Black, White, Grey and mediAgora

I know I've been quiet on the mediAgora front recently, but the Grey Album case is in many ways a perfect example of the mediAgora principle of rewarding Creators of both derivative and original works.

Imagine, if you will, a parallel universe where The Beatles 'White Album' and Jay-Z's 'Black Album' had been released under mediAgora licences.

Along comes Danger Mouse, and mixes the two to make the 'Grey Album', and releases it for sale under a mediAgora license too.

So what happens?

He list both monochromatic albums as 'source works'. Everyone who buys 'The Grey Album' has to own a copy of the two source albums too. If they already do, they just pay Danger Mouse; if they own The Beatles but not Jay-Z they pay him and Danger Mouse.

As DM is generating incremental sales in this way, he gets promotion fees from the other two.

And all those bloggers pointing to the Grey Album? They get promotion fees from Danger Mouse, insofar as they generate sales (and have bought a copy themselves).

End result - every Customer has 3 great albums, and all Creators involved get paid the price they set.

And even Glenn Miller and the orchestras George Martin and the Beatles sampled could be rewarded too.

Technorati, Xanadu and other dreams

Tim Oren says nice things about Technorati:

As we all know, Ted Nelson meant hypertexts to have bidirectional links. But due to a laboratory accident in Switzerland, we ended up with this lame thing. Mechanisms such as Google link search and Technorati are just hacks, ways to leverage Moore's Law to ameliorate a fundamental flaw in our hypertext data architecture, crawling the Web faster and faster to aggregate all of our trackbacks.

Yesterday, David Sifry convinced me that's just wrong. What Nelson missed, with his focus on 'literary' architectures, is that networked hypertexts are inhabited by people. Links are not just citations. They are gestures in a social space, parts of conversations or other interactions. There's an inherent value in looking at the dynamics of the record as it is created.

Obviously I agree with the broad thrust of this or wouldn't be working at Technorati. However, I think the one-way nature of links was necessary for the Web to achieve what it did. The globally connected nature of the web as a small world network is built on a scale-free distribution of linkage. If all links are required to be two-way, this rapidly becomes unwieldy and cumbersome - imagine if the front page of Apple.com showed all the inbound links to it. The unidirectionality created the permission-free linking culture the web depends on, and reversing those links in a useful way is an interesting problem we're having fun solving - the hot products page is an example of this.

In fact, that page addresses another issue, if obliquely. Shelley asked how being a community member affects your writing:

[W]eblogging [is] different than Big Media, because it puts publishing in the hands of the people. I have to presume they think this is a good thing because webloggers can write what they want, and aren't censored. Unlike Big Media, we aren't accountable to an editor, or big companies, or important politicians.

But I guess we're accountable to each other, and that's the most dangerous censorship of all -- it's the censorship of the commons.

Indeed. I think this is a good thing. The fact that when blogging we are accountable for our writings and their public history acts, in general, in a good way - it makes us stop to think about our reactions before they 'end upon our permanent record'. Shelley's own campaign against comment spammers that violate community norms in this way is an example. David Weinberger in 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined' put it this way:

A human being raised in isolation would not be identifiably human in anything except DNA. Sociality grants a mute herd of brutes their souls and selves.

The example of what happens when anonymity is allowed in Amazon reviews, leading to all kinds of dubious behaviour was revealed in the NYT , and picked up by auctorial bloggers like Cory and Neil Gaiman. The bloggers' comments show up in context with the rest of their writings, so you can gather whether you are likely to agree with them generally too.

For example, when Lago attacks Vote Links for reinforcing hegemony I can see that he is the same person who threatened to offer Joi a reading list, but then didn't, so I can offer him one instead:

DRM a sign of Disney's malaise

Mitch Wagner:

DRM doesn't work and consumers don't want it, so of course it's very appealing to big business, who are also in a big rush to sell other, equally practical products, such as anchovy flavored ice cream and bicycles with square wheels.

We learned that DRM doesn't work in the late 80s, only back then it was applied to software and we called it 'copy protection.'

Not much to add, but it's good to see the meme spread.

Vote Links

A while back I made a proposal for 'Vote Links' - a way to indicate that just because you are linking to something, you are not necessarily endorsing it (which is the default assumption by search engines and other dumb robots).
My original proposal used a nonstandard attribute which would make it hard to validate.
Tantek has helped me create an XHTML compliant Vote Links specification, which we'll be talking about tonight at the Technorati Participant Session and the XHTML Semantics session at ETCon.

Technorati at Etcon

We've got Dave's talk at etcon this morning. Here's the newest thing - the recent amazon products page

See what amazon products people have blogged about recently.

Power laws and blogs: first, the classic power law chart - note how smooth the curve is - no saturation due to no barriers to entry.

In fact, if you count up the total number of blogs with links you see a different picture - look how the 'little' blogs totally outweight the top few.

Technorati is Hiring

I don't think I've mentioned it here yet, but as Director of Engineering at Technorati,we're hiring.

The Mass Media bubble bursts

Doc and I were taking about this the other day, and tonight I remembered how well Douglas Adams explained the end of Mass media five years ago:

Because the Internet is so new we still don�t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that�s what we�re used to. So people complain that there�s a lot of rubbish online, or that it�s dominated by Americans, or that you can�t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can�t �trust� what people tell you on the web anymore than you can �trust� what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can�t easily answer back � like newspapers, television or granite. Hence �carved in stone.� What should concern us is not that we can�t take what we read on the internet on trust � of course you can�t, it�s just people talking � but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV � a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no �them� out there. It�s just an awful lot of �us�.

Read the whole thing. Regularly.

Orlowski trolls again

In his latest rambling, shambling semi-coherent collection of innuendo, semi-sourced smears and out of context quotes with no attempt at fact-checking or giving anyone the chance to reply, Orlowski says:

"What sort of people go to these?" he asks, rhetorically. The panel on Political Blogging doesn't even include a Political Blogger. We can help answer that one: andsometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. (Taken at the $500 a head BloggerCon conference).

Now that is a picture with me in the middle. Admittedly Adam Curry, Elizabeth Spiers, Jeff Jarvis and Charlie Nesson are there too, but what is he trying to say? That we use laptops in public?

He even repeats his widely debunked Googlewashing hogwash.

Fortunately we don't need to worry about him giving space for responses - you can read the rebuttals here.

RSS Winterfest - I'm speaking

I'm speaking at RSS Winterfest this morning, with Anil Dash and others on 'RSS 2.0 and Atom'

Tune in

Categorising blogs

Why I Write - George Orwell :

There are four great motives for writing:
1. Sheer egoism.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.
3. Historical impulse.
4. Political purpose.

Seems like one way to categorize blogs.

Technorati beta test

Dave Sifry just announced what I've been working on with him: We focused 100% of our time on completely refurbishing our underlying event engine - essentially taking a Volkswagen engine out and putting a Ferrari engine in.

Head on over to http://beta.technorati.com and try it out.

Or recursively see who has linked to it at the beta Technorati beta cosmos

Alienaid: Iowa Caucases

I think these were explained by Lewis Carroll:

What I was going to say,' said the Dodo in an offended tone, `was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.'

`What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.

`Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)

First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?'

This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.'

Media Heresy: Compression is becoming redundant

Yesterday, Ross sent Bambi Francisco to talk to me, and she asked an interesting question: "Is there a Moore's Law for compression?" My answer didn't all make it into her article, so here is an expanded version for my 'media heresies' series.

"Is there a Moore's Law for compression?"
In the sense of compression getting uniformly better over time? No.
Compression has different constraints - it is primarily based around fooling human perception systems by sending less information. Compression generally has two phases - a lossy phase where the data is transformed into a less accurate version by exploiting limitations of human vision or hearing, and a lossless phase where redundancy is squeezed out mathematically (this phase is like using .zip).

With more computing power, more elaborate transformations can be done in the first phase, and more complex mathematical compression can take place in the second phase, and still give the computer enough time to achieve a useful frame rate, but overall compression standards do not improve at anything like Moore's Law speed.

I'd say video compression is maybe 2-4 times as efficient (in quality per bit) than it was in 1990 or so when MPEG was standardised, despite computing power and storage having improved a thousandfold since then.

However, what does happen is that the Moore's Law effects on computing power, and the Moore's Law cubed effect on storage capacity mean that compression becomes less relevant over time.

You can now buy an off-the shelf computer that can edit uncompressed High Definition TV for under 10% of the cost of an HD tapedeck.

Consider that the iPod has gone from 5GB to 40GB in under 18 months - a factor of 8. The MP3 compression iTunes uses is about 8:1, so that means you could fill the new iPod with uncompressed audio and store as much as you did in the old one. Apply that rate of doubling another few times and think about pocket TiVos. Farfetched? I'm not so sure - Computer users have been watching DVDs on laptops for a while now; hand-held DVD players are being bought for children in the backseat and people who travel. According to my friends at Best Buy, they sold out all the portable DVD players they had this Christmas - they had hit a sensible price point.

The deeper point is a trend based one. If storage continues to improve in capacity per dollar at 3 times the rate of computing power, compression becomes wholly redundant - the CPU running the bit-manipulation is the bottleneck. The HD editing computers work this way - they have DMA (direct memory access) hardware in the disk interface and the screen interface, and the computer's job is to get out of the way.

The other reason compression is a bad idea in the long run is precisely because of its success in removing redundancy. If you have uncompressed audio or video, a single bit error will likely go un-noticed. If you are unlucky and it is the high bit of a sample, you will get a transient click in the sound, or a brightly coloured dot in the wrong place in video, but it will soon pass and be covered by a correct bit.
If you have a single bit error in a compressed stream it will make the rest of the frame, or possibly many frames, corrupt. In the worst case it can destroy the rest of the file from then onwards.
For archival content this kind of fragility is not what you want.

RIAA's fake cops harrass based on racial stereotypes

LA weekly story:

'A large percentage [of the vendors] are of a Hispanic nature,' Langley said. 'Today he�s Jose Rodriguez, tomorrow he�s Raul something or other, and tomorrow after that he�s something else. These people change their identity all the time. A picture�s worth a thousand words.'

Langley is Western regional coordinator for the RIAA Anti-Piracy Unit.

New model for music playlists

We were talking in #joiito about wanting to play music for each other, but not being able to just post urls to our mp3's for fear of vexatious prosecution.

So here's my initial straw man suggestion for how to do this.

1. create a new playist format that refers to songs by a canonical naming scheme - MusicBrainz has a good starting point. These get put in URI's that look something like:

songid:66fea472-0093-4764-a574-7ef87ade4433?artistid=d1601842-8052-4ac1-81ef-67e8259250dd&artist=Shannon%20Campbell%20and%20Scott%20Andrew%20LePera&title=Nothing%20New

How does one resolve this URI?

Implement an app that tries several alternatives:
1. Is it in the local music collection?
2. Is it available on a label or artist website/bittorrent?
3. Is a promotional extract up on Amazon or iTunes store?
4. allow further plugins

In each case the name/title are used for an initial match, and the sing identification process defined by MusicBrainz used to be sure we have a real match.