One major place where the conflict between fully generative and contingently generative comes into play is on online video. YouTube‘s terms of service should give any independent video maker pause – both in terms of the license rights they claim and in terms of the susceptibility to take down on the basis of broad criteria[1].

Two things make me hopeful, though, for the future of video on the open web: Miro and Kaltura.

In other words, YouTube may suspend your account at virtually any time and for virtually any reason. Remember, since you’re also not allowed (per the Terms of Use) to download videos from YouTube, if the copy stored at YouTube gets deleted in theory it vanishes entirely, making your web browser connected to YouTube one giant tethered appliance. (“You agree not to access . . . YouTube Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate”).

And don’t even get me started on DRM, which aims to replicate the experience of a tethered appliance with content on your own computer.

Last week Dean Jansen from the Participatory Culture Foundation came to visit the Berkman Thursday blog group to talk about Miro.

Miro, which I’ve blogged about many times in the past, is an open source, multi-platform, standards aware video player, as well as a collaboratively edited channel guide. If you spend any significant amount of time watching video on your computer, you should have it. (It’s especially great for longer-form video, high definition video, and disconnected mode – planes, trains, and automobiles).

(Yes, those are actually my subscriptions – click for full size image).

Two things I did not know about Miro that Dean showed us:

1. You can add additional web sites as “Guides” inside the Miro player. If they aren’t formatted as guides they won’t quite work the same way, but this makes it possible to have multiple guides from different sources, ensuring distribution of control of the media.
2. You can create an account on the Miro guide, which tracks your ratings of channels and then can suggest channels you might like, on the basis of those recommendations.

I’ve also been looking at (and talking to the team behind) Kaltura, which bills itself as:

The first open-source platform for video creation, management, interaction, and collaboration.

Kaltura not only enables you to embed video on your site (a la YouTube, Blip.TV, or several dozen others), but lets users collaboratively edit video, providing a complex and full featured editing environment all hosted in the user’s browser.

Kaltura has an interesting partnership with the Wikimedia foundation (see Yochai Benkler’s blog entry about it) and make a video extension for MediaWiki is available now from their downloads page; extensions for Drupal and WordPress are “coming soon.” These extensions let you integrate Kaltura’s SaaS offering inside your hosted application.

The “Community Edition Video Platform,” which will let people provide the full Kaltura functionality from behind a firewall or on their own server, is work in progress, but you can register on their site to be notified when it becomes available.

While it may sometimes seem that free software is not required for generative platforms – an argument Zittrain makes in his presentations above – free and open source solutions do help us to avoid the kind of contingent generativity Zittrain describes, since the worst case scenario is to take the software and run your own, or modify it in order to remove whatever restrictions (intentional or unintentional) the platform imposes. You just can’t do that with most hosted offerings.

[1] From the YouTube Terms of Use:

YouTube reserves the right to decide whether Content or a User Submission is appropriate and complies with these Terms of Service for violations other than copyright infringement, such as, but not limited to, pornography, obscene or defamatory material, or excessive length. YouTube may remove such User Submissions and/or terminate a User’s access for uploading such material in violation of these Terms of Service at any time, without prior notice and at its sole discretion.

Last week’s Berkman Thursday Blog Group was an update on Babbledog – Jessica, one of the folks who does QA/testing on the site, walked us through the existing features and some stuff that’s still in alpha/beta phase.

It’s an interesting site – a cross between Digg or Reddit (in that you can post new stories/topics which folks can vote up or down) but also a kind of recommendations engine which pulls in lots of back end feeds and suggests stories to you based on your expressed preferences (answers to a quiz about what you are and are not interested in) as well as your implicit preferences (what you post, read, comment on, etc).

Down the left column, to the side of the river of stories, is the current site activity – almost like a live IM chat room discussion across different threads. They’ve also got stickers, which are badges you create and wear on your profile, to show the things you’re interested in. (You can see my profile and few stickers I created).

Once you create a new post, a discussion thread gets created around it. Here’s an example where I posted about ICanHasHotDog, the new LOLDogs site from the makers of ICanHasCheezburger:

I like that threads and users have unique urls, though they are a bit obfuscated – will I ever remember that http://babbledog.com/user/6511584d0a1248938d4abd301807dcf3/ is my profile, rather than something like http://babbledog.com/user/jeckman/ ?

They also don’t yet have OpenID, so you’ll have to create another username/password combo. They do link, in the user’s profile, to other profiles (free form – you enter URLs) but they are marked rel=”nofollow” rather than with XFN notation like rel=”me”

There doesn’t seem to yet be a way to see other users who are “wearing” the same stickers as you – in other words, a kind of “groups” function which might be valuable.

We also spent some time talking about the “progress percentages” Babbledog uses, as in this screenshot:

I love the idea of people earning points over time for activity on a site – but I have to say as a former geeky honors student (now just a professional geek) I found it rather disheartening to still be at <25% complete. That’s like an F-minus. At least when LinkedIn tells you your profile is 50% complete there is a clear set of steps for how to get to 100%.

Maybe the concept is just too mixed – there is some set of tasks which add up to a 100% complete profile, then there is some running total “activity points” you earn on the site, and a rank which goes with those points.

That way I could feel ok with my 100% complete profile and a low standing in the overall activity ranking – otherwise it feels a bit like a disincentive. Who wants to log in to a site which will keep telling them they are nearly 80% incomplete?

There’s Jonathan Zittrain‘s new book, The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. (In addition to buying a print copy, you can download the pdf version under creative commons license). Presenting on that book, there’s video of Zittrain at Princeton on March 26th, at ISOC-NY on April 11th, and at the Berkman Center the following week. You can also read and comment on the book.

Finally, via Biella Coleman I found this fascinating video from an event April 16th (between the above two videos), from a meeting of the NY Chapter of the Internet Society, talking about “The Futures of the Internet.” The discussion was sponsored by the NYU Information Law Institute, Free Culture @ NYU, and ISOC-NY. (Shirky’s presentation is on the same cognitive surplus theme from his web 2.0 expo keynote I recently blogged about).

The Panelists:

• Clay Shirky, Author: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Adjunct Professor, NYU ITP
• Tim Wu, Author: Who Controls The Internet?, Professor, Columbia Law School
• Lauren Cornell, Executive Director, Rhizome
• Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia and Wikia
• Jonathan Zittrain, Author: The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It, Professor, Oxford University; Visiting Professor, NYU Law,

It’s a lengthy video (1 hour 30 minutes), so I recommend downloading a version and getting comfortable to watch it. But if you’re interested in generativity, free culture, online communities, geek culture, mass collaboration, and the larger questions of the internet-as-public-sphere, it’s well worth it.

Once you’ve watched it, go read Biella’s blog post which raises the question she also asked in the video about the depth of political consciousness in “geek culture” generally and free software communities like Debian in particular, as well as the comment thread following it.

I can’t help but relate the discussion also to ROFLCon, and what I perceived as an unfortunate lack of critical and political framing to the discussion there (with some notable exceptions). Don’t get me wrong – I’m a huge fan of LOLCats and potentially subversive power of humor. But what kind of culture do we hope we’re collectively creating on the ‘net?

One attraction of the internet can be how unlike the offline world it is – but as the line between online communities and “real world” communities blurs (as more and more offline groups and communities become digitally enabled, and more and more online communities develop offline manifestations) do we risk losing the generative freedom the internet has made possible in the last decade?

As we move in the direction of cloud-based and hosted computing platforms like Google App Engine, Amazon EC2, or even the Facebook API and Open Social, do we put at risk the basic freedoms the FSF is organized to fight in support of?

There’s a quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln that the best way to predict the future is to create it – so what are we collectively doing to create the future of the internet that preserves its progressive and liberational aspects?

On January 30th, Beth Kolko spoke at the Berkman Center luncheon series on “User, Hacker, Builder, Thief – Creativity and Consumerism in a Digital Age.”

You can see the video (.mov link) or download the audio (mp3) at Media Berkman.

As usual from the Berkman Center (I wish I could go every week to these talks) it opened more questions than it answered. I’m the guy asking a very rambling and not so articulate question about the simultaneous appearance of a popularized DIY ethic (Make magazine et al) and the DMCA with its tighter limits on what you can “hack” in the broadest sense.

My “notes” follow – not really notes but a series of near quotes and interesting bits – hopefully enough to pique your interest to go listen to the MP3 or (better) watch the video.

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Studying the developing world / emerging markets – and the tech usage patterns

Two key arguments:

1. Thinking about emerging markets as the locus of bottom-up creativity, not just a market to be exploited with older tech

2. Recuperating the term hacker.

Background: Postmodern feminism and Paul Smith – constructed subjectivity but also empowered subject.

We’ve become adept at reading UGC as resistance – rewriting the empire. But in the digital age adoption and adaptation are twin frames not opposites.

Patterns of technology adoption in resource constrained environments have as much or more to teach us than traditional user centered design about what makes technology work for humans.

Use of “outdated” technology – retrofit strategy. Use of what we see as single user computers as multiuser environments – three people, one computer. Internet cafes and games. community businesses, mixture of internet access, LAN games, sometimes movies/ring tones – doesn’t need to be a pure internet cafe.

The local WOW environment – setup their own WOW servers, with their own rules to account for the difference in universe size.

Voice over IP, Internet Phones in cafes, individual landlines converted to pay phones, trade in cell phone cards and minutes.

The whole idea is to study patterns of emerging use as opposed to user-centered design or participatory design.

We need to bring the same recognition of resistance to technical hacks – we have sophisticated readings of cultural resistance but not of hardware hacking.

Non-expert, non-credentialed, not requiring arcane knowledge.

How users hack systems and make them usable and relevant – these activities can be generalized and learned from.

Playing with fera-fluid, power-tool powered drag races, tesla coils, high altitude weather balloons, RFID tags, social implications.

The challenge is that increasingly this work gets categorized as illegal.

The Ford motor company, calendar; cars which you can’t work on because of proprietary software and DCMA issues.

That move from user to hacker is similar to the move from reader to co-author – this is the UGC of the hardware world.

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Great question (Ethan Zuckerman) – what about motivation and context for the activities – Make readers in silicon valley don’t have the same motivation or context as these emergent markets (necessity versus play)

What about economic motivations – Etsy.

Interesting paradox – we get more attention to DIY and hacker ethic – right at the same time that a whole legal framework gets vitiated.

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What are the lessons here for design? What about the design of multi-modal and modifiability into consumer devices?

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Challenges to the DMCA – the successful challenges have been won on the grounds that the invoker of the DMCA is trying to push a copyright claim too far. We still need to keep pushing on the notion that learning and experimentation are necessary and protected by the first amendment but we haven’t gone far there.

Legal Framework still to come.
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Is there a more commons-based, pre-industrial (post-industrial) approach to this whole framework? Getting away from procuding, consuming resisting. Grazing, or something?

There are problems having 9 networks but it is a hell of a lot better than having none.

The issue with solidarity across american geeks and the emerging world is that the us geeks have no clue what the technology challenges are in Ghana. [Guilty as charged, there.]

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There some moments of effective cross over. Every now and then it does happen successfully.

This is a benefit not only for the steady stream of students (undergrad and graduate) and recent graduates all those colleges and universities pump into the workforce regularly, but also because of the broader institutions they support.

My two favorite examples this year are the MIT Comparative Media Studies program and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. (As an alumnus of neither Harvard nor MIT, I can recommend both impartially).

Somewhat less well-known in tech circles than the Media Lab, the Comparative Media Studies program practices “applied humanism”:

The . . . program is committed to the art of thinking across media forms, theoretical domains, cultural contexts, and historical periods. Both our graduate and undergraduate programs encourage the bridging of theory and practice, as much through course work as through participation in faculty and independent research projects.

Among the projects that the MIT CMS program currently sponsors / hosts:

• The Convergence Culture Consortium
• Learning Games to Go
• Metamedia
• Project New Media Literacies
• Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
• MIT Center for Future Civic Media

In addition, check out their Faculty, Theses, Publications, and subscribe to their Events Calendar and News Feed, which often includes podcasts of various events.

This week (Nov. 16th and 17th, 2007), the Convergence Culture Consortium will be hosting the Futures of Entertainment II conference, which (true to their mission):

brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications. This year’s conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, metrics, measurement, and accounting for audiences, cultural labor and audience relations, and mobile platform development.

Check out the full conference schedule for more detail on speakers and subjects. I will be attending and hopefully blogging about much of the conference – though those posts may not appear until the following week due to some vacation time which will take me offline.

Just up the Charles in Harvard Square, the Berkman center focuses on “Internet & Society” in the broad context of the Harvard Law School.

To get a sense of the breadth and depth of the center, just look at:

• The projects linked from their home page, including the Center for Citizen Media, the Citizen Media Law project, the Digital Natives project, and the Internet and Democracy Project, among others)
• Their faculty and fellows, including Yochai Benkler, John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, danah boyd, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jimmy Wales, and David Weinberger, and that’s just grabbing the names that immediately jump out to me, not to suggest all the others aren’t equally prominent or doing equally fascinating and worthwhile work.

Also be sure to check out (and subscribe to) MediaBerkman, which podcasts / vodcasts many Berkman sponsored events for those not able to make it to Cambridge in person.