Chris Boese's Weblog

A cautionary tale as social media sites and platforms inevitably rise and fall

Link:  FT.com / Reportage - The rise and fall of MySpace.

I've been around the social media block long enough (Geocities, Friendster, Tribe.net, anyone?), and this seems to apply to the seemingly "invincible" search engines as well (WebCrawler, AltaVista?): the one thing that seems as constant as death and taxes online is that the social sphere (the wisdom of crowds or mob rule) is fickle.

You may be up one day, but most surely, a day will come when you will be down (think about it, Blackboard!).

So while I never really got into MySpace, the larger story of the MySpace failure is a cautionary tale for any 800 pound gorilla entertaining dreams of invincible bigness.

This Financial Times article dissects the failures of the early leader dancing on the tensions between interactive communication models and mass media communication models, as News Corp tycoons demanded MySpace scale up to mass media audiences and oblivious mass media behaviors, effectively killing their own golden goose.

But is that what killed the MySpace social ecosystem?

(Note, it is not really dead, but it is acknowledged in this article that its 100M users are no longer contesting Facebook for leadership at 300M users.)

One could argue that as surely as MySpace rose, it would also fall, as surely as a small town church will split into two churches, as surely as Friendster begat Tribe begat MySpace begat Facebook (which will begat ???).

But back when this question of ascendancy between MySpace and Facebook was still in more open contention, I never once doubted Facebook would come out on top (and this wasn't just because MySpace often resembled the old Geocities pages either!).

But people argued with me. And I knew they were wrong, despite their very earnest and rational arguments, proofs, numbers.

It bugs me: How did I know they were wrong? I am wont to reflect on these things. I wouldn't just  cite my online research background in social ecosystems, user experience design work, or some other thing from my resume' (an argument based on authority or expertise, which seems to be a cheat in this instance, since I have never designed a site as successful as MySpace or Facebook).

So truisms and arguments from authority or expertise don't count, at least for this exercise.

So how did I just KNOW? How did all those other 300M users just know? What did we know?

Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking make beautiful music together

Link: YouTube - Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed).

You know you want to watch it!

Common carriers, hotels, and pimps, oh my! Net neutrality and the law

Link: The Spacey Gracey Review: The Magna Carta of Web 2.0.

Thanks to Spacey Gracey for the tip to check out this Slate article that really piles on the metaphors (except for Common Carrier, where'd it go?) for thinking about copyright issues, YouTube, Napster, and Net Neutrality.

Here we go! Let's take the plunge with Mr. Tim Wu. My comments interspersed among key excerpts below.

Link: How the Bell Lobby helped midwife YouTube. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine.

Does YouTube Really Have Legal Problems? How the Bell Lobby helped midwife YouTube.

By Tim Wu
Posted Thursday, Oct. 26, 2006, at 4:28 PM ET

When Google bought YouTube, the conventional wisdom—expressed in op-eds, newspaper articles, and scary editorial cartoons—was that they'd also bought themselves a whole heap of copyright trouble. The New York Times used the phrase "litigation-laden landmine." Part-time copyright theorist Mark Cuban warned that YouTube would face the same copyright fate as Napster.

There's only one problem with these theories: the copyright law itself. Under the copyright code, YouTube is in much better legal shape than anyone seems to want to accept. The site enjoys a strong legal "safe harbor," a law largely respected by the television and film industries for the choices it gives them.

But the most interesting thing is where all this legal armor protecting YouTube—and most of the Web 2.0 (user-generated content) industry—comes from. It's the product of the Bell lobby—Google's bitter opponent in the ongoing Net Neutrality debates. So, while YouTube may be the creative child of Silicon Valley, it is also, as much, the offspring of Bell lobbying power.

Back in the early 1990s, when the "information highway" was the talk of the town, Hollywood and the recording industry worked hard to make Internet companies responsible for any and all copyright infringement that happened via the Internet. Jack Valenti, Hollywood's chief lobbyist, warned that without congressional action, "the information superhighway … will collapse the great wonder of intellectual property." The recording industry, for its part, dispatched Johnny Cash to rhetorically link Internet piracy and, yes, a "ring of fire."

[Heh. I remember that debate. I could never wrap my mind around it, because the Sony VHS decision MADE those Hollywood folks, but schizophrenic law that can't be consistently applied is really nothing more than protectionism. Basically, I figure Hollywood will lobby for anything that appears to protect its interests, even if there's no way the law can be consistently applied without more protectionist exemptions and loopholes.

That would be the point: make laws that only protect me, and only persecute those I don't like, even if we are both engaged in identical behavior.

The biggest irony in all the copyright debate, I think, goes back to a decision made by Marc Andreessen with Mosaic: for a graphic to display on a browser, a copyright violation MUST take place as that image is copied to the machine with the browser. That is the illusion of browsers: that you aren't stealing because it doesn't LOOK like you're taking something that isn't yours. Browsers hide the invisible FTP thingie behind http.

Just like magic! You'll notice that at no time do my hands leave my arms!]

[...]

Had that view prevailed, there would probably be no YouTube today, and also no free blog sites, and maybe not even Google or Web 2.0. What venture capitalist would invest in a company already on the hook for everything its users might do? But, in one of the lesser-known turning points in Internet history, Hollywood never got its law. Its unstoppable lobbyists ran into an unmovable object: the Bell companies, who own those "tubes" over which the Internet runs. In the mid-1990s, fearing a future of liability, the Bells ordered their lobbyists to fight Hollywood's reforms, leading to one of the greatest political struggles in copyright history. (This paper provides a history of this and other struggles.)

Hollywood employs legendary lobbyists, like Jack Valenti, but when they ran into the Bells, it was like Frazier meeting Foreman. The Bells quickly put holds on all the legislation the content industries wanted. Telecom lobbyists like Roy Neel, a close friend of Al Gore (and later Howard Dean's campaign manager), went to Congress and began saying things like, the "copyright law threatens to put a damper on the expression of ideas on the Internet."

Facing stalemate, in 1997 the industries settled on a compromise: something called the Online Copyright Liability Limitation Act, which became Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (§512 of the Copyright Code). It is this law that makes YouTube worth paying more than what you pay for its videos. And its long-term effects have been enormous—you might call §512 the Magna Carta for Web 2.0.

Why? Section 512(c) of the law applies to "Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users." In 1998, that meant Geocities and AOL user pages. But in 2006, that means Blogger, Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and, yes, YouTube—all the companies whose shtick is "user-generated content."

Thanks to the Bells, all these companies are now protected by a "notice and take down" system when they host user content. That means that if Jon Stewart notices an infringing copy of The Daily Show on YouTube, Comedy Central can write a letter to YouTube and demand it be taken down. Then, so long as YouTube acts "expeditiously" and so long as YouTube wasn't already aware that the material was there, YouTube is in the clear. In legal jargon, YouTube is in a "safe harbor." Earlier this week, when YouTube took down 30,000 files after requests from a Japanese authors' group, that was §512(c) in action.

[...]

Stated otherwise, much of the copyrighted material on YouTube is in a legal category that is new to our age. It's not "fair use," the famous right to use works despite technical infringement, for reasons of public policy. Instead, it's in the growing category of "tolerated use"—use that is technically illegal, but tolerated by the owner because he wants the publicity. If that sounds as weird as "don't ask, don't tell," you're getting the idea. The industry is deeply conflicted about mild forms of piracy—trapped somewhere between its pathological hatred of "pirates" and its lust for the buzz piracy can build.

[This is the concept the NYTimes for some reason couldn't grasp in creating its locked stable of Times Select columnists. Some of my favorite columnists ever, but I refuse to read them now. Why? Because the Times chose to limit the influence of those influential voices, by removing them from the public sphere.

The Times chose financial reward over significant public influence (and abdicated any real effort to use those columnists to contribute to the national conversation on behalf of the public good). The Times didn't just act to jeopardize its own private interests. It also deprived the Commons of those columnists' ideas in the sense of a Jeffersonian "free exchange of ideas." To my mind, that means the Times is basically saying, "Screw the quality of national debate. We have no interest in contributing to the larger public good." I should note that official Times editorials are still freely available for all. The public presence of the monolithic Times "Editorial We" is probably how it rationalizes the TimesSelect abdication of public responsibility.]

But what about Mark Cuban's copyright argument? Why isn't YouTube in trouble in the same way Napster and Grokster were? The first difference, as indicated, is that Napster simply wasn't covered by the §512 safe-harbor law, and YouTube is. Napster wasn't "hosting" information at the direction of its users, but rather providing a tool for users to find and download predominantly infringing content. It may sound odd that Napster gets in more trouble for helping you find illegal stuff than YouTube does for actually hosting it. But that's the law and why YouTube should really, really thank its friends at Bell.

[Now this part appears to me to be a big pile of crap. Nothing against Tim Wu. I mean the argument distinguishing YouTube and Napster, because of hosting vs. directing. There's something more afoot here.

Ultimately FTP was the first real file-sharing program. Nobody wanted to go after FTP. Back in the BBS days of the dial-up walled garden Net (remember Pine?!), I knew entire BBS's devoted to trading photos, which were then zapped out to floppies that had to be hand-carried around. This was about 1990, when I observed this. I had a bunch of students who taught me how to find the BBS's. So much is made of Internet porn and naughty chat rooms now, but there was an entire network of those spaces in BBS land, far from the searching eyes of Archie and gopher. They worked out their hook-ups with a private BBS dialer, then used FTP for trades.

Napster was attacked legally because of its success, not because of its central architecture. Gnutella was just a semantic work-around because the legal heads wanted to make the central direction point (for non-hosted material) the deciding factor. To my mind, the common carrier argument should have been harped on to the wall with Napster.

I mean, can you imagine how the phone companies would scream if they were held accountable because copyrighted Musak fed over your phone line while you were put on hold, and you could make copies of it?

Or if phone companies and beeper companies could be held legally accountable because drug dealers use telephones to make their drug deals?!

I never could see why the FILE-sharing aspect of Napster was not the deciding factor in making good law. Instead, the Napster decision had no consistency, because it only applied to a company doing X on every second Tuesday while hopping on one foot, if wearing green shoes. I can't STAND inconsistent law that is not broadly applicable.]

There may also be deeper differences. If the Internet were not a bookstore, or tubes, but rather a red-light district, YouTube would best be imagined as the hotel, and Napster, well, the pimp. YouTube, like a hotel, provides space for people to do things, legal or not. It's not doing anything illegal itself, but its visitors may be. But Napster, everyone more or less now admits, was cast as the pimp: It was mainly a means of getting illegal stuff. Right or wrong, we seem to accept the benign vision of YouTube as an entity which, unlike Napster, was basically born as a place to showcase stupid human tricks.

[This is my favorite paragraph in the whole story. Attack of the Metaphors!

Or as my witty friend in upstate NY used to put as his email sig:

May the metaphors be with you.

No really, I'm loving the hotel metaphor. The truth is, Internet law could not exist without metaphors, but we run into trouble when many metaphors apply at the same time. What to do, what to do? I've already shown my bias. I like law that looks at the FUNCTION of what is happening, and applies itself consistently across all different instances of that function. I'm making a MEANS argument.

What this article seems to indicate is that Internet law primarily uses an ENDS argument, with 800-pound gorillas as primary (and perhaps corrupt?) influencers of which ends shall be rewarded, which ends shall be punished. Napster was punished because it created a very successful end point that the powerful music industry didn't like. FTP has never been punished even tho it accomplishes similar functions as any other common carrier, because it was never so wildly successful as to threaten any deeply entrenched interests who demanded protectionist law.

And as it says above, YouTube seems to have a "Get Out of Jail Free" card, simply because it isn't bit-torrenting entire feature-length films that threaten entrenched interests. There's something to be said about flying under the radar, but it wouldn't be necessary if the law were actually consistent, and not applied in a biased fashion.]

 

Kevin Kelly: Scan This Book! - New York Times

Venerable Wired dude Kevin Kelly has a fun article that is near and dear to my heart in the New York Times, and I just can't pass up calling attention to it (although I think it is Most Emailed, so I'm hardly the only one).

I'm just so easy. All you have to do is mention Alexandria and I get all a-quiver. I have my own theories about grand libraries, which I'll probably mention below, but suffice it here to say that a Library of Everything is one massive part of the reason I jumped into cyberspace with both feet in 1990 and never looked back. And for the record, that was long before I read about Neal Stephenson's Librarian in "Snow Crash."

What would Borges say? What would Confucius say?

I think Confucius would say "It is written... "

But the bigger question, I think, is "Will this Tower of Babel reach to the heavens?"

Link: Scan This Book! - New York Times.

May 14, 2006

Scan This Book!

By KEVIN KELLY

In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

[You know, if they were going to build such a great library in Alexandria with all that very precious stuff, why did they have to put it in such a precarious location?! I've been mad about this as long as I've known about it, and I'm still mad about it. I WANT to go to Alexandria and I'm pissed off that I can't, dammit!]

Until now. When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. Indeed, the explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade, has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?

Brewster Kahle, an archivist overseeing another scanning project, says that the universal library is now within reach. "This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!" he shouts. "It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon." And unlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.

[And we an build this wonderful Tower that will reach to the Heavens! We will all speak the same language and nothing we plan to do will be impossible for us!

Until you look at the appropriate Tarot card, the Lightning-Struck Tower.

You say hey, it's a web, not a tower. Why are you going on and on about a tower? It's my theory, you see, a theory of the Web. In the Platonic sense, or Neoplatonic, if you will, this idea of a Library of Everything is technically an imitation, and perhaps a very pale imitation at that. The original "Library of Everything" supposedly exists as a great Ideal in the sky, in the Heavens, on some energy plane, or in Nirvana. It is called "The Akashic Records," or, to Hebrews, Muslims, I think, and Christians, it is called "The Book of Life."

It's the source of that "This Is Your Life" movie that St. Peter plays for you when you get to the Pearly Gates, before you get your harp and cloud and graduate to a New Yorker cartoon.

Edgar Cayce supposedly went to visit this library when he was asleep and found out all kinds of mysterious and secret stuff. I bet he's got a lot of overdue books by now, too. I usually think it is this library that Borges wrote of in his "Library of Babel" short story in the "Labyrinths" collection. His version is pretty twisted, though.

So what does this "Book of Life" have that our longed for Library of Everything doesn't have?

Some people imagine it as a Tapestry, with a thread for every life and a full record of each and all its intersections. This would be where the Three Fates of Greek mythology would hang out, the Three Norns of Norse mythology.

So the Akashic records would have not only every book, every image, an instantly searchable movie of every life, IT WOULD ALSO HAVE A FULL RECORD OF EVERY THOUGHT.

Stream of consciousness personal diary bloggers are working on uploading this part into the Web, but we're still stuck with a pale imitation of that panoptic record that Santa Claus clearly has access to as well, for checking to see if we've been naughty or nice. I bet the NSA is envious of HIM. Oddly enough, the Panoptic Eye appears to be just as much a part of the Neoplatonic imitation of the Akashic as it is in the "real" Akashic.

New Agers and others believe the Akashic Records are not confined to matter, but also include a record of all energy, which makes sense if matter and energy are conserved. Perhaps the Akashic is where all that dark matter goes that no one can account for. These people believe "Thoughts are Things" that send energy out in to the universe, whether in the form of prayers, wishes, curses (a panoptic and authoritarian god keeps track of sins of thought, word, and deed: God as Universal Accountant), lust in your heart, coveting, or the off-key internal singing of your soul.

So the Akashic Tapestry Record spreads out across the ethers like a giant web, just as our Internet weaves invisibly around our planet. You could make an argument that the Akashic Records are the Mind of God, and all of us (and our atoms and animating energy) make up that godhead at an atomic level as well, microcosm, macrocosm, as above, so below, or is that as below, so above? Ergo, the Akashic Records ARE GOD?

And what does that make our Platonic Imitation of an Imitation of the Akashic, the World Wide Web? The etchings of the Mind of Humanity? Humanity trying to make Itself God?

Interestingly, when you use a Kabala system of numerology (not the "Americanized" one), WWW=666. Those odd literalists, the fundamentalist Christian dispensational pre-millenialists, see three as the number of God, and six as the number of humanity, so they interpret this very famous and ominous symbol 666 (the movie previews are making such a big deal about an "Omen" remake coming out on 6/6/06, so maybe my ramble here is in honor of that) as three times six, or man trying to make himself god, repeated without question in pulpits across the U.S. I don't know if it is really an accurate interpretation, as some Hebrew sites also list six as a holy or "god" number, instead of seven, which I had always heard.

My Neoplatonic argument isn't really that compelling, if you look at the actual text that mentions it, because it is a WEB, not a man, unless the Web is the Mind of Man.

In the New International Version Bible, Revelation 13:18 reads:

This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666.

And here's a neat tidbit, care of Wikipedia: The fear of the number 666 is known as "Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia". Say that three times fast.

Now about that Tower of Babel, reaching to the heavens, is the Web another instance of man trying to make himself like the gods, to reach into the heavens? The cautionary tale here is the lightning-struck tower, the blow to the head, a fall from a high place. The Tower is a nearly universal cultural symbol of hubris, of pride going before a fall.

Something to look forward to! Anyway, let's get back to Kevin... (grin)]

But the technology that will bring us a planetary source of all written material will also, in the same gesture, transform the nature of what we now call the book and the libraries that hold them. The universal library and its "books" will be unlike any library or books we have known. Pushing us rapidly toward that Eden of everything, and away from the paradigm of the physical paper tome, is the hot technology of the search engine.

1. Scanning the Library of Libraries

Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone — the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.

This is a very big library. But because of digital technology, you'll be able to reach inside it from almost any device that sports a screen. From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what's taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

[Kevin! You of all people know we won't need that white cord into our heads, iPod reference not withstanding. The library of all libraries will of course either be transmitted wirelessly, or hell, it'll probably be implanted into our heads directly! Instantaneous interfacing, always on, ubiquitous. Neal Stephenson's Librarian, beamed directly to gargoyles everywhere.

Surely Plato has reincarnated around here somewhere at this time. He pre-dates Alexandria (Aristotle was Alexander's tutor, so I imagine Plato had been dead a while) but he actually wanted Greeks to keep things in their amazing big Greek memories. Plato had his toga in a twist because this new thing, WRITING, was creating cheat sheets, so to speak (cheat scrolls?). If you could write something down, your brain, your big-Greek-reciting-Homer memory didn't have to work so hard, and you started keeping fewer things INSIDE your head, storing them so much more effectively in written form, which could then be assembled into a library.

Just as most of our math skills have withered in this age of the calculator, poor Plato was watching the decline of Greek oratorical skills based on memory. Was the trade-off worth it, Plato? Could Alexandria be the consolation prize?

And now, if we can have a Library of Everything implanted in our heads, does that mean we're returning to the days when people will be able to recite Homer without a teleprompter or PowerPoint? Will we get those big Greek memories back, augmented and more complete with access to everything that was ever written? Would Plato reincarnated feel redeemed at long last, or would it be the final betrayal?]

[...]

But because of copyright issues and the physical fact of the need to turn pages, the digitization of books has proceeded at a relative crawl. At most, one book in 20 has moved from analog to digital. So far, the universal library is a library without many books.

But that is changing very fast. Corporations and libraries around the world are now scanning about a million books per year. Amazon has digitized several hundred thousand contemporary books. In the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford University (one of the five libraries collaborating with Google) is scanning its eight-million-book collection using a state-of-the art robot from the Swiss company 4DigitalBooks. This machine, the size of a small S.U.V., automatically turns the pages of each book as it scans it, at the rate of 1,000 pages per hour. A human operator places a book in a flat carriage, and then pneumatic robot fingers flip the pages — delicately enough to handle rare volumes — under the scanning eyes of digital cameras.

[Boggles your mind, doesn't it? All those texts, all those words, keyword-searchable, context-searchable. But still, not enough of those texts in the public domain.]

[...]

The idea is to seed the bookless developing world with easily available texts. Superstar sells copies of books it scans back to the same university libraries it scans from. A university can expand a typical 60,000-volume library into a 1.3 million-volume one overnight. At about 50 cents per digital book acquired, it's a cheap way for a library to increase its collection. Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe's e-publishing business, says: "Some of us have thousands of books at home, can walk to wonderful big-box bookstores and well-stocked libraries and can get Amazon.com to deliver next day. The most dramatic effect of digital libraries will be not on us, the well-booked, but on the billions of people worldwide who are underserved by ordinary paper books." It is these underbooked — students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru — whose lives will be transformed when even the simplest unadorned version of the universal library is placed in their hands.

[Democratizing, yes, I suppose, if people are still reading these books. If they one day become inert material, like the quartz crystals New Agers think are embedded storage devices holding the wisdom and all the knowledge of Atlantis, about as useful to us as that funky vinyl record the post-apocalyptic kids spin on the end of a forked stick in "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome." Gotta watch out for the Pocky Clips, or your giant Atlantis pyramid shaped quartz crystal Library of Everything gets as wrecked as Alexandria, and then where are you? Standing in front of a frame of branches and "telling the tell" through a memory of television?

I'm still chuckling at the idea of lesser university libraries getting to make huge leaps in how many "volumes" they supposedly have, simply by downloading a big old mess of these public domain texts from those famously massive major university libraries. Will they use the new numbers to adjust their budget requests? Will university administrators realize they don't have increased heating and lighting costs for all these new "volumes?"]

[...]

Yet the common vision of the library's future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In this vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability — the nifty translation of a book's full text into bits, which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island.

[Aha! Decontextualized Library of Congress notation, The Dewey Decimal System, arbitrary shelving, or even mis-shelving, a black hole that books sometimes disappear into in some libraries, even the venerable card catalog, will they all become irrelevant? Remember those dreary library classes where you were drilled in when to use the Author's name, when to use the Subject Index, when to try to find the Title? And even early databases used in libraries preserved this quaint eccentricity long after it was necessary, in some cases, is present still, although I have no idea why we need separate fields for Author, Subject, and Title, when Keyword ought to catch everything just fine.

I remember an argument I had with a librarian once, and I remember the exact year: 1990. I was bringing my research paper classes to the library for their regular library orientation sessions. After class, I questioned the librarian about the new InfoTrax database system for periodicals that she was happily touting. It was pretty neat, and I was ready to go to town with it, but as a usual dyslexic, I was frustrated when it couldn't find things I didn't type precisely, or in the correct Subject, Title, or Author field.

Why can't it all be keywords I asked her? Oh, that's coming soon, she said, and went on to explain what it would do. But no, I wanted keyword searching of ENTIRE TEXTS, just of magazine, journal, and periodical articles, which I thought was perfectly reasonable. Why wouldn't it do that? I wanted to be able to run Boolean combinations through this jackpot, just to see what would turn up. The librarian's eyes went wide, and then she got angry. How dare I even expect such an impossible thing! The absurdity of it. THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN, she pronounced. Don't even think about it.

Meanwhile, I got to graduate school three years later and eventually encountered my future dissertation adviser, a hypertext theorist who imagined a world where EACH AND EVERY WORD is a hypertextual link to somewhere else. Even "a" "an" and "the." Ted Nelson's "docuverse" indeed!]

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic amateurs have written and cross-referenced an entire online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. Buoyed by this success, many nerds believe that a billion readers can reliably weave together the pages of old books, one hyperlink at a time. Those with a passion for a special subject, obscure author or favorite book will, over time, link up its important parts. Multiply that simple generous act by millions of readers, and the universal library can be integrated in full, by fans for fans.

[I just can't wait. Not only will the future be hyperlinked, but it will also spin out into recombinant document DNA, and we don't even need plagiarizing Harvard sophomore novelists to start us off on the right/wrong foot.

Imagine recombinant Faulker and parody Faulker, the novelistic version of "filksongs."

Interweave Emily Dickinson's 1,775 quatrain-driven poems with 1,000 "Centuries" of Nostradamus quatrains! Ooh oh! Hold me back, hold me back! Audio track them all over the midi-tune of Gilligan's Island.]

U.S Women Snowboarders ROCK!

FINALS:  American Hanna Teter (left) won the gold medal in halfpipe Monday, with fellow teammate Gretchen Bleiler earning the silver.  FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

I just had to blow that bit out in here, cuz I know from one of my students in Montana that the Flying Tomato guy (Shaun White) is totally amazing, but 'scuse me cuz I'm really just enjoying what these women can do. Totally fun to watch.

And I just can't figure out how Kelly Clark could just catch that much air. Sorry she didn't win, but what an amazing run.

Woo woo!

Link: Salt Lake Tribune - Torino 2006.

U.S. finishes 1-2 in women's halfpipe

By Kurt Kragthorpe
The Salt Lake Tribune

BARDONECCHIA, Italy - This will be the last time the U.S. Olympic team is mildly disappointed with a 1-2 finish in the 2006 Games - if there's even another one like it at all. Women's snowboarders Hannah Teter and Gretchen Bleiler earned gold and silver medals Monday in the halfpipe competition of aerial tricks and turns - matching Sunday's achievement of American men Shaun White and Danny Kass. [...]

BARDONECCHIA, ITALY - FEBRUARY 13: (FRANCE OUT) Gretchen Bleiler of United States competes in the Womens Snowboard Half Pipe Final on Day 3 of the 2006 Turin Winter Olympic Games on February 13, 2006 in Bardonecchia, Italy. (Photo by Agence Zoom/Getty Images)

BARDONECCHIA, ITALY - FEBRUARY 13: (FRANCE OUT) Hannah Teter of the United States celebrates winning the gold medal in the Womens Snowboard Half Pipe Final on Day 3 of the 2006 Turin Winter Olympic Games on February 13, 2006 in Bardonecchia, Italy. (Photo by Agence Zoom/Getty Images)

Link: US snowboarders lay claim to halfpipe | csmonitor.com.

US snowboarders lay claim to halfpipe

Both the men's and women's teams finish 1-2, as the sport becomes one of America's most certain medal hauls.

By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

BARDONECCHIA, ITALY– At the top of her final run down the halfpipe, her gold medal waiting in the most august competition in all of sport - the Olympics - Hannah Teter danced.

Maybe it was to the music in her headphones. Perhaps it was to the song that thumped over the loudspeakers below and spilled though this dramatic cleft in the Italian Alps like an auditory avalanche. More than likely, though, it was to that same outrageous inner soundtrack that, an hour later, told her it was completely normal to lean back and clunk her boots onto the table during the most important press conference of her life.

[...]

Doncha just love fiesty women at the top of their games? Now somebody puh-leaze tell me why they want to drop SOFTBALL from the Summer Olympics?!

Maybe they need to clunk their boots on the table too.

Monday introduced the world to snowboarding's Odd Couple. There was Gretchen Bleiler, who would win the vote for snowboarding prom queen in a landslide. At the podium, the microphone cupped regally in her right hand, she said winning an Olympic medal has always been a dream. Did the US want a medal sweep? Of course, she answered, but "everybody at the Olympics works so hard."

It is not rehearsed or forced, but familiar. These are the answers Olympians are supposed to give, and she happens to be wired that way.

Then there is Teter, who says that winning the gold medal will change her life. Now she can get a boat - to wakeboard.

She won the gold, she says, by the fortuitous combination of Vermont maple syrup, brotherly love, and yoga. "I lit the candles at night and zoned in," she told a press corps apparently not quite sure if the real Olympic champion was bound and gagged in a closet somewhere.

In truth, the two women champions might not be so different. At the top of her final run - the one that brought her silver - Bleiler paused for a moment to dial in the right song on her iPod. It was no concerto. It was Green Day's buzzsaw "Holiday."

And 30 minutes before their chance at international superstardom, Bleiler and Teter took the chairlift to the top of the hill, hopped under some out-of-bounds ropes, and sought out that greatest of snowboarding treasures: untracked powder.

But this is the Olympics. Weren't they afraid of getting injured? Bleiler corrected: "This is snowboarding."

[...]

[grin]

I did some skiing a few months ago, which did my soul good after so many years in the South. One of the funnest lift conversations I had was with this short, fiesty little point guard from just over the Idaho state line who was out snowboarding every weekend even tho her high school coach had forbidden anyone on the team from skiing/snowboarding lest they risk an injury.

Brought back some memories. I couldn't snowboard or do any of those things if my life depended on it, but I did my share of sneaking off to Mt Alyeska in Alaska even tho our coaches said "no skiing." Not to mention the trouble we used to get into, sneaking off on our own on basketball trips to pull all manner of stunts in the ice and snow.

Follow-up on video iPod...

I'm just wondering what the current television programs will cost through iTunes. Yeah, $1.99. That seems odd to me, as what is charged for a DVD of a various number of series episodes is MUCH higher. And this comes out the day after the program airs, giving TiVo some time-shifting competition.

There's an interesting bit on it in this article below. And I've got some more to say about possible implications of this, below that. Whoa! Great minds think alike. NYTimes David Pogue just dinged into my email box with his Circuits column with some of the same thoughts I'm mulling over. Geez, now I guess I'll have to give him credit for them.

Link: Techtree.com India > News > Gadgets > iTunes Offers 'Lost' on Video iPod.

iTunes Offers 'Lost' on Video iPod

Techtree News Staff
Oct 13, 2005

Apple Computer has announced iTunes 6, the Gen-Next version of its popular music jukebox and online music store.

iTunes 6 will enable fans to purchase and download over 2,000 music videos, as also 6 short films from Pixar Animation Studios, for $1.99 each.

Also, thanks to a landmark deal with Disney, iTunes will now offer current and past episodes from two extremely popular television shows, "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost"; the new drama series "Night Stalker"; and two popular shows from Disney Channel, "That's So Raven" and "The Suite Life of Zack & Cody"; for $1.99 per episode.

In effect, customers will now be able to purchase and download their favorite television shows from iTunes, the day after they air on TV; watch them on their Mac or PC; and Auto-Sync them onto the new iPod - video iPod , for viewing anywhere.

Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple Computer, said, "We're doing for video, what we've done for music - we're making it easy and affordable to purchase and download, play on your computer, and take with you on your iPod.

Robert Iger, CEO, Walt Disney Company, said, "For the first time ever, hit prime-time shows can be purchased online, the day after they air on TV.

[...]

[emphasis mine]

OK, I'll get my ideas out here first, and then switch to Pogue. Maybe they aren't exactly the same ideas.

I think Apple scored something WAY bigger than a video iPod here. I think it just did an end run, maybe a major end run, against the oddly intransigent entertainment industry.

Maybe there's a catch. Maybe the video is of terrible quality, a postage stamp. But to my mind, this isn't about the iPod at all. This is about a major concession by the entertainment industry (well, Disney and ABC) to stream time-shifted television shows in their entirety to computers for playback, the next day (what about time zones?!).

I mean, if you had a choice, would you watch lost on iTunes on your computer, or in the teeny iPod window?

I listen to most podcasts daily from my computer at work, running through iTunes, even though I have a perfectly functioning iPod with my music on it (and Harry Potter audiobooks).  Podcasts are great to run in the background behind whatever I'm working on in the office.

My thought is that the video iPod is a TROJAN HORSE! A red herring. The thing Steve Jobs used to pry open a door that would never be opened up for general computer users from their monitors otherwise. And if it goes further and IF the quality is good, it seems to me it could make personal video recorders like TiVo superfluous. What do I care what exact date a show comes out on? TV schedules are arbitrary anyway.

OK, now let's look at what Pogue says. this is from his email column, not the one in the Circuits section. I just looked on the web and on his blog, and I don't think it's posted anywhere there yet, or I'd post the link.

From the Desk of David Pogue: Apple's Sideways Entry Into Portable Video

[...]

To me, the two biggest video iPod surprises were the ways Apple worked around the arguments against one.

For example, for two years, Steve Jobs has maintained that nobody would want to watch movies on a two-inch screen. In an interview in January 2004, he told me that Apple was investigating video. But he noted that people just don't consume music and movies the same way. You might listen to a certain song dozens or hundreds of times in your lifetime. But how many times do you watch a movie? Most people probably wouldn't buy nearly as many movies as they do songs or CD's.

What Apple wound up doing, therefore, was very clever. It sidestepped the movie issue altogether; the new iPod comes ready to play short movies, music videos and certain ABC television shows--but not feature films. None of these items lose much when they're not on a big, wide screen. (It's not clear at this point whether or not you can load the iPod up with your own video, like a movie you've downloaded or ripped from a DVD.)

Nobody's suggesting that you might watch these little video morsels hundreds of times. The price of those ABC and Disney TV shows ("Lost," "Desperate Housewives," and so on) costs $2 per show.

This $2-per-episode pricing, by the way, blows my mind. How on earth did Apple persuade ABC/Disney to sell its shows for $2 an episode? Remember, we live in an era of rampant greed and paranoia in the TV industry. The only other legal TV-show downloading service I've encountered is the Akimbo box, which costs $10 a month AND $3 to $5 per episode AND your downloads expire in 30 days! My guess? Disney, which owns ABC, made this concession as part of a larger negotiation with Mr. Jobs in an effort to persuade him to renew Pixar's distribution deal with Disney.

[...]

You and me both, dude. I just can't wrap my head around how Jobs did it. Pogue is still more amazed at video in your pocket. I'm not a BitTorrent users, as I don't care that much about stupid TV shows (except Xena, of course, but that was back in the day).

I have trouble keeping track of what day of the week it is enough to watch any one show regularly, but I do like "Lost," and it would be worth it to me just to drop it down to my iTunes some time when I missed it because I got busy and didn't notice until a day or two after it aired.

I want to know what kind of quality I'll get on the iTunes playthrough, tho.

 

Is Apple a cult?

Link: Wired News: Apple Hones 'One More Thing' Hype.

Apple Hones 'One More Thing' Hype

By Pete Mortensen

02:00 AM Oct. 12, 2005 PT

It's the moment every Apple Computer nut lives for. CEO Steve Jobs is working through a presentation filled with recaps, market-share updates and some minor product announcements -- and then he makes everyone hold their breath.

"One more thing," Jobs says, and a new object of technological lust ascends into the pantheon.

And as we fall into the Turtlenecked One's pregnant pause here... all I can say is "Hey, I'm down with that. Steve Jobs on stage playing Apple theater works just fine for me."

Ah, but I'm drinking the Kool-Aid. I'm indoctrinated. I can't even see how I've been sinisterly drawn into this cult of Apple, right?

BS. Steve on stage actually has APPEAL. How do you explain the starry-eyed drooling and repeat-after-me behaviors of Windoze users, who keep buying a ridiculously inferior product year after year because some border collie herds them and they go where they're told?!

But let's get back to the video iPod unveiling, shall we? It's a hell of a thing when you are accused of being in a cult because you like innovation, quality, not to mention stuff that actually WORKS and looks cool too.

Apple would not comment on its marketing strategy, but the role of secrecy and speculation in building excitement for the company's launches is undeniable.

Douglas Atkin, a partner of the advertising agency Merkley + Partners and author of The Culting of Brands, said Apple's secrecy about unannounced products is characteristic of cults, both brand and otherwise.

"Maybe the reason Apple is so secretive and arguably paranoid about that is that they are not the market leaders (in computers)," he said. "Many cults start developing paranoia because they fear they may be crushed by the overwhelming force of a monopoly."

That's a stretch, said Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple marketing evangelist and founder of Garage Technology Ventures. Apple's interest in secrecy is simply about perfectly timed upgrades.

Uh, yeah. Guy Kawasaki, who goes around evangelizing about the power of evangelical marketing and how to get people to drink the Kool-Aid says "That's a stretch." OK, that's wryly ironic and perhaps silly. That's like your brother denying he's ripped the heads off your Barbie dolls while wearing a necklace strung of the very same heads, the rotten cannibal. If you want to debunk the cult claim, don't quote the guy who is doing his level best to turn Apple INTO a cult.

I personally don't think Guy Kawasaki succeeded, but his denial is a bit disengenuous.

[...]

But flashy introductions alone don't keep a brand relevant, Godin said. Apple's marketing success is driven by "the products and the anticipation of those products; the way it makes you feel to know that some sort of Christmas is happening next week."

What remains to be seen is whether this "one more thing" will be the next big thing. And that's what keeps even the most experienced theorists paying attention.

"I wonder what it is," mused Atkin, "a G5 laptop?"

[...]

Nope. It's a Video iPod! Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Watch the shiny black swinging iPod Nano... you're getting verrrry verrry sleeeeply...

Link: Wired News: Apple Gives Video the IPod Touch.

Wagging the Long Tail...

I go on and on about this so much, I figured I needed some references in here, and I just found this good entry in Wikipedia for a quick capsule version. Be sure to check out the cultural and political impact of the long tail. I'm sure there will be even more to it than that, but it's a good starting point.

Link: The Long Tail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

I've also just discovered that Chris Anderson (Wired Editor in Chief) has a blog to go with the book he's working on, by the same name, so that just went on my blogroll. His October 2004 Wired article also by that name was what got me all fired up on this topic in the first place.

Here's Chris's Typepad blog.

Link: The Long Tail.