Like the father portrayed in Buck 65’s wonderful track ‘Roses and Bluejays’, I ‘read books of every sort’ but ‘get all the news [I] need from the weather report.’ I avoid newspapers for the same reason I don’t watch television. I don’t enjoy being passively indoctrinated. Whilst my reasoning may not be representative, my apathy is. In a time when you can have Japanese lessons, National Public Radio, the latest news from the worlds of skydiving, knitting or subatomic physics delivered to your RSS reader, why would anyone read a newspaper? Or more accurately, why would anyone pay for a newspaper? Freesheets like Metro, which subsist on snazzily repackaged press releases and AP cuttings, seem to be doing quite well. The conventional answers - timeliness, local relevance, and newspaper specific features like investigative reporting, opinion editorials and Suduku grids - just don’t seem to cut it any more. Almost two years ago I attended a lecture delivered by Senator Shane Ross, Business Editor of the Sunday Independent, Irelands most popular ‘broadsheet’, and asked the esteemed magnate a cheeky question. How in the era of citizen journalism, podcasting, vidcasting, IPTV, blogging and user generated reportage, can traditional newspapers survive? His answer - they probably can’t, and that is no bad thing.

Simon McGarr agrees with the first part of Senator Ross’s reply, and vehemently disagrees with the second. To Simon, newspapers are an essential element of a functioning democracy, and philistine that I am, I’m inclined to agree with him. Here’s what he’s proposing we do about it.

Proposal for a meta-publishing platform

Simon wants to aggregate content, and he wants you to pay for it. This is not as crazy as it initially sounds. For all their benefits, blogs and podcasts have significant barriers to adoption. Both are currently (and likely will remain for quite some time) far less user friendly than the humble newspaper. The cheap, ubiquitous, viewable in daylight, ergonomic, user friendly digital reader does not exist. When it finally comes, as it must, two, five, or ten years from now, the content it relies on must be paid for somehow. Such a devise will kill the bookshop, just as surely as as the mp3 killed the record store, but that’s a story for another article! Online advertising is ultimately a zero sum game; there are only so many eyeballs, and only so many iotas of attention to go around, and clever selfish users will expend enormous amounts of effort getting around it. Whilst blogs will remain a terrific source of opinion, analysis and information, they cannot hope (and have not yet managed) to replace the scope and depth of traditional investigative reportage. Bloggers would have castigated Nixon, but it seems unlikely they would have uncovered the Watergate conspiracy in enough detail to impeach and force the man from office. We need reporters and we enjoy professional writers, and both need to get paid.

Simon’s proposal is the creation of an open aggregation platform, from which users purchase their own bespoke newspaper; and writers receive a cut based directly on individual subscriptions to their content. That’s that basic idea, but as ever, the devil’s in the details.

How is such content aggregated in the first place?

Under Simon’s proposed system, individual writers sign up, either with a view to building an audience or in the knowledge that an existing audience will follow them to the platform. Newspaper, magazine, research, even fiction publishers sign up to increase their distribution for individual articles, stories, books or whole sections of their publications.

How is content edited?

Each writer and reader become an editor. Lazy users can choose from existing pre-mixed packs of news and features - think cable packages - these could be as coherent as ‘Features from all the Irish dailies’, as specific as ‘All news stories focused on the Chinese mainland’ or as esoteric as ‘Today in Soup Making’.
More adventurous users can pick and mix from individual authors, topics, ‘reading lists’ selected by their favourite writers and pundits, or articles enjoyed and recommended by their friends. Which brings me to..

How is content selection navigated?

This is possibly the hardest question for the proposed service - how to present such a wealth of information. It will take research and experimentation to get right. The probable answer is that there is no one correct way, and an amalgam of web browsing, iTunes style catalogue and feed grazing paradigms - with ‘feeds’ dynamically navigable based on numerous criteria - will probably emerge. Perhaps most exciting as a content discovery mechanism is social networking - suggestions based on existing maps of friendship (imported from online social networks), direct recommendations (think del.icio.us’s for: tag), geographic and demographic preferences.

How is content paid for?

Simon favours a subscription model, but there are additional potential sources of revenue, and many potential methods of payment. Users could phone a premium rate number, send a text, buy ‘credit’ as with pay per use phones, or subscribe via laser or credit card. In addition to subscription, advertising, likely a better source of income with this model than traditional newspapers, offers a significant income stream. Advertisers should be attracted by the hyper-local nature of distribution, which I’ll get to next, and the targetability of sales. Of course there’s no reason why as distribution costs fall, advertising can’t be used to offset the price of content delivery; nor why more expensive ad-free versions cannot be provided. So lets get to the doozy…

How is all this content to be delivered?

Simon and I had a tremendously involved conversation on this topic on Tuesday, and the solution we arrived at was this. Individualized newspapers printed at kiosks in newsagents, shopping centres and the like. Content selection can occur online or right on the device, and content delivery involves the printing of your unique paper (perhaps paired to your phones bluetooth UID), while you wait. It’s likely bespoke printing solutions of the dimension and speed required already exist - in the US, libraries are trialling print on demand public domain titles, whilst online web2.0 vanity publishers are providing the capability to produce individual full colour glossy books at about or less than the cost of an off the shelf equivalent.
But assuming we need to create the device itself, lets look at the components involved - a commodity touch screen, daily replaceable paper roll, broadband connection (already in place at any shop with a lotto machine), rapid low cost printer and binding apparatus. And that’s it. The output would be a Berliner or smaller tabloid format paper. The unit cost (excepting ongoing paper replacement, bandwidth, maintenance and electricity) shouldn’t exceed 20k; and would of course decrease greatly with mass production. As Simon is keen to point out, Ireland as a reasonably densely populated, geographically diverse, ethnically and demographically heterogeneous nation, with high literacy and GNP per capita, makes the perfect testbed for such a service - which if successful should certainly work internationally, and provide daily newspapers a previously unheard of geographic reach.

So it’s a newspaper?

Yes, but we don’t need to stop there; once we’ve established a POS for content, we can add additional media delivery through bluetooth, WIFI, CDR burning etc. The core service proposed is an enormously individualised, highly localised, distributed alternative to traditional daily publishing.

How much would it cost?

Clearly the ultimate cost of such a paper paper would be a key factor in uptake (along with ease of use, successful syndication deals etc). Right now it’s difficult to estimate the cost of the finished product. The likelihood is that it would cost significantly more than a traditional newspaper, at least initially. But it would offer significantly higher value to the reader - think of the utility of family or friendship group based news reporting, of regulation bulletins to legislators, stock market analysis to traders, exam prep to students, of any number of other long tail markets.

What are the obstacles?

The barriers to the development of such a platform are not insignificant. On the hardware side, a fast, effective and reliable solution must be sourced or constructed. On the software side a mass market user friendly front end needs to be paired with a marketplace for writing and photography (incidental, feature and reportage), robust editorial features, and a sophisticated distributed distribution architecture (think bittorrent). The range within which writers may set their prices needs to be balanced with the budget they are allotted to illustrate their articles (alternately an open illustration market could sell images to feature writers based on a cut of their sales). The degree of editorial control needed to prevent liable, and the printing of ‘The Al Qaeda Times’, needs to be carefully examined, in tandem with the ease of contribution for both writers and photographers. Archives should of course be free, but after what period? The software element of the platform is clearly multi-faceted and vital, both on the user and content provider end, and it’s construction non-trivial, but certainly not impossible. Nor are the barriers to adoption, from inertia to technophobia, necessarily intractable.

The key here is that the ‘product’ could ultimately offer a benefit to all current stakeholders in print news media. As a paid outlet for the the swathe of would be writers and pundits who lack a means of monetising their creations, as a place where well known authors can sell directly to their established audience, as a method for publishers to reverse declining sales, and as a new medium for the reader ill served by overly generic newspapers. On a final note, it’s an interesting postulate to make that such a scheme might not need a corporate behemoth behind it, to succeed on a smaller scale. Open source instructions could provide a template for an open platform, built by enthusiasts, profiting from their individual machines, selling on material created by a loosely affiliated network of content providers. Either way, how ironic would it be if the salvation of newsprint were to arise in the end from the much maligned blogosphere.

There’s a profound fragmentation going on right now in online identity. The change from isolated web sites (with technical, and in the early days, financial barriers to entry) to readily updatable, easily subscribable, often free blogs, acted to more tightly integrate the public web. An unfortunate side-effect of newer forms of blogging, more sophisticated social networks, and the surfeit of emerging web services, has been to splinter identity across multiple platforms. Ultimately this problem may be solved by more open and intercommunicative social networks using something like Open ID, by an ur-MySpace aggregating all the disparate services, or by next generation life stream scrapping utilities. Until then here’s where where I am..

Del.icio.us - makes bookmarking easy, available anywhere, and subscribable like a blog. It’s also a great way to keep informed of your friends projects.

Twitter, Jaiku - moblogging platforms, which allow you to create a mobile social network of sorts, create and receive updates on the go.

Facebook - my social network of choice. I’m on Bebo, Myspace, Live Journal, Orkut, and now Pownce; but Facebook plays host to my primary ‘online identity’. Facebook’s newsfeed provides a great way to keep up with the goings on of real friends; and it’s open API and platform are providing an evolutionary paradigm, an environment in which shared ideas, intense competition and rapid development are accelerating the improvement of social applications.

Tumblr - I use as a meta blog, adding all my feeds, and posting photos, videos, songs, and cool articles. I made the decision a while ago to keep the focus of dbspin.com on original articles and occasional media projects, which reduces hits, but hopefully increases quality. Additionally, I’m finding less and less time to blog proper, and in turn, feeling that each blog post must attain some arbitrary level of quality and originality. I believe quality is becoming more important relative to timeliness in the blogosphere; as rapidly updated information moves to micro and mobile blogging platforms, and as more people begin to suffer from feed aggregation overload. Tumblr’s also just a great way to give a technophobic friend a really user friendly blog they can update online, or via their phone.

An interesting point to note, is that for non developers there’s really no need to buy webspace any more; given that most features from web pages, to blogs, video hosting, to podcasting, are possible and easier to implement via free web services.

Right now I’m involved in three major projects. One is a prospective web2.0 / mobile service company, two is a documentary film, and three is co-writing a satirical (and partly parodic) novel. I can’t talk about the first two right now, but I’m more than happy to suggest you check out the book, which is being updated in real time on the web (please avoid if even moderately easily offended), or the main satirical review site - with over 100 movie, music and other reviews (again offensive); not too frequently updated right now, but that should change in October.

As Twitter leaves the realms of ‘joiner geek’ social network, and (partly due to it’s integration with platforms like Facebook), becomes a more popular and diverse service, its utility is being more rigorously critiqued. What is Twitter for? Its a cogent question. In a world of blogs, microblogs, and social networks, what’s the use of twitter? Is it merely a loose knit social network, or a (nano) blogging platform? Is it just the latest fad? Lets look at some real world uses of Twitter, how its utility differs from more traditional blogging platforms, and some scenarios in which it could be more effectively used.

Real world use

Right now, twitters use is primarily as a loosely coupled, mobile social network. The barriers to membership and use are low - as the platform is quick to join and simple to use; and adding ‘friends’ can be done easily and quickly. Perhaps too easily, since no confirmation is required to ’subscribe’ to a user. Mass adding of contacts within twitter is a quick way of creating an audience - as some of those added will tend to add back the mass connector, creating potentially unwanted one way connections.

Connectivity

Twitter has strong but limited communication features. Users can receive updates (’tweets’) from their ‘friends’ via web, RSS, IM or (free) text message. They can send their own tweets, through Twitter or a host of other websites, IM or paid text messages.
Tweets are either undirected, direct, or aimed at a user, but visible to the general audience (signified by the @ symbol). A general audience in this context can be either the public at large, or a users entire friend group, depending on privacy setting. Blocking is available - and users can only directly message their friends.
However no fine grained control is available - users cannot for example, chose to receive text message notifications of tweets from one specific user, or group of users. In fact no user groups or gradations of connection exist within twitter. Aspects of this functionality may ultimately emerge from third party applications.

Moblogging

With built in text messaging functionality, Twitter has the capacity to function as a ’short message’ (140 character) moblogging platform. While it lacks MMS picture support, it has the advantage of immediate one to many connectivity. As such, it can be used to provide news updates and reports of ongoing events.

Public Conversation

A conversation emerges in the ‘friends’ feed of a users twitter; visible from their profile on Twitter.com or via RSS. Although direct messages are not visible to all, as previously stated, frequently publicly visible messages are directed at a user, through use of the @ sign. This allows a users friends or readers to engage in conversation, and allows a user to publicly flag the existence of their communication with high status users. In effect this serves to pull users on the periphery of the network into more direct conversation with more centrally connected users. In this role Twitter can provide a form of ad hoc business social networking.

Linkblogging

Blogging grew in part, out of link logging, and the low time cost and mobile nature of Tweets, makes Twitter ideal for sharing links with a directed audience. Due to the character limit of ‘tweets’, links are often truncated using services like slink.in.

Future Use 1 - Group management

As previously mentioned, creating user groups is not yet a feature offered by Twitter, but their addition would allow significant additional emergent uses of the platform. Work teams, clubs, and institutions could use Twitters push messaging to notify members of meetings and updates. Rather than acting as a replacement for traditional systems of notification (e.g.: email memo’s), Twitters immediacy would make it ideal for notification of last minute changes of plan, or time sensitive communications - especially with large or loosely affiliated groups.

Future Use 2 - Mobile applications

Applications are already being built around twitter, but none have yet taken advantage of the powerful utility of the mobile communication capabilities built into the platform. Twitter applications should in theory proliferate virally, due to the public nature of visible ‘@’ directed communications - in a similar fashion to the recent viral growth of applications on the Facebook platform. However this can only take place if an applications utility necessitates two way communication with its users. ‘Mashups’, which utilise the API’s of two or more external services to create a new service providing additional utility, hold great potential in this regard. Combine low cost two way mobile communication, with social application proliferation, API sourced data, and multicasting, and a variety of potential services become obvious. The viability of businesses which utilise Twitter in this way will be dependent on the future reliability of the platform, and on Twitters tolerance of providing host to an emergent ‘ecosystem’ (positive construal) or ‘parasite infestation’ (negative construal) of applications.

Social Network ‘Facebook’, has made an enormous splash this week with the release of the ‘Facebook Platform‘, an opening up of the mature Facebook API to internal widgets with access to Facebook’s ‘core functions’. Whilst this move has been criticised by some influential members of the syndication community, it places Facebook at the forefront of mashup’s and the read-write web. In one fell swoop, Facebook has become a socially enabled aggregation platform.

‘Zuckerberg describes the Facebook core function that the new third-party applications can tap into as a “social graph,” the network of connections and relationships between people on the service’.
- Dan Farber on ZDNet

Social Aggregation

Let’s look at some ways that Facebook collates user information, and serves this summated information back to a users social network.

Facebook offers users three direct methods of adding to the ‘News Feed’ activity stream of their connections on the Facebook network.
‘Status Updates’ are brief, 160 character messages, updatable by text message or from within Facebook.
‘Posted Items’ are smart links which retrieve a brief descriptive paragraph and photo from a provided link; updatable from within Facebook, and through browser and web based bookmarklets.
‘Notes’ are text, images and links - essentially blog posts; updatable from within facebook itself, and via imported RSS feed. Notes contain an additional feature, a social equivalent to pingbacks, allowing posters to ‘tag’ friends mentioned in, or related to, a post.

Controversially, Facebook also provides an aggregated feed of indirect socially relevant user actions - profile changes, photo uploads and contact addition etc.

Finally, with the addition of ‘Facebook Platform’, Facebook can now socially aggregates the information flow to and from users and their installed applications - for example, tweets updated via and integrated Twitter application.

All of this aggregation is done parsimoniously and noninvasively, with an emphasis on usability and integration with the social map of a users Facebook network - for example, if a user updates a number of notes in quick succession, rather than each note appearing in the news feed of his connections, a lists of titles will appear.

Fine Grained Control

The aggregated ‘Posted Items’, ‘Notes’, and ‘Status Updates’ from a user’s connections, can each be exported as an RSS feed. In addition to the feeds available from applications within the ‘Facebook Platform’, this means that users can now (or will soon be able to, with third party developer support) use Facebook to export feeds of updates to the attention streams, social bookmarkings, and blogs, of their connections.

By allowing users fine grained control over which aspects of their social activity on the site are published to the ‘news feed’ of their connections - for example a user can choose to de-list notification of their new connections completely, or on a case by case basis - and control over the sources and quantity of the information they aggregate from their connections; Facebook have built the beginnings of a social write application to compliment feed reading, on the Read/Write web. Together with the social elements of next generation browsers, this could provide the template for how such services work in the future.

Maturation is inevitable and necessary, and Facebook are only at the beginning of the development of their internal services - for example ‘Posted Items’ can function as social bookmarks, but without tags or folder utility, cannot replace a dedicated social bookmark application.

Balancing the desire of application providers for greater access to the Facebook API, with the privacy of users and the overall usability of the platform will be a difficult challenge. Right now it seems that Facebook are erring on the side of caution - for example, Twitter integration seems for the moment hampered by a lack of write access to user ‘Status Updates’ through the Facebook API.

What to do with all this information?

Beyond hyperbole, what does all this mean? Right now, it means I can import the ‘Status Updates’, ‘Notes’, and ‘Posted Items’ of my Facebook connections; right into Google Reader. I can also export my own aggregated updates, and construct a feed blog, or metafeed - increasing the utility, and decreasing the exclusivity, of my updates to Facebook.

This flow of information will grow richer as more useful applications are added to the ‘Facebook Platform’, as Facebook continues the roll-out of its third generation of internal services (like Market Place and Video); providing a portable, rapidly updated aggregation of social events and conversation - a friends feed, which comprises a deepening, dynamic, and semi-public conversation.

The Future

What’s next? Increased portability of Facebook mobile updates (currently the limited SMS notifications available are restricted the the US), and the easier establishment of networks, would greatly increase the utility of such powerful information aggregation; as would RSS feeds of the ‘News Feed’ activity stream itself. Right now, Facebook is a fantastic tool for large, loosely connected, public social networks, but increased privacy options and network building flexibility could make it a more useful tool for work groups, businesses, and families. Although it’s important to note that company networks do already exit, each new network must be suggested directly to Facebook - with little direction as to the amount or type of requests needed before such a network will be created.

Look out soon, for applications leveraging the social aspects of the Facebook platform in innovative ways - enabling collaborative video editing or games for example.

Open source and information portability advocates would no doubt like to see greater portability of the (user generated) networks with give Facebook its value. Such portability may become ever more difficult, as users become more locked into the services provided by a specific social network, and the social groupings which exist there.

Filmed last weekend in Dún Laoghaire Harbour, with some kooky individuals.

Caveats

You should be aware before you start that posting remixed video online (if you don’t own the copyright to your source video) could theoretically get you into legal trouble.

These instructions are for Windows. Here are some simpler instructions for the Mac. Let’s face it, video stuff is faster and easier with a Mac, if you can afford one.

It’s also important to note before you begin, that uncompressed video files are enormous. You’ll likely need at least 1 free Gigabyte per 5 minutes of video you plan to convert, and much more to do editing later.

If anything goes wrong, I disclaim all responsibility. These instructions are provided as is.

All that said, here’s how to do it..

Download the video

There are lots of ways to download a video from YouTube. Here are a couple.

Throw the address of the video you want into one of these sites
- Keep It Simple, Video Downloader 2.0, KeepVid.

or

Install Firefox, GreaseMonkey, and one of the these scripts.

Once the file has downloaded, you’ll have to convert it before Movie Maker or Adobe Premier Pro 1.5 (haven’t tried this with more recent versions) will open it.

Download Super

The free program ‘Super’ will convert almost any multimedia file to almost any format.

Download Super. The link is difficult to find on the horrendously designed site, but keep looking, it is there!

Convert the File

1. Install and Run Super
2. Find the file you’ve downloaded, and drag it into Super.
3. Along the top of Super, set the settings like so [Image]
   • Output Container: avi
   • Output Video Codec: huffYUV
   • Output Audio Codec: WAV -(pcm U8)
4. Right click anywhere in Super, and click ‘Specify the Output Folder Destination’. [Image]
5. Select the folder where you’d like to put your finished file and click ‘Save Changes’
6. You may wish to increase the size of the output video (by default Youtube’s resolution is 320*240). To do this simply change the Video Scale Size setting (e.g.: 640*480) [Image]
7. Your finished settings should looks something like this [Image]
8. Now click Encode. After a few seconds the video should start to encode [Image].
   In a few minutes (depending on video length), the process will finish.

That’s it!

You should now have a video that most video editors can import and edit without glitches. Happy remixing!

In addition to providing a predictably terrifying list of interrogation techniques in use against detainees accused of ‘terrorist activities’, from electrocution, to sexual humiliation, water deprivation and physical violence; and documenting how bounties offered for Al-Qaeda members led to the imprisonment of innocent civilians; this episode also describes a fascinating chapter in the history of Habeas Corpus.

John Ronson, an author and documentarist in the vein of Louis Theroux, takes a look at the suspension of this Magna Carta granted right, during the British restoration, an act which led to the impeachment of the Earl responsible (Lord Clarendon); and 450 years later, to an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief to the US Supreme court, by All-Party Parliamentary Group of 175 members of the British parliament.

Compelling and disturbing listening.

Links: MP3, Transcript, Podcast Feed

Paul Walch of Segala, asks ‘Do we want a code for blogs?’

This question has arisen due to the Kathy Sierra controversy, the case of the online harassment of an O’Reily writer by an anonymous group of commenters, at a blog created specifically for uncensored criticism. Very quickly the ‘blogosphere’ divided into two camps, those who repudiated the hate speech directed at Sierra, but considered it a cost of the freedom of speech that blogging affords. And those, like tech writer and Web2.0 pioneer Tim O’Reilly, who believed a response was needed (beyond the specific legal retaliation sought against the perpetrators). O’Reilly’s proposal was a code of conduct for bloggers. Here’s the wiki for the code under development.

What follows is my response to Paul’s question, both in terms of the idea of a bloggers code of conduct, and the specific code O’Reilly proposes.

In short

Absolutely not, as Glen Farrelly points out, ‘good’ bloggers will follow their own individual codes regarding what they perceive as responsible behavior, ‘bad’ or ‘irresponsible’ bloggers will not follow any informal codes.

In detail

Apologies in advance for my inevitable mistakes in attempting to characterise Irish Law, a complex area in which I am not qualified to comment.

The blogosphere already has the means to deal with antisocial behavior, whether it be the denial of links to hate sites, or taking legal action against defamation. It could spell disaster if additional forms of policing emerge from within blogging, at a time when freedom of speech is being implicitly reduced through the dumbing down of media and the normalisation of embedded reporting; and explicitly prevented by anti scientific and religious extremist movements, by totalitarian governments (witness the insidious sousveillence built into the Chinese version of MySpace), and by the misuse of legislation regulating speech online.

Generally speaking, the blogosphere is a broad church with respectful members. A vanishingly small number of individuals abuse the anonymity blogging makes possible to besmirch others, beyond the acceptable realms of satire or parody. Their actions are to be repudiated, but should not be used as an excuse to sacrifice the freedoms enjoyed by all. Luckily, the centralised, intercommunicative nature of the blogosphere, means indubitably antisocial behavior is rapidly identified and denied an audience.

Copyright:

Adding copyright to the debate, as O’Reilly has done, appears an example of abusing a controversy for personal ends. Copyright and patent law are in a state of flux right now, and in a sense a culture war has developed. On one side neoliberals like the WTO and corporate lobbyists, are seeking to maximise copyright duration, and criminalize copyright infringement through legislation like IPRED2 in Europe and in the DMCA in the US. On the other, NGO’s like the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, the Open Science Project, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are developing methodologies for the open exchange and development of ideas; and seeking to defend fair use and ensure a viable digital commons.

This debate is far from over, and to seek to propose a set of guidelines for blogs, enforcing laws which in many cases have been imposed in complete contradiction with how the web has evolved, and the means by which humans most effectively proliferate knowledge and opinion, is both absurd and dangerous. Let me provide an example. In Ireland, where this blog is written (though not hosted), the legally allowable extent of ‘fair dealing‘ (equivalent to the concept of fair use), is more restrictive than in the United States. Under Irish statute, it may be literally illegal not merely to host copyrighted music (as the highly influential, promotional music blogs regularly do), or images (as most bloggers do to illustrate their articles), but also to quote small sections from newspapers, books, blogs or other material under copyright, as is almost universally done by blogs to illustrate a conversation. To quote Daithi MacSithigh (who I’m almost certain won’t sue), “Copyright violations are either legal or illegal - we don’t need a Bloggers’ Scout’s Honour Code to deal with things that people post.”

Defamation:

Defamation and liable laws are also much stricter in this country, with both the hosting company, and the owner of a blog liable, not merely for a blogs content, but for the defamatory content of its comments. This host liability is regularly misused by aggrieved companies, who have for example received a negative review of their products, to have entire websites preemptively removed with a solicitors letter. A practice described by TJ McIntyre, in the Sunday Business Post, as ‘a form of privatised and cheap censorship that’s quicker than going to court’. A ‘liable’ can consist of merely repeating published allegations. Just as I, in this very article, am repeating the allegations regarding the alleged threats to Kathy Sierra.

And lest you think that such legislation is a quirk of a wee country’s decrepit legal system, the same removal procedures frequently occur in the United States. When a hosting company receives a complaint under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, it can protect itself from liability if it ‘responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity’ (DMCA SEC. 202, Amendment Sec. 512, C, 1). Irrespective of whether the material in question is actually infringing. This provision is often used to deny access to (or delete outright) entire business or personal websites on the basis of unsubstantiated ‘takedown’ letters.

Chilling Effects:

Now Paul Walch is not proposing Tim O’Reily’s guidelines specifically, and Tim O’Reilly’s evolving guideline do no currently seek to extend copyright, or the reach of defamation law. However, the examples quoted above are just some of the chilling effects which emerge when codes, guidelines and ultimately laws evolve - with the reasonable goals of protecting individuals from harassment, and businesses from copyright infringement; and ultimately act to dilute sometimes necessary anonymity, erase criticism, and create artificial fences around the communication of ideas.

It is sheer naiveté to assume that if a bloggers code does emerge, complete with microformat tags and shiny PNG badges, it will not be used within censoring applications, such as those which are manditory in US schools and libraries, to restrict access to information. Or by autocratic governments to censor their own citizenry. Moreover, it is insidious to conflate such codes of conduct with labels declaring compliance to web standards and accessibility, or opt in licensing agreements like Creative Commons; as Content Label appear to be attempting. While creative commons licenses facilitate the controlled sharing of information by it’s creators, and accessibility guideline facilitate the widest possible access to information, a bloggers code of conduct can only ever reduce the freedom of expression which blogs facilitate, and if successful could act to ghettoise speech outside its defined framework.

What’s the use?

While O’Reilly’s code and similar initiatives will most likely fail to win enough popular support to become enforceable, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that they will succeed enough (for example by becoming default options on blogger and typepad, or in wordpress installs) to endanger debate. Without an enforcing body they are effectively powerless (unless separately enforced by governments or third party filters), with the backing an enforcing group they have the potential to become the internet equivalent of the much criticised MMPA rating system.

Paul Walch says ‘I’m not trying to police the Internet‘, and I believe him. But when codes like the one currently proposed emerge, they fill a vacuum in the control of internet speech, and are eagerly supported by individuals and governments who seek such control.

One interesting question to ask is, would such a code of conduct have prevented the Kathy Sierra incident? Markos Moulitsas Zúniga thinks not, “1) There are assholes that will 2) email stupid shit to any public figure (which includes bloggers, but 3) that won’t be stopped by any blogger code of conduct”.

Interestingly, under Irish law, my quoting Zúniga technically infringes copyright, thus violating O’Reilly’s proposed code - ‘We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that.. infringes upon a copyright or trademark’.

An article by Mike Elgan in Computer World Magazine, laying the boot into e-books, has sparked a surprisingly intelligent discussion on Digg. According to Elgan, e-books are bound to fail because..

1. They aren’t cheaper - both the hardware and content are more expensive
2. Content is available on other platforms (e.g.: PC)
3. People love paper books

Throughout his article Elgan conflates the e-book format and electronic book devices, in a way that confuses the issue of uptake. Perhaps the reason he fails to differentiate between medium and it’s media, is that there are so many kinds of things that can be described as a e-book. Wikipedia for example, lists twenty five e-book formats, including both document types and readers.

Elgan’s article might have been written twenty ago, about digital music..

‘Companies like Sony, Panasonic, Hitachi and Fujitsu have devoted millions of dollars over the past couple of decades developing what they hope will be a device that replaces the..’ [Record player]
‘The hardware costs hundreds of dollars’ [CD Player]
‘everyone already has alternatives’ [Vinal, Tape, 8 Track]
‘do people want to “curl up” with a battery-operated..’ [iPod]

For a new format or device to succeed, what matters is not how much people like an existing product, but how much they would enjoy an alternative with greater function. Currently e-book readers (like all digital display technologies), are in their infancy. We know this because their development is occurring so rapidly. The best digital display available in 1987 was a 16 inch VGA CRT, boasting 256 colors at a 320×200 pixel resolution. Twenty years later, digital images can be displayed on a variety of output media from 63 inch flat screen HDTV’s at 1920 × 1080 pixel resolution, in 281 trillion colors; to high contrast, monochromatic 800*600 e-ink ‘powerless displays’.

We each carry a variety of devices capable of displaying digital books; from laptops, to MP3 players, to mobile phones. Digital displays are becoming ever more versatile, ubiquitous and cheap, with increasing contrast, fidelity and resolution. Fujitsu have recently announced the first prosumer colour e-ink display. So why haven’t e-books already taken off?

Existing efforts are crippled by Digital Restrictions Malware, and available in a bewildering variety of incompatible proprietary formats, from Adobe, Sony, Microsoft, Mobipocket, eReader and others. Publishers fear they will experience the same growth in copyright infringement that the record industry claims has negatively effected sales. It may already be too late. In the absence of reasonably priced, DRM free alternatives, consumers are turning to unlicensed downloads, just as happened with music and film. A quick search of isoHunt, a top bittorrent index, for the term ‘DVD’ returns over 26,000 active downloads. A similar search for ‘Book’, returns over 4,000.

A great majority of these files are posted without their authors consent, but some publishers and authors are embracing digital distribution. Blogger and award winning science fiction author Cory Doctorow, has distributed all his novels online for free; releasing digital versions simultaneously with their paper equivalents. A few publishers, like Baen Books, have adapted to the new marketplace, making available older content for free, and selling reasonably priced, DRM free, multi-format e-books, with subscription options. Initiatives like Project Gutenberg, seek to make digital copies of public domain books universally available. Whether publishers eventually embrace consumer friendly formats, or continue to ignore them, digital e-book content will continue to grow in availability.

With e-book readers, the costs of adoption are still high, as dedicated devices or high resolution PDA’s still cost hundreds of euro. Similarly, while common devices like iPod’s can technically display e-books, such uses often require a degree of technical knowledge, and force users to struggle with unfriendly user interfaces. This should soon change, as devices like Apple’s iPhone usher in a new generation of high resolution, high contrast digital display devices. While Apple seems likely to restrict the iPhone’s use, their competitors will be more than happy to capitalise on more open platforms, whilst learning from Apple’s user interface innovations.

Digital books provide a variety of predictable advantages, as well as many which will not emerge until they become more evolved. Right now groups like The Institute for the future of the book, are hard at work ‘inventing new forms of discourse for the network age’, and their efforts provide an insight into just some of the potential benefits of e-books..

1. Collaborative writing / revision / comment / annotation
2. Effectively free wireless distribution
3. Smaller form factor - potentially infinite books in one networked device
4. Environmentally friendly
5. Text search
6. Updateable
7. Rapid universal publication
8. Dynamic user interfaces
9. Flexibility of format
10. Interactivity

Whether e-book’s are ultimately consumed on laptops, dedicated palmtop devices with flexible screens, enhanced newsprint, heads up displays, or by all these and other means, is impossible to predict. Right now paper books are far more durable, resilient, and user friendly than any of their alternatives; but as an analogue medium, their development is slow and expensive. E-book’s by contrast, benefit fully from the brakeneck pace of accelerating technological change, and offer so many potential advantages in cost, portability and capability that their adoption is all but inevitable. Witness the publication and consumption of scientific articles, which though nominally tied to peer reviewed magazines, increasingly occurs initially online - increasing the speed, penetration, and availability of research.

Digital consumption will affect the format of books, as it has already affected the format of articles published on the web. There will always be a market for traditional ‘dead tree’ editions; but ‘the book’ will likely morph and splinter into a variety of forms, and the nature of authorship will change with it. This is as an evolution of discourse as significant the creation of written language, or the invention of the printing press. It’s an exciting time to be a reader, and an even more exciting time to be a writer.

Just back from Barcamp Ireland 3. What a day, so packed I couldn’t possibly get to half the talks (which ran concurrently), but I managed three lectures and the panel discussion. The event was held in the beautiful Digital Hub, off Thomas St in Dublin. The building is fantastic, with bare brick walls and natural lighting throughout, and would make a fantastic billionaires studio apartment.

I’ve posted some wikified notes. I grabbed several mini interviews, on TFM’s sweet but pricey Roland wav recorder (check out the uber cheesy website), not enough material for a full blown podcast, but I’ve thrown them up, below. Also attempted to moblog throughout the day, with mixed results.

Mini Interviews

Sean O Sullivan of Rococo.
Robin Blandford creator of Comment Casting.
Darren Barefoot of Capulet Communications.

Update: Fixed the wiki link!