You can also subscribe to their video podcast in Miro, using this as a channel:

http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/main/podcast/

(If you don’t use Miro, just copy that url into your podcatcher of choice).

They’ve also just published the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, which provides guidance to video creators. The goal of the code is:

to clearly establish what constitutes fair use in online video, and to reach out to creators and copyright holders alike to create a common awareness of what kind of quoting is legal and illegal. This can only be accomplished through participation — by spreading the word to your users, you can help to protect this emerging culture.

It’s well worth reading through whether you’re a video creator or a copyright holder.

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?

I bookmarked it at the time, downloaded a copy to my “to read” folder (a dangerous thing to have) and then ignored it for the last month or so. You should not do the same. This may be your only chance to explain away the hours you wasted watching dramatic chipmonk videos as “work-related.”

The researchers looked at hundreds of user-generated videos, specifically focusing on those which “incorporate copyrighted works into new creations.”

They analyze the videos in terms of the uses to which the copyrighted material is put, and how those uses related to the “fair use” doctrine with respect to copyright. The types of uses they uncover include:

• Parody and satire
• Negative or critical commentary
• Positive commentary
• Quoting to trigger discussion
• Illustration or example
• Incidental use
• Personal reportage or diaries
• Archiving of vulnerable or revealing materials
• Pastiche or collage

It’s not only perfectly relevant analysis, it’s also a really good catalog of the best of user-generated videos.

My current favorite – too recent for inclusion in the report, but otherwise very much in line with the satire and critical commentary approaches is the Obama-supporting Yes We Can video and the corresponding parody of McCain: Like Hope, But Different.

(To subscribe to any of these in Miro, you can just use the “Add Channel” command in the Channel Menu and put in the RSS url below. Be sure to look at whether you want to download ALL the videos in that feed or just NEW videos added.

TED Talks

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference in Monterey California which “brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).”

They now make a huge variety of talks from the conference (current and past) available for syndication in video format. (They also encourage users to share talks – including embedding videos as well as enabling download to desktop without any nasty DRM).

The only real challenge with TED Talks (as the videos are called) is where you want to subscribe to them:

• The “official” feed at the TED site: http://www.ted.com/talks/rss
• The Feedburner TEDTalks_video channel: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TEDTalks_video
• The Feedburner Ideas Worth Spreading feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ideasworthspreading

Any way that you get them, these are fascinating commute sized snippets of high energy brain food, all directed at challenging preconceived notions of all kinds. Many are deliberately provocative.

Recent favorites include Lawrence Lessig on Copyright Law and Erin McKean on Redefining the Dictionary.

Google Tech Talks and Google engEDU

As you might expect, given their reputation for attracting and retaining top quality, imaginative engineering talent and for supporting diverse approaches to innovation, lots and lots of good speakers come to Google.

Two series in particular I’m fond of are the Google Tech Talks and Google engEDU. Neither of these has a feed of it’s own per se, they are just search results on Google Video for the appropriate tags, served as an RSS feed:

• Google Tech Talks: http://video.google.com/videofeed?type=search&q=Google+%22Google+Tech+Talks%22″>
  +duration=long&so=1&num=30&output=rss
• Google engEDU: http://video.google.com/videofeed?type=search&q=Google+engEDU&so=0&num=20&output=rss

Again there are a TON of interesting videos – don’t set yourself any expectation of watching them all, but cherry pick from the stream passing by.

Pop! Tech Popcasts

This one stretches the definitiion of favorite since it is brand new, but the initial set of videos is compelling. Pop!Tech is a conference on “The Impact of Technology on People.”

This year they also created Pop!Casts, which are also creative commons licensed, and availble in audio or video formats.

• Popcasts Audio Feed: http://www.poptech.org/popcasts/rss/popcasts_audio_rss.xml
• Popcasts Video feed: http://www.poptech.org/popcasts/rss/popcasts_video_rss.xml

Initial videos on their list include Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, and Jason Moran – and intriguing mix.

With all this great content available, there’s no excuse for not having an active, ongoing, “continuing education” program of your own. So take the time to feed your brain and your imagination.

Just for fun bonus: Ask a Ninja!: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AskANinja

And my recent favorite, Ninja Poetry:

Unfortunately we weren’t able to record the audio of the whole presentation, but the slides themselves are now available on the Optaros site: “Rich Internet Applications: The What, Why, When, and How” (pdf, 3.37 MB).

It’s under a creative commons license.

I’ve left a brief comment there, but wanted to expand on it here. This isn’t just a question of two different approaches to delivering Internet TV – it’s a fundamental difference of passive consumption versus active participation.

The fundamental difference between Joost and Miro is seen in these two quotes.

From the Joost FAQ, section on “Content Related Questions, ” the question is “Can I upload my own videos?“:

Not at the moment. Right now, we’re concentrating on high-quality TV content from well-known TV brands, so that we can provide entertainment to the widest possible audience. Future versions of Joost may allow you to upload your own material, but we have no immediate plans for this.

As opposed to, on the GetMiro site, the entire first-level tab called create, where one reads:

How do I get my Videos on Miro?

Miro converts any media RSS feed into a channel. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of RSS — it’s an open distribution format that works with Miro, iTunes, and lots of other tools. Many blogs and video sharing services automatically generate an RSS feed. Once you have a feed that works in Miro (please test it first!), you can submit it to the Miro Guide.

With pointers to the Make Internet TV site, where you’ll find:

We have created a detailed set of guides for shooting, editing, publishing, and promoting internet video. We think it’s the best resource anywhere. If you are getting started with creating internet video or if you want to learn more about a specific topic, it’s the best place to start.

To me, this is the clear difference between Internet TV imagined as something brought to you by “well-known TV brands” (turning the internet into TV) versus Internet TV imagined as something inherently participatory (turning TV into the internet).

It shouldn’t be hard to tell which one runs on my machine(s).

Help spread the word:

Luckily, despite some overlapping sessions, the keynote by Yochai Benkler was shared across summits and I was able to attend.

If you’re not familiar with Prof. Benkler, you should be. His book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is the treatise on /study of commons-based peer production. (It’s available in many formats including free versions under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Attribution Share-Alike License).

He’s also the author of “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” in which he argues that:

while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

What follows are my rough outline notes of his talk. Benkler’s the kind of speaker where the notes or even the slides don’t do justice to seeing him speak – but at least I’ve got some of the highlights and examples down.

Benkler:

We now live in a world in which:

• The most important inputs into the world’s core economic activities are widely distributed (the ability for globally distributed populations to create information and culture)
• Behaviors once on the periphery of economic concern are moving to the core (social relationships, friendships, concerns about decency and fairness)

Example: The Encyclopedia – used to be thousands of dollars to get a 24 volume set of bound encyclopedias. That pressure drove the price of the Brittanica down to $500 in 1989. That was then followed by Encarta for $59.95 in 2000. Finally, wikipedia which is free.

Benkler mentioned the Nature study on the quality of Wikipedia entries, and Britannica’s response (PDF) to it. (Nature‘s since responded to the Britannica objections).

The reality is that most hands on practicing scientists felt both were equally lousy. (Never ask a deep expert to evaluate a paragraph level summary of a complex topic – they always find it lacking). But that this was even a serious question to be tacked – that Wikipedia could be said by a reasonable person as potentially comparable in quality to Brianicca – is Benkler’s point.

“Information Production” is now the critical economic activity – at the same time that our ways of producing information are shifting to commons based production.

Benkler outlined a number of concepts (and drew distinctions between them) related to Commons Based Production:

1. Peer Production
2. Shared Resource Utilization (things like SETI @Home
3. Free/Open Source Software

Examples included (I added links):

• The search for Steve Fossett
• Craters outlined by volunteers for NASA
• The BBC Help Us Make News
• Threadless
• Learning to Love You More
• Kaitura
• Porkbusters and the Secret Holder
• The Sunlight Foundation Earmark Map
• Black Box Voting and the campaign to decertify certain electronic voting machines
• Media Volunteer (as I’m writing this their site seems to be down – asking for authentication for public pages)
• Cambia BioForge

This is really a new kind of production in that it is not market driven and it is not centralized. We’ve had market-driven, decentralized production (standard firms in the US), we’ve had market-driven, centralized production (large corporations), we’ve had non-market, centralized production (governments and NGOs, non-profits). What we have not had is non-market, decentralized production. (This echoes Clary Shirky’s assertions about Perl being an act of love).

Benkler showed a typology of different ways peer production works, in terms of the types of inputs people are asked to make and the types of organizational strategies they use, as well as the kinds of motivations (extrinsic and intrinsic) driving them. The more creativity and knowledge necessary in the types of contributions people are asked to make, the more you have to move to a many to many type collective form of organization. The major examples here are things like Google and Digg, where the effort required by the user is low (making links on the web means helping Google’s algorithm but you don’t think of it that way, digging something is a single click activity); on the other hand Free/Open Source Software requires much more complex structures. (Not sure if he’s overestimating the “volunteer” nature of open source here given the number of developers on may open source projects who are employed and do this contribution as part of their job).

The key question isn’t whether peer production is a fad – it clearly is here to stay – but how it operates and how we can design to encourage the right kinds of collaboration.

Too much of the theories of cooperation has classically depended on “rational self-interest” but newer explorations in a number of fields (sociology, economics, psychology, evolutionary biology) has started to move beyond that.

Benkler’s argument is that people respond in ways which are not always or first self-interested: people resond in ways which are predictably cooperative under certain conditions:

• Communication
• Humanization
• Trust Construction
• Explicit Norm Creation
• Monitoring / Peer Review / Discipline
• Transparency in Governance
• Fairness (in context – concepts of fairness vary widely)
• Self-Selection (as opposed to assignment to tasks)
• Group Identiity and Investment
• Leadership (older sibling style, not parent)

Benkler made a great point about being wary of introducing extrinstic motivators (ie, money) in systems which have been driven by intrinsic motivators. For example, systems which try to introduce shared ad revenue in the user-contributed-video context may alienate existing users who were motivated by other factors. You try to match love with money and some folks end up not wanting the money and no longer wanting to work for love.

Benkler closed with some of the political impacts of social production – ways in which social production is changing the political reality of people all over the world and ways in which industries, governments, and corporations threatened by social production have tried to push back – the DCMA, Trusted Systems, etc. (Unfortunately by this point he was trying to wrap up very quickly and I didn’t get a good list from his last few slides).

Because Benkler’s operating at a high level of abstraction – thinking about the impacts of peer production at a global and historical scale – it can be hard sometimes to connect his concepts to what companies are trying to do in the “Web 2.0″ space – but his elaborations should help us understand the real fundamental shifts underlying what otherwise might look like a “fad.”

Two recent videos stood out as worth sharing. Both focus on creative visualization, and are inspiring in terms of how some relatively simply changes in visual display of information can have a tremendous impact.

The first is from TED Talks, and it’s Jonathan Harris talking about “The Web’s Secret Stories“:

You can view We Feel Fine and play with it yourself – but I’ll warn you it is ponderously slow on my Linux machine – much more engaging in Windows or Mac OS.

It’s also open – at least in the “here’s an API, go mash up something cool” sense. (Free as in beer and free as in API but not as in Free software – Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike).

I wish I could spend a week just playing with what this API makes available, maybe using Yahoo! pipes to connect feelings to news stories about locations?

The second is from OSCON, and it’s Ben Fry talking about Processing, a design and prototyping tool:

Click To Play

Processing is Open Source – GPL/LGPL – so you can not only try it out and see what goodness you can make, you can also contribute to its development.

I find it nearly impossible after watching these to go back to standard office docs – but I think that’s a good thing.

Hyperlocal will not, I firmly believe, happen at one site. It will work only via networks: content, commercial, social. It will work by gathering, not producing.

In other words, hyperlocal efforts must be based on content aggregation and syndication models, not just content creation models. We need flexible networks for connecting together content producers, advertisers (funding sources), and content publishers.

Jarvis also points to Paul Fahri’s “Rolling the Dice” in the AJR, which asks “is there a real business in this kind of business?,” and answers that “the field as a whole is so far financially marginal.”

The problem is that Fahri’s approach looks at it from the point of view of individual sites, not networks of sites. Jarvis argues:

we will need a combination of models and platforms: Newspapers will have local sites. Local bloggers will do their own thing. There is a need for group sites like Backfence or GoSkokie, which helped inspire it, where people can contribute. There is a need to organize all this; I hope Outside.in can do that (disclosure: I’m an adviser). There is a need to support all this financially; that is where newspapers can play a crucial role, setting up ad networks and infrastructure. And then we still need to see what will motivate people to contribute what they know: money, ego, influence, what? And we need to see what help people need: technology, attention, training, support.

I registered for and took a look around outside.in, which Jarvis mentions, but they don’t seem to have made up into my neck of the woods (01950). There was only one story, which was a Boston.com story about their Metro North edition. (Which means it was applicable, but very broadly to the whole North Shore- certainly not hyperlocal).

There’s a better, organic local site at Newburyport 01950 – but there doesn’t seem to be any way to tell Outside.in that, except to link to specific stories.

What’s the best hyperlocal site where you are?

How can for-profit newspapers learn to work with local information sources (professional, amateur, and everything in between) in a way that enriches both?

Can’t we imagine a business model for a network which is sustainable across the network rather than focused on profit making at a single site?

Licensing through things like Creative Commons is also part of the picture – enabling legitimate, stable content reuse with attribution and rights control.

Another missing piece is a solution the global ID problem – I had to create yet another account at outside.in just to be able to point other 01950 interested folks to the Newburyport River Fest this weekend. Will I ever use that account again?

Executive Summary:

Enterprise 2.0 promises a new approach to creating, managing, and consuming knowledge within the enterprise, allowing patterns and value to emerge out of relatively freeform, experimental, unrestricted exchanges. Unlike knowledge management systems of the nineties, which locked users into strict taxonomies, enforced rigid workflows, and reflected hierarchical management relationships, emerging social computing systems rely on lightweight, adaptable frameworks designed to facilitate knowledge creation across traditional boundaries, enable rapid change, and foster contributions from throughout the management hierarchy.

This new knowledge management paradigm needs to be supported by new technologies and approaches. It isn’t, however, just a matter of selecting the right set of applications or the right platform; there is no “One True Architecture” which includes all the features and functions users could ever desire.

The paper goes on to talk about Drupal and Alfresco as core platforms on top of which Enterprise 2.0 solutions can be delivered.

I’ll be at Enterprise 2.0 for the next few days – attending sessions (and blogging what I can) and at the Optaros booth during the demo pavilion hours.

Stop by and say hello!

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words. Words. Words.
- Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii

I’m not normally prone to quoting Shakespeare – more of a Modernist and Americanist by (academic) training and by inclination. But a few blog memes this weekend have me thinking of Hamlet and his antic disposition, and the potential for words to be meaningless.

First, James Governer and Nick Carr talking about Twitter.

Governer’s posts (“If Markets Are Conversations Then Twitter Is Money” and “Somebody shot the president! Twitter: Nothing To See Here, Get Back To Work“) argue that the 140 character limit on Twitter is a virtue, leading to greater precision and reduced verbosity:

“if you can’t say it in 140 characters its not meaningful”

With Twitter I can get up to date with my network in less than half an hour – the beauty of the 140 character limit for messages.

Carr agrees to the premise, but turns the conclusion on its head (“The Tweet Filled Void“):

I think he’s right that there are far too many words in circulation today, and I also think he’s right that meaning and even profundity can come in tweet-sized packages. But I think he’s wrong to suggest that Twitter is the friend of brevity. For that to be true, we’d have to assume that the messages streaming through Twitter are briefer than they would have been otherwise – that they’ve been pared down to their essence, like telegraphs. I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I don’t think that most tweets are substitutes for longer messages. Rather, they’re additional verbiage layered atop all the existing verbiage. Twitter adds to the great landfill of words; it doesn’t subtract from it.

Twitter, in other words, is the real “evidence of the verbosity of our culture.”

I have to agree – the things most folks say (my impression, of course) on twitter are not replacements for things they would have said in longer form elsewhere. They’re more like thoughts people might have kept to themselves, or IM’d or emailed with equal brevity.

To me, twitter sounds too much like chatter. But you’re probably tiring of hearing me say that.

Lest you think I’m twitter-obsessed, the other conversation that’s leading to me to think of the Danish prince is the one about the presidential debates.

CNN has announced that they will release the upcoming presidential debtates they host without restrictions:

The presidential debates are an integral part of our system of government, in which the American people have the opportunity to make informed choices about who will serve them. Therefore, CNN debate coverage will be made available without restrictions at the conclusion of each live debate.

While this lead Arlen Parsa to conclude that this means a Creative Commons license (since updated to a “creative commons type license”), in reality there isn’t a specific mention of what license will be used.

In fact, the announcement suggests that the only way to allow free circulation is to waive all restrictions – a major mistake given the whole structure of Creative Commons and the notion of “some rights reserved” in which you explicitly retain copyright while enabling specified uses.

There’s also no mention of what technical / functional mechanisms will be allowed for redistribution – will CNN do something to make video available, or simply promise not to take action against anyone who manages to record the debate and circulate it? Will they pre-seed edited videos into popular sharing channels?

Regardless, I think it is an advancement to enable the footage to circulate.

The question is, though, what will the real benefit of a freely-circulating presidential debate be, if the debate is run like most presidential debates: carefully restricted questions, soundbite answers with no substance, minimal follow on, and lots of evasion?

If all we get are more opportuntities to send soundbites to each other, is that really progress? Does being able to follow Obama on Twitter make me any clearer on his policies, or any more informed about the issues?

Brevity may be the essence of wit, but it provides no guarantee of wisdom.

I am writing in strong support of a letter from a bipartisan coalition of academics, bloggers and Internet activists recently addressed to you and the Democratic National Committee. The letter asks that the video from any Democratic Presidential debate be available freely after the debate, by either placing the video in the public domain, or licensing it under a Creative Commons (Attribution) license.

Since then it seems Edwards has joined in as well:

. . . I am asking each news network to make video footage from the presidential debates that they broadcast available on the internet for the public to view and use responsibly. I am also asking Chairman Dean, who is playing a valuable role in organizing many of the Democratic primary debates, to use his influence with the networks to make the debates more broadly available.

The Creative Commons license terms offer an easy way to ensure that the networks’ rights are protected. Much of the content on my own campaign web site is available under just such a license.

Commercial constraints are severe enough in their effect in diluting the substance of our campaigns. Limiting access to long-form televised debates makes matters worse.

Hopefully the debates themselves will be worth all the fuss about making them available – if it is the same old sound bytes having them under a CC license won’t be terribly helpful.

Sony’s new competitor to YouTube, eyeVio, will license content users upload under a Creative Commons Attribution license by default.

Lessig points to this article from Digital Trends as the source of this bit of info.

I wish Flickr would do this. Flickr already allows you to set, as an individual user, your preferences for uploaded images to default to a specific license, including several creative commons licenses, – but the global default is still “all rights reserved.”

There’s a huge difference in adoption curve when you make something the default (see this article for the debate about organ donation, which is an opt-out in many European countries but opt-in in the US).

I’d argue it is reasonable to assume that people generally want to enable some usage, when they are uploading content to a site designed to share that content. It is also reasonable to assume they want to encourage sharing when they are uploading a site which provides things like embed codes (e.g. YouTube) or guest passes (Flickr).

YouTube, in fact, doesn’t even ask you to identify a license for the content you upload – perhaps a way of ignoring the fact that you may not own the copyright in the first place? They do give you a copyright notice (‘Do not upload copyrighted material for which you don’t own the rights or have permission from the owner”) but they don’t offer you any options in terms of how to present uploaded videos with respect to licensing.

The presentation itself is available under a creative commons license via Slideshare – if you actually download the ppt file from there, you can view the notes on many of the slides as well – or it also embedded below.

It’s a compelling presentation, well designed, connecting the power of brands (and consumer’s emotional connections to them) with the rise of consumer-generated media:

In our a world where consumers hop from one medium location to the next, we need to follow them to as many places as possible, yet also need to recognise that the stories people tell about our brand are one of the most effective media to affect our brand’s performance both in a positive and in a negative sense.

Because those consumers your traditional media efforts may miss, will need to be reached through the friends that do talk to them.

In short, in a million channel world, the brands whose consumers tell the best stories, win.

(Thys also mentions in the comments on the Logic + Emotion post that he’s working on a update, which responds to “the memo that participation and adoption of Social Media isn’t as compelling as we think” – should be interesting to see.)

What stories does your brand encourage users to tell?

Unfortunately, most of the time, consumer brand experiences run from mediocre to awful.

He notes that, in a change from the old State of the Blogosphere reports:

With this report, we expand on this tradition by introducing information and analysis relating to the broader range of social media on the Web — what we and many others call the Live Web (another good definition). Technorati continues to grow well beyond its roots at the leading blog search engine; increasingly, we are the main aggregation point for all forms of social media on the Web, including blogs, of course, but also video, photos, audio such as podcasts and much more.

It’s odd to me that the links for “Live Web” actually point to Linux Journal – I’d always though of “Live” as a kind of Microsoftism – to go with Windows Live Search, Live Spaces, Office Live, etc.

(According to Doc Searls, the “World Live Web” meme goes back to 2001 and was coined by Allen Searls – I know Doc has been using this distinction between Live web and Static web for some time.)

Anyway, some conclusions:

• 70 million blogs tracked, 120 thousand new ones each day
• Doubling now takes 320 days, not 180 (continued lengthening from last report)
• In Q4 2006, there were 22 blogs in the top 100 most popular sites, up from 12 in Q3 – there is an increasing overlap / mixture of “mainstream media” and “blog” audiences

Interesting that Sifry doesn’t take on any of the reports that blogging will reach it’s peak in 2007 – or is already in the process of dying out. (See this BBC article about Gartner’s predictions, or see Bruce Sterling’s SXSW rant that Blogging will be dead within 10 years).

While I don’t see blogging dying anytime soon, I can imagine it might change forms.

Will Twitter surpass blogging? I hope not. What about tumblelogs, on platforms like Tumblr?

Perhaps I’m too old (at 37 I’m on the late edge of the curve for many Digital-era technologies) but I prefer the longer form blog to these microblogs, even if they are updated in near real-time.

It’d be interesting to plot average length of blog post over time – are we (collectively) writing more but shorter posts?

Is there no future in the long form essay on the weblog?

(Technorati has also set up a homepage for these reports, enabling users to review all of them in reverse chronological order, and clarifying the creative commons license under which the reports are published).

(Is there anyone who would say “controlled knowledge” is better than “open knowledge”? If they would, they wouldn’t use those terms – piracy versus respect for intellectual property, perhaps?)

Panel was moderated by Francesca Rodriquez from Creative Commons, and included:

• Robert Capps (Wired)
• Brett Gaylor (Open Source Cinema)
• Hemai Parthasarathy (Public Library of Science)
• Gil Penchina (Wikia)

Rough notes follow, but there were a few highlights:

1. Clips from Gaylor’s film, including someone (an RIAA spokesperson) arguing that “a song is just like the man who makes donuts” (See episode #1 – MGM vs. Grokster)
2. Capps talking about the challenges of transparency in traditional magazine publishing – you’re being transparent, talking in advance about what articles you plan to run – but your competitors are not. (Well, I’d say, those you think of as your competitiors are not – but there’s a whole other set of competitors who are).
3. Parthasarathy talking about the difficult getting academics to contribute quality time to things like peer reviewing for Public Library of Science journal when those things are not recognized by tenure committees. (Parable: God created a Scientist and everything was great – pure pursuit of knowledge, abundant resources. Then he created Colleagues.)
4. Penchina articulating (to Capps) the difference between opening up to the public something which for a long time they have been excluded from (Come into the palace, peasants, and please don’t mess up the furniture. Sorry we kept you out so long), versus creating something wholly new from scratch (Let’s build something together, all of us). This is the difference between wikipedia and wired’s wiki.

Notes:

—-

Introductions:

Gaylor – making a film about copyright and music, you culture, etc -  he showed the beginning of the film- the basement tapes.  “a song is just like a man who makes donuts”

Wired – still a magazine, owned by Conde Nast. But we want to be forward looking. The next issue, which will be out in a few weeks. It’s all about radical transparency.

Parthasarathy – a non profit, started as an advocacy effort.  Public funded research outcomes should be publically available.  PLoS publishes two different journals – one is tightly peer reviewed  with a strong editorial vision – these are the most important papers -  the other publishes all scientifically valid papers – without editorial vision, just through peer review in the simplest sense.  (Is it valid science, not what impact will it have).

Wikia – see wikia.com

-
What is the place of open content in publishing?

Capps – we’re trying to learn how to open the story before it is  published – not just reactions / letter to the editor, but making more  transparent what it is that we’re writing about before it happens. Could wired publish all its articles under cc license? Yes, of course  they could, but “I can’t even imagine” all the tradition we’d have to buck at Conde Nast, and the writers we use.

Penchina -  there is a key difference between different kinds
of openness:
- Open in that you can participate in adding comments, insights
- Open in that you can take the same content and reuse it elsewhere
- Open in the sense of transparency

Gaylor – is culture really opening up or is this being co-opted? Open
Source Cinema – we need you not just to watch the film but to
participate – we need the web to make this film with us.

Capps – We’ve got 3 months from the time we close on an issue to when it hands the stands. There are challenges if you are transparent and others are  not – you have a power differential. Getting scooped may happen – but  the bet is that it happens less often than we think. More accurately,  it may even discourage it – let’s not work on that, they’re already  all over it.

Penchina – how’s the community take the concept? GFDL and CC both allow you to have free content and be commercial. Our users are passionate about their topic and want other people to see their point of view. They want the respect of their peers.

Parthasarathy – this has been one of the challenges – people’s rewards in science are directly tied to their publishing – so why should they do  it for free? They need to learn the value of open peer review, comments etc – many are reluctant to do it if they won’t get CV type credit.

Capps – Clive Thompson wrote the cover article – on transparency. The whole thing at Wired is really an experiment. Their is some tension between the craft and the polished product – this is all about seeing how the sausage is made. I don’t necessarily want anyone to see that – because part of the process involves going through a lot of crap.

Gaylor- clicking the post button on that rough cut can be bad – with enough eyeballs, any bugs in my edit will be shallow. It can be challenging to do it but ultimately the best documentaries are excercises in democracy.

Penchina – we’re painfully transparent already – to the point that if I want to leave an email to one of our users it is public and anyone can  read it. It’s clearly a revolution, and we’re coming at it from one side, Wired is coming at it from a different end, and it isn’t at all  clear where it will land. He sees the new challenge as being how do  you get the cream to rise to the top – how do you find the good stuff  and avoid the crap.

Parthasarathy – how do you align the rewards for new behavior? If we can’t change the tenure and review process then people will not participate. The most vocal folks in science are the most critical. One Nobel  Laureate was concerned about publishing in PLOS because we allow e-letters, and there is someone who follows him around attacking his  work – which is a legitimate concern. We think over time the valuable comments will rise to the top, but in truth that remains to be seen.

Capps – success is what we need. Once we’ve demonstrated the value and it actually works and the community kicks in. One of the things we’re looking at is how we can use wikis.

Good answer from Penchina – one of the challenges is that for a long time you had things controlled – there’s a lot of water behind  the damn of people wanting to take control. It’s kind of like getting to be principal for the day.

[You're taking something you've built and own, and asking them to contribute, versus building something from scratch]

–
[Questions from the audience - mostly about "why don't people get it"]

—

Capps – Registration is really just a very thin door – but it is a way of  trying to handle spam.

Wikia guy – we believe that registration just for leaving a comment is  a bad idea. People motivated to leave spam comments have no problem registering, people who want to leave real comments don’t want to be bothered to register – you punish good behavior and enable bad behavior, and it takes time and energy to build and maintain.

Panelists included:

• Genn Otis Brown (YouTube)
• John Buckman (Magnatune)
• Laurie Racine (Eyespot, DotSUB, co-founder of Public Knowledge)
• Max Schorr (GOOD)

As is typically of the last panel of the day, I didn’t really get good substantial notes. But there were a few highlights:

Why does Good Magazine use the creative commons license?

To enable the contributors to retain control of what they’ve produced. For now, we just pay people the same (that they would make in a more traditional, exclusive license-to-publish mode) but try to also educate contributors about their rights and enable them to leverage their content more broadly. It isn’t that contributors come to us wanting creative commons licensing – we have to explain to them what it makes possible.

YouTube is an example of the need for a way to clearly express a remix culture. They are relying on the DMCA and the takedown notice as the best way to enable  sharing and participation. But it seems like it really the wrong way to go about it – post everything as though it were all open content and rely on content owners to protest.

(John Buckman from Magnatune blogged about the discussion, saying this:

The energy level was a bit low, so I picked a fight with the lawyer from Youtube. The lawyer is actually Glenn Brown, former head of Creative Commons, and we’ve been friendly for years, so this was hardly a nasty fight. But, point was the Youtube is the “wonderful thing that’s gone terribly wrong” in that every media owner is angry with them and spewing DMCA take-down notices at them, and it’s not clear at all to me that Youtube will survive the collected venom of the video industry, and Youtube looks a lot like Napster to me (from a legal standpoint). Glenn countered that there was only one lawsuit currently, so there was hardly a stampede of lawsuits. Ironically enough, the next day Viacom launched their billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube.

There was certainly some friendly jabs going back and forth, but I wish they’d really been able to open up and have that discussion be the focus of the panel, which otherwise was fairly tepid).Brown: fair use, when interpreted correctly, actually works pretty well – the goal shouldn’t be the reform of companies through legal action.

Companies do have a responsibility to  be transparent about what they are doing, but we shouldn’t look for legislation to make that happen.

We need icons for this like the universal ones for hospitals and toilets – we need human readable licenses, with links through to the full version if necessary.

Even for Creative Commons – there are challenges around what something like non-commercial use might mean in every context.

–

Q: From audience – is there even really a line to be drawn, in the sense that we ought to just allow sharing. It’s only pushing the line back, rather than reforming.

Do you want open content to be a hardline party or a big tent party. Principle and effectiveness can be in conflict. Creative Commons decided we want to be a big tent party – that’s what we think will be the most effective.

Books to read: The Future of Music. Also Promises to Keep.

Buckman: The music business does 18 billion a year in revenue. 12bil is licensing. Only 6bil is retail sales. The more you are in the business the more you realize we are in the business of creating culture which we then stamp on things- shirts, posters, cards, concert revenue.

Racine: The fashion industry dwarfs both the msuci industry and the film industry – there isn’t any copyright protection for designs. Knock-offs occur, but are broadly tolerated (until they start using the logos / trademarks -that’s where the line has been drawn for that industry).

Monday’s panel “Convergence Culture: A Conversation with Henry Jenkins” was simply further evidence that I’m right to be Jenkins Fanboy.

(I ran into Erik after the session for lunch and told him “Henry Jenkins is what I want to be when I grow up.” Iwas only partially kidding.)

Jenkins was interviewed by Danah Boyd, who was smart enough to generally allow Jenkins to talk with minimal interruption (except at one point to chime in – “do you see why I think he’s god!?”).

Here’s a photo from the pre-session setup – really a crappy photo on my part, so I had to mess with the brightness/contrast to make it clearer:

(I was kind of far back in the room, too – but the audio was great).

My notes from the session are below – covered a lot of the same ground as the Beyond Broadcast keynote, but certainly threw in some additional insights.

My favorite: “What everyone’s now calling Web 2.0 is really just fandom minus the stigma”

Lots of links to issues discussed during the session can be found at Jenkins’ blog:  “If you attended our session at south by southwest . . . ”

Notes:

Boyd’s known Jenkins since he was one of her profs at MIT where she studied computer science.

Jenkins recalled that becoming a fan preceded becoming an academic. Academia saw (and still does in many ways) fans as dupes of the culture
industry, as intellectually immature. I felt that academia was telling me to “get a life” – but instead of getting a life I wrote a book. (Textual Poachers).

“Whateveryone else is calling web2.0 is fandom without the stigma”

Industries are learning from fan culture. More people are finding fandom then every before – much more so than  20 years ago. In part this is a difference in distribution – tools which are available. Compare fanzine distribution with the internet. Much easier  to not only create and distribute but also locate and discover.

But there are challenges: Schools are dumbing down at exactly the same moment that popular mass culture is  expecting more – Pokemon expects children to be familiar with over 250 characters at the same moment that schools are reluctant to  teach the greek pantheon of mythology because it is overly complex.
–
Boyd: what about fans being sued – official creators who don’t like fandom’s version of what they are doing.
–

The reality is the producers never had control – the reality is I can  take your characters and content and make it something else. Lets recognize the unpaid and invisible labor of fans and how it is  contributing to and enriching the revenue of the products.

There’a variety – a spectrum of approaches between active engagement and hostility.

Too many of the folks who are fighting for electronic freedom are pushed too far into technology platforms rather than fans who are  creating transformative fiction – defending napster rather than going into pure free-speech type arrangements.

Bullying overassertion of intellectual property authority – the DCMA  takedown effect. It isn’t that the courts have supported the bullying
or even legitimized it, but that the money wins – it is too hard to  fight against the law firms retained by large creative firms.

Participation gap – we finally get good action on the digital divide  but now the very places where that access is most widely spread, and  now that is threatened by DOPA, filtering, censorship, etc. Passed by wide cultural concensus – security moms – appear moderate but support this.

Mark Foley was one of the original authors of it – now it is back as the protecting online children act by Stevens.

People are getting hit from both sides – cease and desist letters from studios  and filters installed at libraries at the same moment – we need to put  these pieces together and think about them systematically.

“You” is under fire right now – you may have been named person of the year but you are in danger of losing your basic rights.

Connecticut senator who wants to implement age-verification technology for any social networking software or any technology that would let them communicate with anyone else.

Its interesting that in a heavily partisan conflicted culture the one place both sides agree is that our kids should be muzzled. The politics of fear has a gendered dimension as well – we’re afraid of our sons and afraid for our daughters.

McArthur foundation work on digital literacy and how we can better create mechanisms for teaching about and empowering teens to use digital culture rather than hiding it from them.

Spontaneous applause breaks out in the audience on the “democracy isn’t a special event, its a lifestyle” meme.

Photoshopping for democracy – the people’s editorial cartoon. But the peoples language will be broader and cruder – we will see racist images of obama, sexist images of hilary, etc – the traditional editorial cartoon ethics and standards do not apply.

As spiderman tells us, with great power comes great responsibility.

Middlebury college history department has banned wikipedia? They’re missing the difference between history as product and history as process – fundamental problem. Knowledge is produced – why is academia still struggling with this fact?

[This is one of the major critical points we used to try to highlight when I was teaching writing-in-the-disciplines at the University of Washington back in the 1990s - "history" isn't some endless set of objective fact but a highly interpretive and argumentative medium in which different versions of a story fight for acceptance - it would seem wikipedia could be an actual object lesson in that struggle.]

The other impressive thing about wikipedia is the way in which the ethics of the community are open, well described, and carefully articulated. Wikipedia is also in a very real sense the first global story of some of the wars between nations, of which national history books tend to reflect very specific versions.

[One Wikipedia entry that I think exposes this well is the one on "Naming the American Civil War" - how does the "War of Northern Agression" strike you?]

–
Boyd: One of the challenges to wikipedia and other UGC stories – UNC  video breakup on valentine’s day. (YouTube video). It’s a very
uncomfortable video – she stands up for herself, back and forth, etc.  It flew across the web on valentines day – the whole thing was a hoax.
–

My own 25 year old son does not use YouTube!.

PT Barnum and the 19th century concept of Humbug – Barnum would say “the status of this exhibit is up for dispute – come see for yourself.”

This is the same type at which the naturalists in new zealand were uncovering various elements – the duck-billed platypus. People really were unsure at the time what was really and what was not – it has always been difficult to determine veracity within entertainment.

The challenge is just that people are getting angry about being faked out – why is it that we keep getting angry about this?

The UNC breakup video is a well timed and highly sophisticated fake – how do we tell that this is fake when the tasering of the student in
the UCLA library is real? How will we tell the difference?

Clay Shirky and Beth Coleman argument about the value of second life – a la medieval carnival and the carnivalesque. (See the “On Second Life” section of this blog post).

The Boston tea party as an example of carnival – but were taught about it as kind of sit in – it was really potential much more explosive or  radical than that.

This is embodied theory – second life. Using second life to reflect on first life.

Steven Duncan’s book Dream – the learning from vegas book on politics.

The sistine chapel is a remix / mashup.

Nothing inevtably grows out the technologies – these early waves came  and went – but some of these traces still exist. Lol was used in the  19th century print culture.

Eirenreich on collective joy – depression arose when people stopped  celebrating in the streets.

Personalized / atomized / individualized is not what it is about – its  about community media, social media, the world of a networked society.

Second life isn’t narcissistic – it is about connections to other  people – these can bring us joy but they can also bring us pain.

We’re moving into a communal space in the electronic world but a  privatized space in the physical world.

It isn’t that technology is neutral – its that it can be used for very  positive things – it has an impact on the environment but it also helps to build the awareness of it.

–

There is a kind of a dependence on the high hollywood, expensive  special effects culture – we have certainly become dependent on “mass media” culture in the sense of large media companies.

It only makes sense that our current culture is heavily based on what  came before it – just as our current global mass culture was/is  heavily based on what came before it.

Current fan fiction writers who are writing fan fiction not from the point of view of being fans but because it gives them a common  language – if I write about my high school you may not read it, but if I write that same story about a common fictional high school you might.

It was moderated by Jason Levitt (Yahoo! Developer Network) and included:

• Jeremy Hogan (Lulu)
• Matt Rubens (Jamglue)
• Derek Powazek (8020 publishing, which produces JPG Magazine, about which I blogged a while back)
• Heather Champ (Flickr community manager)

Aside from the humorous bits (the bored balloon clown), it was interesting to see a discussion full of people whose products truly are people powered in the most basic sense. They are not communities which were built up on “professional” content and then opened – what a lot of large media companies are trying to do these days – but built “from a blank screen” out of unpaid user contributions.

They started by sharing the deep links in the panel’s history – Levitt’s at Yahoo, Flickr is owned by Yahoo!, Heather (who works at Flickr) is cofounder of JPG magazine, Derek publishes JPG Magazine (and Derek and Heather are married), JPG magazine started out published through Lulu (before going on to do offset print runs on their own), and JamGlue would like to be owned by Yahoo!.

Some of the most interesting discussion was around the unintended uses people have for the tools, and the unexpected issues that arise in a community driven, people powered site.

For example, Matt talked about how JamGlue had been originally designed “for people like us” – but that their user base includes a lot of young, hip-hop influenced, rappers and remixers – who have a completely different understanding of what “tagging” means – and they have been tagging each other – just writing stuff on each others pages that aren’t really tags in the traditional folksonomy sense.

Jeremy talked about unexpected genres and subgenres – heavy frontier lesbian erotica for example – which they had not imagined, but are happy to have because the system is design to allow people to use if for what they want (with some clear mechanisms for separating adult from open access content).

Heather talked about when GeoTagging launched on Flickr, and someone had tagged a bunch of photos so that when you looked at a map they spelld “fuck ” in little thumbnails over Greenland.
–

Funniest moment:

When JPG launched story tools the first one was by Jenna Cooper – pictures taken in character as a drug addled clown, sad clown, etc. She apparently missed the “clowns are scary” memo.

Also litigious. No I’m serious.

Someone had taken a photo of a clown sitting at a bus stop – titled it “bored balloon clown” – and posted it – but the clown threatened to sue us.

If someone was going to sue flickr, it would have been great if it were a balloon clown – can you imagine a crowd of people twisting balloons into giant middle fingers outside your headquarters?
—

Q: How do you deal with quality?

Jeremy: at first, there was a lot of crap – there was a lot of water held behind the floodgates, and a lot of people waiting to tell their
story. Now it has evened out quite a bit.

Q: Do you feel you can compete effectively with professional photography magazines?

Derek: When the going gets wierd, the wierd turn pro – hunter s thompson. The more people you have, with the right interface and the right experience, will always produce something better than a small group.

8020 publishing’s next title is going to be in the travel genre – travel stories, advice – the wisdom of first personaccounts. Everybody has something they know about somewhere. Wouldn’t you rather hear from someone who lives there rather than some paid outsider.

It’s not about getting rid of the editor – JPG uses a hybrid model – setting the tone, setting the standard, providing leadership – the community voting determines a pool from which the editor selects.

What’s the danger of no wisdom of editors – lots of babies and sunsets no matter what the theme is.

Jeremy: Lulu calls this a retro future model – at the end of the day its just a machine that craps books. You can use technology to disintermediate so that you don’t need to justify 50,000 copies of something to drive the market.

The books don’t exist until someone buys them. Therefore it really doesn’t matter how many will buy a book before we make itavailable.

Q: Given the ease of use, why are their only 100,000 users? Everyone has a story to tell.

Jeremy: The problem is you actually do have to write it. It isn’t just enough to have a story to tell, you have to actually have told it. One of the problems is that people have a stigma about being self-published- it’s like the vanity press. There’s a different feeling in music, art – in book publishing it is still “will my mom still respect me if I’m published on lulu?”

And some professional use Lulu – SpiderWorks publishing on lulu – lots of mac titles, bridging out into Open Source titles.

The right Lulu customer doesn’t want the traditional publishing world – they choose to go through Lulu in order to retain control over their product.

JPG ended up using Lulu as a kind of launching pad – we looked at spending thousands of dollars per run in traditional offset printing versus free to us other than our time with Lulu, so it was infinitely more cost effective.

Q: What has evolved and changed over time?

Matt: Turns out people want to have sex, make money, and not be bored. Turned out that the most frequent question asked on JamGlue was “are you a boy or a girl” – originally we didn’t have gender on the pages.

—-

Q: What kind of challenge has Yahoo! presented in terms of building community.

When you’re a small fry, you have to work really hard to define to every newcomer what is important – that are not going to go away, that you are trustworthy, etc.

But if you’re the size of a planet – you have to spend more time with every new user to show that you’re not evil.

Q: from audience – what do you do with a pro user who looks great but then ends up going bad – what happens when someone who was one of your best users suddenly starts posting photo ads or whatever.

Derek – there needs to be someone there whose job it is to respond and deal with those issues – it means you need to have someone who is in the community – dude, whassup?

How do you build a reward system – you provide a clear sense of this is what we want, and what we’re about – and a certain kind of photography – when people wander away from that, we have a community of people who care about that and want to tell us – report a problem link – a ratting out interface.

Turns out that people who’s photos you’ve removed for a given problem actually become those who are the most likely to then patrol the rest of the site.

Lulu – it’s about curated concensus – true community members manage their own communities. As Bob Young says – its easy to game Lulu: just get half-a-million of your closest friends to buy your book and everyone wins.

Best question from the audience – where do you fall on the spectrum of anonymous / pseudonomous / real user base – you learn over time, together – you are looking for consistent behavior attached to a given name – whether it is their real name or not.

Derek: we have Firstname Lastname fields but also username – so people can be anonymous. But in terms of getting published in the magazine, most of those users have a “real” firstname and lastname.

Heather – give people the tools to create their own environments and determine what they feel is appropriate.

The slides are available here:

• Building a Business Case for Ajax Applications (odp – Open Document Presentation)
• Building a Business Case fo Ajax Applications (pdf – Portable Document Format)
• Building a Business Case for Ajax Applications (ppt – PowerPoint Format)

The first was on “Participatory Culture,” moderated by Jesse Walker from Reason magazine, with Kenny Miller from MTV, Elizabeth Osder from Yahoo!, and (via webcam) Arin Crumley from the film Four-Eyed Monsters.

The second was on “Participatory Democracy,” moderated by Drew Clark, from the Center for Public Integrity, with Jennifer Harris from the Center for Digital Democracy, Chuck DeFeo (former eCampaign Manager for Bush-Cheney 2004) from Salem Communications, and Tad Hirsch from the MIT Media Lab.

Unfortunately my notes from the panels aren’t very good – I was spending more time reading questions in the “backchannel questions tool” and being snarky on the IRC backchannel to take efficient notes.

Luckily, the videos are up in the Berman Media Lab, so you can view them directly.

Related posts:

David Weinberger liveblogged about the first panel

David Silver covered the whole day, including the panels

(Update: The recorded videos from the conference are now available).

Beyond Broadcast 2007 kicked off with a keynote by Henry Jenkins, which was by turns entertaining, upsetting, and thought provoking.

Much of the material was drawn from Convergence Culture in which:

Jenkins argues that the debate over convergence will redefine the face of American popular culture. Industry leaders see opportunities to direct content across many channels to increase revenue and broaden markets. At the same time, consumers envision a liberated public sphere, free of network controls, in a decentralized media environment. Sometimes corporate and grassroots efforts reinforce each other, creating closer, more rewarding relations between media producers and consumers. Sometimes these two forces are at war.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, as a sign of how good the talk was?) I was so busy paying attention most of what I got into my notes were the examples, rather than the questions Jenkins used them to raise – but I’ll try to recreate the as much as I can of the context and the argument here.

He began with the “Bert is Evil” scenario, which lead to the image of Bert sitting with Bin Laden made its way into actual printed posters waved in real-world anti-US demonstrations. (I though Jenkins said the site’s creator took it down, saying it was getting “too close to reality” – but there is a site up now – perhaps resurrected by others?).

In a more explicitly or deliberately policitized example, the film This is What Democracy Looks Like which distributed cameras to protesters in the streets during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.

But is that the only thing democracy can look like? He pointed also to Velvet Strike, in which people graffiti anti-war slogans inside the game CounterStrike, and the single by the legendary KO – “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People.”

Finally (or at least those are all the ones I managed to scribble down while he was talking), he talked about Vote For The Worst, which is a kind of mass participatory hack of American Idol – and in the process debunked the whole “more people voted for American Idol than in the last presidential election” – pointing out that more votes were cast, but people were allowed to vote as many times as they wanted.

The question, really, is what happens when mass participation meets mass media. Traditionally mass media meant broadcasting – the few speaking to the many – but now we have (again – this isn’t the first time it has happened – more on that below) the potential of the many speaking to the many.

What Jenkins points out, rightly, is that the media reform movements too often fall into the same set of tropes and metaphors as the popular, mass, commercial culture they hope to work against. In trying to negate the commercialism of modern mass culture, they accept its very premise: that the populace is powerless in the face of popular culture, and can only passively consume.

This means ascribing enormous power to popular media, but without ascribing any power to the “audience.”

What, he asks, would a reform movement look like which took popular culture seriously, as something to be leveraged rather than overcome?

(Pointed to Stephen Duncombe’s book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy – looks like a kind of Learning from Las Vegas for contemporary left/liberal/progressive politics).

We need to learn to manufacture dissent, he argued, echoing and responding to Chomsky’s notion of manufacturing consent.

Some examples of gestures toward manufacturing dissent:

• When V for Vendetta was released as a film, though based on a screenplay about England during the Thatcher era, it had clearly updated to reflect the contemporary US. A variety of amateur videos sprung up on YouTube explicitly connecting the film to the Bush administration. (This one, for example).
• Republicans for Voldemort – t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc., drawn from the comic strip goats.
• Billionaires for Bush – a group which would often show up at Bush rallies – check out the photo gallery

But the challenge is not to make culture interactive – interactivity is a property of technology – participation is a property of cultures.

Jenkins traced amateur publishing back to pre-civil war US pamphleteers, and covered amateur radio in the early 19th century.

In both cases (print and radio) what began as a relatively populist, amateur and youth culture got transformed through commercial intervention into a closed, broadcast, few to many, passive medium.

What could kill participatory media this time?

The use of fear as a mechanism for shutting down free speech. Ted Stevens (“He of the Tubes”) and the DOPA act – which Stevens has reintroduced as the “Protecting Children in the 21^st Century Act.“

The combination of anti-free-speech regulation and the attack of over-zealous copyright protection – it is these two things which can kill participatory culture.

What else stands in the way of a truly democratic, participatory culture?

The digital divide has been somewhat effectively combatted – though it is still an issue on Native American reservations. But there is still a great difference of participation – it’s different to have 30 minutes on a public computer with filters and such, than 24/7/365 broadband connection.

Jenkins uses the Save the Internet coalition – bi-partisan, leveraging popular culture, including participatory culture, as a strong example of what is possilble. (See, for example, the “ask a ninja” video on net neutrality).

I worry that the example works only because the issue is not devisive for the audience it targets – not to say there isn’t controversy over net neutrality, but it isn’t an issue like marriage rights or reproductive rights where the audience is divided.

–

One question from the audience was about the access kids get to the internet (and new media / digital literacy in general) at school – Jenkins talked about the “mass de-skilling of the kids when they enter the schoolhouse gate” with respect to technologies of participation and interaction.

So how do we educate educators? How do we teach digital media literacy to those in secondary and primary education, so that they don’t feel threatened by it?

(David Weinberger liveblogged the same presentation)

I’ve been checking them out for a while now, and trying to decide whether I should “burn” my feeds.

Honestly, I’m not sure what’s holding me back, but I find myself reluctant to do so.

Is it just my “I want control” mentality, which says that handing my feeds over to a third party means I will somehow have less control?

(Not that I’ve ever done anything unusual with my feed that FeedBurner would stand in the way of).

Arguably, a service like FeedBurner would actually give me more control, since they enable a bunch of other functions that I can’t easily do in WordPress.

Is it the terms of service? They do say, in point four:

You hereby grant to FeedBurner a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to publicly display and distribute your content (the “Content”) in connection with the Service and the Advertising Program (provided you have opted into the Advertising Program as described in section 9 below), and you represent and warrant that you own or have rights to provide such Content for use with the Service.

But that seems fairly innocent – they get the right to display and distribute my content, which I want them to do, and my Creative Commons license would allow them to do anyway.

Point 13 in the TOS seems a bit odd: “You agree that FeedBurner may use your name and logo in presentations, marketing materials, customer lists, financial reports and Web site listings of customers.” But are they really going to want to use my name? I suspect this is for the really A-List bloggers.

Are any of you using FeedBurner? Have positive or negative experiences? Do Share . . .

The distinction between closed approaches and open approaches is clearly demonstrated by an article in Fast Company about the Los Angeles public transit system, and the recent announcement by Architecture for Humanity, a “charitable organization founded in 1999 to promote architectural and design solutions to global, social and humanitarian crises,” that they will be launching the Open Architecture Network.

[The Network] will be a gathering place for community designers and all those interested in improving the built environment. Here designers of all persuasions can post their projects, browse projects posted by others, comment and review projects, discuss relevant topics, contribute to shared resources, collaborate with each other and access project management tools to support their work.

We imagine a site that not only helps create, support and implement ideas, but also a place that fosters sustainable, replicable, adaptable and scalable design solutions. The network has a simple mission: to generate design opportunities that will improve living standards for all.

The network will open March 8th 2007 – I look forward to seeing it and wish them success

The Fact Company article, “L.A. Goes Public,” is a lauditory piece about the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transite Authority and their “countywide campaign . . . to shift public perception” through design:

Now working closely with manufacturers, Metro has pushed for the same extreme customization at all consumer touch points, creating a shiny new identity completely unique to Los Angeles. Metro’s creative director, Michael Lejeune, says the transformation was necessary, but not just to get Angelenos out of their BMWs. “Our goal is to employ design to attract discretionary riders–those who have a choice–by giving Metro a distinct style,” he says. “At the same time, we’re giving those who are transit-dependent–those who don’t have a choice–a system they can be proud of.”

You should check out the full article, with photos – it is a great example of how design and marketing can have an impact and improve environmental conditions rather than just contribute to more consumption.

The part which gives me pause, though, is in the captions to several of the photos (and the ones I’m pointing to here are not in the online version). First, there’s a caption on a photo of a set of bicycle lockers:

Metro’s designers collaborated with manufacturers to create bays of private bike lockers for commuters. The design was so successful that the firm wanted to offer it to other transit companies. Metro said no, keep it unique to Los Angeles.

Another caption at the bottom of the same page describes the machines which sell Metro tickets:

To avoid a generic “off the shelf” feel, Metro designers customized the ticket machines, even using the systemwide typefaces Scala and Din. Again, the manufacturers wanted to market the design elsewhere–and were denied.

Metro said no?

Deliberately witholding from other markets – which don’t, in any normal sense of the word, compete with Metro – a design innovation which might encourage a broader set of people to use public transit? I’m all for using design to differentiate, but to prevent sharing of innovation (on a publicly funded project nonetheless) seems borderline criminal.

Now, it’s entirely possible that the only “design” covered in both cases is the look & feel – typefaces, colors, icons. But what would the harm be in allowing other transit companies to leverage the fundamental design, perhaps with some caveats about required changes?

I can understand the need to prohibit look & feel copying in competitive markets – Apple’s desire to protect the iPod, designers’ needs to limit the impact of knock-offs, etc. But in an arena in which the other players are more accurately seen as colleagues attempting to improve transit in other markets (with geographically distinct coverage areas) why be closed by design?

It’s great to see Jobs, and Apple, coming out against DRM, which has long been the reason I never buy music from iTunes.

But as Lawrence Lessing points out, why does Apple have to wait for the majors to come around?

So bravo to Apple and Steve Jobs. About this I am happy to be proven wrong. But then here’s a simple next step: There are artists on iTunes whose creative work is Creative Commons licensed. Colin Mutchler is one. When his stuff first went into iTunes, he requested the DRM be turned off. The request was refused. But if no-DRM is Apple’s preferred policy, then let them begin here.

Getting DRM selectively enabled or disabled on iTunes would go along way toward showing the major labels that it can be done.