Closing the Censorship Loop

Censorship is nothing new: ever since there has been power, it has feared knowledge. The trouble is, as people become more dependent on online information, it gets easier to censor, as well as easier to find out information. It all depends on the structure of information access.

That's what makes this story about the LA Times censoring the Internet feed into its newsroom deeply troubling. Since the censorship will naturally block out lots of uncomfortable things - like censorship - this closes the loop, at least in that environment. Journalists there might not even know that they don't know about something.

Let's just hope that the LA Times journalists have lots of fast Internet connections at home, and that they do plenty of Web wandering to find out alternative points of view.

Wireless Meshes and Net Neutrality

The recent brouhaha over net neutrality has emphasised how important it is to have a completely independent way of accessing the Internet. The obvious approach would be to use a wireless mesh: linking thousands of disparate wireless networks together to create a larger, wide-area coverage. TechDirt has an interesting meditation on this idea, pointing out that there are various obstacles to be overcome.

Nobody said it would be easy.

Craigslist: the Open Source Company

The Wall Street Journal has a good story on Craigslist:

One industry analyst has estimated that Craigslist could generate 20 times that $25 million just by posting a couple of ads on each of its pages. If the estimate is to be believed, that's half a billion dollars a year being left on the table. What kind of company turns up its nose at $500 million?

Well, an open source kind of company. And try this:

"It's unrealistic to say, but -- imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?"

An open source kind of world, perhaps. (Via Slashdot.)

Microsoft's Other Monopoly

I've often wondered about this.

Hakon Wium Lie, chief technology officer of Opera Software, has a positively wonderful post about "Microsoft's forgotten monopoly":

The story of how Microsoft used its monopoly in operating systems to acquire a dominant position in office applications and browsers has often been told. But there's another Microsoft monopoly that's rarely mentioned, even though most of us see it every day--right in front of our eyes.

Microsoft's fonts are used to display most Web pages on the planet. Even Linux and Mac users, who often have fled Windows to avoid dependence on Microsoft, read most of their content using Microsoft fonts.

His solution?

The time has come to break the Microsoft monopoly on fonts. This is easier than it sounds. There are thousands of font families on the Web--I call them Web fonts--that are freely available for anyone to use.

...

Just as the visual appearance of the Web changed dramatically when images were introduced by Mosaic in 1993, the Web can change yet again if browsers start supporting Web fonts. I believe it will benefit everyone on the Web.

Except, perhaps, the monopolist.

The Great Blog Carnival of the Vanities

Blogs are by their nature interactive and cross-referential. Their posts are often about other blog posts, and they encourage comments, which are then commented on, and may link to other blogs. But there is little in the way of formal structures gathering them together. Little, that is, apart from the blog carnival.

I first came across this concept when I took part in one - Tangled Bank number 51, to be precise. Carnivals are essentially self-selected groups of blog posts, submitted by the authors to a site that acts as a host for a particular topic. The host may be fixed or rotating. But the end-result is the same: a thought-provoking collection of items on a theme.

A good example that I came across today is the carnival Mendel's Garden, hosted at "The force that through..." (great blog name, Dylan). I especially liked the RNAi introduction that was included in the carnival, but then that's me all over.

If you want to find out more about carnivals, there's a whole site devoted to them. According to a page there, one of the first blog carnivals was called, appropriately enough, "Carnival of the Vanities". Alas, it seems to have slipped through the wormholes of cyberspace, but you can catch a glimpse of it frozen in time thanks to the Internet Archive.

Deliciously Open

It may be heretical to admit it, but I'm not a big user of bookmarks, either online or offline. Certainly, I have my del.icio.us account, but I find that this blog is a better place to dump my bookmarks (sorry, gentle reader).

Nonetheless, if you're going to use bookmarks, you may as well use an open bookmarking service like MarkaBoo. The man behind it is really trying:

My other number one priority tomorrow will be to get the seal of approval on a more conventional open source license. Right now I’m really only tossing around three possibilities: Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (dropping the non-commercial requirement), the GPL (de-facto open source standard), or just pulling out all the stops and going with the MIT license. What do you think?

Good question: which do you prefer? (Via TechCrunch.)

Wikis: the New Blogs?

It's interesting how more companies are hoping that wikis are the new blogs. Mr Wikipedia himself was an early player here, with his Wikia. Now here comes Wetpaint (where do they get these names?). TechCrunch reckons that:

The service is incredibly easy to use (Jotspot comes close, but isn’t as mass-user friendly) - and it may bring a much larger audience to wikis than are currently comfortable using them.

I can see why blogs have taken off: it's vanity writing - a chance for the world to enjoy your wit and wisdom. But wikis are almost anti-vanity, since you let people scribble all over your precious masterpiece. Can't see it being so big, myself.

Flashiness Beats Reality

Bad news according to this story: Flash has jumped ahead of Real to become the number 2 video format (after Microsoft's Windows Media). The rise of Flash is particularly tiresome given that there are good open alternatives like Theora and OpenLaszlo.

Podcasters of the World, Unite!

I'm no huge fan of the poddy world (with notable exceptions), which I think is something of a fad, currently; but I certainly wouldn't want it to disappear. So it's good to see the podcasters getting together to fight the underhand WIPO moves I've reported on before. Good luck podboys and podgirls. (Via Boing Boing and Blogger News Network.)

The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons

So through bribes the Japanese have bought the passage of a shameful resolution that flies in the face of science and commonsense. They argue that since whales are more plentiful, they can be hunted. But the only reason whales are more plentiful is because they have not been hunted for 20 years: start hunting them again, and they will be forced to extinction, and there will be no whales for hunting - or anything else.

There's a name for this: it's called the Tragedy of the Commons, and was articulated more than 30 years ago in a famous essay by Garrett Hardin. Basically, it says that selfish use of a common resource leads to the loss of that resource - exactly as Japan seems hell-bent on proving. If the commercial whaling ban is indeed lifted, history will rightly judge them and their allies - including, surprisingly, the previously civilised Denmark - harshly.

The Commons: a Matter of Life or Death

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO):

An estimated 24% of the global disease burden and 23% of all deaths can be attributed to environmental factors.

In other words, the health of the environmental commons and of mankind are inextricably linked.

As WHO says:

These findings have important policy implications, because the environmental risk factors that were studied largely can be modified by established, cost-effective interventions. The interventions promote equity by benefiting everyone in the society, while addressing the needs of those most at risk.

Textop: Mashups and Strong Collaboration

Larry Sanger is beginning to emerge as one of the key players in the open content scene. As I've written before, he played an important, if disputed, role in the creation of Wikipedia. Currently, he is one of the driving forces behind the Digital Universe project.

I notice that he now has a blog (subtitle: "Constructing the Digital Universe"), which looks like it could become a must-read for those interested in the world of open content. Take, for example, this post about something called Textop, or the Text Outline Project. There is a summary of the project, as well as a more detailed explanation. This looks fascinating, and consists of several projects:

# The Collation Project, the flagship, will analyze various public domain works studied by scholars (e.g., Classics and history of philosophy) into approximately paragraph-sized chunks, summarize them, and place these chunks into a single outline. Each node of the outline will not have more than, say, a half-dozen chunks, so the outline will be constantly expanding. This will provide a single reference point for comparing the detailed content of scholarly works from throughout history and eventually, it is to be hoped, more recent works as well.

# The Analytical Dictionary Project will sort dictionary definitions and much other lexicographical data not by word but by concept, discussing and distinguishing the senses of words, introducing idioms and jargon, etc., all as part of the Collation Project's outline.

# The Debate Guide Project will describe the dialectical landscape, that is, it will provide fair but in-depth briefs on all sides of controversial issues, perennial and contemporary, academic and popular. The results will be located in the Collation Project's outline.

# The Event Summary Project will provide summaries of events or "stories," aggregating information from news articles and other sources and presenting it in the most neutral possible fashion. Event summaries will be appended to the end of the chronological portion of the Collation Project's outline.

The first of these, the Collation Project, is furthest along. Basically, it seems to be about chunking online texts for the purposes of overlaying extra information - a mashup, in effect. There's a sample screenshot of how this might work in practice.

What's interesting about this Textop project is the attempt to go down a level: that is, to produce not just texts, but a kind of Semantic Web within texts, with information about textual subunits. It's ambitious, but certainly worthwhile.

And I like Sanger's concept of "strong collaboration":

Strong, or radical, collaboration is crucially different from old-fashioned collaboration. Many people who have not worked much with open source software, or with Wikipedia, do not realize this.

Building on this idea, he has a couple of provocative suggestions:

First, speaking to the open source and open content community: I ask you to imagine if the Establishment were to use the methods and principles (including shared ownership and freedom) that you champion. Just imagine what fantastic results would come of that. Imagine that, and then ask yourselves what you can do, perhaps what in your processes and attitudes you can change, to help see to it traditional information producers adopt the really productive parts of your culture. And bear in mind that they love the efficiency collaborative systems display, and they aren't in principle opposed to freedom and openness.

Second, speaking to traditional information producers (including academics): imagine a world, after a new collaborative revolution, in which massive amounts of reliable information, nothing like today's Internet, is available free for all. Isn't that something you would want to use your influence to get behind, if it were possible? If such incredibly useful information resources might very well be created with low overhead, then isn't it worth it, at least as an experiment, to jettison top-down assignment and individual authorship, and to explore the creative possibilities of modest business models necessary to support the modest overhead? It may or may not make you rich; but it might well make the world rich in a way it has never been before.

Well, quite.

Will Geo Data Get Inspired and Go Open?

According to this post by Rufus Pollock, the INSPIRE proposal, the European Commission Directive on European Spatial Data Infrastucture, just might make European geo-spatial data available to the public for free.

I'm sure there's plenty of scope for things to go pear-shaped, and this isn't an area I know anything about, so I've no idea what the dynamics are. But at least there's hope. The place to find out whether that hope is realised or crushed is Public Geo Data. (Via Open Access News.)

Wengo: Open Source VoIP

One of the potential obstacles to adopting open source is the absence of important or even critical applications. A case in point is VoIP. Although, to its credit, Skype offers a client for GNU/Linux, it's not open source. So what do you do if you really need VoIP but also want to follow the path of light?

Enter Wengo, which not only offers the client, but makes all of the code available under the GPL. I've no idea what the VoIP is like, but Wengo is certainly doing the right thing as far as the software is concerned. (Via LXer and Free Software Magazine.)

Spread OpenOffice.org

A little while back I was calling for a spread of the SpreadFirefox meme. It looks like someone is now doing something along these lines with this attempt to spread the use of OpenOffice.org among New Yorkers.

The Balinese Commons

Well, this sounds like paradise: a conference about the commons taking place in Bali. As the press release puts it (no direct link because of the retrogressive use of frames):

Bali itself is a prime example of commons institutions. The subaks, or traditional irrigation systems have been built and managed by farmers that have lasted over centuries. Even the cultural heritage of the island--seen in the dance, music, and art - is a treasured commons.

Well, quite: kecak as commons, the gamelan as commons, wayang kulit as commons.... (Via On The Commons.)

OpenSolaris: Yes, And?

I'm as big a fan as the next geek of companies opening their code. So kudos to Sun for doing that with its Solaris operating system. But I can't help feeling that this move was about, oh, ten years too late. The stats after one year - 33,000 downloads (no, there are no zeros missing) - seem to confirm this. But I wish the OpenSolaris project well, nonetheless.

What's in a Name?

Digital Rights Network is reporting that as far as the dreaded broadcast treaty is concerned, the EU says protection can only go up. Well, of course, if something is protected, it must be good, so we should increase it.

Now try this: the EU says the monopoly can only be extended. Doesn't sound so good, does it? Monopolies are bad, and so should be decreased. Amazing what a change of terminology can do.

Why Analysts are a Waste of Skin, Part II

Patently.

Wanted: Visual Search Engine

Most people know about Google Images - the second element on the main Google search page. But it doesn't really find images that match the search string: it finds images that are near text that matches the string. Searching for images qua images is much harder.

Which makes this blog entry about Riya's future intentions in this respect intriguing. I've written about Riya a couple of times: but this move, if it happens, and if it works, is really the big one we've been waiting for. There's some interesting background to the move here. (Via TechCrunch.)

The Decline and Fall of the Microsoft Empire

The announcement that Bill Gates will "transition out of a day-to-day role" at Microsoft is no great shock: he was gradually inching in that direction. But once he has gone, and Steve Ballmer is left completely on his own, things are likely to go downhill pretty fast.

After all, Ballmer is not a man of vision (Gates may often have had the wrong vision, but at least he had one). He's a salesman. As this article suggests, he may well go soon too. That would leave the company even more adrift: it would simply become a huge, hugely-successful, convicted monopolist, adrift in a world very different from the one that it exploited so successfully.

The acme of the Microsoft empire was August 24, 1995, when Windows 95 was launched. Since then, it's been sliding. Soon it'll tank.

Update: It seems that Scoble has some related thoughts, together with a nice graph of the plunging share price.

The GNU and "L"-ephant in the Room

Nearly a great piece in The New York Times about Google's vertiginous expansion of its hardware platform:

Today even the closest Google watchers have lost precise count of how big the system is. The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world.

Great, except for the fact that it misses out one key piece of information: that nearly all of those servers are running GNU/Linux. Kinda relevant, don't you think, John, baby?

Open Mobile Linux Platform

The success of GNU/Linux as a server operating system is well known. It's lack of success on the desktop is exaggerated. But what many tend to forget is that GNU/Linux is increasingly widely deployed in everyday devices - music players and mobile phones. Indeed, the overall use in such devices probably exceeds its appearance elsewhere.

Further proof of the importance of this sector - if any were needed - is provided by the creation of "the world's first global, open [GNU/]Linux-based software platform for mobile devices" as the press release puts it. And it has some serious support: Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone.

A Review of Open Peer Review

I've mentioned before the idea of going beyond open access, which generally employs traditional peer review of papers, to a totally open peer review system. One attempt to implement this is Biology Direct.

The chief movers behind this journal - Eugene Koonin, David Lipman, Ros Dignon and Laura Landweber - have now written an interesting commentary on the first six months' experience. They speak of "cautious optimism about the Biology Direct model". The piece forms part of Nature's continuing examination of peer review and its place in the modern scientific world.

Google, Wal-Mart and the Commons

It's funny how sometimes it all just comes together.

A few days ago, I was quoting approvingly an analysis of how the prices of cheap food at places like Wal-Mart do not reflect the true costs - in terms of damage to the environment, local economies, small farmers etc. And now here is the deeply incomprehensible, but clearly perceptive Umair with some cognate thoughts about Google, its business model and PageRank (inspired by Scott Karp's interesting but depressing posting on linkfarms):

But, of course, there's a loser in this game - there must be, since no attention value is created, but attention is being exchanged. In the end, it's consumers, and, to a much smaller extent, advertisers. Consumers pay by spending attention to which returns are essentially zero, and advertisers pay with clicks whose propensity to consume isn't very high (but not many of them will be so interested in that for another couple of years).

Put another way, It is the expected value of attention of consumers which PageRank is supposed to, somewhat accurately, compute. But as long as there's no real competition in search (and let's be honest - there really isn't), Google can keep shifting the costs of this arbitrage on to consumers.

As Scott puts it, "the media business has been reduced to pure transaction". That's a brilliant statement - he's exactly right. In fact, his statement parallels Mark Pincus's very nice analogy from a few months back - Google as Wal-Mart. The dynamics are very much the same: scale economies are achieved by shifting costs elsewhere; at the expense of consumers, quality, etc.

This naturally led me to the original Google as Wal-Mart posting:

in fact, google feels a like walmart today. once the excitement over trying out their latest release wears off we are left with the realization that they are going to ultimately put the corner grocer (being craigslist) out of business, and suck value out of an economy not add back. and while it's a beautiful day here in san francisco, it's a sad one for me to see a company with so much promise to help the world, primarily focus on helping itself.

do we really want this form of capitalism? where companies like msft, walmart and now google pacman up industries, turning founders into billionaires who then hopefully make big philanthropic donations back to the community. is this sustainable capitalism? yes we live in a free market and yes we can choose how to come together as ants. united we stand, divided we work for google and walmart.

(Lack of capital letters not mine).

And of course, it all fits together, it all makes sense. Commons sense, of course.