It's something of a truism that the courts take time to catch up with technology, especially in the fast-moving world of the Internet, but Thomas Steen points us to a recent court decision in Norway where the gulf between law and life is particularly wide. The case concerns a blogger called Eivind Berge who was arrested recently on account of some statements on his blog that allegedly "glorified and encouraged the killing of policemen" as a report on the Dagbladet newspaper site puts it (Norwegian original.) Moreover:
If you go to the Italian version of Wikipedia, you will not find a gateway to 847,000 articles in that language, but (at the time of writing, at least) an unusual letter to the reader:
As Bessen and Meurer's book "Patent Failure" points out, one of the biggest problems with software patents is their lack of well-defined boundaries. This makes it very hard to tell whether newly-written code is infringing on existing patents or not. The threat of treble damages for wilful infringement removes any incentive to try to find out.On Techdirt.
Started in 1997 by Floor64 founder Mike Masnick and then growing into a group blogging effort, the Techdirt blog uses a proven economic framework to analyze and offer insight into news stories about changes in government policy, technology and legal issues that affect companies ability to innovate and grow.The dynamic and interactive community of Techdirt readers often comment on the addictive quality of the content on the site, a feeling supported by the blog’s ~800,000 RSS subscribers, 45,000+ posts, 600,000+ comments and a consistent Technorati Technology Top 100 rating.
I joined Twitter on 1st January 2010 as an experiment. I wanted to see whether this trendy thing had any real merit, or was simply the latest fad that would come and go. I was was soon disabused of my prejudices about it being just for posting about what you had eaten for breakfast. Indeed, I discovered that the presence or absence of such culinary info was a very quick way of deciding whether someone should be unfollowed or not.
I was particularly impressed at the many different ways that people used Twitter. For some, it was truly an online diary, recording what they did, often in exhaustive (and exhausting) detail. For others, it was a way of passing on news far faster than traditional outlets. And for some it was evidently a real microblog – a way of publishing extremely short piece of information with optional comments.
This turned out to be the way that I felt Twitter was most useful, and my own use soon conformed to this model. I realised that it solved a problem with blogging that I had been wrestling with for a while. I frequently came across stories that warranted passing on, but which looked decidedly thin when posted to one of my blogs. What I wanted was a quick way of saying: “hey, take a look at this – it's good/bad/stupid/funny/horrible” without needing to come up with anything more detailed in terms of analysis. What I wanted, it turned out, was Twitter.
As my followers there (and later on identi.ca and Google+) will know, I soon lost control completely, and started posting dozens of microblog posts a day. Indeed, I have had several people unfollow me because they say I post too many interesting links, which stops them working....
But for all that I feel my microblogs work well on their own terms, there is one huge problem. I have apparently posted some 43,000 of them in the last 20 months (really? How posts fly by when you're having fun...). Quite a few of them have useful information that I like to refer to. But it is a truth universally acknowledged that Twitter's search function is pretty useless. Even though I have supplemented this with bit.ly, which has its own search feature, it frequently happens that I can't find that super important link I posted a few months ago.
This is not just frustrating, it is becoming a serious problem. It means that the not inconsiderable effort that I put into choosing my links and commenting on them is effectively going down the digital drain.
So, in an attempt to preserve at least some of the more interesting posts, I have set up a new blog called, with stunning originality, “Moody's Microblog Daily Digest.” As its name suggests, each day this will provide a digest of those microblog posts that I think are worth keeping. These will be posted in an entirely minimal format, simply a paste of the microblog content – don't look for any prettiness here.
This will, I hope, have two advantages.
First, it will allow Google's not inconsiderable search engine capabilities to index stuff on the new site. That means any post should be retrievable by me and anyone who feels the need. Secondly, it offers an alternative way to deal with the Moody flood: not only will it be a pared-down list of microblog posts, but it will be one-per-day (I aim to update it during the day, and then close it at the end, although I'm not sure if that will mean multiple appearances in RSS readers...) This might help those who find that you can have too much of a good thing....
Obviously, I'll be reviewing how things go, and would appreciate any comments along the way as this latest experiment progresses.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
I've never been one to follow the latest digital fashions immediately. I didn't start blogging until November 2005, and I only joined Twitter in January 2009, and identi.ca in May 2009. And so it is that I haven't joined Foursquare, or any of the other location-based social networks. That's partly because I like to wait, to see whether it's just a passing fad or something more enduring, and partly because I frankly haven't seen the point. Maybe it's about this:
On Open Enterprise blog.
It's a red letter day here on Computerworld UK, for the open source section just gained an important new strand in the form of Simon Says, a blog from Simon Phipps:
On Open Enterprise blog.
...surprises, that is:So my blog turns seven today. On August 20, 2002, while hiding north of San Francisco working on the Eldred appeal, I penned my first (wildly and embarrassingly defensive) missive to Dave. Some 1753 entries later, I'm letting the blog rest. This will be the last post in this frame. Who knows what the future will bring, but in the near term, it won't bring more in lessig.org/blog.
The main reason is that he's too damn busy with other projects, although I suspect the imminent arrival of his third child also was a big factor.
Lessig surprised me before by moving from CC work to his transparency gig. I thought he was bonkers then...and I was wrong, he was just - as usual - prescient. Maybe his move away from blogging is the same: but I hope not.... (Via John Naughton.)
Great point here from Adam Tinworth, about why traditional publishers are suffering so badly at the hands of the bloggers:
the new breed of publisher - the ones doing it for pure passion, at virtually no cost - will and up wounding us where we're weakest. Because we've neglected parts of our audience, pandered to our own prejudices and missed opportunities.
*That* is why blogs have succeeded, and will continue to succeed until the gentlemen's club formerly known as publishing has an epiphany and sorts itself out.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.
A question that often comes up is why people blog and twitter. I've given various answers over the years, but once again Mike Masnick says it best of all:
These discussions are like another graduate degree for me, because I constantly have to think, rethink, defend and truly understand the arguments I'm making. It's hard to overstate how incredibly valuable that's been. The fact that many journalists refuse to engage in that sort of conversation actually shows through in their work: they don't want to bother. They like to position themselves as experts, but many don't really understand what they're talking about. Engaging in the conversation may be a lot of work -- and, at times, it can be frustrating or seemingly pointless. But, the massive amount of value I've received from those discussions -- just like the student in the story above -- is almost impossible to quantify. People talk about the importance of ongoing education. That's exactly what these conversations are for me.
Non-journos probably should avert their glances, but there is a cracking set of comments on this wonderful story from Adam Tinworth, blogger-in-chief at my old employer RBI, which concludes:
Nice to know that my union people associated with my union (self correcting in the interests of fairness), which I have been a member of for the last 15 years think that the journalistic field in which I work - blogging - is "effing blogs".
Like many of the people commenting, I too was once a member of the NUJ; I'm rather glad that I never went back judging by the extraordinary responses from a representative of that organisation to the original post (do read the whole thread if you can, it's highly entertaining.)
It contrasts nicely with the deft way that Anthony Gold responded to my critical article over on Open Enterprise, where he immediately offered to talk with me about the issues I raised (which turned into this interview). I emerged with enhanced respect for the man and the organisation he heads, since he did exactly what the NUJ representative did not: he addressed the issues I raised in a non-confrontational way.
In the last three years, I've written just under 4000 blog posts. You might think that is more than enough, but for some time I have been conscious that I don't always blog everything I could or even want to. Often, I've multiple Firefox tabs sitting there holding juicy items that I think deserve passing on; and yet I never get around to writing about them. I've been pondering why that is, and what I can do about it.
I think it comes down to two things. First, it takes a certain minimum amount of time to craft even the simplest blog posting: sometimes I just don't have the spare minutes/spare brain cycles to do that. Often, though, there is very little to say about the item in question - no profound comment is required beyond "take butcher's at this". What I really need, I realised, is a lightweight way of passing on such stories quickly.
Enter Twitter.
One of the interesting trends over the last year has been the steady rise of Twitter. Increasingly, I am finding bloggers that I read referring to stuff they find via Twitter, or to conversations conducted there. Clearly this can be a very powerful medium, if used in the right way. I've always been sceptical about the idea of twittering about every mundane detail of your life, but using it as a kind of micro-blogging tool is an attractive solution to the problems I've been experiencing.
As a result, I've started using Twitter at twitter.com/glynmoody; updates aren't protected, so anyone can follow. Note that I won't generally be posting links to blog posts there, unless there's a particular reason for doing so. In part, that's because the info is meant to be complementary. But it's also because some kind soul (whose name escapes me, to my shame - please get in touch if you want your name up in lights - now revealed to be one Jonny Dover, to whom many thanks) has set up a separate Twitter feed for opendotdotdot (which also includes pointers to my other posts on Open Enterprise and Linux Journal) at twitter.com/opendotdotdot. This means that you can choose whether to follow just the longer-form stuff, or the new, reduced-fat posts, or - for masochists only - both.
A few early observations on the medium.
First, one of the reasons I have held off from Twitter is that its parsimonious format forces you to use a URL shortening service, the best known of which is TinyURL.com. I have inveighed against these several times, largely because of the fact that they obscure the inherently linky nature of the Web. Fortunately, things have moved on somewhat: you can now provide users of the shortened URL with a preview. This means that (a) they can see that structure and (b) they can be slightly more sure you are not dumping them on some manifestly infected site.
Although TinyURL offers this service, I've plumped instead for is.gd, partly because it uses considerably fewer characters than TinyURL.com, partly because it has a shorter preview feature (you just add a hyphen to the end of shortened URL), and partly because it uses buckets of open source:is.gd runs on the CentOS operating system. The most major pieces of software used are Lighttpd (web server), PHP (scripting) and MySQL (database).
CentOS:is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free.
The coy "prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor" is Red Hat, in case you were wondering.
The other aspect that has already struck me, after just a few days of using Twitter, is how you find people to follow. For me, at least, it's very similar to how I find blogs: I come across links to new ones in the blogs that I currently read. Similarly, I've found that a good way to find people who may be of interest is to look at whom the people I am following are following themselves. This leads to pools of people who tend to be reading and responding to each other - a micro-community at best, another echo chamber at worst.
I've also made up a few rough and ready rules: no news feeds (I want real people, their opinions and their daily lives - isn't that partly the point of Twitter?) and nobody who can't be bothered posting on a fairly regular basis. I've also avoided most of the Twitter super-stars (you know who you are) as a matter of principle: I don't really want to follow people who are almost totally famous for being famous on Twitter, for the same reason that I read relatively few of the A-list blogs.
Blogging has evolved considerably over the last few years, and I expect both it and Twitter to continue to do so - for example, in terms of them working together, fulfilling different functions (along with email, which completes the trinity of one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many interactions online). I've already found that I enjoy blogging more: I no longer feel obliged to blog about everything of interest, since I can push some stuff straight out on Twitter.
Part of the fun of blogging and twittering comes from participating in this huge, collaborative experiment in open writing and open thinking; this means that your comments/tweets on any of the above are even more welcome than usual.
The best meditation on blogging and bloggers I have read so far:
In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane.
Words, of all sorts, have never seemed so now.
(Via Open (minds, finds, conversations).)
Quoth Hazel Blears:"But mostly, political blogs are written by people with disdain for the political system and politicians, who see their function as unearthing scandals, conspiracies and perceived hypocrisy.
"Until political blogging 'adds value' to our political culture, by allowing new voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair."
Well, darling, could it be that bloggers unearth scandals and hypocrisy because that's mostly what you and your chums in the government seem to generate? Could it be that a more affirmative kind of blogging will emerge once your government drops its own unending flood of cynicism and spin and lies?
Because - and here's the shocking truth, Hazel - nobody is stopping "new voices" from emerging in the blogosphere: that's it's beauty, entry is frictionless. The fact that there aren't any such voices, or that nobody reads them if there are, is because of the noxious atmosphere you and your mates have engendered. Essentially, politicians get the journalism they deserve, so you stand condemned by your own observations.
In case you missed it, something of truly global importance happened last week. No, not the collapse of capitalism as we know it, something much more profound: Linus started a blog. His first post suggested that it won't be of much interest to the enterprise open source world, since it's really a *personal* blog....
On Open Enterprise blog.
An interesting perspective from Chinese blogger Isaac Mao:It's a different mindset that one can feel after blogging for a period of time. I call this philosophy "Sharism", and it can be practised by anyone because the rewards are easy to see. You share one piece of knowledge and then could come a time of returns (maybe not immediately, but with many magic happenings in the future).
The sharism spirit can currently be found in any so called "Web 2.0" phenomena - Wikipedia is just one example, created from the collective intelligence by many people around the world based on their sharing philosophy.
In a more metaphysical view, your blog can act as a halo (to borrow a term from gaming) to shine more lights to the world and coupled with other people's halo at the same time. This has spawned more imaginations in my mind of future society where everyone can be sharist and all the brains are well connected to form a smarter society like a social brain - though given the controls and obstacles that still confront blogging, it is going to be a long road to reach the social-brain dream.
Whoever thinks blogging is a sad, soulless activity is clearly bananas. (Via Boing Boing.)
In the dark, twisted world of copyright, one ray of light has been William Patry's blog. No more:I have decided to end the blog, after doing around 800 postings over about 4 years.
Although Google's top copyright man, he wrote his blog in a purely private capacity as one of the leading copyright scholars in the world. Indeed, despite his position at that company, he was remarkably approachable: when I asked him to do a quick email interview for this blog he readily agreed. Sadly, one answer has proved prophetic:I think copyright has become less and less responsive to the balance of incentives and exceptions that the 18th century English common judges grasped intuitively. Our ability to adapt has been seriously hampered by trade agreements, and that's a big problem.
Indeed, Patry now feels that this crucial "balance of incentives and exceptions" has been lost to such an extent that he can no longer blog. Alongside the fact that people kept assuming his views were official Google policy (they weren't), his other reason for stopping was simply:The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing
This leads me to my final reason for closing the blog which is independent of the first reason: my fear that the blog was becoming too negative in tone. I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.
When one of the world's pre-eminent experts in the field is so depressed by the state of copyright that he can't bring himself to blog about it, you know that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Thanks, Mr Patry, for all you gave, and sorry to see you go. Now it's up to us to carry on the fight for some copyright sanity.
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