, the reality is it really isn't journalism at all, and it opens up information flow to the strong probability of fraud and abuse. The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend

The UK's National Union of Journalists can't actually say "Citizen Journalist", instead referring to us as "Witness Contributors". (Heck, what's wrong with Blogger....). Neil McIntosh writes:

...the union continues to flog the dead horse of its Witness Contributor Code of Conduct, which remains a profoundly silly document. For example, its insistence on, whenever possible, using “material produced by NUJ members […] when such alternatives to witness contributors are available” cheapens the latest, more savvy, report. It speaks more of a fear than an understanding or vision of what users might add to our traditional work. It looks old-fashioned alongside today’s report, and should be spiked.

(To be fair, Neil compares the latest NUJ report very favourably to the one of last year)

The truth is the Genie is out the bottle...I'm a journalist and publisher now, as are many of the bloggers I read, even if they are VC's, academics, businesspeople or whatever as well.

Our economics are disruptive as we do it as an offset activity, our opinions - in our areas of expertise - are worth reading (we are ever so humble ), our enthusiasm is boundless (as are our numbers), and we are capturing an increasing amount of time and attention, and thus Ad spend.

So....what does the aspirant Journalist do today?

Until recently, my advice was largely the same as anyone had given for many decades: Find a gig where you can write — a small town paper, freelancing for an alternative weekly, a business trade publication (my route). If you’re good, the story went, you would find you way to bigger publications and forge a career.

Today, it’s hard to give that advice, when the economic underpinnings of all those places you were supposed to be trying to work for are so shaky. Is there any good advice other than to learn how to trade mortgage-backed securities?.... In fact, there may well be many more interesting options today for someone who has a passion to find and tell stories.

This by NYT Bits Journoblogger Saul Hansell at a convocation for Journalist Entrepreneurs pitching their (YASN) startups

So...just as all the Geeks are becoming Journos, the Journos are becoming Geeks....

Update...looks like Hollywood Scriptwriters are also becoming Geekpreneurs...its getting crowded

From the WSJ

Live Gamer Inc. is developing an online marketplace where players of Internet games will be able to safely trade in virtual goods, a business that is often plagued by fraud. In the biggest departure from current methods of trading in virtual goods, Live Gamer says it will only allow trading of items with the blessing of game publishers. Live Gamer is working with Sony Corp.'s Sony Online Entertainment division, Funcom GmbH, Ping0 Interactive Ltd. and other online-game operators to integrate its trading system with their titles.

And why are they doing this wonderful thing? To provide a service to gamers? Not quite....

Live Gamer has the support of publishers by promising to prevent the sale of goods by gold farmers, who are widely disliked because they tend to hoard game wealth without socializing with legitimate players. Live Gamers says players who sell goods through its marketplace will keep 90% of proceeds, with the remainder split between Live Gamer and the publisher. Sony, which allows the sale of virtual goods for its Everquest II game, said there is a need for an independently operated marketplace for virtual goods.

Strong parallels with the early days of online music then, when the majors tried to set up tame sales arms that control sales and hand them a share of the profits.

Thing is, I can already buy Linden dollars on eBay, so why won't a service like that (or eBay itself) do the job adequately enough, without the 10% tax?

(Postscript - In case it wasn't obvious from the title, by implication these sort of markets will be very attractive to Gold Farmers, for whom there is not insignificant demand....)

Pew Internet has a report out about how we leave and track digital footprints across the web. Here are some highlights

Internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprint; 47% have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago. However, few monitor their online presence with great regularity. Just 3% of self-searchers report that they make a regular habit of it and 74% have checked up on their digital footprints only once or twice.

Yeah right......only 47% and 74

In the report, they define 4 groups of Net Natives in the Jungle

Online adults can be divided into four categories based on their level of concern about
their online information and whether or not they take steps to limit their online footprint:

Confident Creatives are the smallest of the four groups, comprising 17% of online
adults. They say they do not worry about the availability of their online data, and
actively upload content, but still take steps to limit their personal information. Young
adults are most likely to fall into this group.

The Concerned and Careful fret about the personal information available about
them online and take steps to proactively limit their own online data. One in five
online adults (21%) fall into this category.

Despite being anxious about how much information is available about them,
members of the Worried by the Wayside group do not actively limit their online
information. This group contains 18% of online adults.

The Unfazed and Inactive group is the largest of the four groups—43% of online
adults fall into this category. They neither worry about their personal information nor
take steps to limit the amount of information that can be found out about them online.
Most internet users are not concerned about the amount of information
available about them online, and most do not take steps to limit that
information.

Unfazed.....Uneducated and Naive more like, the Digital Bunnies in the jungle

More interesting even is that apparently Kids are more Private than adults:

Among adult internet users who maintain an online profile, 82% say that their profile
is currently visible compared with 77% of online teens who report this.

Among adults who say they have a visible profile, 60% say that profile can be seen
by anyone who happens upon it, while 38% say their profile is only accessible to
friends.

Teens with visible profiles make more conservative choices with respect to visibility;
just 40% said their profile was visible to anyone, while 59% reported access that was
restricted to friends only.

Danah Boyd feels this is because adults are not walking the talk:

In other words, adults (and presumably there are parents in this group) are telling teens to be careful online and restrict what information they put up there while they themselves are doing little to protect their own data.

This reminds me of adults who tell their kids never to meet strangers online under any circumstances and then proceed to use online dating sites and, rather than meet in public places, choose to go to the stranger's private residence. Adults need to think about safety too - it's not a story of binaries. The safe and practical approach is somewhere between abstinence and uber risky behavior.

I disagree to an extent....

Firstly, I suspect many adults are using SocNets for different reasons - ie work / network related so it is in their interest to have more data publicly available (Linked In profiles for example) whereas kids are using it to communicate within more formed (and defined - eg school, college etc) social nets.

Secondly, I am sure one would find 2 other groups of adults in there - those telling their kids to be careful and being so themselves, and those who don't do either.

I am always a bit concerned by surveys that take the line of "everyone is letting it all hang out more online" (so why not you implied)....one has to look at where they are coming from. I'm quite glad to report that I googled Pew Internet and found that they claimed that impartiality was their modus operandi.

Anyway, I like Nick Carr's alternative take on this discrepancy:

I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that the primary reason teens restrict access to their Facebook and other online profiles is not because they are dutifully following their parents' and teachers' advice but because they're trying to hide stuff from their parents and teachers.

As for adults, the reason they're happy to let it all hang out is because, alas, there's nothing much to see. When was the last time you saw an adult being photographed while engaging in the ancient rite of tap-sucking?

Funnily enough....

In a related article, I note that Sociologists are studying a group of Facebookers:

Facebook’s network of 58 million active users and its status as the sixth-most-trafficked Web site in the United States have made it an irresistible subject for many types of academic research.

Scholars at Carnegie Mellon used the site to look at privacy issues. Researchers at the University of Colorado analyzed how Facebook instantly disseminated details about the Virginia Tech shootings in April.

But it is Facebook’s role as a petri dish for the social sciences — sociology, psychology and political science — that particularly excites some scholars, because the site lets them examine how people, especially young people, are connected to one another, something few data sets offer, the scholars say.

Message to those careful youth - you can hide, but you can't run

Chatted to 12yr old son re the much disputed Richer Scales video, and he pointed me to this Facebook Song - very funny, and no Lane Hartwell pix (unless those subliminal ones in one scene are hers



Enjoy

This is very interesting...a photograper had one of her photographs (that she had posted on the web) used (uncredited) in an amateur video on YouTube, served them with a takedown notice and had it removed. Leaving aside Youtube's speed of action here when they don't seem to have quite the same urgency of action with other copyrighted content, this highlights a real cutting edge issue between Fair Use and Copyright on the Web.

Lane Hartwell, the photographer, said:

"I wasn't upset by the video itself," Hartwell said, but the brief flash of her photograph -- without compensation or credit -- still rankled. "I thought, 'Where does somebody just get the right to take this?'

"

The answer, traditionally, was the Fair Usage law*.

However, as Lawrence Lessig points out in his book The Future of Ideas, there has been a creeping extension of copyright to the content owners over the last 10 years or so, eroding many of the traditional conventions of Fair Usage, noting that .

... But this structural design is changing–both legally and technically.

This shift will destroy the opportunities for creativity and innovation that the Internet originally engendered. The cultural dinosaurs of our recent past are moving to quickly remake cyberspace so that they can better protect their interests against the future. Powerful conglomerates are swiftly using both law and technology to "tame" the Internet, transforming it from an open forum for ideas into nothing more than cable television on speed.

(Incidentally, Lane defends herself in this article in Wired Magazine, whom she has done work with, and not once in the article is Fair Usage brought up - shame on you Wired)

...and shame on YouTube...by any reading of the Fair Use rule this is very arguable - a lot more so than airing TV shows and MTV videos.

Richter Scale...take her photo out, get the guy to send you one of his own, and resend your brilliant video, taking care to mention Lane Hartwell for her role in the credits

As for Lane...what was she thinking - biggest opportunity ever to get her name in lights, and she winds up getting a reputation as a total killjoy to hordes of people across the planet who previously had never heard of her.

* which incidentally means you don't have to give credit for short excerpts, though it is customary usually to do so. Quite what a quick flash of a photo of someone else in a video collage counts as is I suppose the nub of the issue.

Update....read some more of the comments back and forth on this one in various blogs, and have decided that if there is a good place to make a stand for fair use rights, its here - to be allowed to show a photo of a fairly easily obtainable commodity (a well known face) that is shown as a photo-collage for about a second in a far larger creative work, should be a no brainer.

Was on the train this am...delayed, crowded....sitting opposite this woman, who then proceeded to flip open her mobile and talk total and utter drivel the whole way - some 30 mins. You could see the people around her getting more and more irritated - the hope in their faces when one call was finished, replaced by silent frustration as the next call was opened up.

(A note to airlines who want to put mobile calls in-flight - don't !. I can see so many "phone rage" incidents occurring...)

Anyway, what she was doing was that sort of social grooming stuff that GigaOm's Anne Zelenka thought Twitter was ideal for....

Isn’t that what human interaction is like? Sometimes there’s an urge to say something just for the sake of saying something — just for the sake of interaction or recognition. Sometimes there’s conversation that doesn’t really mean anything; there’s no signal in the noise of ambient intimacy

...so it occurred to me, if she had been Twittering her life away she would have been happy, and so would we have been.

I just had to reply to this Nick Carr post...

accusing Krigsman of being the one who doesn't understand enterprise software, took a detour into Ross Mayfield talking about getting laid, and eventually ended up with all sorts of yo-mama-ing Enterprise Irregulars, Regulars, and Rubberneckers leaping gleefully onto the Techmeme pig pile. (Can pigs leap?) Bottom line: nobody understands nothing.

Well, yes........I guess we were earnestly yo-yo-mama-ing with Nick and the rest of the chorus (Isn't that the point of the blogosphere though), but as we've all been doing this stuff for 20 odd years (designing, building, implementing, running, fixing some serious-grade Enterprise systems) we thought we just may understand some of this stuff.

Anyway, Nick points to one of Sig's posts (I'm taking my laptop skiing over the break to see if E2.0 enlightenment hits me too ):

ERP actually stands for Easily Repeatable Process: "Processes that handle resources, from human (hiring, firing, payroll and more) to parts and products through supply chains, distribution and production. Known to be rigid, but handle events and transactions with precision and in volume. Systems deliver value through extensive reports and full control over resources. Resource oriented, transactional, event driven systems. Delivered by system vendors with roots in accounting using up to 25 year old technological solutions." But Sigurde is far more interested in the Barely Repeatable Process (BRP): "Typically exceptions to the ERPs, anything that involves people in non-rigid flows [like] the daily unplanned issues that happen in every organisation. The activities that employees spend most of their time on every day. Processes that often start with an e-mail or a call.

Precisely....any computer system is just a simulation of a real life ecosystem, and thus simplifies it - no simulation ever captures the full system. And sadly, often the more complex the simulation (and the more opaque it is) the harder it is to adapt it for the BRP

For example, take car manufacturing and supply - the western approach was to build increasingly complex MRP (later MRP 2.0, mutating into ERP) systems to control it. The Japanese just simplified it all with paper cards, lightbulbs and removing a lot of the supply chain complexity by removing the supply chain itself with JIT delivery.

The other thing about most (not all, but most) Enterprise systems today is they are based on systems that are 20 years old, and in fact many are just expansions of even older logic just coded into newer languages....and nearly all of this was built without the slightest consideration of a networked environment (this I know, my MSc was on networked enterprise software 20 years ago, it was radical then and remains unusual today in enterprise software - hence the market for EIN et al). The architecture is usually redolent of top down, mainframe based DNA - and this impacts the whole ethos of enterprise software.

The Baseband Internet shook up the supply chains first (EDI etc) as they were low bandwidth...but what has really changed in the last few years is that even the average dude at home now has the sort of bandwidth and computer power that is light years more than existed when most of today's Enterprise software was architected.

In other words, the LAMP based, Open Source sourced, distributed / widgetised / XML WebService coherent software which the broader "Web 2.0" community takes for almost a given is several generations ahead of most of the stuff sitting in the corporates today - and thus stuff that corporate systems find very hard (the "BRP" - as well as security etc) is in many cases easier - non trivial, sure, but easier - for this sort of software.

And its a hell of a lot cheaper to build and run - we are assembling software from open source components today that even a few years ago would have cost millions to develop, never mind maintain.

And this has only just started....with the emerging technology we will be breaking up enterprise applications into smaller modules and then using them interchangeably, and we will expect to be able to call on a many to many structure of databases, software modules and front end UI that we may assemple on the fly as we need it, and we will expect "the network" to manage complex messaging, identity and security.

...anyway, that all brings us to the same place as Nick:

That brings me, and Governor, to the present, and the impending web-spawned firestorm in business software.

You heard me: FIRESTORM!

And why do we think this?

(i) We're working on projects that are chipping away at it from a supply side via Open Source, XML etc (as I guess quite a lot of people debating Enterprise 2.0 are) and are starting to get a feel of the Art of the Possible

(ii) I can see that millions of consumers with big pipes and fast tins will change the dynamics of the supply side of enterprise software design structure...there is no hard and fast rule that says a lot of the functions in there have to be done there. I'm not advocating SETI 2.0, but it ain't going to be centralised like now. Also, it moves the poer - the thinking around VRM is one indication of this.

There is a view that it will be "Web 2.0" front ends and something akin to today's enterprise stuff in the back end. I don't think so....today's Enterprise stuff is largely obsolete, its a question of time and inertia (not budget - the business cases of new software are v good usually) as to how long it takes to get it out, but one of the traditional barriers - getting the data out - is much less of an issue with common network standards, and once the data is out then piping it between modular apps is far easier.