I just got back from a great talk by Koleman Strumpf at Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. He’s added movie trading to his file-sharing study so I got to hear a lot of new news. Basically, trading movies is now worse economically than trading music (at the current quality levels at least).
But when I got back, Fred and a guy from Carolina Week had taken over my office. Except for my shabby mess, it looked like a TV studio. Fred’ll be on later in the week talking about FaceBook and social networking.
Category: Information Commons (Page 14 of 26)
Information Commons, Copyright, Censorship and/or withdrawal of public information, Libraries: Digital and other
Koleman Strumpf will be speaking at Duke on “The Economic effects of P2P file sharing.” Amazing that I have to go to Duke to hear Koleman speak. Jennifer Jenkins of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain writes:
In 2004, Professor Koleman Strumpf co-authored an empirical study concluding that downloading has no statistically significant effect on record sales, and can even boost them. The study was called everything from “heretical” to “absolutely astounding” to “incomprehensible” (by an industry spokesperson). Come hear Professor Strumpf discuss his continuing work on the economic effects of file sharing at our first Information Ecology lecture of 2006. It will take place on Monday, January 23, at 12:15pm. Details are below.
Professor Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
“The Effect of File Sharing on the Sale of Entertainment Products: The Case of Recorded Music and Movies”
Date: 1/23/06
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Location: Duke Law School, Room 3041
Lunch will be servedFor industries ranging from software to pharmaceuticals and entertainment, there is an intense debate about the level of protection for intellectual property that is necessary to ensure innovation. In the case of digital information goods, web-based technologies provide a natural crucible to assess the implications of reduced protection because these technologies have drastically lowered the cost of copying information. This talk will discuss empirical evidence of the crowd-out effect of file sharing on entertainment products such as music and movies.
Professor Koleman Strumpf’s research interests are in applied microeconomics with an emphasis on policy applications. His current work focuses on P2P file sharing, prediction markets (such as political wagering markets or sports betting), and the economics of criminal behavior in illegal sports bookmaking. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, Science, Economist, Business Week, Rolling Stone, and Variety. He has appeared on ABC News, Nightline, CNN, CNBC, C-Span, NPR, and Bloomberg Radio.
I just finished talking with Sergio Quintana of NBC 17. The interview will run during sweeps week in February. No one knows what night.
I talked about blogs. How they are powerful because they have an intimate and personal voice. This is exactly the problem with blogs. They are intimate and personal. We have no ground rules culturally to deal with this new public intimacy. Should blogs be treated like diaries or like billboards? We are circumspect (or should be) about material from a private realm like a diary, but we consider billboard information to be completely public. We spoke a little about Facebook and Fred Stutzman’s research which showed that UNC students highly value their privacy when ask, but in practice on Facebook they reveal all the information that they listed as particularly private.
Also mentioned were last year’s Triangle Bloggers Conference and this year’s Podcastercon (the last covered by Sergio). I got in a little about Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media too.
We didn’t get to talk about car songs tho.
Brian Russell writes to let us know that WCOM is podcasting all of their talk shows. A good step in making community radio even more accessible. Now if they would add better descriptions of the shows — overall and individual segments.
My collegue Chris Roush on his Talking Biz News Blog takes the story of a BusinessWeek reporter who has his email interview questions posted by the interviewee.
I disagree with Chris and point to Dan Gillmor’s book in the comments. Dan touches on the story on his own blog for the Center for Citizen Media.
Also in the comments on Chris’ blog, thesanitycheck.com folks post a comment and a traceback to the interviewee’s reply.
Then Chris publishes this update: BusinessWeek reporter calls and is mad; Overstock head responds on Internet again. The reporter hasn’t caught on yet.
Of course I posted a comment to Dan’s blog telling him and his readers about Chris’s posts.
Got all that?
Hang on there’s more. Chris just posted, when I wasn’t looking, another bit from SanityCheck. This time, we learn that CNBC’s marker guru, Jim Cramer is threatening Sanity Check’s webmaster in More from The Sanity Check: Jim Cramer is mad now.
Phil Meyer alerts us to this Washington Monthly article by John Podesta and Robert McChesney, “Let There Be Wifi”.
Let There Be Wi-Fi
Broadband is the electricity of the 21st century—and much of America is being left in the dark.Two decades ago, the chattering classes fretted about economic upheaval rising from Japan and the Asian Tigers. They feared an invasion of cars, microchips, and Karaoke that would take away American jobs, take over U.S.-dominated industries, and shift cultural norms. In the 1990s, America responded with a boom in high technology and Hollywood exports. But a revolution is again brewing in places like Japan and South Korea. This time it’s about “broadbandâ€â€”a technology that, in terms of powering economies, could be the 21st century equivalent of electricity. But rather than relive the jingoism of the 1980s, American policy makers would be wise to take a cue from the Asian innovators and implement new policies to close the digital divide at home and with the rest of the world.
[…]
Several video streams of Podcastercon selections are on line. RTP-TV (wmv- yikes; mostly the copyright session) and Mac Pro Podcast (mpeg4; mostly Podcast 411 and podcaster interviews with podcasters).
More reactions to Podcastercon on Technorati.
The Friends of the Chapel Hill Public Library have been sponsoring a series of talks on Einstein. Tucker and I were at the first three, but he had a conflict today and I was there alone. Alone with a completely packed room! Dr. Henry Greenside does a fantastic job of making Einsteinian concepts approachable and understandable to the layman and his listeners obviously appreciate his work.
Greenside a nice set of notes and links to the talks and further readings on his Duke website.
Einstein’s most spectacular achievement as a scientist was his 1915 general theory of relativity, which explained gravity as a geometric bending of spacetime by matter.
Dr. Henry Greenside, Professor of Physics at Duke University, will present a non-technical overview of Einstein’s theory and then explain some of its amazing implications, including the bending of light by gravity, how strong gravitational fields cause time to slow down, the properties of black holes that form when massive stars die, and how space itself can expand and contract. Dr. Greenside will desribe how general relativity is being used by scientists to understand many mysterious astronomical observations — monstrous black holes at the center of each galaxy, an ever-expanding universe, and the mysterious “dark matter” of which the universe consists.
Finally, Dr. Greenside will describe the major crisis with which physics is currently faced: our two greatest physical theories — general relativity and quantum mechanics — conflict with one another. The resolution of this crisis is likely to lead to spectacular and unprecedented insights.
Podcastercon was a big success! We had about 300 people here and a good many of them over 1/3 from out of state; Brian was right when he wrote that Podcastercon was national (and he was writing early on in the planning).
The conference was indeed self-organizing which meant that I mostly dealt with securing buildings, getting tables and trashcans, talking to caterers and the like while the sessions were well run by the attendees and Brian could keep us all on track.
During the first sessions, I managed to visit both the Podcasting 411 session and the Advanced Podcasting session as well as having some chat time in the halls with folks that I don’t get to see enough, like Ed Cone, and folks I was just getting to know as the day progressed.
For lunch we experienced the Med Deli version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Brian’s order of good Lebanese finger food from domates to tzatziki to humas to salad and chicken skewers fed us all well.
In the afternoon, I got to parts of the Podcasting as a Teaching and Learning Strategy session lead by the talented teacher Dave Warlick and to Mur Lafferty‘s Women in Podcasting session. Mur had lost her voice which is a terrible thing for a podcaster to lose. I didn’t get into the Copyright Law and Podcasting session lead by Derrick Oien formerly of MP3.com. That room was way to full for me to slip in and hear what was up. But I heard great reports. Derrick certainly knows the consequences of running afoul of copyright laws.
The open sessions were a bit scattered in location and I was running one so they’re harder to mention (or to link to).
Overall, we had a great time. A very attendee directed conference in content and in tone — relaxed, welcoming, open to a variety of ideas and of people with no one feeling like she or he had to be a superstar. I think we stayed true to Brian’s ideals throughout and the result was a great feeling of comradery and shared success.
Dinner afters for some of us — many from out of state — was at the new Bon’s Home Cookin’ where we experienced such Southern food specialties as fried green tomatos, okra (fried or stewed with tomatos), pulled pork, fried chicken, field peas and corn and some very sweet desserts.
Podcastercon has over 280 people registered! We’re adding a much bigger room, Carroll Hall 111, in the lovely and talented School of Journalism and Mass Communication home building. This room will hold over 400 podcasters and podcaster-wanna-bees. Don’t worry Carroll Hall is not far from Murphey Hall.
Brian writes about the details here.
Brian Russell and I — mostly Brian appropriately — were interviewed today by Sergio Quintana of NBC 17 in Durham about Podcastercon. Sergio got all excited about Brian’s Treo 650 and its short video capability. He couldn’t stop talking into the phone/camera. I don’t know if Brian kept any of that tho.
Remember Podcastercon, which we were talking about when not talking about the Treo, is Saturday!
Inspired by my own post about Bon’s, I went over and added a bunch of eat options to the Podcastercon Saturday dinner pages. If you have favs that you’d like to let others in on, then go over there and add ’em and comment on them.
Remember that Podcastercon is this Saturday!
Brian Russell has put his excess Holiday energy to work and has been making unique nametags for Podcastercon out of old floppy disks.
Where: 116 Murphey Hall, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC
When: Saturday, January 7, 2006 9 am – 6 pm
You’ll see a variety of people already signed up for Podcastercon when you go over to check out the latest at the Podcastercon site. The unconference is really shaping up. Brian Russell is doing a great job of keeping us all on track and keeping it open and “un”.
The folks at lulu.com’s blooker prize blog write to remind YOU to get your Blooker Prize entries in soon. You’ll need to send in 3 copies of your blook and the official entry form by January 30! For details and recent entries, see the Blooker Blog.
NOTE: Along with Robin “roblimo” Miller and Cory “boingboing” Doctorow, I’m one of the final judges.
Today’s NYTimes carries an announcement that 4 tech companies — IBM, Cisco, HP and Intel — have joined with 7 universities — Texas, Illinois, Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Rensselaer, and Georgia Tech — to agree to make software developed in collaborative projects freely available.
The article, and others based on the same press release, is short on details, but promises that there will be more posted later this week at the IBM Scholars site and at the Kaufman Foundation site now.
Listening to Sister Rosetta Tharpe 4 disk collection called “The Original Soul Sister.”
A few weeks back, the talented banjo player and NC Cultural Resources guy, Joe Newberry, dropped by to talk about podcasting from the NC Cultural Resources website. We chatted a bit and now some time later, the first podcast in online and ready for listeners. It’s interviews with the winners of the 2005 North Carolina Awards — Bland Simpson, Randall Kenan, and others.
Tim Berners-Lee has the beginning of a blog at MIT. In his first post, he reflects on his feelings about how the Web has evolved to include Wikis and blogs. Hidden in a link (well, sorta hidden) is a write up on the first web brower which only ran on the NeXT in the very early 90s. I had one on my NeXT and still have the code on the machine now. Tim came by in 1991 and showed me how to turn his demo page for Hypertext 91 into my own personal page. I’m sad to say that since http://info.cern.ch/ is gone many historic links have vanished.
A number of places are passing on the announcement that Roomba folks have opened the software for their robotic disk-shaped vacuum cleaner. One catch: your Roomba must have the new Serial Control Interface which is only in vacuums manufactured since October 24, 2005. In January, the Roomba Osmo //hacker will be available which will let you upgrade olde school Roombas.
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