Google Strives for More Openness...

...says the BBC.

And about bloomin' time too: the cognitive dissonance between what the company enables externally - opening up all kinds of conversations, both human- and machine-based - and what the company enforces internally, like clamping down hard on staff who blog, is becoming downright painful.

Indeed, it will be hard to believe that Google really gets it until it starts to practice what millions of its customers already know: that the future belongs to openness.

The Digital Sum of Human Knowledge

Most of us think of open access as a great way of reading the latest research online, so there is an implicit assumption that open access is only about the cutting edge. This also flows from the fact that most open access journals are recent launches, and those that aren't usually only provide content for volumes released after a certain (recent) date, for practical reasons of digital file availability, if nothing else.

This makes the joint Wellcome Trust and National Libary of Medicine project to place 200 years of biomedical journals online by scanning them a major expansion not just to the open access programme, but to the whole concept of open access.

It also hints at what the end-goal of open access must be: the online availability of every journal, magazine, newspaper, pamphlet, book, manuscript, tablet, inscription, statue, seal and ostracon that has survived the ravages of history - the digital sum of all written human knowledge.

On the Bolivian Commons

An interesting alternative view of the recent events in Bolivia as a kind of re-creation of the commons there.

Anti-ODF Stuff Turns Nasty

With his customary sharpness, Andy Updegrove skewers a particularly nasty piece of lobbyist punditry. The statement in question manages to twist the news that Massachusetts is calling for an ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office - an eminently sensible thing to do, which the open source world is keen to support - into some kind of act of desperation.

It then goes on:

the Massachusetts ODF policy ... is a biased, open source only preference policy. We believe such preference policies exclude choice, needlessly marginalize successful marketplace options, and curtail merit-based selections for state procurements. In short, they disserve citizens who demand cost-effective solutions for their hard-earned tax dollars.

This is rich. It is factually incorrect - there is no open source only preference policy; it is hyperbolic - the idea of Microsoft Office being "marginalised" is droll, to say the least, as is the idea that "successful marketplace options" deserve to have their near-monopolies preserved; and ultimately (wilfully) misses the point, which is that a truly open standard is the only way to guarantee future access to files, the only way to allow competition among software manufacturers, and so the only way to provide "choice" and the "merit-based", "cost-effective" solution the statement purports to espouse.

Digital Universe Powers Up the Earth Portal

The Digital Universe is a fascinating experiment in trying to get all the benefits of Wikipedia's distributed approach to content creation without the well-publicised hiccoughs that an open philosophy can entail.

This makes the news that the grandly-named Earth Portal, part of the Digital Universe, has acquired some high-powered UK academics for its forthcoming Encyclopedia of Earth of particular interest. Given that Encyclopedia of Earth is likely to be the first part of Digital Universe to go live, it will inevitably be regarded as a test-case for the whole project.

British Music Industry See the Light - A Bit

I've written often enough about the rapacious, egotistical, and totally unreasonable demands of the recorded music industry when it comes to copyright, so it behoves me to record when part of it seems to be doing the right thing - at least, to a certain extent.

Apparently, the guardians of the British music industry, the BPI, have actually recommended to the on-going Gowers Review of "intellectual property" that you and I be allowed to copy our own CDs and records for personal use.

Now, you might have thought you could do that anyway, but in the UK the current legislation doesn't really allow it (but that's not surprising, since it was probably drafted when music technology meant men in tights playing lutes). So, two cheers for the BPI.

Well, maybe one: its Web site is still a pretty unedifying spectacle, full of the usual veiled threats to parents over their children's use of P2P software, and plenty of fanciful avast-there-me-hearties pirate stuff. But credit where credit's due: the Gowers submission is a step in the right direction. (Via TechDirt.)

Open Knowledge Development

The Open Knowledge Foundation has some thoughts on the principles of open knowledge develoment:

Open knowledge means porting much more of the open source stack than just the idea of open licensing. It is about porting many of the processes and tools that attach to the open development process — the process enabled by the use of an open approach to knowledge production and distribution.

New Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Actually, I was wrong: wikis aren't the only form of open collaborations that are thriving. Remixes are coming on strong too. As well as the mother ship at ccMixter, there's now this great offering, courtesy of two of my favourite artists: David Byrne and Brian Eno.

British "Library", National Disgrace

A stunningly good - and staggeringly depressing - article on Groklaw examines how the British Library has sold its intellectual soul for a mess of DRM'ed pottage.

Groklaw explains in appalling detail how it is now a waste of time trying to get anything digital from the BL, since it will be locked down with idiotic DRM, will require you to sign away all rights past, present and future (and those of your family, dog and local hairdresser) and probably won't work on any system not identical to the one that sits on Bill Gates' desk.

Somebody should have told the BL that you need a long spoon when you sup with the devil, but having chosen Microsoft as its "partner" (i.e. the brain surgeon carrying out the frontal lobotomy), it now cannot think straight. Worse, it wants to spread its spongiform encephalopathy to the nascent European Digital Libary.

The so-called British "Library", as we must now call it, is a total and utter disgrace to the country.

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....