playthegameforopenjournalism.org

One of the daftest URLs I've seen in a long time, but interesting to see the "open" meme here.

What Can You Protect in Open Source?

Marc Fleury is a Frenchman who famously made lots of dosh when he sold his open source company JBoss to Red Hat. That puts him in a strong permission to pontificate about what does and what doesn't work in the world of businesses based around free software. Try this wit and wisdom, for example:

B.D asks: "marcf, my open source project is starting to enjoy a measure of success, I am thinking of going professional with it, I am thinking about business models. How much thought should I put in protecting my Intellectual Property?"

Answer: B.D. protecting IP in OSS is extremelly important. The only "private" property that exists in OSS are 1- brand 2- URL. Both are obviously related but really you need to protect your brand name, in other words REGISTER your trademarks, use them, declare they are yours and enforce the trademark, meaning protect against infringement. Other products, specifically based on your product should not include your name. Consultancies will be able to say they know and work with your "product name" but they cannot ship products using your trademark. Educate yourselves on brand IP, that is a big asset in OSS.

The URL deserves the same treatment. A successful website with traffic is a source of revenue in this day and age, either directly through ad placement or indirectly by lead generation.

It's interesting that Fleury concentrates on trademarks, rather than copyright or patents (of the latter he says: "you will have little protection against thieves that want to copy what you have done without letting you know and put it under different licenses, I have seen it done, such is the nature of the beast.") I think this indicates that trademarks can be useful, even with open source, just as copyright is necessary for licences to work. It's patents that remain the problem.

Daily Me 2.0

One of the problems with blogs for advertisers is their fragmented nature: to get a reach comparable to mainstream media generally involves faffing around with dozens of sites. The obvious solution is to bundle, and that's precisely what Federated Media Publishing does. As its roster of blogs indicates, it operates mainly in the field of tech blogs, but the model can clearly be extended.

To the average blog-reader on the Clapham Ominibus (probably the 319 these days), more interesting than the business side of things is the possibility of doing blog mashups. And lo and behold, Federated has produced such a thing (note that the URL begins significantly with "tech", hinting of non-tech things to come...).

What struck me about this federated news idea is that it could be extended beyond the bundles. It would be easy - well, easy if you're a skilled programmer - to knock up a tool offering a range of newspage formats that let you drag and drop newsfeeds into predefined slots to produce the same kind of effect as the Federated Media/Tech one.

RSS aggregators already do this crudely, but lack the design element that would help to make the approach more popular. You would also need some mechanism for flagging up which stories had changed on the page, or for allowing new stories from designated key blogs to rise to the top of the dynamically-generated newspage.

The result, of course, is the Daily Me that everyone has been wittering on about for years. But it comes with an important twist. This Daily Me 2.0 is not just a cosmetic mixing of traditional medium news, but a very different kind of online newspage, based on the very different perspective offered by blogs.

One reason why Daily Me 1.0 never took off was because traditional media are simply too greedy to contemplate sharing with anyone else. Blogs have no such qualms - indeed, they have different kinds of sharing (quotations, links, comments) at their core. I think we'll be reading more about this....

Picture This

I wrote about Riya.com a month ago; now it's out in beta, so you can try out its face recognition technology. I did, and was intrigued to find that this photo was tagged as "Bill Gates". Maybe Riya uses more artificial intelligence than they're letting on.

It's certainly a clever idea - after all, the one thing people (misanthropes apart) are interested in, is people. But you do have to wonder about the underlying technology when it uses addresses like this:

http://www.riya.com/highRes?search=1fSPySWh
FrHn7AnWgnSyHaqJl6bzuGByoFKJuG1H%2Fv
otjYbqlIMI22Qj88Vlcvz2uSnkixrhzHJP%0Aej%
2B9VuGvjiodlKDrBNS8pgy%2FaVqvckjfyo%2
BjhlL1sjK5CgHriGhifn3s2C1q%2B%2FnL1Emr
0OUPvn%2FM%0AJ0Ire5Zl2QUQQLUMi2Naq
Ny1zboiX7JtL77OG96NmV5VT8Buz4bzlyPFmi
ppcvmBJagMcftZjHUG%0AFlnXYIfp1VOGWx
gYijpgpDcsU9M4&pageNumber=9&e=bIaIR30d
SGNoZcG8jWL8z2LhcH%2FEg1LzsBF%2F6pr
Fd2Jm7tpMKFCXTu%2FBsOKk%2FVdS

I know a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, but not in the URL, surely....