Ten Reasons Why

. . . I’m not dead. Just really busy with preparing to go to Educause and to move into my new condo within the same week.
It’s making me very grumpy. Pity my poor officemate who has to spend eight hours a day with an extremely cranky Greg. She’s not happy about it.
I’m also having some severely wacky dreams regarding the homeowner bit. I would expect some anxiety dreams about things going wrong with the place I just bought, but the crazy part is that well-known actors show up in the dreams to notify me of the impending problems. So far Christopher Walken has told me water is leaking into my walls from the unit above, Alec Baldwin alerted me to rats in the basement, and Brad Pitt (as Tyler Durden from Fight Club, which I saw again last week) broke the news that my movers lost all my belongings. At least he didn’t kick my ass.
Clearly I’m grumpy and insane.

Personal

Jay Allen has written and released a Movable Type anti-spam plug-in called MT-Blacklist. [link via cogdogblog]
So far my strategy to avoid comment cruft has worked perfectly fine, but it’s good to know there’s another solution out there if I need it.

Movable Type

Trés cool: Andrew Lisson’s Lego page.
Check out the Lego renditions of Escher drawings! Whoa!
Link via Andrea’s Weblog.

Open Source

The digital watermarking concept in my previous post sparked an idea. I’ve written before that music retail (and eventually video and book retail) as we know it is in its death throes. The oh-so-twentieth-century “grocery store” model of bins of physical media (CDs, DVDs, books) won’t last. Music retail is not not doomed because of file-sharing, which I think will turn out to be just a blip in the history of how we deliver and consume content, but because it’s just bad business: why pay the enormous overhead of manufacturing, shipping, warehousing inventory, rent and utilities, employee salaries, etc. to sell and distribute content that, thanks to the digital age, can be reproduced and distributed for a miniscule fraction of those costs?
The primary reason we continue to do so that the mega-corporations that control the content also own, control or are invested in a many of the manufacturing and distribution channels. For the last several hundred years, content has been a manufacturing industry, with big factories that churn out physical media that just happen to have this abstract stuff called content cut, stuck, or burned on them. Likewise, some of the distribution channels, e.g. Wal-Mart, are as powerful (if not more so) in our culture than the media conglomerates.
Eventually greed eliminates even a powerful status quo, though. The media industry will find a way to divest themselves of the physical distribution infrastructure, because, as the software industry alread realized, you can make better margins selling just the bits. Which brings me back to the digital watermarking.
The challenge of piracy to the content distributor is that, currently, content is pretty much untrackable. I can rip a CD, share it, and once it’s shared it’s nearly impossible to track that particular file back to me. Big value (e.g. free content), little risk (e.g. hard to track me down), leads to lots of file sharing.
However, suppose you go to an online store, enter your account information, and every song you download is stamped with a digital watermark identifying you as the purchaser? What if you didn’t purchase a CD that was a duplicate of 5 million other CD’s, but instead went to a retail kiosk, entered your account information, and had a CD custom-burned for you (or even more likely the files transferred wirelessly to your MP3 player/personal content storage device), again with a digital watermark identifying you as the purchaser? Suddenly it becomes much simpler for the copyright infringement to be tracked back to you, thus providing a disincentive to illegally share the file, but — and this is the important part — this custom digital watermark does so without squashing fair use.
That model requires some pretty drastic changes, not the least of which is the eradication of the retail content industry (record stores, video stores, and eventually book stores), but also probably some advances in the speed of burning/transferring content (I need to be able to get 50 songs nearly as quickly as a clerk can ring up 5 CDs), advances in digital watermarking, and a significant mind-shift among consumers. Also, it only works moving forward — back catalogs are already lost to file sharing because they were never watermarked (but, for the most part, it’s the new content where the money is made).
If, for the purposes of this thought experiment, I can fiat all those assumptions into existence, I think the custom digital watermarking idea might work.
I can’t be the first person to have thought of this, can I?

Intellectual Property

Okay, the whole “enemy of the people” bit is a little over the top, but the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its director, Jack Valenti, run a close second behind the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for actions designed to stomp out every use of intellectual property that doesn’t directy line the coffers of big move/recording studios. In Why inspecting a turkey sandwich won’t stop movie piracy, film critic Roger Ebert writes about a recent Valenti edict that basically takes independent film out of the running for Academy Awards:

[Valenti] announced that signatories of the Motion Picture Association of America would be forbidden to send out the thousands of advance DVD ‘’screeners” that jam the year-end mailboxes of Academy members and critics compiling Best 10 lists.
His reason is that screeners have been used by video pirates to make illegal copies of movies. That is true. It is also true that pirates will find a way to steal prints anyway.
The Valenti Decree would cripple the chance of a small independent film getting an Oscar nomination. With dozens of films opening at year end, the academy population lacks the time and energy to attend all those screenings in theaters. The DVDs pile up at home, and when the buzz turns hot on a title, they look at it.

Ebert goes on in the article to provide an excellent alternate solution for Academy screening purposes: “disposable” digital video discs which self destruct after one viewing and are digital watermarked with the name of the Academy member to whom it is distributed.

Intellectual Property

Wired News: Music Label Cashes in by Sharing:

Berkeley-based Magnatune calls its approach “open music,” a blend of shareware, open source and grass-roots activism.
The idea is to let users try music before they buy, and when they do, to give half of every sale to the artist.
Magnatune’s motto: “We are not evil.”

Nice motto. :)

Intellectual Property

From yesterday’s Washington Post: Students Fill Grade Book On Teachers at Web Site. The article is about Ratemyteachers.com, another site that allows students to review teachers from their school:

Critics, including many teachers and principals, said the site’s ratings are unscientific, not to mention hurtful. Many school districts across the country, including Montgomery County and Loudoun County, have blocked access to ratemyteachers.com from school computers.

I think that there’s a great potential for this kind of service to provide students, parents, and administrators with valuable (if unscientific) feedback. However, it’s accompanied by a great potential for immature abuse.
It strikes me that what’s lacking from this kind of service is a social software-like reputation system like Slashdot uses. E.g., the community needs to be able to mod up or down the comments. Of course, the hole in that approach is likely that the small sample size may not be large enough to effectively moderate itself.

Education

Oliver Willis, in Deflating The Blog Bubble, writes:

During one of the Saturday sessions [at BloggerCon] a member of the audience referred to the assembled crowd as “utopia”. Now, yes, I loved the blog camaraderie but quite frankly I don’t want to be the only black person in utopia. I was the only black person in that room, and was one of a few minorities.

A thoughtful and thought-provoking post on the reality, not the hype, of weblogs.

Weblogs