Make your customers your partners

Dave writes an essay worrying about who will pay for software. This is a hard problem, and the bundling model whereby Microsoft or Apple include the software in the cost of the hardware does not scale well to all kinds of software, attractive as it is when it works for you.

My answer to this is the same as my answer to the media issue. The way to win is to make your customers your partners. Give them an incentive to generate sales for you, and they dynamic changes. mediAgora's Promoter model would work very well for shareware, and the derivative works model could work well for software libraries, with applications that incorporate the libraries being rewarded for incremental sales.

Gibson on media

William Gibson's speech to the Directors Guild of America should be read in full, so I won't excerpt it here.

He expresses the same sense of awe that I did in 'I can read people's thoughts', but extends it to film and music too.

He also eloquently points to the need for a new model for media once it becomes malleable by any viewer, which is what I have proposed over at mediAgora .

Music I remember

Excellent program on 80s Electronic music hosted by Phil Oakey on Radio One. Shame it's only up in low bitrate Real8

Why isn't all this on the iTunes Store? I'd buy it.

Wait 50 years, then pay

Larry Lessig is trying to pass a law that will require copyright registration, as $1/year after the 50th year:

The idea is a simple one: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner must pay a $1 comment maintanence fee. If the copyright owner pays the fee, then the copyright continues. If the owner fails to pay the fee, the work passes into the public domain. Based on historical precedent, we expect 98% of copyrighted works would pass into the public domain after just 50 years. They could keep Mickey for as long as Congress lets them. But we would get a public domain.

A step in the right direction. Even better if the fee doubles every year thereafter, but that can come as an amendment later.

DRM as crime

David Weinberger explains clearly why using computers to enforce laws is foolish and dangerous.
In reality, our legal system usually leaves us wiggle room. What's fair in one case won't be in another - and only human judgment can discern the difference. As we write the rules of use into software and hardware, we are also rewriting the rules we live by as a society, without anyone first bothering to ask if that's OK.

Potemkin DRM

The iTunes Music store has the same approach to DRM as the original iTunes did.
Don't annoy customers too much. Make it very easy to do the desired, legitimate thing, and awkward to do the undesired thing, but don't waste too much effort trying to make it impossible, as leeway is important.

Creative code

Paul Graham writes a very perceptive essay on coding.

Rebuilding Iraq

There are a couple of people who should be persuaded to help rebuild Iraq. The first is Hernando de Soto, who should be put in charge of creating a land registry.
The second is Mohammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank. He should be give the task fo setting up the Iraqi Oil trust.

Maf Awakes

Nearly a year ago, I told Maf he should start a blog, and made one for him, which he resolutely ignored. Now he's started posting to it, and it's helpful stuff too, about Curry and how to make DVD players useful.

So go and read Maf's blog

Emergent Aristocracy

The history of democracies is usually told as a rebellion against an overweening King - George III for America, Louis XVI for France. In England it is King John, in 1215, and the rebellion gave rise to the Magna Carta which constrained the powers of a king, and providing for a separate body (of barons) to enforce it.

Cromwell's rebellion against Charles I is not often portrayed as democratic, though the accession of William & Mary in 1688 after James's restoration was notable for the English Bill of Rights which further constrained the King's power and in effect made Parliament sovereign.

The history of democracy can be seen as successive (and expanding) answers to the questions:
Who gets to vote?
Who gets to speak?
Who gets to set the topic?

With a single sovereign, or a single parliament, control of the latter two is still tricky; legislative agendas, though longer than historically, are still constrained, and the introduction of legislation is more often reserved to government or elected legislators, and more rarely allowed by referendum.

In a deliberative body, elaborate rules are adopted to ensure only one person speaks at a time.

There is an inherent funneling of debate because of these procedures.

Conversely, online there are millions of conversations happening in parallel, topics are introduced daily, and votes are largely spurious.

The challenge is help these conversations to focus, converge and produce action.

Faces and names help

Over on the Corante Social Software blog (Aside - you'd think with all those SSA gurus there they'd have managed to get an RSS feed for this one, but no) Liz writes about Friendster and Hydra.
One thing that struck me about the ETCon experience was that Rendezvous iChat had benefits even if you didn't use it to chat - you could see who was in the same room as you, and match faces to names with it without having to peer at badges.
I wonder how the school districts that have an iBook per pupil are using these tools.

Blogs, Wikis, mailing-lists and linguistic forms

Zak picked up on the discussion at Joi's, and Mark commented:

I don't agree with Kevin Marks when he says that conversation is diluted and washed away with wikis.
Signal to noise is increased after discussion over a period of time by distilling it to its main points. To get the data to the reader in the best possible way. (sometimes conversations can get heated, and often conversations are over many months.)
Wikis often act like Weblogs, example is thread mode, one post after another. But the benefit with wiki is that later some one can refractor the conversation to the important information.

He's missing my point a bit. You can do wiki-like things in blogs, and blog-like things in wikis, but you have to work at it. Blogs don't make subsequent editing easy; Wiki's don't make attribution and temporal order obvious. (Did I just refactor his comment? hmm.)

This reminds me of the cross-blog Sapir-Whorf discussion going on.
Language does not limit thought, but different languages do affect how the thoughts end up being expressed and communicated. Some things are easier to say in one language than another - English doesn't have a (formal) third person imperative, for example, which makes translating the Lords Prayer from Greek hard.

It is not inevitable that blogs become personal, wikis become consensual, and mailing lists become confrontational, but that is the tendency of each form, much as Frayn shows the tendency for formal writing to concatenate cliche in a Markovian manner.

Orwell's tastes better

There is an ISO standard for making tea. I'm almost tempted to spend the 40 Swiss francs...
Jonathan Sanderson did buy it and found it disappointing. Score one for George.

Why societies fail

Jared Diamond takes the long view.

Social Software again

I've posted belated Hydra notes from the Social Software Alliance Birds of a Feather and the Journalism Birds of a Feather from Emerging Tech last week. Taking notes using Hydra was an intersting experience, with 3 or 4 other people taking them too, correcting my spelling and so on.

The SSA meeting was fairly chaotic - perhaps reflecting the diverse meanings of 'Social'. Clay Shirky did not show up (or if he did, did not speak up); Dave Winer later poured scorn on the efforts, implying it was all about social climbing.

Friedrich Hayek famously said that the word 'social' empties the noun it is applied to of their meaning. Hayek goes on:

…it has in fact become the most harmful instance of what, after Shakespeare's 'I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs' ( As You Like It , II, 5), some Americans call a 'weasel word'. As a weasel is alleged to be able to empty an egg without leaving a visible sign, so can these words deprive of content any term to which they are prefixed while seemingly leaving them untouched. A weasel word is used to draw the teeth from a concept one is obliged to employ, but from which one wishes to eliminate all implications that challenge one's ideological premises.

At one point in the meeting, writers of social software were likened to scientists at Los Alamos building the bomb, which is certainly hyperbolic, not to say bollocks.

The subsequent Journalism BoF was less hectic, and more measured. One of the most interesting things for me was the various Blogger/Journalist hybrids like Dan, Glenn, Scott and Doc talking about the difference of voice between a blog and a newspaper, where you would have an editor pushing you into the house style. This reminded me of both Boris Johnson's NYT experience and the lamented Tish Williams, who left 'Upside' for 'TheStreet.com' in early 2000, and went from a sparkling original voice to yet another tech journalist. (I wanted to link to some of her stellar pieces at upside, but they are all gone - not even google or the wayback machine can find them)

I think this conflict, rather than layout issues is behind the blog/wiki divide that Joi mentions.

Blogs amplify individual voices. Unlike mailing lists, they don't get lost in the hubbub. Wikis are different - they blur authorship, and drive towards a consensual style. Blogs' temporal flow creates an affordance for conversation that is diluted and washed away in Wikis.