Category: Uncategorized

Wond’ring aloud….

…Will the years treat us well?…

From Wond’ring Aloud Composed by Ian Anderson, performed by Jethro Tull

Doesn’t sound like the years are treating the composer, one of my favourite flautists, well. Despite the fact that I bought most of the Jethro Tull albums on vinyl, then again on CD, and sometimes yet again on 25th Anniversary or 30th Anniversary special rip-me-off editions I couldn’t resist. But I shall desist from commenting further on that. For now. Gotta go take the tablets….

I was reading the FT today, after a few days away, and came across an article by Ian Anderson. Yes, you have me there, I’m not just a DeadHead but a Tull fan as well. So much so that many years ago, when I first came to the UK and happened to go to Preston, I just had to go stand on Preston Platform, do my Cheap Day Return bit.

Ian is amongst a growing band of musicians and artists and poets and novelists coming to the realisation that a 50-year copyright law meant something they hadn’t considered or expected: their creations going out of copyright during their lifetime….. Ian also argues that Europe being out of synch with the US places musicians here at a competitive disadvantage, suggesting that we should take the 50 and make it 95 like in the US. Why not 120 then, to keep in step with Mickey Mouse Act projections? Why not in perpetuity and be damned with any of the origins of copyright law?

Some of you may already have figured out that I don’t think much of current IPR regimes and regulations. I never realised that copyright tenure had anything to do with life expectancy. My bad.

An aside: The rule at Dead concerts was that you could tape whatever you wanted and give it away or trade it but not sell it. You even had rows “reserved” for people who wanted to tape the concerts. I use the term “reserved” loosely. Garcia and gang knew something.

So when I see articles like this one, I feel sad. Especially at a time when the Arctic Monkeys, Sandi Thom and Gnarls Barkley are all suggesting that things are changing in the music industry. Take a look at this site belonging to The Music Alliance, the amalgam of MCPS and PRS that collect and pay royalties to musicians. When I read what they say in the tab marked The Main Issue, it suggests to me that there’s a battle brewing between the MCPS/PRS (on one side) and (wait for it) The British Phonographic Industry and a consortium of Digital Service Providers and Mobile Network Operators on the other. Whoo-ey. Boy do things have to change.

And one of the things that has to change is IPR and DRM. I’m sure Ian Anderson wants to live in a world where he doesn’t have to pay the inventor of the seed drill royalties for “image and name use rights”. Three hundred years later.

Because that’s the kind of nonsense that will happen. If we let it.

I am tempted to end there with the last stanza from Wond’ring Aloud, a truly wondrous song…. So I will:

And it’s only the giving

That makes you what you are.

Trying to turn lemons into lemonade in class

Andrew McAfee, a professor at Harvard, makes some interesting points in a recent post to his blog.

In a telling, almost depressing coda to the post, Andrew says:

“I’ll end this post with an anecdote that showed me that these three trends* are not yet well understood by many business leaders.  Last week I was teaching in an executive education program for senior executives – owners and presidents of companies.  I assigned a case I wrote about the internal use of blogs at a bank, and also gave one additional bit of homework:  I pointed the participants to blogger and typepad, and told them to start their own blogs and report the blog’s URL to me.

What they reported instead was that they had no intention of completing the assignment.  They told me how busy they were, and how they had no time and no inclination to mess around with blogs (whatever they were).  Out of two classes of 50-60 participants each, I got fewer than 15 total blog URLs.

Trying to turn lemons into lemonade in class, I asked some of the people who actually had sent a URL to describe the experience of starting a blog.  They all shrugged and said it was no big deal, took about five minutes total, didn’t require any skills, etc.  I then asked why I would give busy executives such a silly, trivial assignment.  In both classes one smart student piped up to say “To show us exactly how trivial it was.”  At that point, class discussion became interesting.

[My emphases]

*The three “broad and converging trends” he refers to are:

  • Simple, free platforms for self-expression
  • Emergent structures rather than imposed ones
  • Order from chaos

Having spent time with Andrew, I know there’s a great deal of value in what he has to say. I’d strongly recommend reading his blog.

How long can movies like Blow Up be made?

No, not the 1966 Antonioni movie (which I was young enough to enjoy illicitly in 1970) but its Brooklyn remake by Vinnie.

It didn’t matter that it was late at night in Chennai, that I had a very early morning flight, and that the broadband connection I has was less than perfect, that it took many attempts to finish watching the show. And what a show.
I just loved everything about Vinnie’s efforts. And it encapsulated a number of lessons for me, an all-too-brief definition of what is possible.

How individuals working in teams can do things never done before. Learn about the possibilities. Take risks yet be careful. Tell people about what they want to do with passion and voice and then have the joy of actually doing what they want. Sample bits of this and that without caring about rights or wrongs, not intending to make money out of the sampling per se. Doing no evil. But doing something different. Disruptive in a gapingvoid way. Engaging. Micro capital raising. Co-creating. Sharing.

Having fun. [Thanks to Gordon and Frank for the link.]

A coda. Could you imagine doing this with anything but a Mac? The idea, the fund-raise, making the video, the lot. It’s all Mac.

Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.

Markets are (Dangling) Conversations…with a difference

And you read your Emily Dickinson

And I my Robert Frost

And we note our place with bookmarkers

That measure what we’ve lost… Simon and Garfunkel, The Dangling Conversation

The more I think about it, the more I realise what incredible changes there are in value creation when we co-create and trade and exchange across open marketplaces.

Now I can see exactly where people I like and trust “note [their] place with bookmarkers”.

Now the bookmarkers don’t have to measure what is lost. [Except, of course, the evils sprung up by bad law and bad IPR and bad DRM].

They measure, at least in some part, what is gained. If tags are bookmarkers and things like Technorati are measures. But that’s for another day.

Today I decided to spend some time with Joi Ito’s blog. Not just read it, spend time on it. And it was an exhilarating ride.
First, I experienced the Chicken Little approach to transparency, a story Joi repeats from a meeting he was at. Priceless.

Second, via Joi’s post about Wikia, I decided to take a wander around the Wikia sites that were forming. Here’s a list of some popular Wikia sites:

  1. Alternative History, for creating fictional alternative histories.
  2. Creatures, about Creatures, the artificial life computer game series
  3. d20 NPC, generic NPC and monster stat blocks for the d20 System.
  4. Dofus, information on the Dofus MMORPG.
  5. Doom, for fans of the Doom series of computer games
  6. Memory Alpha, a Star Trek encyclopedia
  7. Muppet, based on the Muppet franchise, including Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock
  8. Star Wars, about the Star Wars movies and spin-offs
  9. Uncyclopedia, a parody of Wikipedia
  10. WikiFur, information on furry community and culture

Tells you something about the way cyberspace is interacting with the real world, doesn’t it? Fictional alternative histories. Muppets and Star Wars and Star Trek. And various forms of MMOG. And, just to “legitimise” the list a la Christopher Locke’s organic gardening*, we have “information on furry community and culture”. [*More on this another day]

Third, while on the subject of real versus virtual, but staying with Joi Ito, I then saw a Philip Torrone story about credit cards and virtual environments and the Lindex exchange.

Wow.

I have already seen stories about “well-to-do” “youth” “outsourcing” the playing of the first few “vanilla” levels of games to “India“, only to take up the reins when a more interesting phase of the game is entered and the requisite number of lives and collateral and artifacts have been earned/collected. Co-creation of a different sort. For well-to-do and youth and outsourcing and vanilla and India please go ahead and substitute with whatever works for you…..the principle’s the same and it’s here to stay.
We should not underestimate the sheer joy and power and learning and creativity that comes from collaborative work using social software in a world of sharply declining computing, communications and storage costs.

Thanks Joi for a wonderful random walk. By the way, it’s what I do with people I link to. It is worth actually taking a walk and visiting the site every now and then, rather than just getting syndicated and alerted content.

……….Yes we speak of things that matter. With words that must be said……………..

More on blogging

[BTW If any of you find that comments you made in the last day or so somehow disappeared, you’re right. It is not because I’ve suddenly taken on control-freak levels of moderation. The answer is simpler.

By accident or design, there were problems with my site and I had to revert to backup.]

My previous post, on collaborative filtering and tags, made me learn something more about blogging.

One,  archives matter. We may spend time telling everyone about the reverse chronological journal nature of the blog, but we shouldn’t get too hung up about the diary aspect. It is an aspect. It is an important aspect. But there’s more to blogs than the time dimension. I found Rashmi’s post on the subject by visiting her site, seeing some of the comments people had made and going via those comments to the post.

Two, blogrolls can really act as trusted referrers. The route I took to get to Rashmi is a common one for me. I read someone’s blog because someone else I like and trust says so. Even if I’ve never met that someone else…..