Open Government

I predict this will become increasingly common in the future:

Earlier this year, former US senator and presidential candidate Bill Bradley published The New American Story, a book about reforming the American agenda. As part of that process and as a public citizen, he has joined open source activists to produce a Web-based window into the US federal budget.

Jimmy Wales of Wikia.com, Silona Bonewald of the League of Technical Voters, and Taylor Willingham from the LBJ Family of Organizations are others involved in the new initiative. In August, the group will hold a confab in Austin, Texas, to begin development of the ambitious project.

Bradley says, "Democracy is more responsive when people have good information. The purpose of the Transparent Federal Budget is to allow anyone to go onto the Internet and to discover how much is being spent on any particular area such as roads, bridges, breast cancer, missiles, secondary education. You could keyword search to identify specific places in the federal budget where money is being spent on a particular category. Then you could link to the floor debate in Congress about that part of the federal budget and to the votes that were taken about that subject, and who voted which way, and then link to the campaign contributors of that particular congressman or senator. The Transparent Federal Budget would allow citizens to hold elected officials accountable."

Exactly. (Via Linux.com)

Time to Face the Music

I've been rabbiting on about this for some time; now The Economist is saying it too, so it must be true:

Seven years ago musicians derived two-thirds of their income, via record labels, from pre-recorded music, with the other one-third coming from concert tours, merchandise and endorsements, according to the Music Managers Forum, a trade group in London. But today those proportions have been reversed—cutting the labels off from the industry's biggest and fastest-growing sources of revenue. Concert-ticket sales in North America alone increased from $1.7 billion in 2000 to over $3.1 billion last year, according to Pollstar, a trade magazine.

...

The logical conclusion is for artists to give away their music as a promotional tool. Some are doing just that. This week Prince announced that his new album, “Planet Earth”, will be given away in Britain for free with the Mail on Sunday, a national newspaper, on July 15th. (For years Prince has made far more money from live performances than from album sales; he was the industry's top earner in 2004.) Outraged British music retailers were quick to condemn the idea. As far as the record industry is concerned, it is madness. But for the music industry, it could well be the shape of things to come.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Eclipse...

...but didn't. Well, almost.

I've said it several times: Eclipse is open source's best-kept secret. So this quick summary of how it got to where it is today from the horse's mouth - Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation - is particularly welcome. And more to come, apparently.

Update: And here is more: Part II, all about ecosystems, a subject close to my heart.

Deutschland = Digital Dummkopf?

With the latest Copyright Act, Germany seems to be intent on waving goodbye to the 21st century, with some people wanting to take it back into the digital stone age:

CDU MP Günter Krings emphasized that "the Union holds intellectual property to be an essential prerequisite for prosperity in our society." He therefore praised the agreement reached on the fee to be charged for copyright even though he said that this could not be the long-term solution, adding that "there is no way around DRM." Krings said that "Internet piracy" was "one of the largest attacks on our national economy." For example, he said that a number of jobs had already been lost in the music industry, and the movie industry faced the same challenge. But Krings reassured everyone that "the legal system was not going to capitulate." He said that the Copyright Act should also be further amended so that only copies of the original would be admissible. In addition, Parliament also faces the problem of "intelligent recording software," which records broadcasts of online radios; Krings spoke of such software as "legally tantamount to an illegal file-sharing network" and added, "there must be an end to the freebie mentality in our society." Norbert Geis of the CSU also felt that the "second basket" of amendments does not mark the end of the reform. For him, copyright policy should focus on "making it clear to people that these rights are protected by the Constitution."

"Intelligent recording software": what will the fiends think of next?

Elsevier Begins the Journey to Openness

For all its faults, lovingly detailed in this blog, Elsevier seems slowly to be getting the hang of this Internet stuff:

About Google/Google Scholar: we're making good progress. As you may be aware, we did a pilot with some journals on SD first, and now we are working to get them all indexed. We're making good progress there - it's a lot of content to be crawled, but going along nicely. Both Google Scholar and main Google are gradually covering more and more of our journals.

SD is ScienceDirect, which claims to contain "over 25% of the world's science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information." Not open access, of course, but at least Elsevier realises that opening up its holdings to become searchable is a good idea. Now it's just got to complete the journey.

The Language of Copyright

Even though IANAL, I rather enjoy the intricacies of copyright law. Maybe it's because copyright occupies such a central place for both free software - which depends on it to enforce licences - and for free content, where it's often more of a hindrance than a help. Maybe it's just because I was, am and always will be a mathematician who likes dealing with logical systems; or maybe I'm just sad.

Whatever the case, here's something I've found interesting: a short guide to (US) copyright for linguists.

Why do linguists need to bother about this? Isn’t this what lawyers are for? There probably was a time when individuals involved in scholarly linguistic work, whether functioning as fieldworkers, authors, or editors, didn’t have to concern themselves with such matters, but this is no longer the case. (It is striking—and somewhat embarrassing to me—that the Newman and Ratliff (2001) fieldwork volume, whose preparation began barely a decade ago, doesn’t include a single mention of copyright.) There are numerous reasons why the situation is very different now from before, but let me mention just three. First, copyright protection—what I prefer to call copyright “shackles”—now lasts for any inordinate amount of time, anywhere from 70 to 120 years, as compared with the 28 years that formerly was the norm in the U.S. Second, contrary to what used to be the case, the publishing of academic journals has turned out to be extremely profitable. Putting out journals is less and less a labor of love by dedicated colleagues committed to promoting scholarship in their fields and more and more a money-making enterprise by large often transnational publishers. Nowadays journals and the scholars who publish in them are not necessarily on the same wave length and they often have conflicting interests. Third, and most obvious, the internet presents new threats to traditional publishing while simultaneously providing new opportunities for fast and effective scholarly communication and the commercial exploitation of that scholarship.

The copyright world has changed. Almost daily we discover that the failure of scholars to pay attention to such matters has had serious negative consequences. For example, older classic works in our field that ideally should be an open part of our intellectual legacy turn out to be off limits, and in general copyright restricts our ability to make creative use of previous works, including our own (!). When we fail to pay attention to copyright matters, we inadvertently give up scholarly rights that we would like to have and needn’t have lost, such as the right to post papers on our private websites or the right to duplicate our own papers for students in classes that we are teaching. In the normal course of things, field linguists might not appreciate the relevance of copyright rules to their work, but the fact is that to protect yourself and your scholarly goals and objectives, you really do need to understand basic concepts in copyright law and how it affects you.

(Via Language Log.)

Decoupling Software and Standards

As you may have noticed, there is a big bust-up over office file formats going on at the moment. On the one hand, we have ODF, which is a completely open, vendor-independent standard that is supported by multiple programs, and on the other, we have Microsoft's OOXML, which is a vendor-dependent standard of sorts, unlikely to be fully implemented by anyone other than Microsoft.

The only reason this debate is taking place is because of the huge installed base of Microsoft Office, which is naturally biased towards OOXML. But with the release of Sun's ODF Plug in 1.0 for Microsoft Office, things have changed:

The Sun ODF Plug in for Microsoft Office gives users of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint the ability to read, edit and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format. The ODF Plug in is available as a free download from the Sun Download Center (SDLC). Download the ODF Plug in.

The Plug in is easy to setup and use, the conversion happens transparently and the additional memory footprint is minimal. Microsoft Office users now can have seamless two-way conversion of Microsoft Office documents to and from Open Document. The ODF Plug in runs on Microsoft Windows and is available in English. More language support will be available in later releases.

This is important, because it decouples the file format from the program. Now anyone - including Microsoft Office users - can opt for a truly open format, not one that aspires to this condition.

We can only hope that the UK's National Archives, making an extraordinary amount of noise about solving a problem largely of Microsoft's making, will use the new plug-in to convert files stored in proprietary formats into the safest long-term solution - ODF.

Google Books Open Up - A Bit

One of the problems with the otherwise laudable Google Book Project is that it's not actually providing access to the texts, just adding searchability. That's useful, but not really want we need. And since many of the the books that it is scanning are in the public domain, there seems no reason not to offer full access.

Google seems to have realised this, finally:

I work on a project at Google called Google Accessible Search, which helps promote results that are more accessible to visually impaired users. Building on that work is today's release of accessible public domain works through Google Book Search. It's opening up hundreds of thousands of books to people who use adaptive technologies such as speech output, screen readers, and Braille displays.

As this notes, one of the advantages of opening up in this way is that the text may be re-purposed for adaptive technologies. Put another way, texts that remain closed, locked up behind DRM or similar, are largely denied to people who rely on those technologies - another reason why closing up knowledge in this way is ethically wrong.

How Daft Can You Get?

Let me count the ways:

David Cameron has pledged to extend copyright on music to 70 years - in exchange for an effort by music bosses to curb violent music and imagery.

What on earth has one got to do with the other? How will "music bosses" "curb" this stuff? What happens if they "curb" only some of it? Or if only some of them curb it? Do they all get an extension to 63 and a bit years? Or do some get any extension to 70, but the others not? Talk about hare-brained....

DomainKeys Identified Mail: A Certain Thing

I'm amazed it's taken so long to come up with this:

DKIM uses digital signatures to authenticate messages. These signatures allow you, or your e-mail service provider, to verify that a message claiming to be from your bank is really from your bank. Without authentication, if I receive an e-mail saying that my account has been compromised and requesting me to verify my personal details, it's a pretty good bet that I should ignore the message. But if I receive the same message and I can prove to my own satisfaction that it came from my bank, then I should probably pay serious attention.

DKIM can offer this proof, and it has just been published by the Internet Engineering Task Force--the group responsible for technical standards on the Internet--as an official Internet standard.

The Nature of the Beast

The journal Nature is a rather ambiguous beast. On the one hand, it represents the acme and epitome of the current science publishing system - and hence everything that is wrong with an analogue, profit-based, traditional access approach - and on the other, it is clearly an organisation that is trying harder than most to be innovative and engage with new ideas flowing from Web 2.0, social networks, virtual worlds and even - whisper it - open access.

One of the people there who seems to get this stuff is Timo Hannay, Head of Web Publishing for the Nature Publishing Group: maybe he's working within the citadel. In any case, this interview with him on the Confessions of a Science Librarian blog is well worth reading for the insights it offers into Nature and its gropings towards openness, and one of the main protagonists prodding things in that general direction.

Having Your Digital Cake and Eating It

How rich is this?

The growing problem of accessing old digital file formats is a "ticking time bomb", the chief executive of the UK National Archives has warned.

Natalie Ceeney said society faced the possibility of "losing years of critical knowledge" because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.

She was speaking at the launch of a partnership with Microsoft to ensure the Archives could read old formats.

Microsoft's UK head Gordon Frazer warned of a looming "digital dark age".

Er, yes, which Microsoft created.

Adam Farquhar, head of e-architecture at the British Library, praised Microsoft for its adoption of more open standards.

He said: "Microsoft has taken tremendous strides forward in addressing this problem. There has been a sea change in attitude."

Pity its new-found love of "openness" doesn't extend to embracing the one truly open and independent file format standard, ODF...

A Declaration of Virtual Policy...

...made by representatives of law, industry, and academia, assembled in full and free convention as the first Synthetic Worlds Congress.

Whereas virtual worlds are places with untapped potential, providing new and positive experiences and effects, we resolve that...

(Via Terra Nova.)

Firefox Fights On

Everybody knows that Firefox is one of open source's biggest success stories. What many may not know is that the story is not over:

OneStat.com (www.onestat.com), the number one provider of real-time web analytics, today reported that the global usage share of Mozilla's browsers is 12.72 percent. The global usage share increased 1.03 percent since January 2007. Mozilla Firefox 2.0 has a global usage share of 11.48 percent.

This is really significant, because it suggests that Firefox's rise is not simply a question of hardcore free software supporters switching, but rather a sustained move by some general users too. The question is, how long will it go on? (Via Tuxmachines.org.)

Blizzards and Beauty: An Ode to Open Access

Peter Suber has long been recognised as the official chronicler of the open access movement; now, with the publication of this paean, it seems he's become its bard as well:

I've heard physicists refer to the prospect of room-temperature superconductivity as a "gift of nature". Unfortunately, it's not quite within reach. But the non-rivalrous property of digital information is a gift of nature that we've already grasped and put to work. We only have to stand back a moment to appreciate it. To our ancestors, the prospect of recording knowledge in precise language, symbols, sounds, or images without reducing the record to a rivalrous object would have been magical or miraculous. But we do it every day now and it's losing its magic.

The danger is not that we already take it for granted but that might stop short and fail to take full advantage of it. The point is not to marvel at its potential but to seize the opportunities it creates. It can transform knowledge-sharing if we let it.

We take advantage of this gift when we post information online and permit free access and unrestricted use for every user with an internet connection. But if we charge for access, enforce exclusion, create artificial scarcity, or prohibit essential uses, then we treat the non-rivalrous digital file like a rivalrous physical object, dismiss the opportunity, and spurn the gift.

More, Peter, more.

You Know Virtual Goods Are Real...

...when they have their own summit. (Via Virtual China.)

This is My 2000th Post

Apparently. Just thought I'd mention it.

The Industry Formerly Known as Music

Prince has always been ahead of the pack. Now he's doing it again:

The eagerly awaited new album by Prince is being launched as a free CD with a national Sunday newspaper in a move that has drawn widespread criticism from music retailers.

The Mail on Sunday revealed yesterday that the 10-track Planet Earth CD will be available with an "imminent" edition, making it the first place in the world to get the album. Planet Earth will go on sale on July 24.

"It's all about giving music for the masses and he believes in spreading the music he produces to as many people as possible," said Mail on Sunday managing director Stephen Miron. "This is the biggest innovation in newspaper promotions in recent times."

And as if that weren't a clear enough signal, try this:

Prince, whose Purple Rain sold more than 11m copies, also plans to give away a free copy of his latest album with tickets for his forthcoming concerts in London.

In other words, he recognises that CDs are now little more than marketing elements for promoting his personal appearances, which are where the real money is generated. Moreover, being purely analogue, the overall experience of attending concerts cannot be copied, unlike recordings of the music played during them.

Sadly, the Industry Formerly Known as Music just doesn't get it:

The Entertainment Retailers Association said the giveaway "beggars belief". "It would be an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career," ERA co-chairman Paul Quirk told a music conference. "It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music.

"The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday."

Now, it wouldn't be that somebody's scared witless of the looming threat of disintermediation, perchance?

The Birth of Blognation

I was a big fan of the Vecosys blog - I even got used to its horrible name. And then it went away, only to emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes, as something bigger and bolder: Blognation.

Blognation is certainly an ambitious”“Go Big or Go Home”” project, the aim being to report on the Web 2.0 startup ecosystem around the globe including, United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Denmark Portugal, Italy, Iceland, Netherlands, Japan, China / Taiwan / Hong Kong, Australia, Brazil, South America, all with the help of 16+ blognation editors who are getting ready to start writing.

Today sees the launch of blognation UK and over the coming weeks and months all of the other aforementioned blogs will be launched. And proving that I certainly don’t lack ambition, I am currently speaking with a further 10 more prospective editors to cover Canada, Russia, India, South Africa, South Korea, South-East Asia, Poland, Czech Republic, Turkey and Greece.

Makes sense, but it depends critically on the quality of the blogger team that Sam Sethi has assembled. We shall see. At least the name is better than the previous one.

Catalonians of the World, Unite!

Good news: a Catalan translation of Rebel Code - Codi Rebel, no less - is hurtling towards a bookshop near you. Well, it is if you live in Catalonia. Here's the rousing peroration to keep you going until that happy day (probably a good few months off):

El GNU/Linux i els projectes de codi obert tracten del codi interior que està en les arrels de tot allò bo que tenim i que es rebel·la contra el pitjor que hi ha en nosaltres mateixos i que existirà mentre la humanitat perdure.

Brings tears to the eyes.

Up and At 'Em, Mappam

OpenStreetMap has always been one of my favourite open endeavours. It's a fine example of people getting fed up with official intransigence - in this case of the UK Government refusing to release public geodata - and getting off their bums to do something, rather than just whinge about it as others (like me) do.

So it's particularly gratifying to see that the chaps behind it are launching a geodata-related business, called Mappam:

Mappam helps you make money by adding relevant ads targeted to the exact place your visitors are browsing.

It's easy to set up and works with all the big web map services - Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, MultiMap and OpenStreetMap/OpenLayers.

Let's hope they've, er, found a way to make lots of dosh. (Via OpenBusiness.)

Wii Opens Up a Bit, We All Gain

Game consoles are notorious for being tightly-controlled, closed platforms. So this news, delivered en passant, is a rather significant vote for openness:

On Wednesday morning, Nintendo will officially announce to the general public its plans for WiiWare, downloadable games for the wildly popular Wii videogame console.

...

while Nintendo, as the retailer, would itself determine the appropriate pricing for each game on a per-title bases, the games themselves would not be vetted by Nintendo. Instead, Nintendo would only check the games for bugs and compatibility

Clearly, the company has recognised that the loss of control is more than outweighed by the benefit of establishing a flourishing ecosystem around the Wii.

Reputation Management in the Age of Google

Here's one good reason why you might want to blog:

At the height of the cyber-abuse, Sue Scheff, a consultant to parents of troubled teens, would type her name in a Google search box and brace herself: Up would pop page after page of attack postings.

The solution? Fight negative Google hits with positive ones:

In December, Scheff turned to ReputationDefender, a year-old firm that promised to help her cleanse her virtual reputation. She no longer dreads a Google search on her name. Most of the links on the all-important first page are to her own Web site and a half-dozen others created by ReputationDefender to promote her work on teen pregnancy and teen depression.

Remember: if you don't manage your reputation online by participating, someone else might....

I Fear the Geeks Bearing "Lughenjo"

If you've been holding your breath while waiting to discover what The Economist's super-duper, top-secret, Web 2.0-y, skunkworks Project Red Stripe turned out to be, you may now exhale:

We are developing a web service that harnesses the collective intelligence of The Economist Group’s community, enabling them to contribute their skills and knowledge to international and local development organisations. These business minds will help find solutions to the world’s most important development problems.

It will be a global platform that helps to offset the brain drain, by making expertise flow back into the developing world.

Oh, right.

Well, at least those geeky Economist types have come up with an interesting code-name:

We’ve codenamed the service “Lughenjo”, an Tuvetan word meaning gift.

Amazingly, neither Wikipedia nor Ethnologue, the definitive source of information about languages, knows anything about Tuvetan, but Webster's does. Anyone with more info?

Signs of the (Virtual) Times

The virtual world of EVE Online now has an official economist, Eyjólfur Guðmundsson:

Some of you may have read in various articles and interviews recently that CCP was bringing an economist on board to act as a sort of Alan Greenspan for the virtual world of EVE Online. That economist is me. So here comes a short intro and a bit about what I plan to do as a part of the EVE dev team.

...

In the real world, economic information is the cornerstone for our daily business; everyone takes note when news on inflation, production and interest rates are announced and traders try to predict beforehand what the news will be. There is a constant game between the market and authorities on predicting each other’s move and for that everyone needs information. Though EVE is a virtual world, the basic needs are the same. Players, designers and the company leaders at CCP will all benefit from having a central figure to monitor inflation and trends and provide a focused insight into what is happening within that virtual world so that everyone can make better decisions.

As the lead economist for EVE, my duties will include publishing economic information to the EVE-Online community. My duties will also be to coordinate research cooperation with academic institutions as the academic world has expressed quite an interest in doing research on this phenomenon (which shows how important MMOGs might become in future research into economic and human behavior).

(Via Virtual Economy Research Network.)