Accept no substitutes

Category: Information Commons (Page 21 of 26)

Information Commons, Copyright, Censorship and/or withdrawal of public information, Libraries: Digital and other

Not His Native Language, but He Read Phil Meyer

Rupert Murdoch told US editors yesterday that the “Internet is an emerging medium that is not my native language.”

As the big Fox told the editors that News Corp had slept too long during the Internet emergence, he quoted Phil Meyer:

One writer, Philip Meyer, has even suggested in his book The Vanishing Newspaper that looking at today’s declining newspaper readership — and continuing that line, the last reader recycles the last printed paper in 2040 — April, 2040, to be exact.

There are a number of reasons for our inertia in the face of this advance. First, newspapers as a medium for centuries enjoyed a virtual information monopoly — roughly from the birth of the printing press to the rise of radio. We never had a reason to second-guess what we were doing. Second, even after the advent of television, a slow but steady decline in readership was masked by population growth that kept circulations reasonably intact. Third, even after absolute circulations started to decline in the 1990s, profitability did not.

But those days are gone. The trends are against us. Fast search engines and targeted advertising as well as editorial, all increase the electronic attractions by a factor of 3 or 4. And at least four billion dollars a year is going into R&D to further improve this process.

So unless we awaken to these changes, which are quite different to those of 5 or 6 years ago, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans. But, properly done, they are an opportunity to actually improve our journalism and expand our reach.

Full speech at The News Corp site.

Testing MP4 streams – Folkstreams

Angel that stands by me
I need your help. We’ve encoded a lot of films in MP4 for streaming — usually your QuickTime player will play the streams whilst embedded in your browser. If you could try streaming the documentary about Wilmington visionary artist Minnie Evans called “The Angel That Stands By Me” or “Give My Poor Heart Ease: Mississippi Delta Bluesmen” featuring BB King then let me know if you get a good smooth stream, the size of the picture, and any quality issues, I’d appreciate it.
If you have difficulties, could you also try streaming “Self Preservation In An Atomic Attack” from the Prelinger Archives at Archive.org and let me know if that movie is handled differently.
Much thanks and enjoy the movies.

You don’t have to be a Marxist…

Late Friday, I took a call from a Daily Tar Heel reporter doing a story on Open Access journals. I chatted a bit and pointed him to others who know more, including but especially Jeff Pomerantz who helped organize the Convocation on Scholarly Publishing here a couple of months back. We both wrote about the Convocation here (me) and here (Jeff).

Here’s a clip from the article which takes what I said, in portions, and at least makes me interesting. Perhaps more interesting than I deserve.

“You don’t have to be a Marxist to figure out that the workers are getting screwed,” said Paul Jones, a clinical professor in the schools of Information and Library Science and Journalism and Mass Communication.

“If I was a publisher and I could say it with a straight face, I would say I add value at every step.”

A paper written by Sarah Michalak, head University librarian, and Research and Special Projects Librarian Judith Panitch states that the cost of physics journals has risen 36 percent in the last five years to an average cost of $2,543 per subscription.

Such numbers make Jones a proponent of open-access publishing. He said he hopes it will force the major journals to be more reasonable in their pricing.

I said that scholars must join (or feel like they must join) the scholarly societies that publish the journal, in many cases they must pay a page fee to publish (or even to be reviewed), they pay again for the journal and/or their library pays for the journal, then they pay again to use the articles in their classes. You don’t have to be a Marxist…

Jeff writes about his experience as well.

Better if we share

The cover of today’s NYTimes Business section has a story on IBM’s patent reevlauation and their patent release. As I discussed in my interview with the News and Observer back in mid-January, IBM is getting the “Better if we share” idea. The Times writer rightly cites Eric von Hippel‘s new MIT Press book, Democratizing Innovation (which you may buy or download free from his website as a PDF and yes the book has a Creative Commons license) as a good (I’d say great) source for learning about the ideas influencing the IBM decision.

Aside: The online version of the story has an audio/visual slide show which does little more than summarize the article. The pictures there add little to the story. Looks like a way to give you all of the downside of a radio news short version of the story with not much added insight. The charts however are quite good. Both are accessible as click and pop links on the story site.

Personal Aside: I did a separate interview with the IBM folks in the article back in February as a follow up to the NandO interview. They seemed to be right on top of things as you might expect and were very interested in ibiblio. It was also a good feeling to hear that I had it right in my interview — I was wondering if they were calling to set me straight on a few things at first, but I surprised myself ;->

Lessig and Tweedy talk in NYTimes

The Wired sponsored talk at the New York Public Library last Thursday evening with Larry Lessig and Jeff Tweedy was sold out early (within 5 minutes of being announced on the Internet, says the Times).
But there’s a quick write up in today’s NYTimes called “Exploring the Right to Share, Mix and Burn”.
Tweedy notes that filesharing helped the sales of “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel” become double that of the previous CD “Summerteeth” in the first week and that filesharing helped the band survive and thrive after being dropped by their label.
More at the Times article above and more important — WilcoWorld says they will be presenting an archived version of their livecast of the event.

Analysis of the Creative Commons

Just back from a great dissertation defense. “An Analysis of the Creative Commons as a Solution for Copyright Protection in the Digital Era” by Minjeong Kim.
First, Dr. Kim does a fine job of outlining the history of copyright in the USA and in the UK showing the various tensions between the private property view and the public policy view of copyright.
Next she did a great survey with good responses from her carefully selected pool of CC license users.
There are some very interesting surprises in her results, but I need to let her have a chance to decide where and when she might publish her work or even the findings before I let them loose on the world. If you are interested in who uses CC licenses and what they expect from them, you’ll want to read this dissertation. (and I hope the book that follows).

Jones to San Francisco and Computerworld Heroes

CW Heroes (last year)
I’ll be in San Francisco tomorrow thru early Monday and will be receiving a Computerworld Heroes medal on Sunday. This is no April Fool’s joke. I’ll be receiving the medal as the first step of a process that has a couple of more stages, but this part includes my wearing a tux to dinner — and wearing the medal to dinner! So the spirit of foolishness is somewhat preserved as I will look more like Harpo Marx than anyone distinguished. The distinction belongs to everyone who has contributed to sunsite-metalab-ibiblio in the past over a dozen years. The list is long, very long and I am deeply in debt to you all and delighted to represent you at the Awards.

If you are in Frisco, drop me a line or gimme a call and let’s get together. Saturday afternoon and/or evening is best for getting together as the awards start at noonish and continue into the evening.

What: Computerworld Heroes Awards
Where: San Francisco City Hall
When: Public ceremony – Noon Sunday April 3

Where’s Paul staying: Sir Francis Drake Hotel

Top Secret ibiblio project to be revealed

Some time in the next few hours, at least before tomorrow noon, the ibiblio team will be revealing a special top secret project that will make the Makers at MIT insanely jealous, that will help Dave Winer in his quest to lose weight, that will compete with Doc Searls for having the best collective knowledge of net.goingson, that will help NC State and Duke forget their NCAA loses, that will put shine on Howard Rheingold’s shoes, that will double the value of Tim O’Reilly’s backlist, that will make a preacher lay his Bible down, that will make a coon dog hung a hound, that will complete Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive, that will be of course under Creative Commons license, that will help Jessamyn West tolerate overdue books, that will combine the Cathedral AND the Bazaar and the Bizarre, that will allow Larry Lessig to wear a color other than black, that will allow Jamie Boyle to speak with a Southern Drawl, that will give Eben Moglen a close shave, that will make John Hood approve of public transportation, that will allow Douglas Rushkoff to drink a can of Sprite without irony, that will turn Boing Boing into something serious and Cory Doctorow into a long haired poet, that will allow Pamela Jones to see the upsides of the SCO claims, that will fill in the large blank spots in Roblimo’s blog, that will make the perfect SlashDot post, that will get the attention.xml of Steve Gillmor, what will get down to the grassroots with Dan Gillmor, that will help Jeff Pomerantz find the next highest prime number, that will reveal Glenn Otis Brown‘s biggest secret, that will put hair back on Bob Young‘s head (so he can quit wearing so many hats, [more later]

UPDATE Bloggy is here! or see the post above. After April 1, find Bloggy here.

Full Frame Festival and Panels (April 7 – 10)

Full Frame Festival logo
Laurie Racine, President of the Full Frame Documentary Festival which is upcoming April 7 – 10, writes to alert us and to invite us to several panels of interest at the Festival.

Some information is on the Festival site, but more specifically there are three flyers (decribed and linked below), grouping the panels by area of interest:

  1. IP and first amendment [PDF poster]
    • Friday 10 am – Intellectual Property: New Rules
    • Saturday 11 am – Speak Out: Risky Business
  2. distribution and the film industry [PDF poster]
    • Sat 9 am – 3 Billion Films: A workshop onf subtitling technology
    • Fri 2:15 pm – Film Distributors: Finding the one that’s right for you
    • Fri 12 pm – TV Broadcasters: Finding the one that’s right for you
  3. filmmaking [PDF poster]
    • Fri 4:40 pm – Heyday: The reality of theatrical success
    • Sat 1:45 pm – Soul of the Story: filmmakers and their personal journeys
    • Sun 9:30 am – Kultur/Culture: The Turkish American Exchange Project

[further details and additional panels here]

Hole in Skype and Open Space Tech

Brian tried to do a 6 person (I was one of those involved) 2 continent Skype conference to plan a Podcastercon. One obvious catch to this is that the originator needs to be on a very fast connection since he seems to be acting as a hub for the conference. The other is that if one person has a bad connection, all suffer.
The short of it is that we ended up on a conventional phone conference system with a lot of us using SkypeOut (in particular Cameron Reilly in Australia).
We could have moved over to text conferencing, but the Mac version of Skype doesn’t yet support multiple person text conferencing. That’s in Skype for other platforms so it should be coming to the Mac version soon. Half of us were (are) using Macs.

Jeff De Cagna pitches using Open Space Technology, which isn’t so much technology as a process for self-organizing at a conference.

Faster Stats? Google buys Urchin

We gave up on all the free ways to get stats for ibiblio.org since processing our 13 million hits per day (not including errors or streaming or a few other things) took over 24 hours for most programs. Instead we threw down and bought/licensed Urchin. It works great.
Now Urchin announces that it will be acquired by Google. Does that means faster stats? Or will we be among the first to get a Gstats invite? (oops! Already a program called that).

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