Painless Micropayments

This is nice: a system that lets you pay tiny amounts to sites as you float through them - without needing to do anything.

Nice, because it all happens in the background; nice because it builds on the fundamental assumption that people are, well, nice. (Via Bubblegeneration.)

The Elephant Has Landed

No, not that elephant, this elephant (via LXer).

Enter the Graphiki: a Wiki for Graphics

Wikis are a striking success. I don't just mean the epistemological juggernaut that is Wikipedia: there are now hundreds, perhaps thousands, of wikis springing up everywhere. And that's just on the public Web: they are also cropping on corporate intranets, though not visible to anyone outside the company concerned.

But what's striking about this rash of open collaboration is that it is all textual: there is nothing equivalent for images. Or at least until now: with the arrival of kollabor8 we have perhaps the first glimmerings of what a graphics wiki - a graphiki? - might look like.

The idea is simple: somebody uploads an image, someone else edits it and passes it on. As with wikis, the result can be an improvement, or just a mess. Occasionally, it produces something really striking. (Via eHub).

More BitTrickle than BitTorrent...

...but it's a start. Warner Bros, not always the most clueful of studios, has signed up to use the wonderful BitTorrent as a way of distributing its films and television shows. Yes, people: the peer-to-peer (P2P) file transfer protocol BitTorrent is the solution, not the problem.... (via C|net).

Update: Techdirt digs a little deeper, and points out some limitations of the deal.

Now There's an Idea: Peer Review of Patents

I almost had to pinch myself for this one: the US Patent and Trademark Office has apparently

created a partnership with academia and the private sector to launch an online, peer review pilot project that seeks to ensure that patent examiners will have improved access to all available prior art during the patent examination process.

(Via Peer to Patent and Boing Boing.)

But wait: they can't possibly do this. I mean, it's so obviously sensible, and the right first step in fixing a manifestly broken system, there must be a catch. Maybe not: the full, wikified details of this potential wonder sound strangely plausible....

The EU Bottles Out

I wrote recently about the approval of ODF as an ISO standard, and how this might open the way for it to be backed by the EU. But now comes this story from Ingrid Marson: since she is usually impeccably informed, it is (sadly) likely to be true.

According to the report, for some reason the EU in the shape of the memorably-named Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens (understandably known to its friends as IDABC) is bottling out of outright recommendation, and sitting on the fence instead. I just have one thing to say to the lot of them: infâmes.

How to Flaunt Your OPML

When the history of computing in the 1990s comes to be written, the name of Dave Winer will figure quite a few times. For those with long memories, he was a pioneer in the field of outliners like ThinkTank, but he is probably best known for his work on blogs, both in terms of drafting the indispensable RSS standard, and his use of pings to track blog updates.

Now he's at it again, setting up Share Your OPML.

Few will have heard of Outline Processor Markup Language (there's the ThinkTank link), but that may well change with the new site, which uses OPML to collate blog subscription lists from RSS aggregators (or similar) in order to extract higher-level information. In effect, it provides a new cut of the blogosphere, showing things like the top 100 feeds, and who the most prolific subscribers are.

In other words, it'll become another occasion for some healthy geek competition. But it does also serve a potentially more useful role by offering other feeds you might like on the basis of what you already read: think Amazon.com's suggestion service for blogs.

Interestingly, Winer describes this new idea as "A commons for sharing outlines, feeds, and taxonomy." Watch out, it's that meme again....

Cluelessness in the Echo Chamber

I've already dealt with the daft idea of open source being "acquired en masse" elsewhere. I'm just surprised that it took the great echo chamber of so-called market analysis so long before chiming in on this cracked note.

O Happy, Happy Digital Code

My book Digital Code of Life was partly about the battle to keep genomic and other bioinformatics information open. So it's good to see the very first public genomic database, now EMBL, spreading its wings and mutating into FELICS (Free European Life-science Information and Computational Services) with even more bioinformatics goodies freely available (thanks to a little help from the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics, the University of Cologne, Germany, and the European Patent Office).

A Rough Cut of the Beta Book Idea

Books are lovely objects, but problematic in terms of their content - once they're published, you can't correct the errors easily. But here's an idea: publish beta versions of books, so that at least some of the bugs can be ironed out before they're published.

O'Reilly have taken the plunge, and kudos to them. One thing: given that the beta-testers are adding value, shouldn't they at least get the nascent titles free? (Via Linux-Watch.)

Get the Facts: Open Access in India

Richard Poynder offers an interesting interview with Professor Subbiah Arunachalam on open access in India, conducted with his customary thoroughness and professionalism.

What's so good about this piece is that it fleshes out all the generalities people (like me) make about how open access can be helpful for developing nations, where a huge amount of knowledge is generated, but little is let through by the traditional gatekeepers of the Western academic tradition.

This is in addition to flows in the other direction, which allow those with modest library budgets to access leading-edge research in freely-available journals like those published by the Public Library of Science.

The Law According to Wikocracy

We've had Openlaw, where anyone can contribute information to the crafting of a legal argument; now we've got Wikocracy, where anyone can edit and revise laws (via Bubblegeneration).

After Open Access

A truly fascinating piece by Clifford Lynch explores what might be possible once we have total open access to scholarly writings, and can apply computation to this mass of raw data in an unfettered way. As he points out:

The opportunities are truly stunning. They point towards entirely new ways to think about the scholarly literature (and the underlying evidence that supports scholarship) as an active, computationally enabled representation of knowledge that lives, grows and interacts with its contributors rather than as a passive archive or record. They suggest ways in which information technology can accelerate the rate of scientific discovery and the growth of scholarship. It would be a disgrace if we allowed the inertia of historic scholarly publishing practices and the intellectual property arrangements that underlie these patterns to foreclose such opportunities. Open access offers an important simplification and reduction of the barriers if its development is shaped in a way that is responsive to these opportunities, although it is certainly not a panacea in its current form.

(Via Open Access News).

Update: Don's miss this splendid interview with Lynch: I wish I were half as articulate....

Curioser and Curioser

"Leaks" (yeah, right) about another new Microsoft Live service: Windows Live QnA, going, er, live soon. What's curious is that this is a version of Google Answers that is entirely open and democratic. In other words, it's a kind of cross between Wikipedia and eBay, where anybody can answer, and people rate the answers using a reputation-based scoring system. But wait: isn't Wikipedia discredited these days? Has anybody told Bill about this communistic stuff?

(And just look at all the Windows Live Betas coming through: wow, Microsoft is really moving here.)

The Meme is Spreading: Film at Eleven

Another milestone in the march of the distributed meme: a film financed by a Net-based group of 50,000 angel micro-investors: the Swarm. This takes it even beyond Elephant's Dream. Like it, the new film will be released under a CC licence that allows remixing (via Boing Boing).

Music for Grown-Ups: Open, Collaborative Pricing

Any fool can knock the music business for their short-sighted refusal to work with the Internet, rather than against it (heaven knows, I've done it myself). But coming up with constructive suggestions as to how they might make money without employing the digital ninja overkill of DRM is less easy. This makes any example of a singer/label who's not only found a way to treat the audience as adults, but is making money by doing so, a real find.

She's Jane Siberry, and old fogey that I am, I've never heard of her. But the who isn't as important as the what, which she calls self-determined pricing. Basically, you get to choose how much to pay for the music you buy. Here are the details:

Like many, I'm restless and impatient with living in a world where people are made to feel like shoplifters rather than intelligent peoples with a good sense of balance. I want to treat people the way I'd like to be treated. 'Dumbing UP' (as opposed to 'dumbing down').

WHAT ARE SELF-DETERMINED TRANSACTIONS?
NOT donations
NOT pay-what-you-can
NOT guilt-trips
NOT tests of your integrity
ARE TRANSACTIONS

You decide what feels right to your gut. If you download for free, perhaps you'll buy an extra CD at an indie band's concert. Or if you don't go with your gut feeling, you might sleep poorly, wake up grumpy, put your shoes on backwards and fall over. Whatever. You'll know what to do.

WHAT YOU WILL FIND AT SHEEBA STORE
FOUR choices on pop-down 'buy' button

1. free (gift from Jane)
2. self-determined (pay now)
3. self-determined (pay later so you are truly educated in your decision)
4. standard (today's going rate is about .99)

STATISTICS BAR: You can see what the paying trends are.
GIFTS: You can still send mp3 gifts to friends with any payment choice.

Aside from the wonderful maturity of this approach - and the maturity that it assumes in the buyer - the other interesting thing is that the pricing mechanism is essentially open and collaborative. By showing what others are currently paying, it sets a kind of community standard for conduct. The pressure to conform to that standard comes not from the artist - and certainly not from corporate lawyers threatening to sue you, your family and your dog into kingdom come - but from the community of your peers (peers at least in terms of the music you like).

It is this that makes Sheeba Store's experiment so important, because it can be generalised to all kinds of digital goods where there are no obvious ways to set a fair price. Open, collaborative pricing is by definition fair (at least within that particular community), it is self-generating and self-regulating.

Given the fact that the tracks are selling for non-zero sums (and that some people do pay more than the average, making up for any perceived "free riders"), the system seems to be working (at least in the short term). Now if only the established music industry were mature enough to see the sense and justice of this approach, and take it for a spin themselves....

OpenStreetMap - Finding Our Way

I wrote a little about the Guardian's campaign to obtain open access to Government-generated data (which we pay for), but here's an interesting alternative: generate it yourself.

This weekend, a bunch of intrepid GPS users aims to map the whole of the Isle of Wight, and then to use this information to generate their own detailed maps, which will be in released under a Creative Commons licence.

The overarching project is called OpenStreetMap, and it seems the perfect way to get public mapping data. Rather waiting for the Government graciously to give us our data back, let's take to the streets and do it ourselves: of the people, by the people, for the people.

Now, if only I had a GPS device....

E-commerce 2.0 Re-visited

A little while back, when I was musing upon e-commerce 2.0, I mentioned Chinesepod.com. Now I've gone the whole hog, interviewing the enterprising Ken Carroll, its creator, for the Guardian. I'd also recommend taking a look at Japanesepod101.com, newly-revamped, which is another fine example of e-commerce 2.0, and directly inspired by Chinesepod.

Free Beer - No, Really

Everybody talks about "free as in beer" versus "free as in freedom". Now somebody has taken this literally: free as in Freebeer (via OpenBusiness).

Get Legal - Get OpenOffice.org

Ha!

Keeping DRM is a Win?

Someone who has clearly had their brain frazzled by the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. Not opening up DRM is a win? Well, maybe for Apple, but certainly not for music lovers....

The Commons of Water

Great meditation on water as a commons - and how we need to change the way companies are allowed to "graze" this commons for profit, without taking account of larger issues.

Open PR? - Whatever Next?

Wandering around Technorati, I came across Novell's Open PR blog. Mere PR PR? Maybe not, since there are comments from real people - including some not-so pleasant ones, which have been left up. How's that for authenticity?

What is Open Knowledge?

If you were wondering, then perhaps the Open Knowledge Foundation might be able to help. They have come up with an Open Knowledge Definition (they actually call it The Open Knowledge Defiition, but that seems a tad ambitious). The full half-hour argument is here.

Some wise words from the introduction:

The concept of openness has already started to spread rapidly beyond its original roots in academia and software. We already have 'open access' journals, open genetics, open geodata, open content etc. As the concept spreads so we are seeing a proliferation of licenses and a potential blurring of what is open and what is not.

Well, that sounds familiar.

The Nitty-Gritty of Net Neutrality

Net neutrality - the idea that the underlying technologies of the Internet should never care or even know about the details of who you are or what you are doing with the data packets it is conveying - is much in the news lately, what with outrageous demands from telecommunications companies to be allowed to charge different rates for different traffic. If you ever had any doubts that we need Net neutrality, here's someone who might convince you, since he knows a thing or two about this area.