Category: Four pillars

The importance of blogs in anchoring/framing and building metaphor

There are three big debates right now that will help shape or kill everything we care about.

  • What is the internet?
  • Who owns it and how do we pay for it?
  • What about the stuff that touches it, whatever it is, and how do we pay for that stuff?

I have taken part in many discussions on this and related issues, covering the web, telcos and cablecos, big media and music and film, copyright, intellectual property right and now digital right.

And all the debates boil down in the end to the words and images we use. if we are to protect what we care for, we need better arguments, better metaphors, better anchors and frames. And blogs are great tools to do just that.

Recent discussions about opensource and internet and the iTunes decision in France have only served to bring this out more glaringly to me.

So here’s another to throw into the pot: Dana Blankenhorn asking about the internet, following on from some posts in a separate “Cook Report conversation”. Well worth a read, just to see how much imagery matters.

Are we moving to a time when sticks and stones will hurt us less than words? Are we already there?

On blogs and diversity

Blogs are an opensource marketplace of ideas, as per Cluetrain.

Wherever I go physically, there are hidden biases that prevent the richness of diversity coming through; diversity in culture, in gender, in age, in background, whatever; diversity that enriches and improves what I experience and learn.

I can prevent these biases from existing in cyberspace. But to do this I must take active steps.

SO I will work hard to read the blogs of people whose ideas I would otherwise not come across.

I place no restriction on the use of my source for any purpose

I was reading Halley Suitt in her Top 10 Sources persona, and came across this by John Palfrey. It made me think.

So I want to be able to say: I place no restriction on the use of my source for any purpose.

So there. I’ve said it.

Blogging with children

It’s been that kind of Saturday. My central heating (which broke down last week) gets fixed, yippee. Liverpool beat Everton. Yippee twice.

And I come across this piece, Why I blog with kids. There’s a teacher somewhere who blogs with his kids. Thank you Clarence Fisher.

And reading the post takes me to another, which asks today “Why aren’t we all blogging?” And Nancy Mckeand, whose blog it is, subtitles it “A first attempt at blogging with no idea where it will take me”.

Teachers who make themselves vulnerable in this way will succeed in their primary goal, to impart learning to their wards in order that potential may be reached, extended and released. Here’s to Clarence and Nancy…. and others out there I may never hear about.

Yippee thrice.

Birds singing in a sycamore tree

…dream a little dream of me….

Mamas and Papas (or Satchmo, if you prefer his sandpaper). And thank you W.Schwant /F.Andre/G.Kahn whoever you may be.

I was trying to work out a post title for DRM and then decided not to, too schmaltzy. But Mama Cass’s voice meant I kept the song reference in.

This has been a confusing week for me as I watch events unfold in the DRM space. Take a look at this, which came to me courtesy Charlie Wood at Spanning, the Moonwatcher.

Let me get this right: Windows RSS Platform to ship without secure feed support. And that goes for all of IE7? No way to get anything RSS other than vanilla news. No Hotmail, no Amazon, no eBay. No authentication support at all?

Mmmhm. Don’t understand. Maybe it’s because my head was still buzzing with the iTunes stuff.

I’m still getting over the French decision re Apple and iTunes. I am no fan of DRM per se, but I needed to get my head around the decision.

Today you can buy any-format music and get it to play on an iPod.

Today you can manage any-format music regardless of origin via iTunes.

But IF you buy music from iTunes (which you don’t have to do) THEN you can only buy it in AAC format and FairPlay-protected and so on.

And the French have refused that constraint. And we may not have iTunes in France. I guess that’s like saying we don’t have internet gambling in the US. Well, fine.

The decision is interesting, because I want everything to be DRM free, yet have this nagging feeling that what was decided makes no sense.

Let me try this on pens, something physical. Let’s make a Parker pen an iPod. Just humour me, please. Let’s assume Parker pens outsell all other fountain pens, that they created the category and zoomed into world domination mode.

Then they made sure you could buy ink from anywhere, not just Parker ink, and put it into your Parker pen. So people were freer about how they used their pens.

Then let’s assume that you had a pen maintenance kit that came with the pen. Dropper, nib cleaner, blotter, whatever. And again Parker outsold everything else. And they made sure that you could use the pen maintenance kit for pens other than Parker.

And let’s assume you had Parker shops. But they only sold Parker pens and Parker ink and Parker everything.

Because that’s what it was, a Parker shop. End of allegory.

Maybe the French are right. But right now I think we have bigger issues to resolve re DRM than this.