Words Fail Us

linguistics professor and author shares a personal selection from the thousands of languages on the brink of disappearing

How about if we all volunteered to learn an endangered language? - You can put me down for Ket:

Ket is the only Siberian language with a tone system where the pitch of the voice can give what sound like identical words quite different meanings. (Much like Chinese or Yoruba). To add to the difficulty for any westerner wishing to learn it, it also has extremely complicated word structure and grammar.

Ordnance Survey: Right Out of Order

I always thought that the Ordnance Survey had a rather, er, Olympian view of things that was more suited to the top-down twentieth century than the bottom-up one we inhabit. Some fine FOI work by the Guardian has confirmed that they really are as out of order as I surmised:

An extraordinary picture of a state body carrying out political lobbying on the issue of free data has emerged from documents obtained by the Guardian.

The correspondence reveals that Ordnance Survey (OS) is targeting MPs from Westminster and devolved assemblies, civil servants and leading figures in the free data debate. The agency openly attends party conferences and other political events to promote the value of geographical data. However, earlier this year a Parliamentary question revealed that it had paid a company called Mandate £42,076.20 plus VAT since August 2007.

So here we have a state body using *our* money to pay for lobbyists to advise on how to stop oiks like *us* from gaining free access to the information *we* largely foot the bill for.

The one consolation is that if they are prepared to stoop to stupid tactics like this, they are clearly running very scared: anyone remember Eric "pitbull" Dezenhall, another consultant brought in a desperate attempt to stave off open access...?

Somebody's Heard the Music

Some people in the music biz are finally getting it:

The music executives behind Kaiser Chiefs and Primal Scream are backing a new website that will allow music fans to invest financially as well as emotionally in hotly tipped new acts.

The venture, dreamed up by a music business lawyer and backed by the founder of Friends Reunited, is being billed as the latest innovative funding model that could provide artists with an alternative to major labels.

Bandstocks will let the public buy a stake in an artist in £10 increments. Once funding reaches a preordained level, for example £100,000, the money will be released for the act to record an album.

Investors will get a copy of the album, a credit on the CD sleeve and a percentage of the profits from its sale and licensing. They will also get priority ticket booking and the opportunity to buy limited edition releases. For the artist, founder Andrew Lewis claimed that Bandstocks would offer a better return than a major-label deal, as well as more freedom and control over copyright.

The Guardian's headline - "Don't just buy the music" is also a sign that people are beginning to realise that there is more than one way to skin a digital cat....

Open Source and UK Politics

The new dividing line between Labour and the Tories is less about a left-right split than about an authoritarian approach on one side and a more liberal one on the other. And Labour are on the wrong side of it. Many of their social and economic policies may have failed, but where they have succeeded is in developing a targeting, controlling, distrustful state. From the micromanagement of civil servants, teachers, doctors and the police, to ID cards, super databases and the growth of surveillance, the government's answer to too many problems has been the removal of autonomy from individuals and more oversight from Whitehall.

The Conservative analysis is that this over-controlling state is not only disastrously unpopular, it is also one of the key reasons why Labour, despite all its spending, has failed to achieve its goals. Endless supervision has been an expensive distraction, and has sapped energy and morale out of public life.

Amazing how the Conservatives are becoming the party of bottom-up openness - explicitly in the case of open source - and Labour seems determined to become its polar opposite.

Czy Spadające Ceny Pamięci Flash Zagrażają Microsoft?

One for my Polish readers (with thanks to Iwo Hencz).

Why Falling Flash Prices Threaten Microsoft

In the Guardian.

Really Googling the Genome

When I wrote a piece for the Guardian four years ago called "Googling the Genome", it was more of a metaphor than a specific warning about Google rummaging through your DNA. But it's a metaphor no more:

A Harvard University scientist backed by Google Inc. and OrbiMed Advisors LLC plans to unlock the secrets of common diseases by decoding the DNA of 100,000 people in the world's biggest gene sequencing project.

The *first* 100,000 people, I think they mean....

Free Music Goes Mainstream

What's interesting about this piece in the Guardian describing how the music industry is finally waking up to the virtues of free is that it brings together most of the arguments that I and others (notably Mike Masnick on Techdirt) have been banging on about for years. Looks like the industry has (almost) got it. We shall see.

Towards Open Government Data

One of the premises of this blog is that openness - radiating out from open source through open content, open access, open data and the rest - is more than a technical issue. Ultimately it is something that will touch every aspect of our lives.

One manifestation of this is the move to obtain free access to government data. In the UK, the Guardian has been a leading campaigner, and here's some news of what going on the other side of the pond:

I got a sense for the importance of the task talking with Dan O’Neil, who is “people person” for Everyblock.com, a remarkable project headed by Adrian Holovaty designed to be a “one-stop shop” for information about urban neighborhoods, including building permits, crime reports, planned improvements, school information, etc. Dan’s job is to negotiate with government officials in the twenty cities Everyblock seeks to map, and gain access to vast geocoded data sets. Armed with a set of principles and best practices that government geeks can show to their bosses, his job would be a lot easier than it is right now.

Most significant, perhaps, is the definition of what constitutes open government data:

Government data shall be considered open if it is made public in a way that complies with the principles below:

1. Complete
All public data is made available. Public data is data that is not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations.

2. Primary
Data is as collected at the source, with the highest possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms.

3. Timely
Data is made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data.

4. Accessible
Data is available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes.

5. Machine processable
Data is reasonably structured to allow automated processing.

6. Non-discriminatory
Data is available to anyone, with no requirement of registration.

7. Non-proprietary
Data is available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control.

8. License-free
Data is not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege restrictions may be allowed.

Best4C: Best4U?

I was interested to read Vic Keegan's column in the Guardian today:

This week I bumped into a number of people who had no office to go back to. But there is no need to feel sorry for them. It was not that they were too poor or unemployed, they just did not need an office to work from.

the reason being, of course, that they mostly use web-based apps.

I'm not quite office-less, since I do tend to work in the same room, but I'm certainly big into web apps, and I'm always on the look-out for new additions to my collection.

Here's one, the wonderfully literalistic Best4C:

Best4c(Best for chart) is a Web-based, online diagram tool that allows you to create, edit and share charts anytime, anywhere.

The interface is rather clunky, and the icons almost indecipherable, but, do you know what? It works, and has a lot of nice computer-related artwork. Not that I have much need for any of this, but if I ever do, at least I won't need to go to an office.

Of course, it's not open source in the traditional, client-side, sense, although the underlying server-side code probably is (LAMP etc.). Which raises the whole issue of what's to be done about such web services that take so much from the free software commons without always giving back. But that's a post for another day.... (Via China Web 2.0 Review.)

Why Free Flies - and Galileo Doesn't

Nice little piece by Charles Arthur in the Guardian today that pulls together a bunch of disparate stories (including my Alfresco profile from yesterday's edition of the same) to explain why giving stuff away makes economic sense. I particularly liked the following:

What I do find ironic though about the (very laudable) OpenStreetMap model is how it's acquired. The key element is Global Positioning Systems, aka GPS, aka sat-nav. GPS didn't just fall into the sky. It cost a lot of money to put it up there, and a fair bit to keep going - about $400m annually, including satellite updates.

But here's the thing about GPS: it's free to use, and in the short time that it's been available outside the military, its use has exploded. Figures for the value of the market are hard to come by, but EADS-Astrium estimates (in the graph at the end of the link) that this year it's worth about €40 billion. That's a hell of a multiplier on something that you give away for free, given a comparatively small investment.

eForum Follow-up

While I was at the Westminster eForum last week I had the pleasure of meeting Vic Keegan finally. Vic used to edit the Technology pages on the Guardian, and commissioned a number of features from me for it, but I'd never met up with him until now.

I was pleased to see that he drew on some of the stats mentioned at the forum for his column in today's Guardian, bemoaning the scandalous indifference of the present UK Government towards open source. This, in its turn, has provoked Alan Lord into a fine rant that draws together a number of related threads.

Enclosing the Agricultural Commons

Here's a nasty little threat brewing:

Government ministers have given their backing to a renewed campaign by farmers and industry to introduce genetically modified crops to the UK, the Guardian has learned.

They believe the public will now accept that the technology is vital to the development of higher-yield and hardier food for the world's increasing population and will help produce crops that can be used as biofuels in the fight against climate change.

"GM will come back to the UK; the question is how it comes back, not whether it's coming back," said a senior government source.

Now, I have nothing against genetically-modified organisms as such - after all, selective breeding has been producing modified organisms for the last few millennia. No, what concerns me is this:

The purpose of the crops primarily is to give intellectual property rights to biotech companies. They're fulfilling their purpose perfectly in those terms. But they're not really doing much for the farmer.

Exactly: it's about turning an open, commons-based domain, into a a closed, proprietary one. Not the way to go, and why this new attempt to foist GM crops on the public must fail.

The Idiots of OS (Ordnance Survey)

This really makes my blood boil.

After a year of negotiations, academic geographers have conceded defeat in their attempt to find a way to make a pioneering 3D representation of the capital, Virtual London, available to all comers via the Google Earth online map.

Followers of Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign will have guessed the reason: Virtual London is partly derived from proprietary data owned by the government through its state-owned mapping agency, Ordnance Survey (OS). What makes the situation bizarre is that Virtual London's development was funded by another arm of the government, the office of the mayor of London.

In other words, I helped pay for this information, twice - as taxpayer, and as London ratepayer - and yet I am not allowed to access it.

The Ordnance Survey's excuse is pathetic:

OS said granting Google special terms for Virtual London would be unfair on other licensees. "We provide an open, fair and transparent set of terms for providers seeking to operate in the same commercial space as each other. We cannot therefore license Google in a different way to other providers. We are completely supportive of anyone putting our data on the web as long as they have a licence to do so." Google would not comment.

Commercial space - and what about the public space, you know those tiresome little people that pay for your salary?

Thanks for nothing.

The Value of Free Content

One of the constant themes of this blog is that there's plenty of money to be made by giving away things for free. Here's an interesting study by Neil Thurman of the UK newspapers sector that confirms precisely that:

Advertising is relevant to the issue of content charging because, to a certain extent, there is a trade-off between them. Content charging, by limiting access, reduces the number of users to whom a page is exposed. When FT.com introduced a subscription barrier to parts of its content in May 2002, user numbers fell dramatically, as did its advertising revenue (Ó hAnluain, 2004). Conversely, when Times Online removed the subscription barrier it had imposed on overseas users, it experienced a “huge” increase in traffic (Bale, 2006).

Users are put off by having to pay, but traffic is also affected for technological reasons. Content charging can alienate sites from search engines and aggregators like Google (Outing, 2005). Similarly, imposing a subscription barrier also isolates newspaper websites like the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.com from blogs, a growing source of traffic (Penenberg, 2005). In the current market, many newspapers feel that the revenue they could gain from content charging would be less than what they would lose in advertising. Even the UK newspapers who are currently charging for significant amounts of content — FT.com, Independent.co.uk, and Scotsman.com—can see the potential benefits of dropping these barriers

A companion study indicates that opening up can bring with it some unexpected benefits:

Some British news websites are attracting larger audiences than their American competitors in US regional and national markets. At the British news websites studied, Americans made up an average of 36 per cent of the total audience with up to another 39 per cent of readers from countries other than the US. Visibility on portals like the Drudge Report and on indexes such as Google News brings considerable international traffic but is partly dependent on particular genres of story and fast publication times.

Opening up means that users get to decide whether to read you, and that quality often wins out. Newspapers with closed content are unlikely to attract this kind of passing trade, and will therefore lose global influence as well as advertising revenue. (Via Antony Mayfield.)

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: And Another Thing

I interviewed Irving Wladawsky-Berger twice: once for Rebel Code, soon after IBM announced its support for GNU/Linux - arguably one of the key moments in the corporate acceptance of open source - and once for the Guardian, shortly before he retired from IBM. On both occasions he was a pleasure to talk to.

And now I find another reason to like the chap:

One of my favorite films is the 1956 science fiction classic Forbidden Planet.

Me too, me too.

iPlayer Frothing at the Mouth

I've done my fair share of apoplectic frothing over the disgrace that is the BBC iPlayer, but here's a further helping, courtesy of the Guardian Technology blog.

The Guardian Identifies Itself on ID Cards

Good to see Charles Arthur coming out with a forthright attack on the madness that is the UK ID Card. Good, too, to see the Guardian returning to its roots by doing so.

IT's Got to be Local and Open

Nice story in the Guardian today about a local UK health system that works - unlike the massive, doomed, centralised NHS system currently being half-built at vast cost. It makes some important points:

Next week the annual Healthcare Computing conference in Harrogate will buzz with accusations that the national programme has held back progress. There are two reasons behind this charge. First, under the £1bn contracts signed early in the programme, hospitals have to replace their administrative systems which record patients' details with systems from centrally chosen suppliers. As this involves considerable local effort for little benefit, progress is painfully slow. The second problem is the potential threat to confidentiality arising from making records available on a national scale.

Quite: if there is no local benefit, there will be no buy-in, and little progress. Think local, act local, and you get local achievement. The other side is that if you impose a central system, security is correspondingly weaker. Hello, ID card....

Of course, there are many areas where you want to be able to bring together information from local stores for particular purposes. That's still possible - provided you adopt open standards everywhere. Hello, ODF....

Blogging Becomes Compulsorier

I think it's a great idea to force journos to roll up their sleeves and interact with their readers; but this may be taking it a little too far:

CNET is mandating that its blogging journalists respond to all reader comments and questions, according to a report in The Guardian. Further, they are also expected to get involved in every debate that "has legs." (Hat tip to Cyberjournalist)

Also, there is a teeny-weeny irony here, in that the Guardian's flagship blog, Comment is Free, rarely sees the posters (many of whom or journos) responding even minimally to comments (with a few honourable exceptions.)