Month: February 2008

It’s in danger of sliding off Techmeme as I write this, but I wanted to send a shout out to Harvard for its proposal to set academic research free on the Web (I wonder if that’s the first time the words “shout out” and the word “Harvard” have appeared in a sentence together). According to this report, the university today voted to require faculty in the Arts & Sciences department to make their research available for free on the Harvard website (although there is an opt-out clause).

This move is being promoted by the Open Access movement, which wants universities of all kinds to make their research freely available. The author still retains the copyright, and is free to submit his or her work to any academic journals, but the paper is also provided for free on the Web. Many proponents argue that too much research — much of which is publicly funded — winds up trapped in journals that no one but academics have access to, journals that cost universities a lot of money to subscribe to.

Web sociologist danah boyd recently called for a boycott of any journal that doesn’t provide its articles to the public in some form:

“Even if you read an early draft of my article in essay form, you’ll probably never get to read the cleaned up version. Nor will you get to see the cool articles on alternate reality gaming, crowd-sourcing, convergent mobile media, and video game modding that are also in this issue. That’s super depressing… I vow that this is the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get access. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I’d like to ask other academics to do the same.”

Others who have written on this topic include David “Joho the Blog” Weinberger, who says he wishes the policy went even further. Weinberger is a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. In a comment on his post, University of Toronto scholar Mark Federman says that he hopes “the academic journal business model heads down the same road as the aluminum-disk-coated-with-plastic business.”

According to The Times, a draft bill — known as a “green paper” — is being circulated in Britain recommending that Internet service providers become a kind of police force for copyrighted content, with anyone who shares such content illegally automatically subject to a “three strikes and you’re out” rule. After two warnings, the draft legislation says, they would have their Internet access cut off.

There are a couple of obvious problems with this idea. For one thing, it isn’t likely to stop serious downloaders at all. As Stan Schroeder suggests in his post at Mashable, there are any number of ways around the filters that ISPs might use to detect such illegal activity — including anonymous proxies, steganography and so on. Would all of those things become illegal as well? And how many illegal files would you have to share before you got the warning from your provider — one, 10, a thousand?

As Mike Masnick notes at Techdirt, this is hardly the first time this idea has come up. Not only did U2’s manager Paul McGuinness effectively come out and demand recently that ISPs police the Internet, but the French government has been considering legislation similar to that proposed by the UK green paper. But there has been very little discussion of whether such a move would even work, let alone whether it is advisable. I would argue that the answer is no in both cases.

Not only would turning ISPs into Internet police open up a giant can of worms — would they be filtering for hate speech or disturbing images or potential anti-government sentiments as well? — but criminalizing copyright infringement on such a massive scale is just wrong. It’s all out of proportion with the damage that is allegedly being inflicted. What we are seeing is the evolution of the content business, not a worldwide crime spree that needs draconian legislation.

Mike Arrington is reporting at TechCrunch that the dating site Hot or Not has been acquired for $20-million (apparently in cash) by a Toronto-based company called Avid Life Media. Since I had never heard of Avid Life Media before, I found this kind of interesting, so I looked around a bit to see what I could find out about it. There’s not a lot of history about the company, but it bought another dating site — Ashley Madison — last fall for an undisclosed sum. Ashley Madison (friends tell me) is a site that specializes in catering to married people who want to find partners other than their spouses.

My impression — and it’s only an impression — is that Avid Life Media somehow emerged from AshleyMadison.com, since Avid’s current president, Noel Biderman, has also been the chief operating officer of AshleyMadison since February of 2007 (according to his LinkedIn profile). Before that he was a vice-president at JumpTV.com for about three months, and before that it says he worked for an Internet company called Move. Avid also bought a Toronto-based green network called FiveLimes last summer for an undisclosed sum.

For anyone who’s interested, video of my appearance on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin is now up at the network’s website, or you can click and watch it below in a popup. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was on last Friday talking about the future of “cloud computing” with Nick Carr of Roughtype (who just came out with a book on the subject), as well as CBC tech commentator Jesse Hirsh and ComputerWorld Canada editor Shane Schick. We talked about some of the benefits and disadvantages, the security issues, whether the Macbook Air makes a good “cloud computer” and some other topics as well. It was a fun show, although Shane apparently didn’t think too much of Jesse’s views on the value of IT administrators.

It’s been awhile since Microsoft did anything really game-changing in the mobile space. Windows Mobile devices, and they work fine most of the time, but they are about as exciting as dry toast (of course, if you’re British, dry toast is pretty exciting). Now, Microbeast seems to want to step up its game, with the purchase of Danger Inc., maker of the Sidekick. But will it bring any life to Microsoft’s mobile efforts?

Like my recuperating friend Om Malik at GigaOm, I’ve been following Danger from the early days, when Andy Rubin started the company and got backing from some senior VC types to shake things up in the mobile space. And the Sidekick handset did that — even the first version, which was kind of clunky, was a pleasure to use, with its flip-out swivelling screen and keypad, and the focus on instant messaging and text messaging.

The mobile industry is a pretty vicious place, though, and Danger was arguably underfunded from the beginning. It was also (as Om notes) a closed system, and so didn’t get a lot of juice from downloadable apps or plugins. And Andy Rubin has since left the company and is now running Google’s mobile Android project. I see the Microsoft acquisition going one of two ways: Danger could bring some creativity into Microsoft, or the beast from Redmond could crush all the life out of the tiny startup. I’ll leave you to guess which of the two is more likely.

The Times is reporting that Yahoo wants to restart merger talks with AOL as a way of avoiding the clutches of Microsoft, a move that — if true — is roughly equivalent to screaming “we’re totally desperate” from the rooftops of Yahoo headquarters. In this case, of course, it’s difficult to know who is the more desperate of the two, Yahoo or AOL. Neither has what amounts to a viable strategy, and neither has managed to capitalize on any of their vaunted media assets, despite years of trying.

Obviously, Yahoo has to cozy up to just about anyone (even Disney, apparently) in order to try and get Microsoft to jack up its offer from what the Web company believes is an insulting $44-billion or so. Like my friend Paul Kedrosky, I think Yahoo is going through the corporate-takeover equivalent of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s classic stages of grief — anger, denial, bargaining, etc. Right now it’s stuck in bargaining.

Fiduciary duty obviously compels the Yahoo board to fight the Microbeast, but it still seems somewhat futile. I hope Jerry Yang doesn’t try to actually float the idea that a merger with AOL would be a good thing for Yahoo — the howls of laughter would drown him out. Better for Yahoo to suck on a tailpipe out in the corporate garage than succumb to that. Rafat Ali at PaidContent says it’s pretty unlikely that Time Warner would do it, and Ashkan at HipMojo doesn’t think it’s too likely either.

Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing has the news that author Neil Gaiman has gotten approval from his publisher to offer one of his books online for free — perhaps inspired by the story of Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, who started pirating his own books and noticed that sales of actual physical copies of his books began to take off as a result. Other authors who have experimented with a similar approach include Charles Sheehan-Miles and economist David Levine. Of course, Cory — who is also a science-fiction author — has also offered some of his own works online for free.

Rafat Ali at PaidContent has news of a couple of other publisher experiments as well, including a move by Random House to sell individual chapters online, and a move by Harper Collins to release digital versions of some books online (including a book by Paulo Coelho), although as Rafat points out the digital copies are crippleware.

I was talking with a colleague recently about the Barack Obama tribute video made by Will.i.am from the Black-Eyed Peas and Bob Dylan’s son Jesse, and how fascinating it was to watch as it made its way through various media last week, from emails and Twitter feeds to blog posts and then into newspapers and media websites.

When I first came across the video, known as the “Yes We Can” video, people were describing it as compelling and passionate — many seemed impressed by the fact that it wasn’t official, and that it had young men and women of all colours in it, symbolizing the breadth of Obama’s reach and how people connect with his message.

Over time, however, you could see the tide starting to turn. Some people started to talk about how slick it was — filled with celebrities and very commercial, in a music-video kind of way. Then people started musing about how that was part of the problem with Obama’s campaign to begin with: style over substance, etc. The blog NewTeeVee called it an “appalling exercise in celebrity self-congratulation.”

Within a day or two, the video was being used as an example of how “user-generated” media isn’t always such a great thing for a campaign. The political site Hot Air called it “disturbingly cool,” while a blogger at The New Republic wondered whether it might not hurt Obama more than help him. One commenter on Twitter wondered when Obama campaign had started having his videos done by The Gap.

So the Obama video went from blockbuster media event and unadulterated success story to backlash in about 48 hours — less time than it would have taken for a typical campaign video to even be distributed to TV networks a few years ago, let alone watched by almost two million people, posted to blogs, commented on and analyzed. Fascinating.

My friend Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has a thoughtful post up about how he hardly reads books any more, and mostly does his reading on the Web, through blogs and other online media. In the post, he wonders whether this is just for convenience — or whether it’s because the actual way that he thinks has changed into something non-linear, to the point where reading books just isn’t as enjoyable as it used to be.

This is something I’ve thought a fair bit about as well, and I recall talking to Paul Kedrosky about how few books I read any more. Like Scott, I’m a literature major, and have shelves full of books that I have read (and want to read). And I still do read books — but mostly at the beach or the cottage, or other places where there’s no Internet access. Is that something to be ashamed of, or is there more to it than that?

I think the most common criticism of people who do all their reading on the Web is that they are like moths, flitting from flame to flame, never stopping in one place long enough to actually think something through. In this view, the Web is a medium designed for those with short attention spans. The other perspective, however, is the one that Scott is advancing: that the Web enables you to connect thoughts and ideas that you might not otherwise have had, and therefore is actually of more value rather than less.

I think about how reading the newspaper is an inherently unsatisfying experience in a lot of ways now, because when I read something that triggers a thought or idea, or a desire for more information, I can’t just click it and do a Google search. Does that mean I’m not giving the story the attention it deserves? Hardly. I think if anything it makes it easier to use an article as a jumping off point for further thought and discussion. Reading books feels awkward in part because — as Jeff Jarvis described in a Guardian piece he wrote — they’re not connected to anything.

Obviously there’s always time for relaxation and thoughtful reflection, and there’s a time for escapism as well, and books are great for both of those things. But when it comes to consuming information and trying to connect it to other information as a way of generating ideas or coming to conclusions, nothing beats the Web — except maybe a great conversation with friends over dinner and drinks, of course 🙂

I wish I had seen this post from sociologist danah boyd (who spells her name without capital letters) before I went on TVO’s The Agenda last night talking about the benefits and disadvantages of “cloud” computing. It’s a great example of the downside of using Web apps and having all of your data live in “the cloud.” Someone danah knows had their account hijacked and then ultimately deleted by Google for terms of use violations. Years worth of email and other data — gone in an instant.

Like Karoli at Odd Time Signatures, I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach just thinking about it. Having your email and other data — Google documents, photos, etc. — available anywhere you have an Internet connection is a great thing, and I’m a huge user of “cloud” services. But I also make a point of having backups elsewhere as well. All of my Gmail is backed up at home through Thunderbird, and all of my photos live on a hard drive at home as well as at Flickr — and just in case, most of them are also backed up at Amazon’s Web Services using Jungledisk.com.

danah boyd’s friend managed to get Google to “undelete” his account because he had connections to important people who could press his case, but not everyone has those kinds of connections. So it’s worth remembering that cloud services are great until the cloud disappears — or it starts raining. Best to have a non-cloudy option as well.