Day: 27 June 2007

Musing about parodies and copyright and mashups

One of my favourite parodies is  Ogden Nash’s Song Of the Open Road, a take on Joyce Kilmer’s Trees:

I think that I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree.

Indeed, unless the billboards fall

I shall not see a tree at all. 

Amazingly, he wrote this in 1933. Even more amazingly, it is still copyright protected, thirty six years after his death and over 70 years since he wrote it, so I guess I have to kowtow to the gods of fair use. Thankfully, you can see the whole of Kilmer’s poem in the Wikipedia link to his name.

As a child, I remember being amazed at finding out that Lewis Carroll’s Father William was a parody of Robert Southey’s earlier poem The Old Man’s Complaints. And how he gained them. These appear to be marginally out of copyright so you can read them at this link.

I’ve always considered a parody to be something new in copyright terms. I’m sure that people far more learned than I’ll ever be have drafted laws to make this possible. How else could I enjoy something like this, the recent take-off of Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie?   Do be careful when you watch it, I would recommend you sit comfortably and avoid eating or drinking anything while it’s playing. As usual I’ve made it available via my VodPod in the sidebar as well.

My thanks to Rachel Whetstone at Google, who reminded me of the existence of the video at a private conference we were both at.

21st century technology adoption curves and Facebook and innovation

Everything changes. Now one of the changes that has intrigued me this past decade is in the nature of the technology adoption curve. Simply put, for most of my life, I was used to a particular adoption curve. In order to experiment with emerging technologies, you had to be 28-40, a high-achieving professional, working for a company in aerospace, defence, high-end manufacturing or investment banking. Before 28 you didn’t have the seniority, after 40 you were past experimenting and having fun, you spent all your time in the paranoid timewasting that characterises so much of large-organisation behaviour.

All that changed with Generation M. The pyramid sort of inverted overnight, as the mobile multitasking multimedia generation caught hold of life in their inimitable way. Now it’s the 14-25 year old who first gets to play.

I’ve known this for a while, and regularly referred to this inversion. But there were other aspects of this inversion that continued to intrigue me, inspired by reading Michael Schrage’s Serious Play many years ago. The connection between play and work, something that has come to the fore more resonantly with MMOG and Second Life and all that jazz.

When I saw the Netvibes ecosystem grow, I had the opportunity to watch this curve evolve and grow, and something stirred within me. There was something I could really learn from plotting it right, but in the end I moved on in my ADD way and sadly forgot about it. More recently, when I was watching the explosion taking place in Facebook Applications, I thought to myself, wow, what a proxy for the adoption curve. I had a second chance to view the culture in the petri dish.

What am I talking about? Have I finally completely lost it? Patience, patience. I’m going to try and cut and paste the list of current applications in Facebook Platforms:

I think there’s  a big lesson for us all in the data presented above. Just For Fun leads, then comes Utility some way behind, then comes Gaming. Music, Photo, Video and Messaging bunch up a little later, and Business is around half the size of any one of those.

I’m sure someone can write an app that plots the movement of numbers in each of these classifications over time, or make it possible for someone else to do it. Any views, Dave? Enjoying your travels?

Now this is the supply side. What would be even more interesting is the demand side and how that behaves across these classifications? How many people are using applications in each classification? I accept there is risk of misclassification or fuzzy overlaps, but I am not looking for exact sciences here, I think the trend information is good enough.

Any comments or views? Have I finally lost it? Let me know what you think.