Wikipedia Data and Anecdotes

I like both data (that is generalized data from lots of people) and anecdotes (specific data from a few). Her's a bit of both about a topic that I follow with interest-Wikipedia. Why the interest? Well, for one thing, I find it a personally useful resource. For another, I consider it a bit of a bellwether of interactive collaboration.

Here's the home page for the stats. Diving down a bit, it looks like there might be at least some suggestion that the rate of new articles generation is slowing (at least in English) although I'd hesitate to draw any real conclusions before seeing more months of data.

On the anecdotal side, Tim Bray points some of the usual problems:

Dave Winer's right, the Wikipedia's article on RSS is a crock. Dave's gripe is that it's "highly political", mine is that it's just wrong: for example, the introductory bit suggests that full-content feeds are impossible. Also, it's badly-organized. Dave's problem is going to be harder to address because RSS itself is highly political; but at least the political narrative should be coherent. Anyhow, it would be nice if someone level-headed were to take responsibility for it. I currently ride herd on two or three other articles and that's all my Wikipedia cycles. It's not as hard as you might think, and here's why: the kinds of people who want to put stupid, irrelevant, badly-written junk in the Wikipedia in my experience are easily discouraged. Just hang in, keep on fixing things they break and explaining why in a calm tone of voice on the Discussion page, and pretty soon they go away.

I'm not sure I fully share Tim's "it will work out" faith. That said, I think it reinforces the view of Wikipedia as a valuable resource-but not a totally dependable one.

Some More on Digital Archives

Although not directly on the point to the current Internet Archive case, this piecewritten by Adam Mathes, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has some interesting discussion about archiving software programs for preservations purposes--as well as current exemptions to the DMCA that aid in that effort.

In addition to processing issues, this brings up some of the legal issues involved in the collection. The mere act of copying these digital works, especially for the eventual purpose of enabling access on a different hardware platform, should arguably be considered a fair use. However, if these disks have "copy protection" schemes, even outdated ones that can be bypassed, care must be used to make sure the collection does not run afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Although recently Archive.org was given an exemption for particularly this reason it presents a considerable barrier and must be dealt with. (1) It may be helpful to amass multiple copies of the works in many formats to further bolster the legal backing to shift and archive the materials.

See also this reference:"Internet Archive Gets DMCA Exemption To Help Archive Vintage Software." Internet Archive. 2003. February 23, 2004.

The Internet Archive continued

In response to my last post, fellow analyst James Governor speculates that perhaps libraries like the Library of Congress might not be one possible analogy.

If, for purposes of argument, we consider the Internet Archive a library, that could well grant them some exemptions to the rights conferred to content creators by copyright law. Consider this from Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act:

§ 108. Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction by libraries and archives
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this title and notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement of copyright for a library or archives, or any of its employees acting within the scope of their employment, to reproduce no more than one copy or phonorecord of a work, except as provided in subsections (b) and (c), or to distribute such copy or phonorecord, under the conditions specified by this section, if—
(1) the reproduction or distribution is made without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage;
(2) the collections of the library or archives are
(i) open to the public, or
(ii) available not only to researchers affiliated with the library or archives or with the institution of which it is a part, but also to other persons doing research in a specialized field; and
(3) the reproduction or distribution of the work includes a notice of copyright that appears on the copy or phonorecord that is reproduced under the provisions of this section, or includes a legend stating that the work may be protected by copyright if no such notice can be found on the copy or phonorecord that is reproduced under the provisions of this section.

See also here and here for various pointers about copyright law as it applies to libraries. (By the way, nothing in there about the content creator having to give permission or being able to withdraw permission--count another strike against robots.txt having any significance in this case.

However, as with many things digital, I'm still a bit suspicious of physical world analogs. Not just because of the different nature of the media, but also the nature of the institution. We can all agree that the Library of Congress is a Library and that Widener at Harvard is a library and even little Thayer Library in my town of Lancaster is a library. And it's perhaps not too much of a stretch to see the Internet Archive as a form of library. But what if I were to declare my own little web site a library and compile Dilbert cartoons there? (I picked this as an example of content that's posted publicly but only for a limited time.) My guess is that Scott Adams might not approve. Yet, what makes the Internet Archive different in any fundamental way?

Thoughts on The Wayback Machine Kerfuffle

The Internet Archive a.k.a. Wayback Machine is being sued by a firm called Healthcare Advocates for storing copies of old web pages. (See Good Morning Silicon Valley, for example.) These archived pages are causing the company heartburn in a separate trademank dispute so it's unhappy. Further, for some reason, the pages were allegedly stored in spite of being flagged with a "robots.txt" file to not be archived, cached, spidered, etc.

The case has generated the predictable throwing up of hands in disgust throughtout the online world. As Good Morning Silicon Valley's John Paczkowski succinctly puts it: "Uh, you published that information to a public medium ..." Now I'm certainly sympathetic with the Internet Archive here. At some level, the archiving and caching of publicly-displayed web pages seems almost part of the fabric of the Web and the way it works. However, I'm less convinced than some others that this is Much Ado About Nothing. I preface the following comments and observations with a standard "I Am Not a Lawyer"--and would welcome any on point case law that might be relevant here.

I think we can all stipulate that web pages and such are copyrighted material and freely displaying them to the public doesn't reduce or eliminate that copyright in any way.

I do agree with John that the robots.txt angle seems a wit wacky.

Why? The robots.txt protocol is purely advisory. It has no legal bearing whatsoever. "Robots.txt is a voluntary mechanism," said Martijn Koster, a Dutch software engineer and the author of a comprehensive tutorial on the robots.txt convention (robotstxt.org). "It is designed to let Web site owners communicate their wishes to cooperating robots. Robots can ignore robots.txt."

Ignoring robots.txt may be bad manners, but it's hard to see the legal significance. (There are perhaps analogs in physical trespass laws--posting your property and the like--but my understanding is that the details of such as typically goverened by explicit state and local laws.)

However--and here I perhaps stray into less charted territory--what exactly gives the permission to copy and archive web sites anyway? Certainly, there's no explicit permission like a negative robots.txt file that affirmatively gives the right to replicate, store, transmit, archive, etc. web pages. I suppose the theory is that there is some sort of implicit permission based on custom and social contract. Which seems a rather loosey-goosey state of affairs.

I can't think of any really good analogs here. Yes, I can record TV and radio--but only for my personal use. It's quite well established I can't put those recordings on a server for all to access. Usenet postings might be the most analagous situation; they're now archived as Google Groups and in more fragmentary form elsewhere. However, as far as I know, the legal status of Usenet and other types of online postings doesn't have much case law underpinning it. Furthermore, I think one could easily argue that such postings have a more explicit element of transmission of content out into the world--with the full knowledge that said content will be forwarded and stored for at least some interval--than Web pages which reside on a controlled site.

Nor can I see the exemplary historical service that the Internet Archive is providing with its activities having any bearing. "Preservation of the past" may be a social good, but it's got little to do with copyright law. After all, Abandonware has the same legal status as any other warez in the absence of the copyright owner's explicit permission to release it into the wild.

From where I sit, robots.txt certainly seems like a red herring in this case--given the lack of laws compelling its observence. But there's a much larger issue of caching and archive that seems to rest on very sandy foundations.

Podcasting Redux

Podcasting continues to be a beloved trend of the plugged-in elite. I've commented rather dismissively about it before. Since then I've spent more time checking out the various podcasting options--both software and content. Have I revised my opinion? Not really, I still think that there are some fundamental reasons why podcasting won't have the impact of text-based RSS. Which is not to say that podcasting doesn't have merits within a limited scope.

Chris Anderson at The Long Tail gives three reasons why podcasts aren't a big deal (yet).

1. They don't have internal permalinks to section and subjects, so they don't get much link-love.


2. They aren't searchable. How hard would it be for some service to run podcasts through a quick-n-dirty voice recognition program to autogenerate transcripts? They don't need to be exactly right; 80% accurate search is better than the 0% we've got now.


3. They're meant to be consumed linearly, and pretty much at the (agonizingly slow and amateurish) pace they were created. Who, aside from trapped commuters, has time for that?

These comport with my impressions, but it's the linear consumption that's the real killer. David Winer, who wrote the RSS 2.0 specification, described the web as a "skimming" medium on this Steve Gillmor podcast and you can't really skim audio feeds effectively. As a result, you end up selecting a few favorite programs that you might listen to during audio-friendly periods--which is to say, typically driving in the car. And, guess what, as professional broadcasters like the BBC start putting content on the air, (e.g. "In Our Time") many--probably most--people will largely devote their limited audio-listen minutes to professionally-produced broadcasts. Call this podcasting if you like, but it's really just on demand radio as you can record more crudely today with software like Replay Radio. (By the way, NPR, get with the program!)

So when are podcasts good? I can think of a few things, both based on my personal experiences and things I've read about.

Business uses--for example, a weekly "broadcast" to a sales force. This is sort of a special case of the "content to listen to while commuting/driving.
Certainly, interesting interviews with the sort of specialists which don't make it onto mainstream broadcasts in any depth are interesting. Steve Gillmore and Dan Bricklin's podcasts are good examples of this. Talks at conferences are another good example--as at IT Conversations.

Thus, I certainly don't argue that podcasting is "bad" or useless. I like on demand listening and RSS syndication provides a handy mechanism to more easily (if hardly automagically) get updated audio content from favored sources to my car. But I'll continue to argue that it remains a largely peripheral trend rather than the "end of radio."

A New Age For Movies

Irving Wladawsky-Berger at IBM has recently posted a couple of eloquent blogs about how the Internet has made movie-watching just that much more enjoyable. First of all, there are all of the reviews and the commentary--such as as IMDB. Like Irving, I find Roger Ebert's reviews on target (alomost all the time). In fact, though it would probably horrify many in the "Ivory Tower," I think Roger Ebert may well be one of the best essayists writing today. There's something nice about, not only getting input on which movies to see, but after watching a film that really connected having a virtual "discussion" on various aspects of the film. What did such and such mean? How did other people react? It doesn't even require active participation.

Then there's Irving's discussion about Netflix. Walmart is out of the game as I wrote about earlier. The latest buzz is that, although Amazon has a movie rental business in the UK, they won't be following up with a US version. In any case, Netflix provides a great way to invite almost every available DVD into my house, without fuss and without muss. It's partly about eliminating "stuff" from my things-to-do list. (II'll be posting on Getting Things Done one of these days. Don't worry: I'm not evangelical about it.)

But it's also about being able to easily depart from mass market tastes and indulge an exploration or an oddball interest. It's The Long Tail if you want to be jargonny about it. But it's ultimately "On Demand"--when you want, what you want. (Which, perhaps, is why Irving is so fascainated by it.)

Another Wikipedia Data Point

Although I've picked and probed at Wikipedia here and here, I find it a useful tool. But I think it important to understand its limirtations and boundaries. An interesting post from Nathaniel Ward at Dartmouth in that vein:

While doing research for the upcoming issue of The Review, I proposed to Executive Editor Scott Glabe that Wikipedia, a free communal encyclopedia, is a terrible resource. Since anyone can change any entry, a user cannot know whether the current version is accurate. Scott retorted that the encyclopedia's communal nature meant that all errors would be corrected in minutes.

It turns out I was right: it took almost 24 hours for users to notice and correct a deliberate error that made out Benjamin Franklin as the inventor of the printing press.

Although I have somewhat mixed feelings about Wikipedia "vandalism" even for valid research purposes and calling it a "terrible" resource seems overstatement, the data point still seems valid enough. (The "vandalism" in question inserted a common incorrect answer from The Dartmouth Review's recent poll of Dartmouth students about various Western cultural questions.) The highly democratic Wikipedia community implies both profound strengths and significant weaknesses.

Dartmouth Review 25th

This will be about as far as I get from IT here. But, given that it's the 25th anniversary of The Dartmouth Review, a newspaper I helped found, and that Dartmouth has just had a very significant trustee election, I guess I should say something.

TDR wasn't the first of the alternative right-of-center or libertarian college newspapers of the early eighties, but it became one of the more influential, if not one of the better mannered. I got involved with the founding through a friendship with Greg Fossedal who was the an editor of The Daily Dartmouth, the campus daily. I wrote about it long ago here. The precipitating event was the election of an "unoffical" trustee candidate. It's thus perhaps more than a bit fitting that we've just seen Todd Zywicki and Peter Robinson elected as the latest slate of trustee candidates running in opposition to the official ones. (T.J.Rodgers, the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor was elected in opposition to the administration in 2004. It has not been a good couple of years for the official slate.) Their positions haven't been political per se. Rather, they've spoken to directions that Dartmouth should take and principles that Dartmouth should have.

I won't go further into the arcana of Dartmouth governance and policies here. Trustee disputes at Dartmouth go back to the Dartmouth College case, argued by Daniel Webster, and a seminal US Supreme Court case in contract law. Suffice it to say that it's somewhat satisfying to see an institution like TDR still involving students 25 years later. It's never been about shadowy outside funding sources-rather TDR has always been supported primarily by Dartmouth's own alumni-but, rather, about students thinking and writing and questioning conventional wisdom. Which seems for the good. Wah-Hoo-Wah.

New PVR Blog

As some of my readers know, I've been fooling around with building up personal video recorders for quite a while now. In general, I still prefer my TiVo, which just takes less mental energy to use on a day-in, day-out basis than PVR software running on a general purpose computer. However, that said, BeyondTV from Snapstream has matured considerably and is now quite stable and functional. I still don't find it to be the "just works" experience that my TiVo provides but it's a good, if not great, PC-based alternative and is, in any case, the best PC PVR software I've run across.

Snapstream now has a company blog, which is worthwhile viewing if you have an interest in PVRs and, certainly, if you're a Snapstream customer. PVRblog is must reading for more general coverage of the topic.

Now That's An IT Failure!

Not traditional IT to be sure, but an automated system nonetheless--the infamous Denver baggage-handling system. I still remember the first time I travelled through Denver aurport with its new system. You had to find a special line to stand in if you had odd-shaped luggage. Odd-shared luggage like... skis. In Denver. Hmm.

Well, it's no more.

United Airlines has decided to stop using its controversial automated baggage-handling system at Denver International Airport, reverting to a conventional manual system by the end of 2005. The automated system (which began operation in 1995) never lived up to original expectations. It had enormous difficulties in its early days, including construction delays, cost overruns, lost bags, damaged luggage, derailed cars, traffic jams, upgrade problems, political battles, and so on. (For example, see RISKS-17.61 and 18.66). United is apparently obligated to pay $60 million a year for another 25 years under its lease contract with the city of Denver (which owns the airport). However, United expects to save $1 million a month in operating costs by NOT using the automated system. The airport cost $250 million to build (BAE Automated Systems of Dallas, no longer in existence), and the city reportedly put up another $100 million for construction and $341 million to get it to work. [Source: AP item, 7 Jun 2005; PGN-ed] http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8135924/

via RISKS Digest

Recovery through genocide?

Good freakin' Lord. Why not just lay everyone off while they're at it? History may or may not show Sun's acquisition of StorageTek to ultimately have been a good move. I think it's potentially a significant win but won't be easy to pull off. (See my comments at IBD and ZDnet. My Illuminata colleagues have also posted in a similar vein.) But, whatever the doubts and concerns about the StorageTek approach, getting rid of all Sun's employees hardly seems a viable recovery strategy either.

"We do question the rationale of a transaction which reduces Sun's cash hoard by 40 percent, and does nothing to re-ignite revenue growth or profitability," Steven Fortuna, an analyst at Prudential Equity Group, said in a research note. "We would rather have seen the company buy back a billion shares and fire 10,000 people."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/06/02/ap/business/mainD8AFO1JO0.shtml

Taking Notes

Not to, in any way, equate myself with Fischer Black (of Black-Scholes option pricing fame), but I was struck by a recent posting in Marginal Revolution about how he took notes:

He did almost all of his work in an outlining program called ThinkTank, which he used as a kind of external associative emmory to supplement his own. Everything he read, every conversation he had, every thought that occurred, everything got summarized and added to the data base that swelled eventually to 20 million bytes organized in 2000 alphabetical files...Reading, discussion and thinking that Fischer did outside the office was recorded on slips to paper to be entered into the database later. Reading, discussion, and thinking that took place inside the office was recorded directly. While he was on the phone, he was typing. While he was talking to you in person, he was typing.

I'm not quite back at the ThinkTank stage--even if I remember the program (a "terminate and stay resident (TSR) outliner that essentially simulated multi-tasking in a single-tasking world)--although my sometimes preference for text editors over Mind maps may seem in a similar vein. However, such assidious notetaking does reflect how many of us work as we transition to a world in which our role is increasingly to synthesize vast amounts of data. It's really handy to have this sort of external memory in accessible and searchable form.

When I started as an analyst, I took old-fashioned longhand notes. I'm an enthusiastic convert to the electronic sort. t's just so handy during a briefing to pull up the notes from a peior meeting and ask: "So, when we last met, you said that XYZ was going to be the next big thing. Whatever became of that?" :-)

Convergence

The term "convergence" may be passe these days, but the question of which devices will fold into other devices is still of immense interest to a lot of people. Especially because it's all more than a little bit mysterious. I suspect that's in no small part because the (in many cases) engineers trying to figure all this stuff out are being entirely too rational about it. They tend to ignore style and fashion, which aren't exactly rational after all.

Let's look at a concrete example. Why haven't MP3 players folded into cell phones in a bigger way. After all, cell phones are ubiquitous and you don't need more than a bit more memory and another chip or two to make them do double duty as an MP3 player. Sure, there are some business issues--the carriers subsidize cell phones and aren't going to be exactly thrilled about subsidizing other types of gear that doesn't bring them services revenue. And some practical ones--does everyone want to drain their phone's batteries playing songs?

But we're heading down the rational path. I was informed by a college freshman of some much more fundamental reasons this past weekend: iPods are cool and small cell phones are cool. The mathematical corollary, I suppose, is that big cell phones playing MP3s are decidedly not.

Q.E.D.

Folksonomies?

John Dvorak's been writing about computers since the early days of PCs. Does he like to be controversial? Sure. That's his thing. And is he sometimes WAY off base? That too. But that more or less comes with the territory when you've been writing for a long time about a wide span of topics--at least some of which you aren't exactly an expert in.

Dvorak's been heating up the Linux zealots of late with his reportage of the PJ-O'Gara tiff. Seems pretty accurate, if a bit over the top. However, it's his latest critique of "tags" that really caught my eye. With all due respect to all the fans of high-tech "blogosphere" linkages, but John nails the hype.

The "folksonomy" notion is the bloggers' last hope of invention, although it's a rewrite of the prebubble "semantic Web" technology at best. And it too is doomed to failure. The utopianism and idealism that exist in the online societies ignore the real problem with tags, metatags, übertags, folksonomies, and the like. This is because they honestly think that most people are goodhearted. The online world, because of its anonymity, encourages bad behavior. "You suck!" is a common post, and it would be the number-one tag if tagging ever became popular. Then would come the tags about "Online Casino!" One site promoting folksonomies is the darling of the bloggers: Flickr.com—an excellent photo-sharing site where being in perpetual beta is a marketing tool.

Interestingly, the ever-insightful Clay Shirky seems to at least sort of endorse the idea of tags in a recent post although he has skewered the "semantic web" in the past. I suspect that there's a bit of a definitional issue going on here. But that's the problem isn't it? When tags become both everything and essentially nothing (i.e. keywords), they lose much of their significance.

My current feeling is that extensive linking and the fact that digital documents have no need for a single physical place means that keywords are preferable to rigid hierarchies. But to extrapolate from there to deep physical meaning for those keywords across individuals and communities seems a bit much. Keywords (or tags if you prefer) yes. Folksonomies, no.

BBS Documentary

For the young 'uns that's Bulletin Board Systems.

Before the Internet was democratized, there were BBS's. At their largest, they were big multi-line operations. My service of choice was Channel 1 Communications in Cambridge, MA. Communications software like Telix and off-line new readers like Qmail let people snarf the contents of various discussion forums onto their PCs. After all, telephone rates were higher back then. BBS's were also where Freeware, Shareware, and less savory files and programs were exchanged. (Mostly legal in the case of the big operations, less so in the case of smaller and shadier ones.

Compared to today's Internet, BBS's could be much more intimate and could even be the hub of a sort of local community given that the reality of phone costs tended to keep a lot of the membership relatively local. (The larger BBS's also participated in various networks of discussion boards but they also had non-networked boards strictly for the "locals"--i.e. those who dialed in directly.)

There's now a documentary out about those days. I haven't seen it and haven't heard any reports, but if it's any good could be quite the nostalgia trip for some of us. I've thought of doing a book on some of the social communications history of the computer age but I haven't made any real progress on doing so.

So Apple's Jumped On the Podcasting Bandwagon

Actually it was more like a ginger step, but the Steve says that iTunes 4.9 will get podcasting support. I suppose it's the least they could do given that they have this buzzed-about phenomenon further building up their iPod brand even though podcasting has basically nothing to do with either Apple or the iPod.

Make that overhyped buzzed-about phenomenon. I'm going to be a party pooper here and suggest that podcasting is not getting anywhere as big as ordinary blogging. Which, by the way, is overhyped too but does seem to be a legitimate phenomenon albeit one that's not as widespread or influential as some of its practioners think it is. But back to podcasting. Why the yawn. Let me posit a few reasons:

• It's harder to do well than written content. There are lots of technical issues as well as strictly content-related ones.
• Power Laws are going to make it real difficult for thousands of broadcasters to find an audience. It's just much harder to "skim" through audiocasts in search of gems than it is through regular blogs. I have to be pickier.
• It's not exactly hard to get a podcast onto your portable flash memory music thingamajig. But it does take several steps more than just turning on the freekin' radio. When we get to the point that your home computer handles this all automagically between itself and its counterpart in your car, OK. (But then will we just want on demand versions of more commercial fare for the most part?)

I have to admit that I don't like even professionally-done talk radio for the most part. OK, maybe that's a big reason that I'm pretty indifferent about podcasts. But I think there are other reasons to think they won't be the "next big thing" too, Wired covers notwithstanding.

Illuminata Perspectives is Live

In addition to here on Connections, I will now also be posting about IT topics to Illuminata Perspectives. Posts that veer close to mainstream, datacenter IT will tend to migrate over there, but most of what I've been writing about--social connections, photography, etc.--will remain here. Collaboration will likely bridge between the two somewhat.

Time To Revisit Micropayments?

"Micropayments" were part of the Boom's lexicon. But they never really went much of anywhere. Instead, everything was "free"--either in the frequently forlorn hope of charging later or in the often deluded hope that it would be paid for by advertising or some other deus ex machina.

We've ended up in this sort of binary state as a result. The free (perhaps with annoying registration) and true subscription. That's a bit of an oversimplification of course. A site like Nerve has both free and premium content. A site like Salon offers various forms of free access in exchange for watching commercials. But, close enough for government work. But, in general, it holds. We've got sites that are largely free and sites that charge subsriptions--often in the neighborhood of $25 to $50 per year--that exceed what I pay for most of my magazines.

And $1 an aricle? Forget about it unless your audience is mostly well-financed paid researchers. That's not a micropayment. That's a midi-payment--just like buying a song is. Perhaps not a major purchase, but something that you'll think about, or as the ever-interesting Clay Shirky calls it, a transaction cost. (I'm not sure that I agree with Clay that free is the only way to go, but I certainly agree that payments large enough to make you think about them are a real inhibitor.)

Perhaps we need to look again seriously at micropayments. In the cents per transaction range--and, perhaps, implemented as subscriptions that span sites rather than per-transaction decisions. Hard? Sure. But the alternative may well be a dichotomy of free sites and sites that hardly anyone has access to or reads.

Score One for the Littler (But Not So Little) Guy

So Walmart is getting out of the online video rental business in favor of a partnership with Netflix. Blockbuster then promptly took the opportunity to start backing off its recent round of price cuts--which certainly undercut Netflix but were also doubtless aimed at keeping its close to Walmart's rates, which were lowest of all.

I don't shed any tears at Walmart exiting this business or at a certain softness in its overall fortunes. There's a lot not to like about the company as a whole (however much I appreciate the low prices when I shop there myself) and it's hard to see that their online video rental business would ever have been more than a very mass market, lowest common denominator, compete-on-price offering that made like difficult for other companies with more interesting and broad-based services. It's nice to see that Netflix is apparently able to stand up to challengers that could have potentially steamrolled it. (Which is not to say that Netflix is exactly raking in huge profits.) I'm a big fan of their service.

This does seem to be a case where the Internet boom mantra of "Spend to capture mindshare" has more or less played out. Netflix now has the brand (along with a competitive service) and its apparently going to be hard to displace. I think there are a few reasons for that in this case:

• Scale matters. Without multiple distribution centers, it takes too long to send and receive movies. For an East Coaster like myself, this was a frustration with the early Netflix which had only a single DC in Los Gatos, CA.
  
• Scale also matters to selection. Perhaps there's an opportunity for a company that deals only in high volume, mainstream fare. But there's a lot of aggregate volume in the less popular titles too--"The Long Tail" popularized by Chris Anderson of Wired.
  
• And, if you're going to have scale, and a broad-based selection, how much more differentiation is possible? Perhaps someone will figure out an alternative way of doing things. (Distribution by broadband will presumably be such an alternative someday; Movielink and its ilk are not not meaningful competitors today.) Perhaps pay-per-movie alternatives to subscription. But the current pricing schemes seem popular and if any such alternative did click with consumers, it would be easy to quickly replicate.
  
  

All of which leads me to think that this business isn't favorable to having a lot of niche companies playing in it. (Porn being, of course, the exception given that it's big business, its boundaries are fairly well defined and mainstream companies--especially public ones--want nothing to do with it.)

The Expanding Linkosphere

It seems like every day we're seeing various information that we've stored away for our own benefit being open up and linked to others in new ways. Now, I'm not referring here to clearly personal data that's being disclosed and compiled against our wishes--inadvertently or otherwise. That's a different topic. Rather, I'm referring here to how we're steadily opening up our wishlists, our bookmarks, and our movie rental lists for all the world to see.

A whole crop of tools has sprouted up to syndicate Amazon wishlists. "I want this, what do you want?" ("Or, please, buy me this!") What started out as more of a personal organization tool--the list of things that I might want to buy someday--is increasingly something to show off to others. del.icio.us and its brothers are even more explicitly communal. They provide a place on the web to store and organize your bookmarks--an increasingly useful concept in these days when people commonly use multiple computers and tyerminals from a panoply of locations. But, in exchange, you bookmarks are exposed as are the way you categorize them using tags - essentially keywords, but explicitly communal.

Now Netflix is the latest to provide an option to make the individual organization part of a collective pool of preferences and predilictions. You can now invite friends to share their movie list queues with you and you with them. Know someone whose taste in film you like, or at least intrigues you, share a list with them. Cool idea.

At the same time, it's impossible not to think that we're rushing pell-mell into throwing a huge amount of at least moderately private information here. Perhaps as Sun CEO Scott McNealy famously said once: "You have no privacy, get over it." much to the consternation of privacy advocates everywhere.

To be sure, that line was a typically McNealy-ian one line zinger; elsewhere he's spoken on the subject in a more nuanced way. But his zinger as a clear kernel of truth as well. The plugged-in are, for the most part, far less private than they've ever been before.

The Sorry State of Collaboration

Stephen O'Grady writes here:

One of the reasons I think applications like Trumba are important is that I think calendar applications are an area with a lot of potential in the near term.

a.) There's been essentially zero innovation in them in recent years,
b.) We've all got complicated schedules and
c.) Most of would like some mobile integration (cell phone at a minimum)

That seems about right. I'd go further though and say that there's been essentially no innovation in any of the core "collaboration" apps. I use the term "collaboration" advisedly because it strikes me as a rather overblown and pretentious use of the word given the sorry state of affairs in software that's supposed to help us work together--especially at remote locations.

What advances we have made have come neither from traditional productivity apps stretching themselves (unsuccessfully for the most part) into a more multi-person context nor form the blaoted, monolithic software that passes for serious collaboration tools. The latter may be useful, or even necessary, in some environments for regulatory and other reasons--but it's hard to see them in the mainstream.

Indeed, the most genuine collaborative innovations have come from the outside. They're lightweight and modular. They're IM and blogs and all the other pieces of software that real people use to communicate and commiserate.

A Hilarious Spoof...

of high-tech marketing creative.

Life is Random...

or at least multi-dimensional.

Tablets are an idea that refuses to either truly live or truly die. It's an idea that certainly has its enthusuasts. Most recently, James Governor of RedMonk weighed in on how Tablets could essentially be a Microsoft killer app in Microsoft: Putting Coolaid in Tablet Form.

It seems like the Tablet PC is one of the few things Microsoft can do (put in people's hands) that just stops people dead and cuts through prejudice. Tablet PC is disarming. Its funny to watch begrudging envy; is there a word for the opposite of schadenfraude?

The big issue here is that theTablet concept fills a very basic need. Us modern folks who have been using keyboards for a long time can type much faster than we can write. Indeed, my handwriting--in addition to bewildering even myself much of the time--cramps my hand and s incredibly slow by comparison to my (non-touch-typed) typing. But that typing is essentially linear--one-dimensional.

By contrast, when we take notes or sketch out ideas, we're all over the page--essentially two-dimensional.

See the problem? Great modern thought organizational techniques like mind maps are essentially 2-D while our fast input mechanism is 1-D.

That's why I consider tablet PCs a great unfufilled promise. Someone's going to ultimately crack the keyboard-tablet hybrid code and then it's going to be "You mean, people didn't always build PCs that way?"

In closing, I have to disagree with my buddy James on OneNote. Maybe it's a good app for Tablets but I don't see it as an underappreciated app for normal PCs--for reasons that I covered here. Microsoft: even if you have to look ugly, lose the proprietary format or at least provide a convenient export option.

The Nikon RAW Format Rumpus

There's been considerable noise from many quarters over the Adobe vs. Nikon tiff about Nikon encrypting the white balance data in its model D70 RAW files. Adobe yelled that it wouldn't support Nikon's RAW format in Photoshop. Nikon came back with a not-entirely-satisfactory offer to make the SDK available to some developers.

My intent here isn't to recapitulate the debate here--which now appears to be at least somewhat overblown anyway. (For the edification of non-photographers, RAW is a camera (or least sensor)-specific format for the digital data captured by the sensor. Because it hasn't been further manipulated or compressed in a lossy way (a la JPEG), it's the highest quality way to store images on camera that support it.)

I do find one aspect of this mess particularly troublesome, however. And it's not Nikon's lack of openness--which is a boneheaded PR move that I can't see benefiting them. (Nor am I convinced that Adobe's motives in taking this public were necessarily pure.) Rather, it's the fact that Adobe could credibly invoke the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) as the reason it couldn't decrypt Nikon's format.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm far from convinced that the DMCA--and specifically its decryption provisions-- would apply here. After all, it's the metadata for the photographer's own data (picture) that's being decrypted. But, the fact that Adobe's can claim concern about violating the DMCA--and people widely accepted that concern as valid--should be concerning.

We don't really know what a judge or a jury could decide are the limits of the DMCA. Certainly "DMCA" gts thrown around by the anti-IP crowd as a bogeyman on the order of RIAA--but that doesn't mean it's right either.

Considering (ID3) tags

I've had occasion to be thinking about certain types of metadata recently. Actually, that's a somewhat pretentious and jargon-y way of stating it. To be both more precise and more colloquial--always a good combination--I've been working on tagging my digital music collection. Some of my findings and experience are doubtless specific to digital music or to my personal requirements and priorities, but I think much of it probably applies more broadly.

For example, why tags in the first place? Well, because there's a bloody lot of data--songs and other sound clips in this case. As a result, while you may want to make hand-crafted playlists for some situations, for your day-to-day background music you might well want the computer to do some of the work. And that means tagging the songs with relevant characteristics that an be mainpulated with some relatively simple rules to create playlists. The analogies aren't perfect with other sorts of media, but, in both cases, neither totally manual selection nor completely unaided computer search are completely effective.

I'll go into the specifics of what I've done and what I'm doing with my music collection in a future post. However, let's first consider some of the more general characteristics of such a scheme. I wish I could pretend that this was a top-down analysis. In reality, it's more like trial and error--and is still ongoing. Be that as it may:

• Eschew unnecessary complexity. With multiple thousands of songs et al. in my database, each additional field could mean a lot of work entering data. If that field isn't going to be used effectively to create playlists consider ommiting it.
• Automation is our friend. To the degree that a utility or your jukebox program can auto-fill a field, that's a big win. For example, J. River Media Center, which I use, can populate an "Intensity" field and a "Beat" field. Even though I've found that these computer-generated fields correspond only modestly to my personal perceptions of these attributes, they're essentially "free."
• Build off the "standard" ID3 tagging infrastructure as much as possible. Unfortunately, once you get beyond the standard artist, album, etc. fields (that is, the truly stanardized ID3 tags), programs start having a lot of trouble interchanging the information. Even the seemingly standardized "Rating" tag isn't. My J. River Media Center can interchange rating information with my iPod, but a lot of tag editors don't seem to see the rating tags that it generates. Thus, for example, if you want to create a "subgenre" tag, you may want to consider keeping the standard "genre" tag and using something like an existing "keywords" field to hold the subgenre data.
• Use fields that you can fill consistently, meaningfully, and without too much mental effort for each choice. For example, I've been toying with a "Mood" or "Situation" field but have had trouble filling in entries in a consistent way that I could then meaningfully use to build a playlist.
• For anything like genre, subgenre, mood, etc., draw out a taxonomy or set of choices that you intend to use. Modify as required but at least you have a starting point.

Anyway, that was my retroactively arrived at starting point. More specifics coming.