Poppy Day

For Remembrance Day this year, Siegfried Sassoon reading Attack! from The Spoken Word: Poets:

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun,
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,
Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
Men jostle and climb to, meet the bristling fire.
Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

Tories urged to be the Linux to Labour's Microsoft

The ideas expressed are nothing new to anyone following the years old Emergent Democracy debate; the surprise is seeing them urged on the Conservative Party in the Daily Telegraph.

Not consumers or users, but amateurs

Mary takes Intelliseek to task for calling the writers of the web 'consumers', but her suggestion of 'users' is equally infelicitous - even Scoble winces every time he says 'user generated content'.

We already have a word for people who create for the love of it, rather than being paid to, and it is 'amateurs'. As with many other pleasures, when we seek out opinions, we prefer those that flow from passion rather than from payment.

Now it may be argued that, given the decline in the teaching of Latin and French, the loving root of 'amateur' is no longer perceived, so those who write pour l'amour ou pour le sport may see 'amateur' as a slight. In which case lets retranslate it to english and call it 'lovingly created media'.

Technorati Tags: blogs, meme, rhetoric

Riots, blogs and speech

Joi's blogsitter and Xeni find it notable that some Paris rioters have blogs.

This brings to mind again Douglas Adams' wise words from 1999:

I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day.

Read the whole thing, annually.

DVD sales 'dip' is really growth

Chris Anderson's list of faltering mainstream media includes under 'mixed':

DVDs: sales growth is slowing dramatically, from 29% last year to single digits this year.

Hang on a second there, that isn't a fall, it's a dip in the 2nd derivative - if it grew 29% last year and ~ 10% this year, it's still doing well. Notice also that the linked article mentions that studios have been shortening the wait between cinematic and DVD release. Think about the impact that has - it moves DVD sales earlier, thus giving an artificial short-term boost that will eventually even out.

Of Policy and Polity

Ewan told me over lunch that the UK Govt had been defeated in the Commons over an extension of detention without trial, which strikes me as encouraging for the ORG agenda (there's still time to be one of the thousand founding patrons, if you hurry).

This made me think about the difficulty of defending an existing, working organisation like the House of Lords or ICANN against a putative more democratic one. The EU argument to the WSIS that internet routing being controlled by a corporation under US Govt laws is somehow wrong and needs to be fixed is difficult to counter in theoretical terms, but it is a pragmatic fact that ICANN, like Wikipedia or eBay or microformats, works better than you might expect.

Just as the House of Lords often does a better job in revising legislation than the Commons, because of both the lifetime tenure, and varied expertise of the specialists appointed to it, ICANN, as Lessig says 'have developed an internal norm about making as light a regulatory footprint as they can'.

Susan Crawford, whose nomination to ICANN is another good sign, says:

Not every change in the world needs to be addressed by a regulatory strategy, and there’s a very high risk that those who are comfortable with the regulatory world will use levers that are easily available to them to make life uncomfortable for their upstart competitors.

We so easily slide into the notion that the internet is “bad” and needs to be regulated.  We’re cutting off the best of ourselves this way; we should be encouraging it to have a life of its own, to catalyze new ways of living and doing business, and only getting in the way when market control leads to an absence of choices and inappropriately high prices.

If only the US equivalent of the House of Lords, the Supreme Court, could get lawyers like Lessig and Crawford appointed, with their scepticism of purely legislative solutions.

PS - Armando Iannucci perfectly satirises Blair's bogus arguments.

PPS - Le Monde makes an argument against ICANN based on the British Empire's theoretical hegemony or something like that.

Technorati Tags: digital rights, law, microformats, ORG, politics, scotus, Supreme Court

DRM's power grab gets more naked

I think this week may be when the supposed middle ground of DRM vanishes. Walt Mossberg and Chris Anderson have both spoken against harsh protection, but stopped short of condemning DRM outright, unlike David Berlind.
This week we have had Sony/BMG adopting the techniques of virus writers to wrest control of your PC from you, and the MPAA proposing legislation to cripple all our video cameras and computers unless we are "professionals".

This is the first of my 5 points: DRM Turns your computer against you.
Sony will feel a backlash due to the value destruction they inflict on their customers (point 5), and their sales will fall. Microsoft should disable the CD Autorun feature used as an infection vector by Sony, as Apple did 7 years ago.

The MPAA attempt, though is serious. They managed to pass a similar law in 1998 that mandated Macrovision video signal corruption, and faulty AGC circuitry for non-professional video recorders. This is why you can't run your DVD player signal through your VCR, and why dubbing copies of your home videos is so awkward.

I worked long and hard at Apple for 5 years making the digitisation of video work easily and seamlessly, so we could all edit video, so my children could create and share with the world, and this stupid law will deliberately undo our work and break our computers and cameras on purpose.
It goes without saying that it will do nothing to prevent large scale commercial copying of movies, as this is done with professional equipment, and is already illegal and subject to huge fines. All it will do is yet again invert the legal presumption of innocence (point 4), and assume that my boys' videos, and your own recordings are copyright violations, and stop them from being digitised.

The 'Analog Holes' they want to stop up are our eyes, ears and mouths.

Technorati Tags: digital rights, DRM, law, meme, politics, video

six things that seemed amusing to me this week but probably aren't if I have to explain the context

1. I keep seeing things that aren't so much 'Web 2.0' as 'me 2.0'
2. I had that Emma Bovary in the back of the cab once...
3. If you buy a Sony CD it saves you the 15 minute wait to get rooted
4. I now realise that Our Island Story was an extended set up for 1066 and All That
   
5. Was the Master jealous of the Doctor in Dr Who because he never finished his PhD?
6. That much Halloween candy is bound to bring on apocolocyntosis

Inspired by the latest 5ive, which is much funnier.

Technorati Tags: 5ive, apocolocyntosis, DRM, sony, tagcamp, web 2.0

Technology should be amoral

Nicholas Carr's 'The amorality of Web 2.0' has an underlying rhetorical premise that is flawed, and Tim O'Reilly's defence ignores this.

Technology should be amoral. Morality is difficult stuff that should be left to humans to deal with. At best, technology can help inform humans to make moral choices, but to argue, as both sides in this debate seem to be doing, that technology can be moral in itself is to take a dangerous step.

We have millennia of literature arguing against devolving moral choice to simple mechanistic reasoning, from the Solomonic compromise, through the cautionary tales of golems to the modern myths like Brazil.

Indeed, lets look at contemporary cases where we are asked to devolve moral judgements to machines. David Weinberger's Copy Protection is a Crime essay sets out this category error clearly - that DRM eliminates leeway by handing control to stupid mechanisms:

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.

David Berlind and Walt Mossberg have picked up on this too, realising that code is not good at subtlety and judgement.

Similarly the Censorware Project and the OpenNet Initiative document the shortcomings of using computers to decide whose idea can be seen online by crude keyword filtering.

When designing software and the social architecture of the web we do need to think about these issues, but we must eschew trying to encode our own, or others, morality into the machine.

Technorati Tags: DRM, meme

20 million served

Technorati passed 20 million blogs today. The 20 millionth was Les CE2/CM2 Anquetil, a blog from an elementary school in Reims, France, in the heart of Champagne country. They started the blog to celebrate running 2 miles in a Relay Marathon.

Technorati Tags: 20000000, blogs, technorati

Tags and cognitive load

I've talked about this before, but not written it down.

One of the criticisms of tags is that they are 'just keywords again', which is true. The key difference is that they are experienced differently by the users, in a way that imposes much less cognitive load.

iPhoto has had an image keywords feature since it was first launched, but I don't know anyone who uses it. Conversely, Flickr's tagging is used by most of its users.

Part of this is down to the effect of working in public rather than private, as discussed in another context in Cory's classic 'outboard brain' essay, where the sense of public performance changes the psychology of annotation.

But a key part of it is the cognitive load of the user interface.

With iPhoto, in order to tag something, you need to first dig around in the menubar to bring up the Keywords dialog, illustrated here.

Then you need to create a new Keyword (which is buried under the popup at the top).

Then you need to select the photos that you want to tag with that keyword in the main window, then go back to the Keywords window and click 'Assign'.

This is not just a four-stage process, it has 2 stages that impose a big cognitive load, of the kind Cory describes as

one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Being handed a list of keywords and asked to add your desired ones is in effect asking you to construct a personal ontology of the world; to break the world into categories you want to keep track of. To hold the entire universe in your head in one go, and chop it into meaningful chunks. That's too mentally exhausting for most people. Plus, as creating a keyword is a 2-stage process, it feels a bit like they are rationed.

Then, the implied second task is to go and find all the pictures you have taken that fit that keyword. Again, this involves scanning through possibly thousands of images looking for the right one.

Now these aren't actual constraints; you can just create one tag and apply it to one photo, but the process makes it feel like a big deal, and something that you should consider carefully before doing it. So hardly anyone does it.

Conversely, Flickr prompts you for tags for each batch of photos you upload, and shows you each individual photo with a place to type tags in next to it. You look at the picture and type in the few words it makes you think of, move on to the next, and you're done. The cognitive load is tiny, because you have the picture in front of you and you can't help but think of words to describe it.

Aperture, Apple's new application for professional photographers, seems to have come up with a better solution than iPhoto. It has a pane in the general photo view that lets you freely enter keywords (one at a time, by the look of it, but I assume they go into the list below as you do so). However, the list of tech specs includes a long list of predefined tags. This is puzzling - why do they feel the need to list tags for 'Bridesmaid' and 'Groomsman' and so on as a feature?

Technorati Tags: Aperture, iPhoto, keywords, ontology, photography, tagcamp, tags, taxonomy

In honour of Nelson, 1758-1805

The Battle of Trafalgar was fought 200 years ago today, preventing Napoleon's fleet from invading England. Admiral Horatio Nelson died during it. He was commemorated by Robert Graves in the poem '1805', so I'm posting this public domain recording of Robert Graves reading 1805, courtesy of the British Library.

Technorati Tags: Battle of Trafalgar, Horatio Nelson

Armando Ianucci explains how to combat deceitful rhetoric

he says:

Resolving a problem by re-stating the obvious is an increasingly popular conversational gambit. For example, how many times have you phoned up a monolithic corporation to complain about bad service, practically spewing tears as you relive the 15-month frustration you've just been through, only to be told: "I hear what you're saying"?

As if, though on the phone with you, they weren't hearing what you were saying but were in fact hearing what a Tweenie was saying, or even doing something entirely unconnected with hearing what someone was saying, like launching a cruise liner or putting sausage-meat inside a car battery.

Of course they are hearing what you're saying, but it's no more effective a solution to your problem than declaring: "I'm sitting on my buttocks."

Do read the whole thing.

Technorati Tags: politics, rhetoric

Typing URLs now Illegal in England

Daniel Cuthbert has been convicted of computer hacking and fined $1000 for typing a URL into a browser.
The Open Rights Group is being set up to fight this kind of idiocy. Go and pledge your support today.

Technorati Tags: digital rights, law, Open R, ORG, politics

At web 2.0 conference

I'm at

Web 2.0 Conference: October 5-7, at the Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA


Come find me!

Technorati Tags: web 2.0