Lunch with Tim Oren

I had a fascinating lunch with Tim talking over possible futures of weblogging and how to rescue music from the RIAA mindset.

He later blogged a splendid rant on all the ways the labels destroy value apart from DRM.

Rosie's Science School

Rosie has begun teaching science to Elementary students. Some details over at Wonder Why Science
Here she is demonstrating kinetic theory with blue ink in cold water and red in warm water:


The hot water molecules are moving faster, and hence mix the ink up more quickly.

Media Heresy - DRM destroys value

People find the familiar comfortable. They want things to be like they were. So when technology did away with scarcity of recordings by making perfect copying easy, they wanted to change things back, to make these digits behave like physical goods.

This is where the dream of DRM comes from - making digital goods scarce, and enforcing payment.

Now using machines to enforce laws is bad. They have no capacity for mercy, latitude or leeway.

And all DRM is readily circumvented as, eventually, it has to turn into patterns of light and sound for people to see and hear, and at this point cameras and microphones can record it. So for the determined adversary, it will be broken.

What this means is that DRM can never thwart the real enemy, it can only annoy the legitimate customers, and they will thus Pay less for the product, or not buy it at all.

There is a very odd reward curve here - the paying customers are getting less value than the non-paying circumventers. DRM is all stick and no carrot.

It is for this reason that DRM destroys value, and business models based on DRM always fail.

The putative counter example at the moment is the iTunes Music store, but as Apple ships a circumvention device with the application, by allowing you to burn the songs to CD, the case is unproven to put it mildly. Remember, the $7M that Apple has grossed from the iTMS is small change to them; they make many times that from selling iPods.

If the labels succeed in making iTMS Windows stricter it will sell fewer songs.

This week I have been reading Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital in which he explains how US property law changed to recognise what was really happening on the ground, rather than what the large landowners wished for. This set off the accumulation of capital that made the US the wealthiest country in the world.

Last week I read The Perfect Store about how Pierre Omidyar created a market for goods online, that was built on mutual trust, and it grew to become eBay, the most profitable of all online businesses.

The time is ripe to do the same for online media, and create a marketplace that reflects people's desires and trust.

Internet archive gets searchable

With nice history charts for all your favourite memes .

Glad to see Anna found a home for it.

Watch out CYC

What the #joiito bot knows. I'm dumping it out dynamically with the Twisted webserver, which is all Python too.

For some reason I needed to use a full path to the pickle data, not a local one.

Firehose not straw

Having finally got DSL via Earthlink, I'm swamped by the megabit bandwidth. Lots of nice movies to watch.

Greg Dyke's speech in full says less than the press release:
We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes.

Cartoon Network promotes homeschooling

Don't go back to school day is a day of warnings about schools. eg "Here's a helpful tip; while at school, try not to get beat up". It's not John Gatto, but it makes the point...

Lunch at the Internet Archive

Rosie & I went up to the Presidio for lunch with the Archive team.
Brewster manages to get a great deal done with a very small staff and a huge penumbra of friends and volunteers. Lots of fascinating stuff about the Bookmobile abroad in Africa and Asia, and met Rick Prelinger and Lisa Rein too.

Afterwards we drove back to the Santa Cruz mountains for a great Mars watching Party, and had to go via Highway 9 to avoid the complete blockage of 17, Rosie winning the skilled driver award again.

Lunch with Dave Winer

Over the famous spicy noodles at Jing Jings, I signed up with Dave to speak at BloggerCon.
I'll be on the 'Tech' Panel, where blog users talk back to vendors about technical needs, and I'm putting together a talk on the Sunday about the need for a new model for video and audio to make them more blog-like and less like voicemail.
I also think I persuaded Dave to include live IRC at the conference - more on that later.

Lunch with Lessig

Had a good chat with Larry about the similarities and differences between Creative Commons and mediAgora - the goals are broadly aligned, but the methods slightly different.

iTunes parody make serious point

iTunes iSbogus attacks iTunes store for funneling money to the record labels instead of artists.

MailFrontier

Had a nice long chat with the MailFrontier folks about the detailed workings of their spam reduction tools Matador and Anti-spam gateway- a clever and systematic approach. I mentioned my swarming class action anti-spam idea.

Coffee with SocialText

Met up with Ross Mayfield & Pete Kaminski of SocialText, who blend Wiki's and blogs for Enterprise customers, and build nice tools for conference communications.
I think there is potential in extending the 'third place' of an online conference chatspace and combining it with a real-world cafe/bar at the conference, but you'd need a friendly host like Jeannie to make it work.

Lunch with Peter Hoddie

Good to catch up with Peter again; had a great long conversation about digital media, the net, philosophy and more.
he's doing interesting things with mobile devices and net standards at Kinoma.