Heresy Pornography and Treason

Scanners Work In Vain

2011-07-26T07:13:00.000-07:00

One of the arguments you sometimes hear in the brouhaha over "intellectual property"
is "well you can just scan it in", referring to copying a book or a story.

My current response to the "you can just scan it in argument" is "like Hell you can!"

For the past couple of weeks I have been trying to scan in an a novella I wrote with Ernest Hogan, called "Obsidian Harvest" that we intend to publish as an ebook. On the basis of my experiences I'd say scanning digest-sized (paperback book size) pages is in fact extremely difficult. The real reason we're no overrun with scanned pirated versions of books is it's damned hard to do.

Part of the reason it took so long was that I was also in the final stages of publishing my new book titled "Shift Happens: The New E-Publishing Paradigm And What It Means For Writers." That was another "interesting" experience, albeit much less frustrating than the scanner.

My first attempt at scanning was with my quirky HP 8500 all-in-one printer-scanner-fax machine. It took me over an hour to scan in the 28 magazine pages. Then it went through OCR and the fun really began.

First off, the quality of the scan and resulting OCR was lousy. There was a mistake or two on nearly every line. Worse, whole sections of the story had simply not been picked up. At several places in the copy I was missing half a page or more. In short the scan was unusable.

Now I regularly use the scanner for contracts and such without the OCR and it has performed satisfactorily. So I assumed the OCR software that came with the machine (OEMed) from Iris wasn't up to the job.

My next step was to go to Nuance and order OmniPage 18, a highly recommended scanning and OCR package. After some hassles getting it installed, I tried it on the pdf file the IRIS software had created. This is a file of graphic images and most OCR packages will accept it.

The results were definitely better, but there were still a lot of mistakes. And of course the gaps in the document was still there.

Okay, recalling the famous dictum of John W. Campbell Jr.: "Always use the proper tool for the job. The proper tool to fix a television is a television repairman." I decided to take doczilla to a scanning service and have it scanned professionally.

The first place I tried was a regular commercial service. After some back and forth on the phone the guy at the service told me that basically they couldn't do it. Not only was my project to small physically for their scanners to feed, it was also too small a job for them. "Now if you had 2800 pages instead of 28 . . ." my informant told me.

After calling a couple of more services I got the same response. They all dealt in letter or legal sized pages printed on dead-white background and in quantities in the thousands.

Then I decided to try one of my local quick print places. They did indeed have a scanner for small quantities, but when I took it down there the answer was the same: They couldn't do it. Their problem was the paper size. It was too small to feed reliably through their sheet feeder.

In talking to the very helpful guy at the copy center, I found out why I was getting gaps in the scans. My all-in-one simply didn't have enough RAM to handle the job. When it ran out of RAM it quit OCR until it caught -- with no warning, naturally.

Okay, I've got one final shot. I dug the original manuscript out of my files and today I'll take it back to the copy center and see if they can do that. It's a little dog eared, but it is a clearly printed original. If that doesn't work, it's time to hire a typist.

The point of this long, rambling tale is that "just scanning it in" isn't easy, especially when you're dealing with digest-size or paperback book-size packages. While it's theoretically easy, the practice for some kinds of documents is a lot harder. It doesn't help that you've got to take the pages out of the original to get a clean scan.

There are a lot of things like this in our high-tech world where the gap between "we can do it" and "we can do it easily and routinely" is broad enough to defeat even semi-serious efforts to make it work. Just because we can do something doesn't mean it has been reduced to everyday practice and just because something is reduced to everyday practice in one field doesn't mean it will transfer easily to another, even closely related, field.

Attention: The driving force behind the web

2011-07-23T23:55:00.001-07:00

One of the peculiarities of selling stuff on the web is that the sales curve is quite a bit different.

I have particularly noticed this since I've been publicizing my new book "Shift Happens: The New E-Publishing Paradigm And What It Means For Writers." The topic is the rapidly changing landscape of e-publishing and the opportunities it offers writers.
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So far the book is following the standard pattern for ebooks. Sales start off very small and then ramp up. This is unlike a print book which typically starts strong and then runs out of legs after a few months.

I wasn't surprised by this because I've seen the pattern in other ebooks. Even runaway best-selling authors such as John Locke and Amanda Hocking has this happen both of them received paltry first royalty checks (less than $20 in both cases) on books that ultimately sold a million copies or more.

This difference is perfectly normal for ebooks, but it is very discouraging to print authors venturing into ebooks because for the first couple of months the book seems a failure.

That perception of failure can easily become self-fulfilling because it can discourage authors from continuing to publicize and market their ebooks. Selling ebooks takes constant marketing and if you let the effort die, so does your book.

So what's going on here? Why is the sales pattern so different?

The answer is that getting an ebook known is a much more important part of selling ebooks. You have to make your book known to potential customers. In the current state of the industry, this takes time and during that time your sales are low.

This also points up another difference between ebooks and regular books: Persistent marketing effort. In ebooks writing the book is only half of it. The other half is marketing the book after it comes out. That's what drives sales.

What Is The Future Of Printed Books

2011-07-16T14:38:00.000-07:00

In light of the advantages of ebooks over printed books, particularly cost, do printed books have a future?

Let me answer that with another question. How many blacksmiths are active today?

The answer to the second question is "thousands". The Artists Blacksmith Association of North America has over 4,000 members and there are thousands of more blacksmiths who aren't affiliated with ABANA. Buggy whip makers are also thriving, and there are a lot of wheelwrights working as well. In fact it's hard to think of an obsolete trade or craft which isn't still being practiced today.

I submit the same thing is going to happen to publishers of print books. The economic advantages of ebooks my limit them to niche markets, but they're going to be healthy niches. Some people think enough of print books that they're willing to pay 5 or 10 times the price of ebooks for a printed-on-paper copy.

In fact that's what has happened to traditionally bound books, made by hand with the cords running across the back under the leather binding. They're still available, although much more costly than regular printed books.

We're not going to lose printed books because of ebooks, but because of price and other advantages ebooks will dominate the market.

"Shift Happens" is now available

2011-07-16T07:28:00.000-07:00

Since this blog is about paradigm shifts brought on by the new media, it's appropriate to discuss the changes that ebooks are bringing to the publishing industry. The answer is the changes are huge; so much so that I'd need a book to discuss them. So of course I wrote the book.

"Shift Happens: The New E-Publishing Paradigm And What It Means For Writers" is now available from Amazon

Ebooks change everything, from the price of books and the selection available to readers to the relationship between authors and publishers. The social implications are vast as well.

For writers the most important changes are that ebooks offer the opportunity for independent authors to make significant ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifmounts of money and that they turn the relationship between the author and publisher upside down. Now the writer is in control of every aspect of their book, from copy to method and timing of publication. Considering the long-standing resentment among authors for publishers, this is a very liberating development.

Of course most people are readers rather than writers but for readers the changes are vast as well. Readers will have a much broader selection of books because publishers are no longer serving as gatekeepers between writers and readers. Perhaps more significantly, the price of books drops sharply because ebooks don't face the hideously expensive, archaic, distribution system that is the essence of modern conventional publishing.

There's a lot more and it's all available in Shift Happens

Cooks Law Of Media Mis-Action

2011-07-10T11:13:00.000-07:00

Having accumulated enough evidence, I'm ready to propose a new law, which I have (with shocking immodesty) named Cook's Law Of Media Meltdown. To wit:

When faced with a disruptive technology which threatens their business, entrenched media companies can be counted on to do the wrong thing.

This is a remarkably consistent response. It may involve fleets of lawyers filing flurries of lawsuits, or it may involve using coercion or their market power to try to enforce silly rules to bolster the media company's position. It is often illegal, if the FTC or other appropriate bodies decide to look. But as inevitably as the sunrise, the media companies try it. And they almost invariably fail while the media death spiral continues.

Case in point: The major book publishers and ebooks.

Operating under the rubric of the "agency model", five of the six major publishers have banded together to fix prices on their ebooks. Under the rules publishers must set non-discountable prices for all their ebooks and at least 30 percent of the price must go to the retailer. This is in sharp contrast to bookstore pricing of print copies, which is a free-for-all.

There are two things to note about the agency model

1) It is almost certainly illegal.
"Almost certainly" because the authorities haven't investigated it yet. However the agency seems to fall under the established rules barring restrictive trade practices in most cases.

2) It is designed to keep up the price of ebooks to eliminate the competition with print books.
The publishers' problem is simple. Ebooks are much cheaper to produce. So much so that they threaten to decimate sales of conventional books. By artifically keeping up the price of ebooks publishers are trying to keep ebooks from "cannibalizing" the sales of print books.

There's a third thing to note as well:
3) This is an idiot scheme which is guaranteed to fail and damage the publishers in the process.

The basic flaw is that the big publishers control an ever-shrinking percentage of the ebook market. It doesn't really matter what the big boys do, the small publishers and independent authors are going to price their books as they please. That means plenty of ebooks available at attractively low prices.

It also means that most independent ebooks will be priced well below the price of their competitors from the large publishers. Since ebooks are highly price sensitive this means that the sales of independent ebooks will out-compete the major publishers' books on price alone.

But wait a minute! Isn't each book a unique item, not subject to substitution?

The publishers believe that but they've been drinking their own kool aid and lacing it with LSD to boot. In one sense it's quite true. No book is exactly like another one. But for most readers of non-fiction books are what economists like to call a fungible good. In other words there are lots of substitutes available.

I can't get the new Sookie Stackhouse (or I'm not willing to pay for it in hardback), so I pick up another paranormal romance from an independent author. If the difference in price is, say, $10 for Charlene Harris, and $3 for the independent, is that enough to influence my buying decision.

For most books the answer is clearly "yes". If I'm really hooked on Sookie Stackhouse, I may buy her latest adventure despite the price difference. But most readers aren't in that category. For that price different they'll forgo Charlene Harris' work, good as it is, and get two or three of the independent authors books instead.

In other words, what the mental giants in publishing have done with their agency agreement is to guarantee sales for independent authors, even if no one has heard of them before.

Typical dinosaur behavior.

--RC

The REAL Cultural Revolution In Ebooks

2011-07-07T16:19:00.000-07:00

Over in my other blog, Rick Cook's Notebook, I've been talking about the revolution ebooks are producing in publishing. Because I'm an author and naturally I'm concerned about financial matters affecting authors I've (naturally) concentrated on the economic bonanza things like 70 percent royalty rates and a potential market of tens of millions of ebook reader owners will produce for us poor, starveling ink-stained wretches. (Joke, sorta.) However there are enormous cultural implications in the ebook revolution as well. Since this blog is more about the social effects of new media, including ebooks, I decided to move the cultural implications over here.

First, let's note that in cultural history giant oaks from little acorns grow. Something that's obscure today is likely to become a commonplace tomorrow. And such things often have totally unexpected results.

Case in point: The automobile and the sexual revolution. The automobile didn't start the sexual revolution -- if anything did, it was the wide availability of birth control pills -- but it gave it an enormous boost even before The Pill arrived. The car became a bedroom on wheels and the availability of cheap cars meant that millions of horny American teenagers were able to obey their raging hormones with a minimum of complications (after The Pill arrived, anyway). It can safely be said that if you came of age in a certain era, if you hadn't made it in a car you hadn't made it.

Now this was emphatically NOT what people like Henry Ford had in mind when they invented the automobile. Henry, in particular, would have been offended to the depths of his strait-laced soul. But once the technology was available, people used it for what they wanted and moralists and inventors be damned.

Actually it was kind of a nice combination of Heresy, Pornography and Treason all rolled into one invention.

In the case of ebooks, the critical cultural factor isn't the high royalties paid authors, or the wide availability of cheap books. The thing that is really revolutionary is simply this: With ebooks, gatekeepers effectively vanish!

Yep. Gone. Nonexistent. The equivalent of an ex-parrot.

The implications of this are huge. Effectively anyone can now say anything they want (barring such things as libel) by publishing it in an ebook.

This is a huge change from the situation which has existed up to now. Even the most fanatic publisher has been limited by economic considerations. Books were expensive to produce and the money had to come from somewhere. That limited the number of tracts that even the nuttiest publisher could put out.

Guess what? With ebooks there are effectively no more limits. If you want to publish the equivalent of a 600 page magnum opus and sell it at the Kindle Store for a penny a copy, there's nothing to stop you and you instantly reach a world-wide audience. Or, if you're a little more savvy, you can boost the price of your screed to Amazon's cutoff point of $2.99 and make just over $2 a copy on whatever you're peddling.

This means that every alternative view from the most staid and sober to the most virulent nutballery can be made available to everyone for almost nothing.

This first reaction to this realization is likely to be (in the best Jonathan Qualye Higgins voice ) "Oh. My. God."

The amount of stuff out there -- badly written, mostly illiterate and generally reaching a level of indescribable awfulness that is, well, indescribable -- that is going to descend on us is almost beyond comprehension. It's like browsing in a peculiar used bookstore where almost everything on the shelves is terrible but there are occasional nuggets of really good stuff tucked in here and there.

Remember, no censorship. No copy reading. No proof reading. And editing? That's like, so 20th Century. And remember, no gatekeepers built into the process.

To give you an idea of what that means, I still have a copy of a self-published book titled Eight Days With Hitler In Yellowstone Park that was put out in the 70's, before ebooks. The poor author actually paid thousands of dollars to have it published and yes, it is truly as awful as you imagine.

It could have been worse. This was apparently a fragment of a much longer work about Hitler's secret trip to the United States in the 30s. I gather there were thousands and thousands of pages of it which the author couldn't afford to publish.

(As an aside: Hitler, of course, did not visit the United States in the 30s. At least not in our universe. I've given up wondering what color the sky was on that planet, but I'd still kinda like to know the Ricci Tensor for that universe.)

So what's the compensation to justify this outpouring of terribleness? The fact that mixed in with it you also get a fair amount of good stuff that would otherwise go unpublished. Perhaps it didn't appeal to publishers (think Harry Potter), perhaps it is incomprehensible to the average reader (think Einstein's Theory of Relativity) or perhaps it is so politically and socially unpopular that it risks getting the publisher's office burned down (think the abolitionist tracts of the early 19th century in the south.)

In other words, just from the law of averages, we can expect that some fair proportion of this stuff will be quite good, and some of it will be vitally important to our world. Now personally I think that's a pretty good trade. But it really doesn't matter what I think. It's coming and coming fast.

--RC

Kindles, millionaires and paradigm shift

2011-07-04T02:54:00.000-07:00

One thing about paradigms: Shift Happens.
-- G. Harry Stine

In the last couple of months there have been some major developments in the publishing business, specifically publishing e books with companies like Amazon. In fact the changes have been so great that I've written a (short) book about it. The title, unashamedly stolen from the late G. Harry Stine, science fiction writer, rocket scientist and cranky crossways futurist, is "Shift Happens". The subject is the paradigm shift in publishing and what it means for authors and readers.

(What's going to happen to conventional publishers and brick and mortar bookstores is less interesting. They're not going to be toast, but they are sure as heck going to be lightly browned.)

To give you an idea of the sea change that's taking place, here are a couple of names to remember: John Locke and Amanda Hocking. Locke is a 60-year-old insurance executive and real estate investor in Kentucky. Hocking is a 26-year-old writer from Minnesota. What makes them worth remembering is that both of them became instant millionaires by writing e books. (When I say instant, I mean instant. Both of them struck it rich in less than a year.)

These two rather ordinary people are worth remembering because they made a whole lot of money by riding the new wave in e publishing. Both of them struck it rich in 2011 and in Locke's case it took about five months to make his first million in e publishing.

This would be a curiosity except for the fact that they are not flukes. Instead they're the vanguard of a wave of successful authors who will be making a ton of money off e books. That means Locke and Hocking are worth careful study -- and emulation -- by up and coming writers. We can expect to see their stories repeated over and over again until "e book millionaire" becomes as common a phrase as "internet millionaire."

So what, you may ask, the heck is going on here?

Actually there's a lot going on. So much so that I'll probably spend the next five or six posts talking about it. For right now let's just deal with the basics.

The first basic is that the sales of e readers have exploded in the last two or three years. According to a recent survey something like 12 percent of the American adult population now has a Kindle or other e book reader. The market is growing rapidly and showing no sign of slowing down.

More readers mean more e books to read. And in fact this is happening. Amazon, one of the largest book retailers in the country, is now selling more e books than it is print books.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is that e books are much cheaper than their print counterparts. (They're not as cheap as they should be but that's a topic of another post.) Locke prices his mystery novels at 99 cents each, while Hocking's fantasy novels sell for $2.99 each. These prices and the accompanying royalties of 35 to 70 percent of the cover price mean that people like Locke and Hocking can sell a ton of books and make more off each copy than they'd make in a conventional royalty deal with a regular publisher.

Finally, decades of stupidity and an absolutely insane business model are catching up with conventional publishers. Their poor business practices, and those of conventional bookstores, are cutting the industry off at the knees and threatening to implode the whole business. (Hmm. Mixed metaphors much?)

What all this means for authors is that people who couldn't ever get published under the conventional system are flooding the market with new books. What it means for readers is that they have far more choice than ever when it comes to books -- at the price of having to wade through a lot of illiterate, crazy dreck, but still. . .

What it means for our society in general is that the realities of the new media are catching up with us in a very public way.

What it does not mean is that we'll have smooth sailing into a perfect world. Things won't work the way they have and as usual that means a combination of good news and bad news.

Personally I think the news will be good on the balance, but we're all in for a wild ride.

--RC

BACK TO 1984 DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE

2009-07-17T21:23:00.000-07:00

Amazon has taken to rewriting the present by retroactively censoring books. Specifically, the company erased copies of George Orwell's “1984” and “Animal Farm” from its customers' Kindle ebook readers.

1984 was, of course, the totalitarian distopia that introduced the term “memory hole” to the wold. In Orwell's book the hero worked for the “Ministry of Truth” censoring books and rewriting history, or the present, to cover it up. The memory hole was the incinerator chute where superseded documents went to make sure the record conformed to the Party's view of history today.

What happened was that someone offered unauthorized copies of Orwell's novels “1984” and “Animal Farm” for sale through Amazon's Kindle book store. When the copyright owner found out, they demanded Amazon remove the books from their store, which Amazon promptly – and correctly – did. But then Amazon veered off into 1984 territory.

According to the New York Times Amazon not only took down the offending books, they reached out and deleted already sold copies of the book from customers' Kindles, while crediting their accounts for the selling price.

This has infuriated nearly everyone, except for a few of the morally tone deaf who have been drinking too much of the “intellectual property” Kool Aid™

Amazon didn't help itself by the surreptitious way it handled the business. No notice to the Kindle readers, just down the memory hole. And apparently no thought to the firestorm of criticism this was going to arouse. At least they didn't bother to publish an explanation, although they did respond to the Times' questions in an email.

Amazonian ineptness aside, this incident points to a serious flaw in the world of the new media. A few months ago in this blog Eisenstein's Changes: Printing and the Web, I compared the changes brought about by the introduction of printing and web publishing. In general the web extended and enhanced the trends that were exemplified by the printing press.

The exception was permanence. As I pointed out then, and as this example underlines, material posted to the web – and apparently downloaded electronically – is much less permanent that printed copy. It is not only easy to create, it is tragically easy to destroy.

We are rapidly moving into an era when not only the past, but the present as well are mutable at the whim of publishers. If you don't secure a copy on your own disk – or even if you do in the case of Kindle – the material can disappear in an eyeblink.

This is flat scary. Americans as a group already have a loose enough grasp on history (“All the historical sense of a colony of cherrystone clams” to paraphrase “Bored of the Rings”), but now we're in danger of losing even that.

As in Orwell's 1984, the first place this has shown up is in politics, going back to the Clinton era. But when it can show up in literature as well, the problem is becoming much, much worse.

The Newspaper of the Future: 9 things that will change and 1 that won't

2009-04-11T00:53:00.001-07:00

What will the newspaper of the future be like? Here are nine things that will change – and one that won't.

1)It will be online
The costs of a traditional newspaper are just too high. If you want something to curl up with, you can always print out stories.
2)It will break the locality based model
Today geographical location is the key differentiator. Every city has “its” newspaper. The news sites will operate in a manner more akin to syndication or the Associated Press today.
3)The space cadets will be on board
The advertising departments will sell online ads with the same enthusiasm and skill that they sell print ads today. One of the major problems with online news now is the general news sites don't have effective sales forces. This hurts revenue.
4)It will have a smaller, but more effective, staff
Rather than trying to have a reporter to cover everything, the reporters will be concentrated in the areas that are important to that news site, including strictly local news. The rest will be covered by stringers and agreements with other news sites.
5)A journalist is as a journalist does
“Journalist” will be defined by the kind and quality of output, not by a degree or the organization they work for. High quality, well-written results will tend to get you hired on to a news site.
6)As always, editors will be key
There is no substitute for good editors.
7)Quality of writing will be a key differentiator
News sites will live or die by the quality of their output. The writing will have to be of uniformly high quality to win and keep readers.
8)Insight will be another key differentiator
Reporters and editors will have to understand what they're writing about at a fairly profound level.
9)It will use all the available web tools
That includes things like Google Maps, tweets, graphics, podcasts and video clips. Web 2.0 and beyond.
10)The pay will be lousy
Some things won't change.

Clay Shirky Gets It (Mostly) Right

2009-03-14T16:24:00.000-07:00

Clay Shirky has the best analysis of the current newspaper situation I've seen in a long time. I've covered parts of it here, but never in the breadth and depth Shirky does.

Shirky argues that what we need is not newspapers but journalism and that the web and other new media will find a way to feed that need for journalism. Newspapers as they exist today, however, are toast.

Shirky also notes that such revolutionary transitions, like the introduction of the printing press in the 16th century are inherently chaotic. There's going to be a period of many different competing models where important parts of the job of journalism aren't going to be done.

Anyway. Read the whole thing.
--RC

The Dismal State Of Online Ad Sales

2009-02-25T18:12:00.000-08:00

Online advertising is struggling for the first time in years. After growing at double-digit rates since the beginning of the decade, online ad revenue grew at a barely perceptible .4 percent last quarter (it still grew a total of 18 percent in all of 2008) and market researcher IDC is predicting a 5 percent drop in the first quarter of this year. IDC says that could get worse in the second quarter.

This is distinctly better than the results from conventional advertising. But as Sarah Lacy points out the difference between conventional advertising and online advertising is the difference between an amputation and a broken leg.

So what went wrong?
A lot of things. This is, after all, the worst economic situation on 75 years and it's no news that a lot of people got a lot of things wrong. Compared to, say, bankers, the online advertisers and their evangelists look like geniuses.

That's the good news. The bad news, I think, is a combination of wishful thinking and jumping the gun. Bluntly some of the factors which were supposed to keep online advertising growing aren't in place yet.

For example, online advertisers maintained that online ad results were more measurable and hence a better value than print or electronic ads.

There are two problems with this argument. First, the superiority is more theoretical than practical and second, just because something is self-evidently true doesn't mean that people will act on it.

To take the second point first, the advantages of online advertising over other media haven't sunk in yet with a large fraction of advertisers. They may have heard it, they may even generally agree with it, but they haven't internalized it in a manner that really matters when they have to trim their ad budget.

The first reason is a little simpler – and somewhat more depressing. The theoretical ability to do precise measurements of customer response to online advertising hasn't translated broadly into such measures. Most online advertising measurement is stuck back in the cost per thousand page views era.

As I pointed out in an earlier post in this blog, page views are a poor measure of ad success. They don't reflect the impact of the ad on the viewer and they don't translate directly into reader responses. There are more sophisticated tools available, but most sites don't offer them.

This is compounded by the attempt to get page views at all costs – including turning the potential customer off with irritating ads. It doesn't matter how many page views an ad gets, if it irritates the viewers to the point where they don't want to deal with you, it is not a successful ad.

If online advertising is going to live up to its potential it is going to have to recognize its problems and fix them. It needs a lot more promotion based on success stories and less on “logical” PowerPoint slides. It needs to offer easy-to-use metrics that relate ad spending on line to the bottom line. And it needs more innovative ad strategies designed to produce action and not just page views.

The Social Media and the Brain: A Good Thing

2009-02-24T14:50:00.000-08:00

In a remarkable display of point missing, some neuroscientists are Viewing With Alarm the entire phenomenon of the social media (and by extension all the new media of the 21st century.

The most recent viewer with alarm is Professor Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University and an authority on the brain and its development.

As Prof. Greenfield told the House of Lords (she is also Baroness Greenfield):
“If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales.“

She may even be right. And she completely misses what's going on. Dyslexia wasn't a handicap until writing was invented. And what's happening with the new media, especially the social media, is a sea change as profound as the invention of writing.

Thanks to being immersed in a sea of information of all sorts, children are being conditioned to handle multiple data streams at high speeds.

What will our children and their children use this new capacity for? Mostly the same sorts of things we use the ability to read for. Which is to say they will fritter it away on the equivalent of trashy novels and supermarket tabloids.

But some of our descendants will use it for other things too. These capabilities will give them the ability to handle vast amounts of information and (with the help of the appropriate software) to correlate and draw conclusions from it in ways we can hardly imagine. They won't be smarter than we are, but thanks to the enhancements of the media they will have a far greater effective intelligence.

Indeed, the biggest problem with social media and their results is not that the brains of children are being affected, it is that not all children are having their brains so affected.

In another 50 years people who can't handle this datalanche are going to be at a tremendous disadvantage.

And The Practical Effect Is. . .

2009-02-20T11:50:00.000-08:00

The Topeka, Kansas, public library has voted to keep minors from accessing five sex manuals, including "The "Joy of Sex".

By a 5-3 vote, the board decided to keep people under 21 away from the manuals, including "The Joy of Sex", "The Joy of Gay Sex", "The Lesbian Kama Sutra" and something called "Sex For Busy People."

Seemingly unnoticed in the ensuing -- and completely predictable -- uproar is the simple fact that the library's action in restricting (some would say "banning") the books has precisely no effect in the Internet age.

Understand, I am opposed to censorship and "The Joy of Sex" -- the only one of the books I am familiar with -- is a book I'd gladly give to a curious 14-year-old. On the other hand, I can understand that most of the minors who check out the book are going to use it as arousing material for solitary sex practice and their parents might object. I also expect that the books would be at the top of the library's "most stolen" list.

However that's immaterial if the purpose is to keep kids away from such material. Most kids no longer get their sex education on street corners. Now they go on line to find out. Which as far as I'm concerned is a very good thing.

Quite simply the rules of the game have changed and public libraries are losing a lot of their importance as sources of information. Things like popular fiction and movies are becoming more important to library patrons and one of the most used features at the public libraries is the bank of computers for patrons to go online.

To their credit librarians are aware of this, but they still haven't figured out how to deal with it.

As someone who spent many happy hours in the public library I'd be sorry to see libraries disappear. I don't think they will though. I expect that like bookstores and so much else in our society they will maintain their name and shift their function under the influence of the new media.

Now It's the Authors' Guild's turn to act silly

2009-02-16T22:46:00.000-08:00

Authors are having a lot of trouble adjusting to the new realities of 21st century media. First we had the Science Fiction Writers of America getting their knickers in a twist over unauthorized posting of copyrighted works – and making fools of themselves in the process.
Now it's the turn of the Authors' Guild, an organization ostensibly dedicated to protecting the rights of authors. Their dovecote is all aflutter because of Amazon's new e-book reader, the Kindle 2. The technically aware types at the Authors' have discovered that – horrors! – the Kindle 2 has a built-in speech synthesizer which can read the text of an e-book aloud.
The guild immediately cried foul , claiming this violates the authors' copyrights unless the publish has acquired “performance rights” (i.e. audio books) as well as print rights.
To give you an idea of how stupid this is, consider one simple fact: Text to speech isn't unique to Kindle. Both Windows and Mac machines can read text files and in all probability Linux can as well. In other words, nearly every computer out there is capable of reading a downloaded book. What's more, they have been able to do it for years.
This is truly a piece of multi-dimensional silliness. In addition to the fact that most computers can synthesize speech, there's the simple fact that Kindle, like the other computers, doesn't do a very good job of it. The “speech” sounds like the the Cylons on the original Battlestar Galactica. It's intelligible but painful to listen to in large chunks.
Compared to simply synthesizing speech from text, the problem of producing “real” sounding speech is exponentially more complex. It will take a lot more processing power and a lot of sophisticated software development to lick and that sort of power and sophistication isn't going to show up any time soon in a $300 ebook reader.
There's also the little matter of what constitutes a “performance”. Normally that's understood as reading for an audience, specifically a paying audience of multiple people. Considering that this is feature, to the extent it is used at all, will be used almost exclusively to play text files for the person who owns the Kindle 2.
It's going to be interesting to see if the Authors' Guild will put their money where their mouth is and sue Amazon (and Microsoft, and Apple, and everybody else) over this piece of nonsense. They have sued over such things in the past and in fact won a $125 million settlement http://www.dailytech.com/Harvard+Google+Cannot+Reach+Book+Scanning+Agreement/article13360.htm from Google over its program to scan books from major libraries. However that case was a lot more clear cut.
What's really going on here is another failure to understand and accept the changes in the media. The fact is that the old media in general – including an awful lot of print authors and their publishers are not merely clueless when it comes to the changes sweeping over us, they're scared to death of them.
This fear comes out in various irrational acts, many of which are silly on their face.
This is unlikely to go anywhere, but if the Authors' Guild decides to pursue it, my advice is to sit back and enjoy the show.

McLuhan Reconsidered

2008-07-31T09:03:00.000-07:00

If you're of a certain age, you undoubtedly passed through a Marshall McLuhan phase. When it was published in 1967, "The Medium Is The Massage" struck like an intellectual thunderbolt. It was hotly debated and nervously dismissed, but soon we were all talking, ironically or not, about "the global village" and how "the medium is the message."

Time may, as the say, heal wounds, but it exposes gaping great holes in social commentors' logic.

Re-reading the hot book du jour, say, 30 years later gives you a much better appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments.

Some such books, such as Charles A. Reich's "The Greening of America" turn out to be a tissue of weaknesses surrounding gaping wounds when read outside the moment. Others are more substantial, although few of them survive the aging process without suffering some damage. Even the most perceptive social critic, after all, is unlikely to get everything right.

Read in this light, Marshall McLuhan's work is very much a mixed bag. Some of McLuhan's insights are striking, some are worth pondering and some were obviously wrong when McLuhan wrote them.

McLuhan's central insight, that society is being shaped by the media used to express ideas stands up well. Indeed, it has become a commonplace. Some of his surrounding insights are off-the-wall brilliant and some of them are simply off the wall. For example the notion that children learn the alphabet by osmosis without being taught was obviously untrue in 1968 -- as any primary school teacher could have told Prof. McLuhan.

So, is there value in the exercise of re-reading MitM (as its aficionados took to calling it), other than promoting a shallow sense of superiority at how much we know better? I think there is.

One of McLuhan's problems was that he was writing too early. If he had written his book in 1977 rather than 1967, it would have been a very different work and, I think, a much more valuable one.

That decade saw the birth and early growth of the personal computer. By 1977, the internet and a few of the changes it wrought could at least dimly be sensed.

It turned out that the defining medium for the late 20th century and early 21st century was not television and radio, although they were important, it was the computer and the associated internet.

Prof. McLuhan intuited some of those changes, but, ironically, he didn't understand the mechanism by which they would come about. Or the depth to which the new media would allow them to run.

More significantly, he misunderstood some of the fundamental developments because the media he was dealing with were largely heirarchical. Information in electronic form still flowed from the top down, or through a series of gatekeepers. True, phenomena like the underground press had begun to break that down, but it was still a top-down world when it came to communication.

There was truly, in the words of the Bob Dylan quote McLuhan included in MitM "Something is happening, but you don't know what it is, Do You Mister Jones?"

And we didn't. Not even McLuhan.

On the dangers of the internet

2008-07-29T15:07:00.001-07:00

Since one of the themes of this blog is that history tends to recapitulate, I wasn't surprised to be reminded that the attitudes toward the web and other new media are reflected in attitudes toward other "new" media in the past.

I was, however, mildly surprised to find a statement of the "problem" as far back as Socrates. To wit:

"The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to external written characters and not remember of themselves. . . You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things and have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing."
-- Socrates, "Phaedrus"
Quoted by Marshall McLuhan in "The Medium Is The Massage"

On the "decline" of reading

2008-07-27T21:07:00.000-07:00

A recent study notes with alarm that young people are spending less time reading and more time on the internet -- where the primary form of interaction is: Reading

Hmmm. Reading counts for less because it's on a screen than on a printed page?

Let's face it. If you can't read fairly well you're going to have trouble using the internet, even to play games. And as we all know reading is a skill that improves with practice.

So logically. . .

But this is the evil old internet. Good things _can't_ be coming out of it.

Goodbye Newspapers

2008-07-22T11:56:00.001-07:00

The web is full of stories recently about the coming demise of newspapers. This doesn't surprise me for a lot of reasons, but it does make me sad.

I started out in newspapers. I cubbed at a suburban daily and finished my career as the energy reporter for the largest daily in the state. In between I worked for a wire service and was managing editor of a small daily. If I hadn't had a crazy boss and an offer for a lot more money to do PR I would probably still be working for newspapers today.

-- If there were any jobs, that is.

Even when I started, I knew newspapers were dying. The big metro dailies were disappearing and more and more cities were becoming one-newspaper towns. The suburban papers were flourishing, but even there you could see signs as television and free shoppers cut into their advertising revenue. Still, I stuck with it for as long as a could because journalism was a high moral calling and besides, it was fun.

To this day, I think newspapering is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

But the newspapers as I knew them are dying. Circulation is dropping as other media steal their audience and advertising is dropping even faster. Costs are soaring for everything from paper to printing presses. Worse, the bean counters are firmly in control and they're applying their sovereign remedy for any industry in trouble -- cut costs and to hell with product, the future or anything else.

Beyond this, journalism today faces a whole series problems with its basic business. Bluntly, old style journalism of all sorts is too easy to manipulate and people from all parts of the political spectrum are manipulating like hell. That, combined with smaller staffs and lack of competition is making the news is newspapers less reliable.

That's a real shame because there are some places where the new media haven't yet picked up the slack, and perhaps never will. There are some stories that require the kind of access an accredited (read: employed) reporter can have and the general public doesn't. As a member of the public try calling the governor's office for background on the latest state scandal.

I suspect this is going to change, just as we will continue to have newspaper like things out there. Some of them will be essentially lifestyle, obits and meeting notices. Some of them will be serious sources of news, probably web-based. But none of them will be newspapers.

And that's sad.

This doesn't mean that things

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

2008-07-20T12:38:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have been following the tale of the teenage girl who was tricked by a phony Facebook ID and committed suicide when her "friend" turned against her.

It turned out the mother of an acquaintance of hers was involved and set up the phony Facebook profile. The woman has now been charged.

However before that happened, the mother's identity was revealed and she and her family were the objects of a campaign of hate mail, death threats and such, much of it coming over the internet from out of town.

Some people have seen this as an example of the dangers of the internet. I see it as an example of community response to an incident they disapproved of. In other words, the only new thing is the internet and that doesn't change much.

People have always reacted negatively to incidents they feel broke social barriers. A few of them took it to extremes. Two hundred years ago they'd throw rocks through your window -- or if they were really angry they'd burn your barn. Having been the editor of a small town daily newspaper, I can tell you that things haven't changed much there -- except now there's glass in the windows to break and they set your car on fire.

The point I see in this is that human behavior doesn't change that much, with or withour the internet. Most of the people who blame these kinds of things on the internet don't understand how they worked before the internet.

READING JOURNALISTIC TEA LEAVES -- AND GETTING IT NOT-QUITE-RIGHT

2008-03-19T23:19:00.001-07:00

The Center For Excellence In Journalism has released its 2008 report on the state of journalism in America. The report is a gold mine of information for those with a serious interest in journalism. However almost no one is reading past the executive summary (the thing is huge) and the summary's conclusions and (mostly implicit) predictions for the future are questionable.

Basically the report, and a lot of the commentary, reflect the usual problem with making sense of a mind-bendingly revolutionary technology . (Hereinafter MBRT for ease of typing.) That is that when we're faced with something mind-bending and imperfectly understood, the natural instinct is to fall back on our preconceptions of how the world works -- i.e., our prejudices.

Now preconceptions about the way the world works come in two general flavors: The conventional and the radical. The conventional view is that whatever it is isn't going to make much difference, thing will keep on working the way they have, and all the fuss is overblown. The radical preconceptions sees the MBRT as something that will remake the world into the image the particular radical preconceiver finds most attractive. Thus, socialism becomes a cure for body odor on the subways, conserving energy will lead us to a green utopia, radio will provide rich culture to the masses, computers will set us all free -- etc., etc., et dreary cetera.

(There's a third form of preconception, which is apocalyptic. Whatever it is will destroy us utterly. This tends to quickly shade over into forces driving us to the particular preconceiver's utopia. Witness Marxism and the reaction to the atomic bomb.)

The problem, of course, is that preconceptions are no better guide to the future than they are to the present. If you're looking at a truly MBRT (and they're rarer than proclaimed) it does change the world, but not totally and not in the ways or to the degrees the radicals or the apocalyptic want to believe.

The journalism report, coming as it does out of the journalistic mainstream (not to say the journalistic establishment) is pretty throughly conventional. It discovers much in the report's data to support the conventional view of the impact of the new media. As such it stands in sharp contrast to the radical view of the new media and journalism. IMHO both sets of preconceptions are equally wrong.

One of the report's points which is getting a lot of play is that the 10 most popular online news sites are mostly products of the world of conventional journalism. Whether it's a journalistic organization such as the New York Times or an aggregator such as Google or Yahoo.

That's true. However the conclusions the report's summary draws from that, and other data, is much more questionable.

The verdict on citizen media for now suggests limitations.

Now I'd like to maintain that no one ever claimed that "citizen media" didn't have limitations. Unfortunately it wouldn't be true. One of the phenomena associated with MBRT is that some people see it as doing away with everything that went before and utterly reshaping the landscape -- not surprisingly, in their own image.

Consider, for example, the"Computer Liberation" of the 60s and 70s, built around Ted Nelson's book of the same name. "Computer Liberation" is worth reading today to see how the predictions of MBRT do -- and don't -- come true.

The purpose of computers is human freedom.
-- Computer Lib, 1974
(Ted Nelson)
The parallels are instructive. And Ted is both brighter and more rational than a lot of the radicals sounding off on the impact of the new media on journalism.

The summary continues:

The prospects for user-created content, once thought possibly central to the next era of journalism, for now appear more limited, even among “citizen” sites and blogs.

Here's where preconceptions start to run the authors off the rails. This statement is only true if you bought into the massive hype about the new media destroying the old journalism. Of course it's done no such thing and it's not likely to.

What it is going to do, just as personal computers did, is to change the landscape fundamentally. Most user created comment is, and will continue to be, meta-comment. That is comment on other sources of information. Currently the most accessible of those sources are conventional media.

However conventional media are beginning to change in response to the new media. Some of the most important changes arise from the fact that the conventional media are no longer the only ones with a megaphone. Others come from the availability of information from much more diverse sources.

Google Headlines may aggregate conventional news sources, but it aggregates hundreds of news sources from all over the world. This gives a much broader picture of what's going on. And if you want more information DAGS (Do A Google Search) for the background, reports, documents and all sorts of other information. Don't want to do it yourself? There are usually a lot of bloggers and citizen journalists out there who will point you toward sources.

News people report the most promising parts of citizen input currently are new ideas, sources, comments and to some extent pictures and video.

First, note whose perception they are relying on: Journalists. That's an interestingly self-referential filter. Second, that's to be expected, of course. At the present time journalists are much more tightly connected with the tools to gather news. (Try calling up the governor's office as a private citizen and asking for comment on the latest state budget crisis.) However this is changing as more sources of information become available.

But citizens posting news content has proved less valuable, with too little that is new or verifiable.

If it's new and verifiable it's scooped up by the conventional media as soon as it hits the web. Which is as it should be. This phenomenon is starting nationally and working its way down. Its worthwhile to look at the list of major national news stories which are broken each year by bloggers and other citizen journalists. In the area where bloggers and citizen journalists are most highly concentrated -- science and technology -- the percentage of stories that start with citizen journalists approaches 100 percent in some cases. Even political stories are increasingly broken by people like Matt Drudge and of course the work of bloggers like Michael Yon in Iraq pretty nearly defined the war at a time when the conventional media were getting it spectacularly wrong.

But a study of citizen media contained in this report finds most of these sites do not let outsiders do more than comment on the site’s own material, the same as most traditional news sites.

In other words, we're not all Wikipedia. But the missed point here is that if you don't like what that particular citizen medium has to say, it's easy to set up your own. "Freedom of the Press belongs to he who owns one", a media critic famously observed in the last century. However today that's everybody.

In other words there's an important corrective here that's lacking in conventional media because there are so many alternate voices. Less generally, but more tellingly, the claim that the response opportunities are "the same as most traditional news sites" is either mind-numbingly self-serving or breathtakingly ignorant.

The fact is that virtually every new media site, and certainly the important ones, offers far, far more opportunity for comment without the kind of editorial filtering one encounters in the letters to the editor column of a newspaper. (As the one-time managing editor of a small daily I can say this with some authority.)

Few allow the posting of news, information, community events or even letters to the editors. And blog sites are even more restricted.

This is by-and-large not true. As scanning through the comments sections following articles on sites like Slashdot, TechCrunch, etc. will easily demonstrate. And if you're still not satisfied with your ability to post, start your own blog.

This is so wrong, I suspect strongly the authors' problem is ignorance rather than being disingenuous. They simply don't know, and can't understand, how the new media work. The next comment supports that notion.

In short, rather than rejecting the “gatekeeper” role of traditional journalism, for now citizen journalists and bloggers appear for now to be recreating it in other places.

Ah yes, the "gatekeeper" argument. The problem with this argument is that it's specious because it equates a single blog or news site with the local newspaper. The key difference is that the newspaper, plus perhaps a couple of television stations (although the local news gerbils do a horrendous job when it comes to original reporting) are the only source of news in the community. The blog or news site is one of dozens, perhaps hundreds commenting on major topics.

More broadly the argument is misconceived for the simple reason that you will always have, and need, gatekeepers for any given source. Over the years journalism has been lambasted for its role as a gatekeeper, not because gatekeepers are inherently bad, but because one or two organizations had a monopoly on gatekeeping. The monopoly was the problem, not gatekeeping per se.

Finally we come to the quote that sums up what the report's authors want to believe.

more and more it appears that the biggest problem facing traditional media has less to do with where people get information than how to pay for it — the emerging reality that advertising isn’t migrating online with the consumer. The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising.

Which comes perilously close to saying that conventional media will continue to be the main source of information and this whole new media thing is overblown.

New media is indeed overblown in some (ever narrowing) circles, but conventional media will most assuredly not continue to be the public's main source of information -- at least not in the traditional sense. Looking back over the last decade there's been a sea change in journalism and the change is only beginning.

The "crisis in journalism" -- traditional journalism, anyway, -- is indeed in large part that newspapers, television and other old-style media are losing advertising revenue. One area where that's particularly true is the most lucrative section of any newspaper, the classified ads. This was already starting to be a problem 30 years ago with the growth of free shoppers. The web has greatly speeded up the process. So advertising is migrating to the web. It's just not supporting conventional journalism as it does so.

The Tech Liberation site has an overview of the report here. The report itself, all 180,000 words, can be found here:

Google, ontology and magic phrases

2008-03-19T14:22:00.000-07:00

Search engines are vital to the web. Search engines also suck. I was just forcibly reminded of those facts as I struggled to find a source through Google.

For my purposes Google is the best of a bad lot. It indexes a huge number of sites, adds material fairly quickly and tries to stay up to date. But the search mechanism is fundamentally broken, because they're all fundamentally broken.

The immediate problem is trying to figure out what to search for. The larger problem is search taxonomy -- how to organize the information so the user can quickly find what he or she is looking for. The method used today is a string search. That essentially means guessing the magic phrase that refers to whatever you're looking for.

This is not only annoying as hell, it is a supremely complicated problem because not everyone uses the same words or phrases for a thing when they search for it.

I got considerable exposure to this a couple of years ago when I was acting as "Chief Staff Ontologist" (hey, I got to pick my own title) for an online yellow pages company. We wanted a way to classify the hundreds of thousands of listings in our database so customers could find the business they were looking for.

Developing a working, and workable, taxonomy just for businesses is a dauntingly complex task. Part of the problem is regionalisms. The same business is called different things in different parts of the country. You can have an "undertaker", a "funeral home", a "funeral parlor", a "mortuary", and several other terms, depending on where you are. And in some areas those terms have specific, differentiable, meanings. For example in some places in the east, mostly in large urban areas, a "funeral parlor" is a place to hold funerals. It doesn't provide embalming or other related services.

Essentially when you develop the taxonomy you have to try to read your searcher's mind, just as a searcher using a search engine has to read the mind of the people who put up the web site.

And since the searches are basically string-based, you've got no way to intelligently cross-reference topics. In fact in a search engine there usually aren't any topics.

I just spent a couple of days trying to find an appropriate "IT compliance consultant" in California for a story I am working on. It turned out the magic phrase was "security consultant" with a sub-specialty in compliance issues. Arrgh!

If you get the impression from this that I have a better solution, I hate to disabuse you but I do not. The answer undoubtedly involves what is called the semantic web -- being able to search by meaning rather than a string of characters. However the semantic web is mostly a pious wish that's struggling to achieve buzzword status.

As far as I know, no one can do a useful, generalized semantic search. The only way I know to do it is to have humans cross reference terms. A whole lot of humans doing a whole lot of cross references.

I suspect we're eventually going to get more useful search through a massive wiki-like project where people enter terms and, after flailing around and finding the magic phrase, provide a cross reference between terms. That's not an elegant solution, but given the power of the web -- and the need -- it's one that can work.

SEO SILLINESS

2007-12-29T00:06:00.000-08:00

One of the things you can count on in the hyper-charged world of the new media is that people will take a good -- or at least innocuous -- idea and utterly beat it to death.

That's pretty much what has happened with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Now understand, I have nothing against SEO per se. What I object to is the blind attempt to substitute tricks for serious content. The belief that if you're just clever enough in messing with Google, or Yahoo, or whatever, you will be successful whether or not you've got anything to say that people want to hear.

The business of getting a high placement in Google has become a growth industry on the web. There are dozens of consultants, books, articles and even videos out there purporting to show you how to move up in the rankings so you appear earlier when someone searches a particular word or phrase.

Some of the methods SEO companies employ are ethically -- interesting, to say the very least. For example some of them have noticed that getting mentioned in blogs increases your page ranking, so they began offering pay per mention deals where they'd pay bloggers to mention their clients in their blogs. A couple of months ago Google changed its algorithm, as it does when these kinds of schemes get too obnoxious, and started removing the page ranks of the paid-off bloggers. Needless to say there was much fluttering in the dovecotes of the companies promoting these schemes.

So what, you may ask, is wrong with that? After all higher rankings mean more business. So why not try to get the highest ranking you possibly can?

There are two things wrong with this. I find this particular scheme personally offensive because it violates old-school journalistic ethics which say you should clearly and unequivocally separate advertising from content.

Perhaps that's just me and a few old newspaper dinosaurs. But the second problem is both more general and much worse.

What's wrong with it is that essentially SEO of any sort is an attempt to game the system. It tries to use the characteristics of Google's search algorithms to increase ranking instead of concentrating on what those rankings are supposed to reflect.

And that, simply put, is content. Ultimately content is what draws viewers. Relevant content presented in an interesting way will bring in people and what's more it will provide you with the strongest possible kind of advertising -- word of mouth.

If these optimized sites were offering real value it wouldn't much matter how Google did its math. They'd still come out well. And in fact the sites that combine SEO with real, useful content do pretty well consistently. They may use SEO to help sell the sizzle, but there's steak there too.

Selling the sizzle not the steak is fine. But it presupposes that there is in fact a steak under all the sizzle. SEO quickly becomes a matter of being all sizzle and no steak. It is the equivalent of a sideshow barker making outrageous claims to lure people into the tent, where the "eighth wonder of the world" turns out to be a completely disappointing experience. And that, far too often, is what you get from highly 'optimized' sites.

This isn't new, of course. Advertising has had this problem in cycles for years. Advertisers have squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on ads that got noticed but ultimately didn't sell the product. Since I minored in advertising in college I've seen the cycle repeat in television and print probably three or four times.

The problem is exacerbated in web advertising because the main measurement of success is page views. Advertisers want page views and click through and that's what web sites try to deliver, no matter how.

Of course the problem with this approach is that neither page views nor click throughs make a dime for the advertiser. It takes sales to do that and these measures do not necessarily translate into sales. In fact if the reader finds that high-ranking page doesn't reflect his or her actual interest, you can pretty much guarantee it won't result in a sale. Such pages, no matter how expertly optimized for ranking, are wasted money for advertisers and ultimately the people who put them up.

One of the reasons SEO has grown to the bloated proportions it has is that search engine rank represents an easy, cheap metric. Ten years ago when no one in the web business had any money, you could justify taking the easy way out and using search rank as the way to decide where to put the pittance you had to spend on advertising.

Of course that's no longer true and the entire web advertising industry is realizing they need better metrics.

What is going to happen, and indeed it is already beginning to happen, is that advertisers are going to get wise to what actually sells products online. When that happens SEO will diminish to its proper proportions.

ON THE INTERNET NO ONE KNOWS YOU'RE A DOG -- OR A CANDIDATE FOR THE JERRY SPRINGER SHOW

2007-12-14T22:30:00.000-08:00

(BUFFALO, N.Y. —) A 48-year-old man entangled in an Internet love triangle built largely on lies was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in prison for killing his rival for the affection of a woman he had never met.

Thomas Montgomery, who posed as an 18-year-old Marine in online chats, pleaded guilty in August to gunning down Brian Barrett, 22, in a parking lot at the suburban Buffalo factory where they worked.

The motive was jealousy, investigators said. Both were involved online with a middle-aged West Virginia mother — who herself was posing as an 18-year-old student.

FALSE POSITIVES

2007-11-27T18:50:00.000-08:00

Google as part of the job process?

Lately I've seen a couple of posts, including this one on John Hawks' Anthropology Weblog, about using Google as part of the employment screening process.

Makes sense, right? If you're looking to hire John Smith you want all the information you can get, and Google is a rich source of information on just about anything, including John Smith.

Fine, only which John Smith are you looking at?

In fact trying to use Google to get serious information on someone is usually a really, truly, really bad idea. Without a lot of extra effort and additional identifying information you can't be sure who you've got.

Now "Rick Cook" isn't a terribly common name, but a Google search reveals that I've done a lot of stuff I was totally unaware of.

My favorite is making custom furniture in a little shop in Port Orford, WA.

The close runner-up is my time as a spokesman for a Florida national forest where I'm worried about escaped pet pythons growing to enormous size and eating all the wildlife -- not to mention the tourists.

I also like my time as an engineering manager on the Mars Rover project at JPL.

And I'm doing my bit for the environment as one of the leading "green" architects in America.

Did I mention I am head of security for a casino near New Orleans? Or that I'm the ex-mayor of a small town in California.

And speaking of California I'm also a fairly successful basketball coach in the Los Angeles area.

Oh yeah, I died in a helicopter crash in Scotland several years ago.

Now no one who knows much about me as a computer journalist and sometime writer of science fiction and fantasy novels full of bad computer jokes is likely to confuse any of those people with me. But there are some Rick Cooks out there who can be confused with me -- to the detriment of us both.

For example, I'm a partner in a major high-tech public relations firm. And I'm an expert on the OS/2 operating system. And I'm a regular poster on several newsgroups related to computer technology. And I'm active in the gaming universe.

Those are harder to disambiguate.

In fact unless you have a really good method of singling out your "Rick Cook" from all the other "Rick Cooks" out there it's just about impossible to know who's done what. This is especially true in areas like arrests that don't involve information that would be on a job application.

Even geographical proximity won't do it. There are at least three Rick Cooks in my urban area. The one who I really don't want to be mistaken for is the one who's a prison guard.

Googling your own or someone else's name may be a fun party game, but as a method of gathering information for serious purposes like employment it represents an abuse of the new media.

STRIKE IN THE DINOSAUR SWAMP

2007-11-18T04:31:00.000-08:00

As I write this the screenwriters’ strike is edging toward its second week and no end in sight.

In one sense that’s beneath the notice of this blog. After all, we’re concerned with the new media and society, not with who’s going to get what percentage of which products. In another sense, it represents yet another example of the inability of big media companies to adapt to a radically changing landscape.

My prediction is that sooner or later the strike will be settled more-or-less on the writers’ terms. And it ultimately won’t make a damn bit of difference.

If you’re not sure what all the fuss is about, WebPro has a good video summary

Of course WebPro’s story is mostly from the standpoint of the writers. The media companies aren’t saying anything, which is probably the best thing they can do. First, they’re going to be cast as the bad-guys in this by hordes of drivel-starved television fans no matter what they say.

Second, they’ve been talking out of both sides of their mouth about the revenue potential of the internet, telling their investors that there are huge profits in internet entertainment while telling the writers no one is making money off it.

I’m willing to believe no one is making money off internet television, but that’s irrelevant. The writers are asking for royalties, not an up-front payment and sooner rather than later the entertainment companies are going to be making money off the internet. And more and more of it as time goes on.

Strategically the studios’ position smacks of the kind of especially myopic lawyers and accountants who infest big corporations. This wasn’t planned by strategic visionaries at the studios for darned sure. (Assuming that the phrase “strategic visionaries at the studios” isn’t a completely oxymoron.)

What is going on here is essentially another performance of the Dinosaur Follies. The media company dinosaurs are so busy trying to jostle the writers away from the tasty new growth in the swamp that they’re ignoring the much larger issues screaming down on them out of the sky.

The real problem the entertainment companies face is the same as the one faced by their music industry subsidiaries. Their business model is less and less effective in the world of the new media. You can see this in declining television viewership, stagnant numbers of moviegoers and the faint scent of desperation beginning to waft out of Hollywood and New York.

The decline in television watching has received a lot of attention, but the state of the movies has received much less attention, especially since numbers were up slightly in 2006 after declining in 2005.

In fact the 2006 movie attendance report from the Motion Picture Industry Association of America shows an industry in trouble and heading for crisis. This isn’t just the fact that movie admissions are still off from the 2002 levels. (This is the important number since it represents tickets sold and it dropped from 1.4 billion in 2002 to 1.33 billion in 2006.) It’s the pattern.

What that pattern shows is an industry increasingly relying on its best customers (frequent moviegoers) because it is having trouble attracting customers in general. The numbers also reinforce what everyone has known for the last 20 years. You’ve got to have a blockbuster to succeed.

Rising costs and stagnant ticket sales have pretty much killed the moderately successful movie, just as they have eliminated the moderately successful television series. Increasingly the only way to survive in either industry is to hit a home run with nearly every at bat. (In the case of television it’s generally accepted that if a show doesn’t last for three seasons – the magic number for syndication – it’s not going to make money.)

This need for home runs is a classic sign of an imploding industry being squeezed between rising costs and stagnant demands. Eventually most such industries are either squeezed out of existence or reduced to tiny niches.

The semi-morons running the entertainment industry may not be able to read the writing on the wall, but they can read a balance sheet. One of the reasons for their intransigence in the current strike is that they’re desperate for more revenue – and they’re stupid enough to think they can get it by squeezing the people who make money for them.

Nor is this the most ridiculous notion the entertainment industry has come up with. the MPAA is pushing for bizarre schemes like licensing home theaters (basically any house with a couch and a 29-inch television screen) for $50 a year.

"Just because you buy a DVD to watch at home doesn't give you the right to invite friends over to watch it too,” an MPAA spokesman explained in defending this piece of lunacy. “That's a violation of copyright and denies us the revenue that would be generated from DVD sales to your friends."

Not even a Congress bribed with millions in campaign contributions ($217 million since 1990) would buy that one, but it’s a measure of the studios’ desperation that they’d even propose such nonsense.

However in pushing into the world of the new media, the studios face a more fundamental problem. They don’t understand the differences between internet based media and movies and television. For the most part they’re still thinking in terms of episodic television and movies and ignoring the kind of interactivity and community that comes from with the media they’re trying to invade.

Ironically part of the problem is that the price of poker is going down. It’s getting cheaper and cheaper to produce videos of decent, or at least interesting, quality. What’s more the tools are getting simpler and more powerful, which makes it easier to “break into the movies” online.

To get a tiny hint of where the technology is taking us, take a look at Beowulf, which is hitting theaters this week. With its incredible graphics and blends of animation and actors, Beowulf is anything but a cheap home-made production. However inside a decade those kinds of effects will be readily available to anyone who wants them, just as the breathtaking effects in the original Star Wars trilogy can be reproduced pretty much at will by amateur video makers today.

The critical point in this for the future of the movie industry is that what you can do in a computer you don’t need to do on a sound stage, complete with the large number of experts and associated expenses. Need to fix the lighting? That’s a couple of mouse clicks on the computer, not a crew of highly paid electricians fiddling with the lights for a couple of hours.

Of course there are other features that will play an even bigger part in these new online entertainments. One of the most important is interactivity and the resulting community. Increasingly entertainment is going to be about communities interacting in created worlds. The model is going to more closely mimic World of Warcraft than Beowulf.

This is utterly alien to the ‘sit back and take what we push at you’ model of traditional studio products. That mismatch alone is going to make it hard for the studios. And there are a lot of other problems I’m not going to try to go into just now.

So how will the writers come out of these fundamental changes? Probably better than the studios but not as well as they will out of the strike. Writers are a notoriously adaptable bunch, and most of us are able to turn our hands to a lot of different kinds of writing. While screenwriting is about the most highly specialized form of fiction writing out there, and screenwriters are in their own way prisoners of the system they’ve enjoyed over the decades, the flexible ones will do all right.

FIGHTING SPLOGGERS, TECHCRUNCH, AND PROTECTING YOUR POSTS

2007-11-11T10:09:00.000-08:00

While think of wholesale copying in terms of file sharing and novels posted without permission, there are a lot of other ways copyrighted material is misused on the web.

Over at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld notes that his posts are being ripped off wholesale by sploggers.

Splogs, in case your cave doesn’t have broadband, are spam blogs. They are the parasites of the blogosphere and they leech off legitimate blogs and bloggers to drive traffic to their sites and make money off the efforts of real bloggers. The ‘content’ of such blogs is either noise or stolen.

What Erick is complaining about is stolen content. Sploggers are stealing TechCrunch’s content wholesale and posting it without attribution on their splogs, surrounded by ads. This generates ad revenue for the splogger with virtually no work.

This is not a trivial problem for some blogs. In Erick’s case a single post was reposted in whole or in part nearly six hundred times. In itself that’s not surprising since TechCrunch is a popular source of technology news and comment. Most of these sites merely quoted extensively from TechCrunch articles and a few reprinted the articles in their entirety with attribution and links back to Michael’s site.

However there were a lot of sploggers who used the material as splog fodder. As Erick notes: “And of those, 115—or 25 percent of the original—were plastered with ads, making money off our work without so much as a link.”

It wasn’t just individual posts. Some of the sploggers were stealing TechCrunch posts repeatedly and presenting them without attribution to generate page views and ad revenue.

Judging by the responses, TechCrunch isn’t alone in the problem. Several other bloggers chimed in on the forum to report they have had material stolen by sploggers as well. And indeed anyone who does much web surfing will find these sploggers all over the place. I ran into one last week following up on a mention of one of my articles.

Equally predictably there was a small band of the morally tone deaf who roundly criticized Erick for complaining about being splogged while TechCrunch opposes the RIAA and others who are trying to crack down on free distribution of copyrighted material such as music. Attempts to make the critical distinctions were roundly ignored by the “intellectually lazy” (in another poster's phrase) who just wanted to run up their snark scores.

What follows started as a response to Erick's original post and has been suitably edited, emended, and (perhaps not so suitably) expanded for this post. I’ll start with the practicalities for someone who’s being splogged in this fashion and then we’ll get back to the distinction between this and file sharing.

Note also that none of this deals with bloggers who quote extensively from other blogs with proper attribution and linkbacks. We’re talking about scammers who are making money by stealing other people’s work and using it to generate ad revenue.

The practicalities
I do have a few practical (?) suggestions for anyone whose content is being stolen wholesale.

The first is to watermark your copy. Not your pages, your copy. Embed the watermark in the text file, not as a separate background layer. That way any robot who scoops it up will also get the "TechCrunch" (or whatever) all over it.
The second suggestion – which should really be the first – is to personalize your posts. That is, make the material truly yours by things like repeated mentions of your site in your posts, multiple links to related articles on your site, adopting a more personalized slant in your posts, etc.

Sploggers aside, this is a good idea anyway because it helps to distinguish your ‘product’ from all the other blogs out there. Vanilla prose, like vanilla layouts, are much less effective at attracting and keeping readers that something that is truly yours. This is true even in technical blogs.

Blogging is a form of communication that works best when your readers have a sense of who you are. That’s true of web interaction in general. Among other things, it helps to build a sense of community if your readers feel they know you. And community is one of the most important generators of repeat views, word of mouth and all the other happy little marks of blogosphere merit.

These suggestions go to the problem of attribution. The sploggers aren't going to go to the trouble of teasing this stuff out of your posts, especially the rewritten copy. That's too much like work after all. On the other hand, the misguided bloggers who think of themselves as legitimate are likely to make the effort. Which provides a useful distinguishing characteristic. Perhaps the misguided ones are susceptible to a gentle note about blogger etiquette.

There are also a couple of legal-type things you can do without turning into a junior-jackboot version of the RIAA or spending a ton of money.

The first, and most important, is to copyright your blog. Make sure every post is copyrighted and include a statement of terms of use in the TechCrunch site. This can be as copy-friendly as you want to make it, but specifically deny things like posting without attribution and requiring things like linking. Also include a phrase about the posts being free for non-commercial use. This puts you on a firm footing legally.
Next, and almost as important, is complain long and loud to Google about all the AdSense ads the sploggers are using to make money off the stolen material. Under the AdSense agreement, Google has broad authority to terminate the agreement – and the ad revenue if it feels the blogger is misbehaving. With luck Google will pull the splogger’s AdSense agreements. Even if Google does nothing on your specific complaints, if enough bloggers complain about the misuse of their posts, Google will be forced to deal with the problem.

Like any scheme of theft for profit, the sploggers’ greatest vulnerability is the money and the trail it leaves behind. Going after the sploggers advertising agreements is the most direct form of attack and it hits them where they live.

If you decide to go this route it’s important to establish that there is a pattern of misuse. Google or other ad services aren’t going to care about a single stolen post. However if you can demonstrate that the splogger has repeatedly stolen large chunks of your work and used it without attribution, Google or whoever is going to be a lot more receptive. For one thing they understand quite well that there’s the potential for a lawsuit against them based on a pattern of supporting bad or illegal practices.

And finally, there's that ol’ debbil the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. File DMCA takedown notices against the egregious offenders with their ISPs or blog services and force them to remove the offending articles. The DMCA makes this extremely easy to do. All it takes is a letter containing the appropriate language and the site or its ISP is virtually forced to comply. You can automate the process and keep doing it every time one of these guys reposts another of your articles. The sploggers will find easier prey soon enough.

Which leaves us with the purported hypocrisy of being angry at sploggers while supporting, or at least tolerating, file sharing and such. I've preached from the very beginning in Heresy Pornography and Treason that while free copying of material is an inevitable part of our brave new online world, theft for profit is not.

For the morally tone deaf among you: I'm saying it's unstoppable, not that it is all right. As an author I've had stuff ripped off and posted on the web (in Russian, no less!) without payment or permission. I may not like it, but I recognize I can't stop it and I'm not losing any sleep over it. Okay?

But that's not what's going on here. Unlike people randomly reposting TechCrunch articles with or without attribution, people who steal content to sell it, whether directly or by loading their stolen content with AdSense ads, are in a different class, both practically and, at least in my mind, morally. Sploggers can be stopped because there's a money trail.

But what, some of you ask, about the torrent sites that are loaded with ads? Why aren’t we upset about them? First, I don’t know anyone who has any particular soft spot for the ad-supported sites. A lot of people will reflexively defend them when they come under attack by the RIAA or other copyright Nazis, but you’ll notice that shutting down even a popular site doesn’t arouse one-tenth the rage that the RIAA going after welfare mothers and teenage girls does.

Yet like the sploggers these sites are terribly vulnerable. Why doesn’t the industry mount a concerted campaign to shut them down instead of more-or-less randomly going after the most popular file sharing sites? After all, the sites are vulnerable because unless they're doing business through the late, unlamented, Russian Business Network they can be tracked and shut down.

Why aren't they being shut down en masse? Because the RIAA and their ilk have chosen instead to conduct a campaign of legal terrorism aimed at intimidating the average downloader in the hope of scaring them out of the practice. In other words they're crazy as a gang of bedbugs and not behaving rationally.

And copiers for profit should be stopped. Copying and reposting without economic gain is, perhaps, homage. Reposting for profit is theft and should not be tolerated.

HOW SOON WE FORGET

2007-10-27T00:17:00.000-07:00

There is an oft-stated assumption that print media, especially books, are more accurate than what appears on the web. In fact you'll often hear it said that any information from the web is automatically suspect.

There's a sense in which that's true. But what the people making those statements forget is that information that appears in books is -- or should be -- suspect as well.

When I was a newspaperman (to resurrect an obsolete term) I was frequently amazed, and usually, appalled at how uncritically people accepted something as true simply because it had been committed to print.

Ah, but that's newspapers, the critics protest. Books are inherently much more accurate because they are written by experts and pass through an editing process.

To paraphrase Mr. Bumble: If the critic believes that, then the critic, sir, is an ass.

I've written books as well and I've seen first-hand how that 'editing process' works. Mostly it doesn't.

There is also the incontrovertible fact that there are a mountain of horribly inaccurate books out there. Some are wrong for political reasons, some are wrong because the information is outdated and some are wrong because they are simply, flat wrong and the writer's didn't know what they were talking about.

Case in point: I was just boxing up some of my library to give to Goodwill when I ran across a shining example I had picked up a few years ago in a fit of optimism. The title was "A Manual of Foreign Dialects For Radio, Stage And Screen", copyright 1943. Since I write fiction I'm always interested in improving my dialogue. And I figured this could help.

Boy, was I wrong!

It is painfully obvious the authors, a husband-and-wife team of dialect coaches, had tin ears and were massively ignorant to boot. While there's some good information in the prefatory parts of the book and they manage, after a fashion, some of the more common (in 1943) dialects, their advice on how to speak with, say, a Japanese accent is utterly ludicrous.

The example isn't chosen at random. I have visited Japan in much more than the usual tourist role, learned to speak Japanese at a kindergarten level and studied Japanese culture in something more than a haphazard fashion for a number of years. I am by no means an expert, but I have listened to a lot of Japanese and tried to reproduce faithfully what I heard.

The authors have no idea what a Japanese accent sounds like and their attempts to guide actors to reproduce it is absurd. Their 'explanations' are even more ridiculous. For example they claim kana (a phonetic syllabary used to write Japanese words) is a separate language.

They claim the Japanese don't like to pronounce two consonants together. It's not a matter of like. The Japanese syllabaries have only one naked consonant, "n". All the other "letters" are consonant-vowel combinations, or worse. Japanese are conditioned to add vowels after consonants, both in loan words (like basubaru -- baseball) and in speaking other languages like English.

Similarly they repeat the sterotype of Japanese hissing when they start to speak. In all the time I have dealt with Japanese, listened to Japanese, watched Japanese movies and television shows to help learn the language, etc., etc., etc. I have never, ever heard a Japanese hiss in this fashion.

Since I also spent some time in Ireland, I checked the section on Irish dialect as well. It is better, but much of it is not-very-good examples a form called "stage Irish" which the Irish abhor. Stage Irish is a phony Irish dialect that actors, mostly English and American, cooked up to 'sound Irish.' It is not at all the way the Irish speak naturally. (Hint: If you hear someone say "faith and begorra", whack him over the head with your shillelagh.)

In short, the book is a wildly inaccurate farrago of nonsense. Yet it was put into print and issued by a reputable publisher. And unlike a similar production on the web -- were one unwise enough to attempt it -- it can't be corrected by counter-postings from the more knowledgeable people. Instead it sits there like some strange insect preserved for the ages in amber.

The real point is that you can't automatically trust anything because it appears on the web or in print. Critical thinking is a vitally important skill and has been practically since the invention of literacy. The difference is that the web not only further highlights the need, it makes it much easier to cross check the information

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY STUPID

2007-10-25T13:07:00.000-07:00

Personally I think "intellectual property" is surrounded by its very own stupid field.

It seems like every time the subject of copyrights, patents, or trademarks emerges, someone, usually a big corporation, gets enmeshed in the stupidity field and does something really, really dumb.

But now comes the defense industry with what has to be the all time low in stupefying copyright/trademark incompetence. The really bad thing is it isn't something new. It's been going on for years.

Big defense contractors are demanding -- and getting -- licensing fees from model airplane companies for making models of military aircraft!

This is so breathlessly dumb on so many levels words (very nearly) fail me.

Legal idiocy aside, this is a classic case of giving yourself a pedicure with a tommy gun, both practically and from a PR standpoint.

Now let's see... Who designs these aircraft and other vehicles for our oligarchy of bloated, inefficient defense contractors? Why engineers, of course. And where do we get engineers? From engineering schools. And who enrolls in those engineering schools? Why young men and women who have a desire to design and build things? And where did they get this desire? From building things in their youth, like, oh, I dunno, Model Freaking Airplanes!

Wanna bet that the French, the Chinese and the Indians aren't doing everything they can to aim their kids toward engineering by encouraging them to do things like build model airplanes. And what are our defense contractors doing? Right. They're demanding money so people can produce model kits that kids can build.

But of course that doesn't matter. In a few years we'll outsource all that design work to places like India and China anyway, and we'll buy more of our aircraft from the French. So who cares whether our kids get interested in the grubby details of engineering? Meanwhile, full speed ahead and soak those little so-and-sos for all we can get. Teach them what American capitalism is really about, by God!
Engineers? We don't need no steenking engineers. We got lawyers!

Nor are the amounts of money insignificant be it noted. The licensing fee amounts to up to 8 percent of the cost of an $8 plastic model. You have to be familiar with the hobby business to realize how big a bite that represents out of everyone's razor-thin margins.

The second little detail is this business is a PR disaster in the making for an industry that needs all the good, or at least neutral, PR it can get. At a time when the cost of our high tech toys has doubled from the confident estimates of contractors and the DOD a few years ago (The F-35 has gone from $30 million to $60 million, or more) the last thing the contractors need is to be seen as a bunch of penny-pinching money-grubbing SOBs.

Siphoning money out of children's pockets does wonders for that image.

While the amount of money might be a big concern for the model airplane companies, most of whom are tiny by defense standards, it isn't even pocket change for LockMart and the other hybrids that charge us stupidly large amounts of money for their products. In fact the few thousand dollars a year they collect on each of these deals probably doesn't even cover the costs of the legal thuggery involved.

And people are starting to catch on. There's a bill in Congress to end this nonsense and I'd love to see the defense bozos trying to defend their stand. Should be more fun than watching cigarette execs swear under oath that nicotine is not addicting.

Ironically the defense leeches are getting support from their minions (in the original sense of the term) in the Defense Department. As another story on this massive case of institutional dumbth notes:

The Pentagon, however, “strongly opposes” Andrews’ provision, devoting an entire page to the issue in its latest authorization appeals package. Such appeals are typically reserved for last-ditch efforts to save big DOD programs from funding cuts.

DOD “can envision no valid reason why a trademark owner should ever be compelled to allow another entity to use that intellectual property, even for reasonable license fees,” the appeal says.

Obviously someone at the Pentagon needs to get his or her eyeglasses cleaned -- or to get a new guide dog.

Or alternatively they can just spend a minute looking at how much it costs the Air Force to recruit someone to work on the real thing. If the clowns in the Defense Department had a lick of sense -- and could manage to get their noses out of the defense contractors' back pockets -- they'd not only prohibit licensing fees, they'd subsidize the model companies for helping them get recruits.

However this particular piece of military yahooism serves as an adequate introduction to the legalities of this tissue of nonsense.

First, of course, those military designs were developed with taxpayer money -- potloads of it. The designations, such as F-22 Raptor, were assigned by the government. Where do these vultures in pinstripes get off demanding money so kids can built toy replicas of American military designs?

I doubt seriously the basic shapes and external details of any aircraft, military or commercial, even be copyrighted, under the functionality provisions of the copyright law. Granted these guys are claiming trademark, not copyright, but I think that's even shakier for much the same reasons. But who's got the money to fight an arcane trademark case in court against the contractors and their law firm of Rich, Greedy & Powerful? They're sucking in so much money from the public trough they can bury just about anyone.

And even if by some miracle the outline of something like the F-22 can be copyrighted, or trademarked, what moron decided that the design should be owned by the company that built the thing with government money?

But enough. This is an utterly silly, massively stupid and finally pointless exercise. It simply demonstrates once more -- if there is some cave-dwelling Kallikak out there who still needs a demonstration -- how completely our intellectual property laws are broken.

(Whew) Thank you. I feel much better now.

COMMENT WOULD BE SUPERFLOUS

2007-10-24T23:17:00.001-07:00

"There are some things it is impossible to parody. Today's parody is tomorrow's design document"
The collected sayings of Wiz Zumwalt

In his blog, Jeff Gomez is loudly proclaiming that print is dead. He adduces some interesting if not necessarily completely convincing arguments. For further enlightenment, Jeff suggests consulting the full form of his argument -- in a printed book called "Print is Dead."

Meanwhile, one of my favorite editors, Esther Schlinder describes her attempts to get press credentials to the Blog World conference and expo, which is devoted to blogging, Web 2.0 and other harbingers of the future. Before handing out credentials, the staff wants to see articles she has written on the subject. And it wants them faxed! Neat trick since almost all of the writing on the subject, Esther's included, appears online with no paper copies whatsoever.

And finally, the Storage Networking Industry Association, SNIA, has prepared a very good tutorial on its troubled SMI-S storage management standard. The tutorial -- all 116 pages of it in tiny little type -- is available as a pdf on SNIA's website. With printing blocked so you can't print out a copy to actually read.

Copyright redux

2007-10-21T10:55:00.000-07:00

I really didn't intend for this to be a blog about copyrights, but it seems like every day brings new news highlighting the intellectual poverty of the old media in this area.

From Radiohead's new album to the latest RIAA silliness, to some other stuff, there's a lot of copyright news I intend to comment on.

It's not all about copyright. A fascinating essay of the wisdom of crowds and how it applies to everything from evolution to wikis (not my essay, but I intend to comment on it). More on community building, the crossovers between MMPORGs and network television, virtualizing reality versus really virtualized reality, and, of course, virtual trade shows.

As soon as things get sorted out, watch this space.

IRREGULAR SCHEDULE

2007-10-08T10:57:00.001-07:00

THE IPHONE, COOK'S LAW AND WRONG BUSINESS MODELS

2007-09-29T02:31:00.000-07:00

Over at TechCrunch Erick Schonfeld has a post on Apple's iPhone as an example of a company choosing the wrong business model.

In the world of high technology, plagiarism is called "using a proven business model." And it is. Every business has a model and nearly of them get at least most of their model from someone else. Which means nearly every company is building on pre-existing success. Or, sometimes failure.

Choosing an inappropriate business model can be anything from limiting to deadly, especially when a company introduces significant new technology. That means it's important to choose the right model.

Fortunately there's a simple rule to help decide when a business model is right. How closely does the model conform to Cook's Law?

Cook's Law, immodestly named after yours truly, is simply this:

Anything that doesn't add value to the person paying for it is not only dispensablle, it will be dispensed with

Someone, usually the consumer, pays for any good or service. Any feature or cost that does not add value for the consumer is surplus and will probably be eliminated.

Apple demonstrated Cook's Law brilliantly with the iPod and then violated it egregiously with the iPhone.

Pre iPod the music business consisted of selling albums at high prices. If customers wanted their own copy of the music, they either had to tape it off the radio, download a pirate MP3 or pay lot of money for a collection of songs, most of which they probably weren't interested in.

The price of albums is high because music travels through an unusually convoluted supply chain from the artist to the customer. The actual cost of production of a CD is typically only a few cents. But in addition to the artist, there are a host of others who must be paid, including the record company, the promoters, the wholesalers, the sales reps and the music stores.

Now, how much of that actually benefits the person buying the music? Well, the artist, obviously, and the cost of recording the music in purchasable form, but that's basically it. Everything else in that cost chain benefits someone other than the customer. Hence, under Cook's Law, everything else is dispensable - and going to be dispensed with as soon as someone finds a way.

The iPod represented a way. With an iPod customers could download only the songs they were interested in and pay less than a dollar each for them. Not surprisingly customers have swarmed to iPods, to the detriment of the traditional music supply chain. Suddenly a second-rank computer company found itself a giant in the music business.

Apple could have followed the conventional business model in the music industry, selling complete albums through kiosks in music stores for about the same price as CD albums. In fact there had been a couple of attempts to do just that with MP3s before the iPod. But that was the wrong way to do things and the companies sank without a trace.

So Apple comes out of the iPod looking like a genius, tries to repeat its success with the iPhone - and falls flat on its face.

As Schonfeld points out, Apple chose to model its iPhone on the cell phone business. Now cell phones have a lot in common with the traditional music industry. It is a complex business model with a lot of features that add no value whatsoever to the customer. In fact a lot of those 'features' benefit no one but the cell phone company.

Specifically what Apple chose to do was to lock in its US customers with ATT as the service provider. If you want to use an iPhone you not only have to purchase the device, you have to sign a service contract with ATT.

In fact the situation was worse with the iPhone than it was with conventional cell phones. I happen to use Cingular (ATT) for my phone service, but I was given the first phone on my account for free and only had to pay a nominal up-front cost for the other phones on my plan. The monthly fee per phone number is low enough that we switched our house phone over to my wife's cell phone. All in all, I'm not dissatisfied with the arrangement.

I say 'not too dissatisfied' because there are some things I don't like about cell phone service. You're locked into the provider and most additional services and features have to come from the provider. If there was open competition and the ability to change freely among providers, the price of service would be a lot less. Further, if I decide to change providers, I'm strongly discouraged from taking my phone with me

An iPhone has all these disadvantages and more. With an iPhone you have to pay several hundred dollars up front and you're locked in to one provider. This may be highly profitable for Apple and ATT, but it violates Cook's Law by providing nothing to the consumer. So it's hardly surprising that buyers started looking for ways around this lock-in.

Hackers being hackers, it wasn't long before a number of people had figured out how to unlock the iPhone and the hacks started appearing on the web.

Rather than recognize the mistake in its model, Apple is fighting back by making changes in the software which will deactivate cracked phones. That will work until the hackers produce the next round of cracks and the futile, expensive and ultimately pointless arms race is on.

This is a race that Apple can't win. More to the point it's a race that Apple shouldn't want to win. The only thing this accomplishes in the long term is to annoy its customers and to drive them to alternatives as the alternatives appear.

And they will appear, if the iPhone is the great idea Apple thinks it is. Heck, even the Newton, Apple's last attempt at a small-form computing device attracted competitors, and it was no great shakes in the market.

The cell phone industry took its business model from the landline phone industry, which traces its business model back to the days of the Bell monopoly. The cell phone industry is vulnerable as well and it is slowly changing.

What Apple has in the iPhone is a combination computer-phone. It would have done much better to model its iPhone business on the computer part of the combination. As Schonfeld points out:

"You don't ask Apple permission to download software off the Web for your Mac. And you would never agree to buy a laptop that only worked with only one broadband provider. Why should the iPhone be any different?"

Why indeed?

And the iPhone device that ultimately succeeds - whether from Apple or anyone else - won't be any different. It will be sold like a computer, with all the freedom and customization you get with a computer.

WHACK THE GOPHER IV: THE FINAL CHAPTER

2007-09-22T01:35:00.000-07:00

Except it isn't of course. The response I've gotten to these posts suggests we're going to be revisiting the issues as developments warrant. So let's just say it's the final chapter for now.

So, after parts I, II, and III of this series, the logical question is "what can we do about it?"

There is a lot we can do, but none of it is aimed at stopping people from posting copyrighted fiction on free sites. That ain't gonna happen, no matter how much the dinosaurs bellow in the swamps.

However that is a long, long way from saying copyrights are useless and authors can't expect to get paid for their work. Copyrights are not useless and authors can not only expect to get paid, most of the smart ones can expect to make more money in this brave new world than in the old.

The bad news is that genre fiction is going to be available for free on the internet. There is simply no way to stop it. SFWA can file all the DMCA takedown notices it wants. Individual authors can sue if they want. Crazed Luddite SFWA vice-presidents can rant about "netscabs" (on other people's pages because they're too technophobic to have one of their own). And none of it matters. People will continue to post copyrighted works for free. For every one you can shut down there will be two, or ten or 20 more.

The technology has simply moved beyond the kind of control publishers had a hundred years ago. Live with it.

(There is also going to be a sea change in the way genre fiction, especially science fiction and erotica, are going to be distributed in this country. This will probably mean the death of a lot of major publishers, and the transformation of the book store into something nearly unrecognizable. There are a lot of complex reasons for this and it really deserves a post of its own.)

The good news about all this is there is going to be a lot more genre fiction available to readers at a lot lower prices and as a class the authors are going to be a lot better compensated.

One way or another, most genre fiction is going to be sold over the internet. You'll either buy it directly on your own computer, or you'll get it in electronic or print form from something like a print on demand kiosk. You may even download and print books on your home system. That's not as big a job as you might think. To see what I mean DAGS "Blue Squirrel".

The Real Solution To Piracy

But while you can't stop free distribution you can stop is piracy for profit. Whether it's designer knock-offs, DVD movies or online fiction, if someone is paying for it, it's a lot easier to control.

"Stop" is a misnomer. You can't really stop piracy. But you can crack down on it hard enough to keep it down to an acceptable level.

The reason is that there's a money trail. If you can't locate the pirate through the work posted, you can locate them by following the money. That's why outfits like the RIAA have been a lot more successful at shutting down the commercial pirates than the file sharers.

The legitimate publisher has some advantages as well. One of the big ones is convenience. Why go to the trouble of searching out a pirate site, when you can go to someplace like Amazon and get everything you want in one place?

Today the incentive is money. Novels are expensive. When books are instantly available for, say, a dollar each, it becomes much less of incentive. In fact for most people it drops below the action threshold.

And yes, we can make novels available for a dollar or so each without significantly cutting into the author's royalties. In fact the late G. Harry Stine and I were in the process of forming just such an online publishing venture several years ago when Harry's untimely death ended the project. Our rather extensive calculations indicated that not only would the authors make as much money as they do now, but the profits to the publisher would be quite nice as well. Most of the cost of a book today is eaten up in an unwieldy system of production and distribution - but that's a subject for another post.

One of the reasons is that as cost goes down, sales go up. I firmly believe that low-cost books will sell enough to swamp the effects of pirate postings - which, as we saw in a previous post in this series, probably aren't resulting in that many lost sales anyway.

So, low price means high sales and less piracy. We've seen this happen before, specifically in the software industry. Back in the early 1980s Borland stood the software business on its head with Turbo Pascal, a full implementation of the Pascal programming language, complete with a nice little Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the amazing price of $35. That was perhaps a tenth of what competing versions of Pascal were selling for and Borland sold a ton of copies.

What was interesting about this was that unlike most of its high-priced rivals, Turbo Pascal wasn't copy protected. Borland made no attempt to stop anyone from copying the disks. Phillipe Kahn, Borland's saxophone-playing president, figured that by keeping the price so low - for the time anyway - he removed most of the incentive to steal Turbo Pascal.

It's worth noting that except for games, most software companies have followed Kahn's lead. Software copy protection as a field isn't dead, but it is generally moribund.

Okay, that's not the whole story. And the way it isn't the whole story is interesting in itself. Kahn did one other thing with Turbo Pascal: He provided a neatly printed manual, which was (misnomer alert) perfect bound (/misnomer alert) like a paperback book. That meant that if you opened it flat to copy it, the spine cracked and the pages fell out. What Kahn did (and having met the guy I'm sure he did it deliberately) was to provide a way to add value to a legitimate purchase that the pirates couldn't match.

Changes in the product

But what about fiction? It doesn't need a manual, after all.

No it doesn't, but that's the other part of the change we're facing. The nature of what authors sell is going to change as well. Increasingly, it won't be just a book or a story, it will be membership in a community.

Successful works of genre fiction tend to build communities naturally. You can see the proof walking the halls of any science fiction convention. Savvy authors are going to use new media tools to capitalize on this to build not just sales, but a loyal following and to provide other products as well.

To see a very early example of this, stop by Baen Publishing's web site and pay special attention to the "1632" universe in all its ramifications. 1632 was originally the brainchild of Eric Flint, who also manages the Baen Free Library. It is the story of a West Virginia coal mining town suddenly plunked down in Germany at the height of the 30 Years War. It is alternate history at its finest and most fun and the original novel has been followed up by a sprawling collection of novels and short story collections. It has also spawned a very active fan base, many of which hang out at the Baen web site, especially in the forum called "Baen's Bar."

The development is still nascent, but with a little imagination it's easy to see how something like the 1632 phenomenon could provide even more value to the readers - value that a lot them would be willing to pay for.

Changes in the authors

The other thing this encourages is a completely different approach to writing genre fiction. While there will undoubtedly be authors who will continue to do things the way we do them now, the ones who will be most successful will be the ones who embrace the notion of community-building around their fiction.

In a sense this is a throwback to the 19th Century when popular authors like Twain and Dickens made more of their money on lecture tours than they did from the sales of their books. However the effect will be enhanced, amplified and zoomed up by the use of everything from web sites and blogs to YouTube videos and MySpace pages.

The author becomes the focus of community and the only thing the free posters will do is build that community further.

The world will be different, the demands on the authors will be different, but in many ways, both socially and financially, it will be a much more rewarding world for those who are willing to adapt.

WHACK THE GOPHER III: The Return of the Mutant Grandson

2007-09-14T03:03:00.000-07:00

While the economics of posting copyrighted work for free on the internet should determine the effort to respond to it, that is not the thing that ultimately determines an effective response.

That is possibility. In other words, can you shut the posters down at any price, not just an economically justifiable one?

The short answer is no.

It doesn't matter whether the free posting of copyrighted work is legal - which it assuredly is not. It doesn't matter if it is moral - which it arguably is not. It doesn't even matter if it causes economic loss to the authors - which is apparently does not. What does matter is whether it can be stopped.

And it can't be. It's as simple as that. And this is point where SFWA vice-president Andrew Burt and his ilk are utterly, completely clueless.

(Burt, of course, is the one who guided the SFWA into filing a massive takedown request under the DMCA against a site in an effort to get them to remove copies of works by Robert Silverberg and Isaac Asimov. The thing turned into a farce when it become obvious that many of the works on the list were not by Silverberg or Asimov and at least one of them had been made freely available under the Creative Commons license.)

Given the structure of the internet there is simply no way to stop the free (in both senses) exchange of copyrighted works, be they music, games or the science fiction stories. There simply are far too many people posting them from far too many places all over the world.

This should be obvious, especially in the light of the Recording Industry of America Association's (RIAA) campaign and its results. RIAA has shut down dozens of web sites displaying pirated music, destroyed a couple of companies (notably Napster) which encouraged the practice and gotten judgments and big fines against dozens of people allegedly exchanging music. All of this, please note, at a cost of millions of dollars.

And the effect on the copying and exchange of recordings? Just about none whatsoever. For every site shut down, for every pirate sued, another, or two or ten spring up to take its place. After years of effort the RIAA is even further from its stated goal of stopping free exchange of copyrighted work than it was when it started. (The RIAA's claims to the contrary won't stand examination. They claim that they've slowed the growth of file sharing, not stopped it or reversed it. Even that claim is highly suspect considering how explosively file sharing grew in the years before the RIAA launched its terror campaign. For one things, explosive growth tends to slow naturally after a few years.)

Well, there has been one effect. In four years, the RIAA has gone from being a relatively unknown mouthpiece for record companies to one of the most hated outfits in America. This is due to a combination of idiotic arguments and fascist legal tactics which have turned even people who've never downloaded a song against the RIAA. Granted that's an accomplishment, but I don't think it's a positive either for the organization or the record companies it represents.

All this is so blatant that even the RIAA now admits the program can't stop piracy.

(The place where the RIAA has been most successful is shutting down paid services that encouraged the practice. That's significant for the real solution to the problem - and the subject for Part IV of this series.)

Half bright ideas

Now as I said before, Burt is misguided but he's not an idiot. He's also computer savvy enough to come up with his own approach to the problem. Burt proposed a half-bright scheme called Shades of Gray involving widely distributing damaged copies of works to swamp the (irony) 'legitimately pirated' (/irony) ones. His theory is that online readers won't be able to trust the copies they find online so they'll buy the books.

The scheme is half-bright because Burt apparently didn't consider what the people who wanted to post these works would do in response to this kind of sanctioned electronic vandalism. The first thing that will happen, of course, is that the pirate community will develop filters to detect the grayed copies. The response will be to develop more sophisticated graying methods - at considerable expense, and the pirates will respond with more sophisticated filters. The result is an arms race and to date such races have typically gone to the pirates.

Again the music and movie industry's example is instructive. They have poured huge amounts into developing copy protection schemes for DVDs and those are being broken almost as fast as they're put into use.

The failure of the DMCA

Even the DMCA, which started this particular thread of nonsense, is pretty much ineffective. As we saw with the SFWA idiocy, a DMCA notice will make a site take down a work, whether it is actually by the person who claims to have written it or not. But the DMCA can't prevent someone from re-posting the same work, especially if they do a little massaging first.

Let's take my story from Analog a few years back "And He Did Ride" about a rather bewildered young man who is sent onto a nasty planet on a rescue mission with an extremely unusual mount. Assume someone OCRs it and posts the file on a site. Then let's further assume that I, the author, in a fit of high dudgeon (and low madness) issue a DMCA demand that the story be removed. The site complies.

End of story? Not hardly.

A poster simply changes the title to "Through The Great Gruesome Swamp By Mechanical Frog", reformats it to fool the filters, says it's by "Fudrucker Q. Hudsucker" and posts it. Since these things are at best quickly scanned before they're posted, it's going to take a long time for someone who isn't in on the gag to find out. Meanwhile there are people out there on the internet spreading the word that Fudrucker Q. Hudsucker's latest opus is really that Rick Cook story about the giant mechanical frog.

Better filters, you say? What happens if I convert the story to a series of image files, one image per page, and give it a pretty, but non-distracting background? The result is much larger, but coming up with a filter to catch it is going to be damn near impossible.

And note the person doing the posting doesn't have to be a computer expert. The pattern for tools against copyright is that the experts write the software and distribute it. Ordinary, if dishonest, schmoes download it and use the easy GUI interface to process the stuff they want to post.

This is not, please note, theoretical. This kind of re-posting goes on every day on YouTube and a lot of other less-well-known sites. We saw an extreme example of this was model Daniela Cicarelli's attempt to block a YouTube video showing her and her boyfriend having sex on a beach in Cadiz Spain. A court ruled the couple's privacy had been violated and ordered YouTube to remove the video. YouTube responded that it had removed the video - repeatedly. People kept reposting it and the result was another round of whack the gopher. The Brazilian court then ordered the video blocked from appearing in Brazil and YouTube and communications companies responded by cutting off YouTube to most of Brazil because there was no other way to keep the video out. Finally some sanity prevailed and another judge overturned the ruling.

Now further note Ms. Cicarelli's net worth undoubtedly exceeds the net worth of SFWA. I don't know how much she and her banker boyfriend spent fighting this thing, but it was probably much more than SFWA could afford to spend on a similar exercise.

And the net result was nothing. The video is still out there and would have been out there even if there was some way to keep it off YouTube.

I don't feel too sorry for Ms. Cicarelli. Granted, her privacy was violated, but anybody having sex in public has to expect that someone will notice. But again, there's simply no way to prevent stuff like this.

The real answer to online posting of copyrighted works is to use common sense. Common sense in the first instance about what can possibly be prevented. And then common sense on what can be economically prevented.

Only after something has passed through those filters can we usefully discuss the moral and legal aspects of the situation.

Does that mean copyright is useless? No. It means you can't stop people from posting for free. Which leads to the next, and I hope, final installment of this thing.

THE ECONOMICS OF THEFT: THE SON OF WHACK THE GOPHER

2007-09-08T00:10:00.000-07:00

In the first part of this series of posts I excoriated the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for acting like a junior-jackboot version of the RIAA in issuing a bunch of DMCA takedown orders against documents on a site called Scriptd. The most obvious problem was that many of the works SFWA claimed were written by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg were in fact written by others - unless Asimov and Silverberg had flourishing careers writing gay porn their fans never knew about.

The point man on this buffalo stampede over the cliff was Andrew Burt, a SFWA vice-president and computer science professor at the University of Denver, who has been waging a long campaign to take harsher measures against people who post copyrighted works on free sites.

(And don't read too much into Burt's position. One of the effects of the problems with SFWA I outlined in the first post is that the organization is vulnerable to electing whack jobs as officers.)

In spite of the idiotic manner SFWA handled the Scriptd case, Andrew Burt is not an idiot. What he is, in my opinion, is fixated.

Burt has been gulping down the copyright Kool-Aid by the glass and he's drunk so much of it he's lost all sense of proportion on the issue.

Burt and the Spider Lady

He reminds me so much of nothing as the Spider Lady - a severely arachnophobic old lady who lives in my neighborhood. The Spider Lady wants the City of Phoenix to eradicate every spider in the city and she's constantly trying to get her neighbors to sign petitions urging the city to spray wholesale with various nasty insecticides. Since most of us value our pets, children and health she had been notably unsuccessful.

Actually the comparison is unfair to the Spider Lady. A large proportion of the spiders in Phoenix are poisonous black widows and homeowners who don't take precautions will soon find their webs everywhere. The Spider Lady may be nuts, but she's focused on a real problem.

Where Burt and the Spider Lady converge is their utter inability to see beyond their stated problems to the utter folly of their "solutions". Even if you drenched every square foot of Phoenix with DDT you wouldn't eradicate the spiders, no matter how many you killed. And even if SFWA bankrupted itself in the effort, it will never shut down all the sites posting copyrighted works for free.

Burt has a FAQ (which is not, please note, an official SFWA publication) that does about the best possible job for laying out the argument against 'piracy'. It extensively discusses the legal and moral issues involved in copyright violation on the web and disposes of some of the more jejune arguments in favor of it.

And, typically of his approach, he utterly ignores the economic and practical aspects of the situation.

I'll cover practicality in the next post. For now let's look at the economics because the rational part of this flap is about money.

The Guiding Principle of Security
Burt may be a computer scientist but he's pretty clearly not an expert on computer security. Well, neither am I, but I write about it extensively which gives me some little exposure to the field. On the evidence a good deal more than Burt has.

The key principle in any computer security system is proportionality. The proposed security solution shouldn't cost more than the possible loss caused by a breach of security.

So the first question is, how much is piracy costing SF authors?

The answer, apparently, is 'not very much.'

Science fiction and fantasy authors are notoriously paid a pittance for their work. For each copy of a paperback book the author usually receives less than 50 cents. Hardbacks with higher royalty rates and much smaller sales usually pay the author about a dollar a copy. Advances are just that; advances against royalties which must be repaid before the author sees any additional money.

While it's true that a very few authors sell enough copies to turn those pittances into substantial sums, only a tiny minority of authors can eke out even a poverty-level income from writing fiction.

The next question is 'how much does this kind of copyright violation cost authors?'

The short answer is 'apparently virtually nothing.' The longer answer starts with the nature of sales of fiction books.

Book sales notoriously follow the Long Tailed Power Law. That is, most of the sales are made in the first couple of royalty periods a book is on the market. After that sales drop off sharply - how sharply depends on the work and the author, but typically they have dropped to almost nothing three or four years out.

So even if you take a popular author like the late Isaac Asimov or Robert Silverberg, who hasn't written much recently, the current expected sales figures on any of these books would be low. It's worth noting that all of Silverberg's works on named in SFWA's DMCA demand were several years old. Which means that since the total sales are small the economic impact would be small as well.

There is some evidence to suggest this is the way it works. I just went back through my old royalty statements to confirm the lack of effect of freely available copies online. A couple of my Wiz books are up in the Baen Free Library, a pioneering effort by the late and much-lamented Jim Baen to use the web intelligently by offering copies of selected Baen books free online. (Not copyright violation, please note. Those of us who participate freely agreed to make out books available for free. I did it because I believed it would increase the sales and longetivity of my books overall. On the whole I've been borne out.)

I'm a particularly useful canary in this particular coal mine because I haven't published a new book in nearly 10 years or a short story in six or seven - not since heart surgery and attendant problems put a serious pause in my writing career. So we've got a series of books that's several years old with no additions in about a decade and two of them made available free online several years ago.

If there was significant economic harm to authors from freely available copies of their works, you'd expect to see an inflection in my royalties about the time my books went on the Baen Free Library. In fact there isn't. The curve diminishes, of course, but it stays smooth.

But the argument of harm to authors faces even bigger hurdles than that. In order to accurately calculate the harm from free downloads you have to account for any increased sales resulting from the author's inadvertent free samples.

I'd argue that my long-term sales have improved because the free advertising has extended the sales at low levels. There's no obvious inflection point in the royalty curve, but I'm still collecting a couple of hundred in royalties every year. This is unusual for books that have been out that long.

I know that freely available copies of books online do boost at least some authors' sales because I've become regular readers of series and authors I first encountered in the Baen Free Library. For example I've probably spent more than $100 on copies of Eric Flint's books since reading "1632" http://www.baen.com/library/ and "1633" online at the Baen Free Library. Now granted, perhaps $10 of that has actually gone to Eric and his co-authors, but those are sales that never would have been made if I hadn't read "1632" online.

By the way, the argument equating the number of free downloads with the number of lost sales is utterly specious. Most of the studies, and common sense, show very few of the people who have stolen something in violation of copyright would have ever bought the item. Thing of the computer types with hard drives packed full of pirated software, most of which they never access and don't even know how to use. The argument has been thoroughly discredited in the case of software and similar numbers turn up with music and books.

Now you would think that if there were major economic losses here the people pursuing the people posting this stuff would be the ones losing the most money - the publishers. In fact book publishers have shown remarkably little interest in going after online copyright violators. Except for situations like trying to keep the latest Harry Potter from reaching the net before it reaches the stores, there's almost no enforcement action from publishers.

The reason is that modern publishers have an almost reptilian focus on economics. If it costs more to go after the pirates than it does to suffer the piracy they won't bother.

And yes, I've had my works posted online without permission. A few years ago Ernest Hogan and I co-authored an "Aztec dinosaur detective story, noir" titled "Obsidian Harvest". It appeared originally in Analog and was reprinted in Gardner Dozois' "18th Annual Year's Best Science Fiction" anthology.

Since then the story has appeared in an unauthorized Russian translation. Am I happy about it? Not especially. Am I losing sleep over it? No. Am I going to call out the copyright dogs? Not hardly. The losses are just too small.

In short, whatever the moral argument against illegal posting, the economic argument simply doesn't hold water. The losses to science fiction and fantasy authors are simply too small to worry about. (Games and game-related material? I don't know. That's not something I follow.)

And it is simply totally impractical to make a serious effort to shut down sites that post copyrighted works on line for free. That's an issue we'll discuss in the next installment.

Coming soon to a screen near you:

Whack The Gopher III :The Mutant Grandson

COPYRIGHTS, WHACK-THE-GOPHER, AND SFWA -- WHY I QUIT

2007-09-01T00:22:00.000-07:00

Just because you write about the future doesn’t mean you understand it. The case in point is the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s recent foray into Piss-Off-Your-Customers-Like The-RIAA Sweepstakes.

Recently SFWA, under the leadership of its vice-president Andrew Burt, mounted a DCMA blitz against the document-sharing site Scribd. The organization demanded the site remove a pile of files that it alleged infringed on the copyrights of SF writers Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg under pain of prosecution for copyright infringement.

Problem was, a lot of the documents in the SFWA demand weren’t works by Asimov or Silverberg. The demand, which swore that the works named were copyrights owned by those two authors, included such things as a bibliography of science fiction aimed at junior high school students, a paper (not by Asimov or Silverberg) titled “A History of Intellectual Discussion of 'Accelerating Change', and a lot of gay fiction that the authors obviously never had anything to do with.

What the mental giants at SFWA apparently did was to go through Scribd and grab every URL that contained the words “Asimov” or “Silverberg”, bundle them into a shotgun complaint, swear every one of those works was by Silverberg or Asimov, and shoot the whole pile of poop off to Scribd as a DCMA demand. Apparently no one even bothered to read through the list of items they were swearing – mendaciously and probably illegally – were owned by those two authors.

If this strikes you as damn peculiar, you’re not alone. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow is livid .One of the works on the SFWA hit list was Doctorow’s “Down and out in the Magic Kingdom”, which he released under the Creative Commons license which specifically allows free distribution. Now Doctorow is receiving angry mail from fans accusing him of hypocrisy.

So why did Scribd take down the stuff that wasn’t by Asimov or Silverberg? Because the DMCA is pretty peculiar in itself. As Doctorow notes: “In the real world, you couldn't get a book taken out of a bookstore or an article removed from the newspaper without going to court and presenting evidence of infringement to a judge, but the DMCA only requires that you promise that the work you're complaining about infringes, and ISPs have to remove the material or face liability for hosting it.”

The DMCA is in fact part of the movie and record industry’s last gasp effort to protect an unprotectable position in the internet age. It was passed after heavy lobbying by those groups in a futile effort to curb the use of digital media to distribute copyrighted material. As a quick survey of the web will demonstrate it hasn’t worked.

The DMCA is draconian in its provisions simply because it is just about useless for its intended purpose – as the experience of both record companies and movie studios have shown since it was passed.

Anyone who attempts to seriously apply the DCMA to prevent free distribution of material ends up playing an endless game of whack-the-gopher. As fast as one ‘infringing’ site is taken down, two more pop up. In some cases the material reappears on the same site under a different name. YouTube is rife with examples of this.

The one thing a DCMA dragnet is good for is annoying the fans. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has managed to make itself one of the most hated organizations in the country by using the DCMA and similar tactics against people who share music files. Now SFWA is playing the same game.

The difference is, SFWA has a much smaller war chest and faces a much more tightly knit fan community. Science fiction fandom is a close group and active fans tend to be opinion leaders in SF and Fantasy much more than the fans of records and movies. Pissing off the fans it notorious for having an immediate, and detrimental, impact on sales.

So what in God’s name possessed SFWA to act like this? Like the original request and the DCMA, SFWA is pretty peculiar in its own right.

The first thing you’ve got to understand about the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is that it isn’t. Like the Holy Roman Empire, which in Voltaire’s phrase was “neither holy, Roman nor an empire,” SFWA is not an organization of science fiction and fantasy writers. While some of the leading SF and Fantasy writers belong, the vast majority of the members are people who barely meet SFWA’s extremely lax publication requirements. They are not professional SF or Fantasy writers in any meaningful sense of the term and many of them haven’t published a word of either science fiction or fantasy in years.

One result is that the real concerns of writers who earn substantial amount of their income from writing the stuff are largely ignored while the membership spends its time in endless debate on tempests in teapots like the quality of the food in the SFWA hospitality suite at the last convention they attended or rewriting the rules for the annual Nebula awards.

The SFWA publications where this stuff is discussed have (to quote Doonesbury) “all the subtle dynamics of a nursery school recess”. The meetings can be even worse.

Another result is that because the membership mostly aren’t writers they are easily swayed on issues they ‘should’ care about. Since they’re writers, they ‘should’ care about copyright, obviously.

To be perfectly fair to SFWA, back in the bad old days there were a number of unethical publishers who took shameless advantage of SF writers by violating their rights wholesale. The oldest magazine in the field went through a period (after many changes of ownership) where they republished stories from their back issues without further payment to the authors – who had received a pittance for selling all rights to the stories in the first place. This left a certain confused sensitivity to issues of copyright in some of the older members.

The third result of SFWA’s absurd membership composition is that when someone comes along with a strongly held opinion on something other than the Nebula rules or the quality of the food in the SFWA suite, he or she can often sway the membership into doing things which are silly, pointless or downright stupid. After all, why not? It’s not going to affect the average member’s livelihood and it’s not like it really matters if you haven’t had a story published in the last ten years and have no reasonable hope of ever having another published in a paying market.

That’s another characteristic of SFWA. If a tiny group is fanatic on a subject they can just keep bringing it up and bringing up and bringing it up until eventually they get the result they want, if only by a fluke. Of course the pendulum is then likely to swing the other way, but in the meantime SFWA is committed to a wrong-headed course of action.

All these things come together in the case of copyright to produce a Perfect Storm of Silliness.

This has been building for some time. The flap over free postings on the internet started about ten years ago when one or two people began to beat the drums against these awful copyright violations. Never mind that no one was making a dime off these postings. Never mind that, much more to the point, it was effectively impossible to stop.

As someone who was covering the internet and new media even then, I knew the limits on enforcement in the new environment. It was obvious to anyone who looked at the situation that as long as the posters didn’t try to charge for the work, there was no hope of stopping the practice. No matter how many sites you shut down there were always more.

And as a writer with several novels and stories already under my belt, I knew perfectly well the effect that this kind of campaign was going to have on the fans. They weren’t going to like it, a lot of them wouldn’t see the point of it, and science fiction fans being science fiction fans, they were likely to react very negatively, to the detriment not just of the individual authors but of the field as a whole.

I wasn’t alone in these realizations, but I was very much a rara avis. While a fair number of SFWA members are technically trained and a few of them are extremely knowledgeable about the web and the new media, it was obvious most members were not merely not aware of what was happening, some of them were best described as aggressively ignorant of the impact of the impending technological changes. They didn’t know, they didn’t want to know and by God, things were going to continue in publishing just as they always had. Now about the food at the last Worldcon…

I thought about pointing all this out, but I quickly realized it was futile. The exchanges in the newsletter made it obvious that reason had already gone by the board and I didn’t see any point in jumping into that particular hog wallow.

It was the final straw. I had become increasingly disenchanted with the organization because of its ineffectiveness as a voice for actual writers, its constant bickering and the bull-headed resistance to anything that might be a substantive change.

The irony of an organization made of up people who wrote about the future about to be blindsided by that same future was delicious, but it wasn’t enough to keep me in the organization. I let my membership lapse and I’ve never looked back.

War on Wikis: Critical Standards and Standards of Criticism

2007-08-26T13:37:00.001-07:00

A Wikipedia article summing up the common objections and answering them.

Also see Wikipedia's article on Why Wikipedia Is So Great.

And, of course, their article on Why Wikipedia Is Not So Great.

Information aside, the interesting thing here is the attempt at honest self-criticism. This is another important difference between the practices of the new media at its best and the way things are done in the old media world.

The standard for the new media is that criticism should be frankly acknowledged and frankly answered. It should not be ignored, dismissed or overborne by claims of expertise.

To say this standard is an ideal rather than universal practice is putting it mildly. A lot of new media practitioners don't do it this way and some of them are pretty scathing in the way they apply the older techniques.

The difference is they suffer for it much more.

The web is in essence a conversation. Communication is two way and neither of the participants has such an overwhelming advantage they can drown out the other party.

This was one of the first things I noticed when I started writing for the web over a decade ago. Articles on web sites drew a lot more comment, especially critical comment, than I was used to in magazines and newspapers.

Personally I thought this was great. While my fear of being wrong in public approaches an obsessive-compulsive disorder -- not uncommon in those schooled in the journalistic paradigm -- I appreciated the fact that I could learn from my readers. For one thing, it meant I could target future articles more accurately to what my readers were interested in. That's very hard to do with a magazine where there is a several-month lag between writing the article and getting the letter to the editor.

If you are writing for the web, or blogging, or social networking you have to accept the fact that your work is exposed to the opinions of others -- and those others have equally powerful channels to express their opinions.

In conventional journalism one party controls both ends of the conversation by deciding what gets into print. While letters to the editor are theoretically welcome, objections and comments are still filtered by the side with the publication.

As A.J. Leibling famously said: Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one.

This produces some unfortunate behavior. Newspapers, for example, tend to alibi their mistakes rather than admitting them.

I remember one occasion when, as energy reporter for a major metro daily, I covered the explosion of a pole-mounted transformer belonging to the local power company. Such explosions aren't uncommon since the transformers can overheat in use. In themselves they're pretty harmless. What made this one newsworthy was that the transformer was one of the old ones whose cooling oil was laced with PCBs. That meant it was a hazardous material spill in a residential neighborhood.

Fine, but how much hazardous material? PR guy at the utility told me it was "several quarts" so that's what I used in the story. The next day I got a call from a reader who informed me the actual amount of oil in such a transformer is about five gallons. After confirming that independently, I told my assistant editor, implying that we needed to run a correction.

His response was that five gallons is the same as several quarts so we didn't need a correction.

It was his call, but to this day I think that story was misleading. However the assistant editor wanted to keep from printing a correction. The prevailing theory at newspapers and magazines in those days was that if you didn't admit a mistake you hadn't made a mistake.

While that attitude is still with us -- witness The New Republic's response to the wildly inaccurate stories from Scott Thomas Beauchamp in Iraq -- it works a lot less well even for the print media. Beauchamp's fables were quickly exposed by bloggers with military experience and The New Republic made itself a laughing stock with its lame and dishonest attempts to defend its position.

(Note: Because I'm rushed for time, and because the material in the blogosphere on this is so extensive, I am not going to provide specific links. For the military blogger's point of view I'd recommend 'Blackfive'. For an series of summaries of the controversy, see Michael Goldfarb's articles in the "Weekly Standard". Not an unbiased source, but a lot of links to blogs and other sources. And of course there's "The New Republic's" own statements. For an example of why TNR is a laughing stock, take a look at the investigation into TNR's "investigation" of whether a Bradley Fighting Vehicle could run over a dog in the manner Beauchamp described. For a summation of the culture at TNR that led to all this, as well as an example of the journalistic CYA mentality at work, see "How The New Republic Got Suckered"

The smart new media folks have learned this lesson already and public reaction is teaching it to the others. If you make a mistake, face up to it and deal with it honestly. Because if you don't it will be thrown back at you with hurricane force.

The War On The Wikis

2007-08-26T06:04:00.000-07:00

Of all the manifestations of the new media, none has attracted the sheer level of bile aimed at Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia.

(In future posts we’ll examine some of that bile in detail. For now, let’s accept that it is so and move on.)

Part of that is a profound lack of understanding of how wikis work. Part of it is a knee jerk reaction against something a lot of people see as extremely threatening. Many of those people are right to feel threatened because the existence of Wikipedia and things like it is going to force them to change their ways or fade into irrelevance.

Let’s start with a simple fact. According to nearly every study, Wikipedia is about as accurate (in the journalistic sense of being factually correct) as the major print encyclopedias, such as Encyclopedia Britannica. (The best compendium of the studies, ironically, is on Wikipedia . However with the information there it’s easy to find either the original studies or reports on them.)

While the studies aren’t uniformly favorable (the Guardian’s panel of experts found material disorganized and not always helpful) they generally support Wikipedia against its real-world competitors.

(Writing style is something else again. It varies from graceful to what Nicholas Carr calls “garbage” and “an incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids”. While Carr misses the mark with ‘dubious factoids’ – I checked the article he’s criticizing against other sources – he’s right about the hodge-podge style.)

Matching an encyclopedia’s accuracy is not an exalted standard, please note. Encyclopedias are notorious for being rife with errors, some of them deliberately introduced to prevent copyright violation. (The late Fred Saberhagen, who was an editor and writer for the Britannica as well as a science fiction author, confirmed that to me in a conversation at a science fiction convention several years ago.) Many of the errors are simple mistakes.

But no matter what their source, there those errors sit, like flies in amber until the next edition of the encyclopedia comes out, often decades later.

This leads to key point that Wikipedia’s critics consistently miss. Unlike printed sources, wikis have a powerful error correction method built into the process.

In fact Wikipedia is sometimes wrong. This is especially true since another front in the war on the wikis comes from those who want to co-opt them for their own purposes by feeding them false, misleading or slanted information. This has apparently become a growth industry among the rich and powerful, with everyone from the CIA to Microsoft editing Wikipedia articles in an effort to elide inconvenient facts.

If you look at this with the mindset of print scholars it is horrendous. If anyone can edit material, how can you possibly produce accurate, reliable information? Obviously you can’t and the end product must be utterly unreliable.

Except you can and it isn’t.

Not only have examinations shown Wikipedia’s articles are about as accurate as those in conventional sources, repeated tests have shown that incorrect information, even if very subtle, are almost always corrected quickly, often within minutes. There have been a very few highly publicized exceptions, such as the claim that John Seigenthaler, former editor of the Nashville Tenneseean , was involved in the murders of President Kennedy and his brother Robert, but those are both rare and very well reported when they do happen.

Part of the response to wikis is simply the normal human problem of appreciating the different. As one of my cultural anthropology professors was fond of saying, “different doesn’t mean better and it doesn’t mean worse. It means different.” Wikipedia, and wikis in general, use a profoundly different method of insuring reliable information. Because it is so different a lot of people have trouble believing it can work as well as the traditional reliance on experts. Except it does.

Some of the attacks are little peculiar. Lee Peoples, a law librarian at the Oklahoma City University Law Library asked his students to analyze a Wikipedia article on administrative law After they found out the piece had more than 50 authors, none of whom was named, the students displayed a ‘healthy skepticism’.

Skepticism about any source is good, authorship of a source is important, but the exercise seems oddly pointless as a test of accuracy. Administrative law is hardly terra incognita to a law librarian. Surely a better test would have been for Peoples or his students to compare the article to standard sources on administrative law to judge its accuracy. In fact it’s hard to see what Peoples’ example accomplished aside from scoring a rhetorical point.

So, differences aside, what’s going on here?

What is happening I think is that there are a lot of people, especially academics, who feel threatened by the easy access to information provided by the web. As a leading source of online information Wikipedia becomes the focus of that fear.

As we’ll see, one of the striking things about the vast majority of the attacks on Wikipedia is their fevered defense of experts and material “created by scholars” and “published by reputable publishers” as the only true source of knowledge. (The quotes are from Michael Gorman, who we will meet in more detail in later posts.) The defenders have a point, but it is vastly overstated.

Indeed it reminds me mightily of the defenses put forward by Catholic theologians during the Reformation against the chaotic, pernicious and dangerous notion that anyone but an expert could interpret the Bible.

Which is, as Karl Marx was wont to say, no accident. Neither is it an accident that the people who are making these defenses of the status quo are largely the academics, intellectuals, librarians and others who have the most to lose in this epistemological earthquake.

(Not all of the hostility is from academics however. For example the “Weekly Standard” makes a habit of ladling out healthy doses of British snark on Wikipedia and the Standard is by no means a haunt of academics.)

In other words, besides some very real and serious concerns about new information sources, there is a lot of protectionism by those who are proactively protecting their oxen from a severe goring by the new media and new information sources like Wikipedia.

Amateurphobia And Roiling The Clam Bed

2007-08-20T23:41:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons our public debates go careening off at odd angles is that we, and especially Americans, have all the historical sense of a colony of cherrystone clams. (To steal a phrase from the greatest bathroom reading every written: Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings)

The result is that one of our culture’s most popular characters is the Viewer with Alarm. Indeed some authors, notably the late Vance Packard (The Hidden Persuaders, etc. ad nauseum) have made long and prolific careers out of Viewing With Alarm. This has the advantage of providing a dose of unintentional humor when one comes across their forlorn relics on dusty shelves 30 years later. However the amusement is tinged with regret when the reader realizes that people not only bought this stuff, they bought into the arguments as well.

The instant Viewer With Alarm is one Andrew Keen, a persistent critic of Web 2.0, whose work, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture is providing a rich source of blog fodder all across the spectrum.

Because democratization, despite its lofty idealization, is undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and talent. As I noted earlier it is threatening the very future of our cultural institutions.

As a Viewer With Alarm, Keen is long on hyperventilation and rather short on substance. Lawrence Lessig, one of Keen’s targets, calls his book an exercise in unintentional parody. Before shredding Keen’s critique of his position, Lessig summarizes one of his central arguments thusly:

“(Keen) tells us that without institutions, and standards, to signal what we can trust (like the institution (Doubleday) that decided to print his book), we won’t know what’s true and what’s false.”

If Keen really believes that, or anything close to it, he is truly one of the great blithering idiots of the 21st Century.

However anyone who’s ever been a professional journalist knows, blithering idiocy has never been a bar to success as a Viewer with Alarm. Some people are bound to take you seriously.

One such person is Tony Long over at Wired He thinks we’ve got something to worry about.

“But one of Keen’s central arguments — that the internet, by its all-inclusive nature and easy access, opens the door to amateurism-as-authority while at the same time devaluing professional currency — deserves a full airing. Basically, I think he’s right to criticize what he calls the “cut and paste” ethic that trivializes scholarship and professional ability, implying that anybody with a little pluck and the right technology can do just as well.”

To give Keen credit, he has noted one of the consequences of the internet as a medium. Just about anyone can use it and much of what is produced is narcissistic drivel. (The proof is about two mouse clicks away from you.) That conclusion is, perhaps, worthy of a bumper sticker (mine reads “The experiment has begun: A million monkeys at a million typewriters. We call it the Usenet.” Obviously it’s a very old bumper sticker.) Stretching it into a book is the intellectual equivalent of homeopathic medicine.

And that dumps us right in the middle of the clam bed.

What people like Keen utterly miss, is the reaction of the audience. The audience adapts to the medium, which historically has meant that they have learned to analyze what they’re reading, hearing and seeing.

If you approach the internet with the same skill set people used to apply to newspapers, you’re in a lot of trouble. Just as you would have been in the 19th Century if you had read the new penny press with the same degree of credulity that people applied to the old-line newspapers. Or if a 16th Century reader applied the same degree of belief and acceptance to the mass of newly printed religious tracts they he or she did to what the priest said at Mass.

But they didn’t and we don’t, at least not for long. We, or most of us, are learning to exercise critical thinking skills to evaluate what we’re finding. We are learning to ignore the junk and to sift some semblance of truth from the fiction.

There’s something else at work here as well. That is the growing ‘professionalisation of amateurism’. In other words, even amateurs can learn and they generally do.

This sort of phenomenon that has Keen’s knickers in a knot happens nearly every time a new medium opens up channels of discourse. There is a huge outpouring of mostly really dreadful stuff as people take advantage of the new opportunities. Some of the stuff remains resolutely dreadful. But some of it becomes excellent.

Early in my journalistic career, the availability of cheap offset presses and photolithography as an alternative to hot metal type meant anyone could publish a ‘newspaper’ with little capital investment and even less skill. A lot of people did and the ‘underground press’ was born. It was rife with all the evil effects of amateurism Keen Views With Alarm. However mixed in with the dreck was an increasing amount of good work — what eventually became known as ‘alternative journalism’.

Similarly, when personal computers and cheap (relatively!) laser printers made desktop publishing possible, much of the early work was stomach-churningly awful. But it also opened up new channels of communication and became the foundation for the way we produce and distribute printed information today.

So once more we will see the cycle played out. And once more, despite people like Keen, the result will be ultimately beneficial.

Eisenstein's Changes: Printing and the Web

2007-08-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

In “The Printing Press As an Agent of Change”, Elizabeth Eisenstein listed six consequences of the shift from handwritten manuscripts to printed material.

Eisenstein’s consequences of printing were:

1)Dissemination
Printing spread information far and wide in books, pamphlets, newspapers, broadsides and other material. In the space of a hundred years or so, Europe went from being an information-poor society to a (comparatively) information-rich one.

2)Standardization
Everything from spelling to language became more uniform. It’s no accident that English as a unified language really emerges during the period when printing became popular.

3)Reorganization
With printing came the ability to organize material more effectively. In fact as information proliferated, organization became more important. Arranging information alphabetically really got its start during this period.

4)Data collection
Printing didn’t exactly make data collection easier, but it made it possible to spread the results of the data collected far more widely. Now scholars and merchants hundreds of miles apart could be sure they were working with the same information. It also meant that mistakes and inconsistencies became more obvious.

5)Preservation
With hundreds, or thousands, of copies of texts produced at a time and spread far and wide, the chances that a work would survive became much greater. Even when the religious or secular authorities tried to suppress a work they had much less chance of success.

The Catholic Church may have attempted to suppress Galileo’s “Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences” after it was printed, but before they could do so copies had already reached the Protestant nations of Europe and Galileo’s discoveries were safe.

6)Amplification and reinforcement of existing trends
Everything from nationalism to Protestantism to science to the rise of vernacular languages for scholarly communication were well-established before printing arrived, but printing made all those trends more powerful and spread them more rapidly.

So now it’s 500 years later and we’re in the middle of a shift that’s at least as big as the introduction of printing and moving a lot faster. It’s instructive to compare how Eisenstein’s big six stack up on the internet and other new media.

1) Dissemination:

A big win. The new media spread everything from pornography to philosophy to physics around the world far faster and more efficiently than printed matter ever could.

2) Standardization:

A necessity. Where printing encouraged regional and national customs, languages and views of data, the new media encourage international standardization of everything from language to presentation.

In fact technical standards, from HTML to RSS are central to the new media.

HTML provides a particularly instructive example. Ten years ago, back in the Web Paleozoic, it was accepted practice to use all kinds of non-standard tricks and clever hacks to design ‘killer’ web pages.

Reading books on web design from that era can give you the creeps.

The problem was that these non-standard methods actually interfered with communication because they broke browsers and sometimes even crashed computers. However it was impossible to convince some people that non-adherence to standards was a bad thing. They honestly didn’t understand why they couldn’t use their little hacks to make their web pages look just so. (On their computer and their browser, of course. But hey…)

The other problem goes well beyond web page design. The new media provides us with a raft of tools to aid standardization and we come to rely on them, sometimes to our detriment. The new media are still very much a work in progress and some of our tools just aren’t smart enough to do the job.

Case in point: Spell checkers and the dreaded homonym/homophone problem. Spell checkers ‘know’ that ‘two’ is a word. But so are ‘to’ and ‘two’. If you rely on the spell checker to give you the right variation you’re going to produce anything from occasional illiteratisms to howlers that can make you look like an absolute idiot.

The problem, of course, is that we expect standardization to the point where we’re upset if we don’t get it. We used to deal with this with paid experts called copy editors, or constant reference to dictionaries. Now we just rely on fallible tools and suffer the consequences.

3) Reorganization:

This one is really interesting. In print the reader has virtually no control over organization and presentation of material and even the author frequently doesn’t have much. In the new media we have almost total control over the organization of the material.

In fact we’re so used to being able to reorganize data to meet our whims, never mind our needs, that we feel cheated when we can’t shuffle the data around to suit our fancy.

Case in point: Wordpress.com, the site that used to host this blog, has a number of limitations on what you can do in terms of data organization and presentation. The themes (page templates) in particular suffer from a number of irritating limitations, such as not being able to have a list of previous articles automatically appear on all the templates. That lack of flexibility in data presentation is the main reason I gave up on them.

4) Data collection:

The biggest win of all. The new media are data sponges, soaking in every conceivable kind of data and making it available everywhere in the world. In fact our biggest problem is not drowning in the information tsunami.

That is, of course, one of the big reasons that reorganization is so important. Selecting the kind of data we’re interested in and the view of it we want helps use swim with the data wave instead of being overwhelmed.

5) Preservation:

A major, major lose. Data on the web is not only ephemeral, perhaps worse it is subject to change without notice. What was there last week may not be there today – or it may have been changed to eliminate embarrassing, damaging or particularly useful information.

History, as defined on the web, even more mutable than it was for Winston Smith in 1984. The Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s dystopia had to physically recall and change books before shoving inconvenient material down the memory hole. With the internet, there’s no need to recall anything and the memory hole is as close as the nearest computer.

Factual information disappears in a heartbeat as well. There’s usually a huge loss of information at the end of every semester, as thousands of students leave school and their web accounts are closed. The fact that some of that material is extremely useful to a fair number of people doesn’t protect it. It vanishes silently away, leaving only 404’ed references on Google – and wailing and gnashing of teeth among those for whom the information was important.

6) Amplification and reinforcement of existing trends.

Macrocosmically, yes. Microcosmically, yes and no. The new media reinforces major historical trends like delocalization, disintermediation, specialization and anti-mediocrity.

“As Maine goes, so goes California – except twice as far and four times as fast.” The old joke isn’t quite so funny any more.

All these macrotrends can be traced back hundreds of years, some of them into the High Middle Ages, even before printing. The new media reinforce and accelerate those changes.

At a micro level, the Long Tail Power Law applies with a vengeance. That is to say that the new media offers an enormously wider range of choices in everything from friendships to industrial suppliers. The counter-intuitive result of that is that a few of those choices become enormously more popular than the rest but that the aggregate of the less popular choices is likely to be much greater than the volume of the few enormously more popular choices.

In other words, Britney Spears becomes enormously more popular, but if your tastes run to the pibroch (the classic music of the Highland Bagpipe), you have a lot more choices available to you as well.

The other thing that happens is that as the choice space expands exponentially, people are likely to discover things that they like more among the choices they didn’t know they had before. That tends to produce rapid, and rapidly fluctuating, shifts in relative popularity of the various choices. Today it may be Britney Spears, tomorrow she may be replaced by someone you haven’t heard of yet.

Fungal Journalism, Michael Yon and his ilk

2007-08-19T16:40:00.000-07:00

If you want to understand Iraq, Michael Yon is indispensable.

Yon has no formal journalism training and never worked for a media outlet. He is, however, an enormously talented writer who has embedded himself with American troops in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and for the last two years provided the American public with the kind of reporting on the war and the US troops in it the likes of which we haven’t seen since the late, great Ernie Pyle covered World War II from the soldier’s perspective.

The comment that struck me was:
“Clearly, context like this is not well-served by the adversarial frame of “mainstream-versus-alternative-news.” Reporting from this war is deadly serious business. Deadly for the reporters, but how they report can also be deadly for us all.”

Michael is a ground truth kind of guy. You no more read his reports for comment on broad societal issues than you read Ernie Pyle (Michael’s spiritual father) for enlightenment on the grand strategic issues of World War II.

However if you look at the view from 10,000 feet, Michael’s work exemplifies another kind of truth. His recent dispatches exemplify that there is a “mainstream-versus-alternative news” split. And the truth is that division is critical to the free flow of information a democracy depends on.

Fungus Among Us
To understand why, let’s back up a couple of times around Robin Hood’s barn and start our voyage of journalistic exploration with a humble fungus.

Bipolaris maydis is about as un-sexy as you can get. It causes a disease called Southern Corn Leaf Blight, which was a well-known and very minor disease of corn.

Was until 1970, that is. Suddenly the disease exploded through the United States corn crop. An estimated 12-15 percent of the corn was lost, food prices skyrocketed and suddenly we had a national crisis on our hands.

The thing that turned a minor nuisance into a near-disaster was monoculture. Since the introduction of hybrid corns about 1950, American farmers had been growing more and more corn of fewer and fewer varieties. By 1970 about 90 percent of the corn grown in the US was of a few hybrid varieties, all of which shared a gene called Texas Sterile Male (TSM). It turned out that TSM corns were extremely susceptible to Southern Corn Blight and the rest, as they say, is history – and a billion-dollar loss.

The needle sharp point of this excursion into agricultural mycology is that monoculture of any sort brings trouble in its wake. It usually provides benefits, but it leaves the entire culture terribly susceptible to predators, parasites and other evils.

This is true in any ecology, be it biological or cultural. Including journalism as it is formally practiced.

And modern journalism is largely a monoculture. This has much less to do with politics than standards and education. Every reporter and editor, from the looniest right to the moonbat left, is trained in the same methods and held to the same standards. This monoculture covers everything from what is ‘news’ to how it is to be gathered and reported, what constitutes a source and nearly every other aspect of modern journalism.

Of course not everyone follows those standards. There are slackers, crooks and mavericks in every culture. And of course there are reporters and editors who cheerfully sell out those principles for a pot of message, be it on the left or on the right. But in the long run that doesn’t matter any more than the resistance of occasional corn plants to Southern Corn Blight in 1970.

I know because I am a product (I hope an escapee) from that very same monoculture. My degree is in journalism and for nearly a decade I was a reporter and editor for the Associated Press, small community dailies (including a three-year stint as managing editor on one) and the largest daily in my state. In that time I saw a lot less political bias than most people associate with the media, but I saw the effects of journalistic monoculture every day.

This isn’t because the journalistic leaders don’t try to avoid the effects. Journalism schools, trade publications like Editor and Publisher and Columbia Journalism Review and good editors everywhere emphasize the traps that journalists can fall into and try to keep them on the straight and narrow. This is about as effective as the scientists who bred TSM hybrid corn. That is, they can protect from the major diseases, but the minor stuff becomes major as the ecology changes.

Playing Journalistic Pinball

The result of this monoculture is that if you know what you’re doing you can play the mainstream media like a pinball machine. By understanding the process and the mindset you can insert toxins into the flow of information as surely and as ruthlessly as Bipolaris maydis invades the stomata of corn plants. The fungus destroys the energy producing centers of cells. The journalistic attackers hijack the process to spread their own propaganda.

Ironically, while the government and industry are enthusiastic players in this game, they are seldom as effective as the non-governmental organizations. For one thing they are less likely to display the kind of conviction displayed by everyone from the Religious Right to the PETA. They are also hamstrung by their own bureaucracy.

(How do I know? I also spent a brief, inglorious stint committing public relations for a major utility building a nuclear power plant.)

What is happening now is that America’s enemies are applying these techniques with the same ruthlessness they show in beheading their own people on spreading stories about baked children served to their parents. And they are damned good at it.

Foreigners have attempted this before, generally without a lot of success. In the 30s, 40s and 50s Communists in the United States tried. But the domestic Communists, under the direction of the Soviet government, were inept clowns when it came to media manipulation. They were blinded by their own culture and preconceptions so most of their efforts came off as weird or silly. The Nazis were even worse.

The Islamo-fascists, on the other hand, have done an amazingly successful job of manipulating the media. This is especially ironic when you consider that most of these groups are so far off the intellectual main sequence they make Hitler at his nuttiest look sane and many of their leaders make Stalin look like a bleeding heart humanitarian.

This is another effect of the globalization of information. Al Qaeda and their brethren my have an insane view of the world and a foaming, rabid hatred of the West, but they know us. They read our web sites, newspapers, they listen to American television and radio. They may be crazy as a gang of bedbugs, but they most assuredly are not stupid.

The people who handle their propaganda know exactly how to impact American opinion through the media and they apply that knowledge with every car bombing, every faked story and every suborned stringer that are responsible for. (Of course the X-Random Looney-bin-Nutcase militants who show up on the 6 o clock news don’t get it at all, but those aren’t the ones running the operation.)

In fact one of the striking things about Al Qaeda is how much of their campaign is aimed directly at American public opinion through their manipulation of journalism. The Viet Cong stumbled into something similar after the Tet Offensive, which they lost overwhelmingly on the ground, and won equally overwhelmingly in the “Living Room War”, but Al Qaeda has based at least half its total military effort in Iraq on attacks through fungal journalism.

In a weird sick way, the Islamic terrorists are internationalists. Saddam Hussein, by contrast, had an almost utterly parochial view of the world. He didn’t understand the United States at all and that got him invaded and hanged.

(The Israelis? In the beginning they were pretty good at manipulating the American media, but their effectiveness has declined in the last 20 years or so. I suspect because of creeping corporatism in their approach.)

Meanwhile, Back On The Home Front

International terrorists may be the latest players of Fungal Journalism Pinball, but they still aren’t the only ones. Increasingly our media is held captive by the manipulators and sometimes the results are truly absurd.

Take, for example, a strange little Irish company called Steorn which claims to have invented a ‘free energy machine’ – perpetual motion, plus, in other words. Which is, of course, thermodynamic nonsense, as even the most scientifically illiterate reporter should know.

In spite of that, thanks to a brilliant campaign of journalistic manipulation, Steorn’s ‘discovery’ and upcoming demonstration received international publicity from such respected media as Fox News, the Guardian, the Observer, as well as technical publications like ZD net. (There was also a lot of coverage on the web, but with the exception of the further out sites, it was generally of the eye-rolling variety.)

I doubt seriously that even the reporters for the mainstream media really believed that this thing would work. So why did they publish such a nutball story?

Blame fungal journalism. In this case the attack was directed against the basic journalistic notion that the reporter is not an expert on whatever he/she covers. Therefore, the reporter has no business judging whether something is true or not.

Normally that is simply good sense. To understand how good the sense is you’d have to know reporters and how much many of them really know about the subject they cover. But it provides an opening for a fungus attack. If Dr. Moonbat von Nutcase claims that the sky is falling, and he has even a scintilla of standing and a half-convincing rap, then the story flashes around the world that the sky is falling.

Okay, I’m oversimplifying. There are a number of other factors that come into play which insure that every single member of the tinfoil beanie brigade doesn’t get his or her vaporings into print. But all too often this kind of fungal journalism attack succeeds. Very often it succeeds even if the reporter in question suspects he or she is being played.

The Answer

This has potentially disastrous consequences for the United States because a democracy utterly depends on a flow of accurate information to its citizens to function effectively. Increasingly fungal journalism has systematically distorted that flow, poisoned it as effectively as the Southern Corn Blight Fungus destroys the energy producing centers in corn plant cells.

Fundamentally this is a product of our journalistic monoculture. Journalists can be played because their commonalities leave them vulnerable to these attacks.

The obvious solution is more of the same. That is for journalists, journalism teachers, editors and such to shore up the obvious weaknesses in the system. Unfortunately that doesn’t work. The bad guys can always find new weaknesses to exploit and the fungus continues to spread through the monoculture.

The real solution to monoculture, as any ecologist will tell you, is to break up the monoculture. Different species have different combinations of strengths and weaknesses. By mixing them up you control the spread of pathogens and offer alternatives.

And finally, after a long, exhausting chase, this brings us to the role of the new media. Bloggers like Michael Yon aren’t part of the monoculture. Many of them have different approaches, different standards and different techniques. They all have their weaknesses, it is true, but by and large they are not the same weaknesses as traditional journalism.

What the new media offer are alternative channels of information. By combining those channels with traditional journalism, we can obtain much more of the ground truth that Michael Yon values – and we so desperately need if we are to succeed.

Resources:

For Michael Yon in his own words, see his blog here:
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/tabula-rasa.htm

The article on the massacre at al-Hamari (warning! Graphic)
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/bless-the-beasts-and-children.htm

The follow up on the media non-reaction to al-Hamari
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/update-on-bless-the-beasts-and-children.htm

The report that motivated this blog
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/second-chances.htm

You can read more the 1970 Corn Crisis here
http://www.cbwinfo.com/Biological/PlantPath/BM.html

and here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/171/3976/1113

and more about the perils of monoculture in agriculture here:

http://aboutbiodiversity.org/agbdx/cornblight.html

and here:
http://oregonstate.edu/~muirp/cropdiv.htm

For an account of Steorn and Orbo, see here:
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/13359/1103/

for a list of stories, see:

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Steorn_Free_Energy#Other_Press_Coverage

The Guardian reporter indicates skepticism, but the overall tone is favorable and the paper published it anyway. A classic example of a successful fungal journalism attack.
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/energy/story/0,,1858172,00.html