There is a There There

I had occasion to use Second Life in anger the other night, by which I mean I made a serious, business-related use of it. Taking up the kind invitation of the splendidly-named Gizzy Electricteeth (SL name, of course), I went to visit IBM's recreation of the Australian Open, which I had written about earlier (and which Gizzy had spotted).

As I had surmised when reading about it, this is an impressive virtual construction, not just for what it is, but mostly for what it portends. The ability to capture a ball's path in real time, and then recreate it in Second Life - and a rapidly-moving ball at that - means that other, more sedate sports like football and cricket will be even easier to reproduce in this way.

As a result, fans of those sports (I'm told there are one or two) will not only be able to watch matches as they happen, but also replay them, watching from different angles. They could even join in - for example, taking the viewpoint of the umpire/referee, or one of the players (even I found myself "playing" tennis, with balls careering towards me at high velocity - and magically being returned).

I think this alone makes IBM's work important, because it may well be enough of a hook to get couch potatoes off their sofas and staggering towards their PCs (until, of course, somebody produces set-top boxes for TVs specifically designed for Second Life.)

But impressive as all this work was - knocked up in less than a month by a small and clearly dedicated team including said Gizzy - what really struck me most was something quite different. This was the fact that I was engaged in this immersive experience while I sat at my computer, late at night in a wintry London, as Gizzy sat at her computer, mid-morning in Australia, in the summer, and while both of us "met" in that somewhere land we call Second Life.

Whereas my previous experiences of SL have been purely of an exploratory kind - and hence retained an element of being "there" only in a shallow, unengaged sense - my visit to the IBM site, which involved me being myself, a journalist asking questions, as I do in ordinary life, was far truer, far more real. Not because of where I was, or what I saw, but because of what I was doing, which was a seamless extension of my life in another place that was neither here nor there, but simply was.

Argo Sets a New Course

The rather fine Argo Genome Browser,

Broad Institute's production tool for visualizing and manually annotating whole genomes

has now been released under the LGPL.

O, to be in Hamburg...

...now that Google Earth is there.

Even though I've been writing about the coming convergence of online games, virtual worlds, and 3D systems like Google Earth, for a while, I'm still amazed at how quickly it's happening. Here's the latest milestone:

Hamburg wird als erste Stadt weltweit als 3D-Modell in das Programm integriert - inklusive der Häuserfassaden.

(Hamburg has become the first city in the world to be integrated into the 3D-program [Google Earth] - complete with building facades.)

...

Franz Steidler, Chef der Cybercity AG, die von Paris und Florenz bereits auf eigene Kosten 3D-Modelle erstellt hat, träumt bereits von ganz anderen Anwendungen: Man solle auch in Häuser hineingehen können, etwa in Geschäfte, um virtuell einzukaufen. "Da ist vieles denkbar."

(Franz Steidler, the head of Cybercity AG, which has already made 3D models of Paris and Florence at its own expense, already dreams of other applications. People will be able to go into buildings, for example shops, in order to make virtual purchases. "All kinds of things are imaginable there.")

Buying virtual goods in virtual shops: now where have I heard that before? (Via Ogle Earth.)

I Urge You to Urge EU Urgency on OA

Open access is important, but for most of us, it's hard to do much about it. So I urge you to vote for the following EU petition, whether you're in the EU or not:

I urge decision-makers at all levels in Europe to endorse the recommendations made in the Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe in full, in particular to adopt the first recommendation A1 as a matter of urgency.

(Via Open Access News.)

Becta: Must Try Harder

Despite Becta's fine words, that guardian of the free software spirit, Mark Taylor, wants more action:

"This is the perfect opportunity for Becta to reject accusations that it is in bed with big suppliers by offering serious support to Linux and open source software as valid alternatives.

"Becta's own evidence says it will save schools money, so let's see them provide at least equal opportunities for schools to buy open source software through their e-Learning Credits and the new Learning Platform Framework Agreements."

Go for 'em, Mark.

Gene Geni

This is quite clever - although it's a pity it uses Flash. You start to build your family tree on-screen, adding emails to the names where available. These are then sent info about the site, and obviously encouraged to add their own local knowledge of the tree. So the system is viral, and is based on two networks: that of family connections, and that of the Internet.

It's easy to foresee the day when we know all our public genealogical connections in this way - a stage before our genomes are used to show all the private ones, too.... (Via TechCrunch.)

Open Aladdin4D

I've written before about the example of Blender, and how it was freed from its proprietary shackles. Now it seems that another modelling program, Aladdin 4D, may also receive its manumission:

What is Aladdin 4D? It's a powerful, but extremely easy-to-use, 3D modeling, rendering and animation package that includes the 3D tools that you'd expect as well as many unique features like relative time-based animation, an amazingly powerful particle system, and one of the fastest rendering systems on the desktop.

Nova originally purchased Aladdin 4D in the mid-1990s from Adspec, Inc. and then heavily upgraded and modernized to make it even more powerful and easy to use. Aladdin 4D has many advanced tools for professional 3D animation, yet its interface was designed to be easy for anyone to use. The source code for Aladdin 4D was designed to be as portable as possible. Adspec, under contract, once ported Aladdin 4D to the Transputer board and also did a special Intel processor rendering engine. Aladdin 4D has already had it's rendering engine test-compiled (a quick hack job) under Linux, MacOS X and other platforms in the past. The source code is highly standard C source code.

This would be great news. Great, because it reinforces this as a model for expanding open source; great because competition is good; and great because with the rise of virtual worlds (especially open ones), 3D modelling packages are going to become as common as HTML editors.

Blog Perdurability and the Information Commons

Simon Phipps raises an important point: what should be done about corporate blog pages when their owner has, er, passed on (as in to another company)? Sun's solution:

When we started blogs.sun.com, we had a long discussion about what we should do when employees left. The conclusion we all reached, supported strongly by Jonathan Schwartz who attended the meeting, was that they should simply be left in place, merely closed for further changes. Our view was that, if the blog text had been acceptable when it was published, there was no reason a change of employment status should vary that. Not to mention the desire by Tim to preserve URIs. Interestingly, one of Jonathan's motivations for this was also so that people could pick up where they left off when they rejoined Sun!

But I'd go further. I think that companies have a responsibility to maintain the availability of any materials that they make public. This is because of the changed nature of information these days: it's inherently interconnected, and snipping out a weft here and a warp there isn't good for the rest of the data tapestry.

Publicly-available information forms a commons; removing it constitutes a destruction of part of that commons. Ultimately there should be laws against it, just as there are against chopping down historic trees that form part of the landscape commons.

Microsoft Enterprise Open Source

Well, that's what it says here, although what this really means is something like this:

Aras Innovator enterprise software solutions take advantage of the Microsoft enterprise service-oriented architecture [SOA] technologies to deliver applications that are scalable, manageable and secure.

Aras Innovator solutions are Microsoft enterprise open source combining the flexibility and control of open source with the affordable Microsoft infrastructure. Together Aras and Microsoft deliver a Total Cost of Ownership dramatically lower than conventional enterprise systems.

Not quite so dramatic, but nonetheless an interesting move from a company that seems hugely proud of its mongrel heritage:

Aras Corporation is the Microsoft enterprise open source software solution provider for companies that want the control and flexibility of open source and have Microsoft skill sets and infrastructure.

(Via TheOpenForce.com.)

Just Say Something

If I had to name the biggest problem with Second Life, it would not be lag or all the other usual stuff (or even unusual stuff like flying penises), but the lack of voice communication. Currently, Second Life is a mute world, which makes it rather eerie (at least for those of us fortunate enough to be able to hear).

So news that Centric are adding a voice chat system in a rather clever way caught my attention:

Centric today announced Second Talk, an easy-to-use voice communication system for Second Life. Second Talk "headsets" automatically scan for other Second Talk users nearby, and offer instant voice chat for groups of up to 10 users through Skype, a popular Voice over IP communication platform.

..

Second Talk offers significant benefits in terms of convenience and cost. Since voice chat is facilitated by Skype, use of the system is free and virtually unlimited. In addition, Second Talk does not require the installation of proprietary software or SIP server setup. Finally, Second Talk does not require a base station to designate a chat area or manage chats - the headset is wearable and fully portable.

Hm: if this works, I might even sign up for Skype....

Gating Technology: The E-Factor

I'm starting to write more posts about energy efficiency, since it obviously feeds into issues surrounding various environmental commons. But it's increasingly clear to me that its impact is going to be much more direct on the technologies I consider on a regular basis.

Take this, for example:

In a piece of research that could have implications for the future of mobile broadband, a US analyst firm has claimed that new mobile applications will make pure cellular technology too energy-inefficient to be practical in the future.

This is going to happen again and again, changing the course of technology development just when everyone thought they knew where it was going....

Becta Late Than Never

I've been a bit remiss in not posting this earlier, but it's still worth underlining the major shift that's going on here, at all sorts of levels.

A while back, I was moaning about Becta not giving free software a chance in UK schools. Well, they've obviously been on holiday to Damascus, because in the recently-published interim report on Microsoft Vista and Office 2007, Becta seems to have seen the light:

The report found that whilst the new features of Vista add value, there are no “must have” features in the product that would justify early deployment in schools and colleges. The technical, financial and organisational challenges associated with early deployment currently make this a high risk strategy. Early deployment is therefore strongly recommended against.

...

As the costs of deployment of Office 2007 would be significant, Becta has not identified any convincing justification for the early adoption of Office 2007. Recognising that many schools and colleges already have perfectly adequate office productivity solutions there would need to be a strong case to justify the necessary investment.

...

The report compared Office 2007 with a range of competitor products and found that many of them delivered about 50% of the Office 2007 functionality, enough it is believed to meet or exceed basic office productivity requirements of many schools.

Becta therefore calls on the ICT industry to ensure that computers for the education marketplace are delivered with a choice of Office productivity suites available, which ideally should include an open-source offering.

The ability for schools to exercise choice is further restricted by interoperability difficulties and Becta is calling on Microsoft to improve its support for the ODF interoperability standard.

There is also concern that the current lack of support for Microsoft’s new file formats in competitor products (particularly “free to education” products) may exacerbate “digital divide” issues. Becta therefore advises that schools and colleges should only deploy Office 2007 when its interoperability with alternative products is satisfactory.

Definitely better late than never.

Shining Mirrored Pages: A Visual Commons

This is art, right?

Thus, by making a public display that is attentive to its community of users, a Visual Commons, it becomes possible for the community to escape the present hegemony of one-way communication, or "broadcast," of generic information (such as the time, or stock prices) or the barrage of mass-media advertising (such as occurs in New York City's Times Square). In effect, dynamic processing of community feedback regarding the contents of the display enables it to become more than just a billboard.

What would Tulse Luper say? (Via OnTheCommons.org.)

We Are All Modular Now

One of the central theses of this blog is that for things like software, modularity produces more and better code, because it allows a kind of Darwinian selection to kick in on an atomistic basis.

But wait: isn't another of my theses that openness is appropriate across a whole range of activities - notably content production? And so...that would suggest that content should become more modular too, allowing a similar kind of winnowing process to take place.

Eek!

Horde Groupware (Also for Humans)

This sounds rather good:

Horde Groupware is a free, enterprise ready, browser based collaboration suite. Users can manage and share calendars, contacts, tasks and notes with the standards compliant components from the Horde Project. Horde Groupware bundles the separately available applications Kronolith, Turba, Nag and Mnemo.

And I can't help feeling that the timing is perfect....

Of WikiSeek and Digital Tyrants

WikiSeek sounds a good idea in principle:

The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes.

Wikiseek utilizes Searchme's category refinement technology, providing suggested search refinements based on user tagging and categorization within Wikipedia, making results more relevant than conventional search engines.

It does, of course, replace one digital tyrant (Google) with another (Wikipedia).

Real Knowledge of Virtual Worlds

If anyone has the right to pontificate about virtual worlds, it's Howard Rheingold. Fifteen years ago, Rheingold wrote Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds - and How It Promises to Transform Society. We're still waiting, of course, but that only makes his historical perpective on things even more valuable:

Some things about online social behavior seems to be eternal and universal--trolls and griefers and the eternal meta-debate about what to do about them, for example. There's a widespread amnesia, as if these kinds of cybersocializing were new. Not many people online have much sense of history. That's probably true of just about everything. What I really like is that it's so easy to roll your own these days. It used to be a big deal to set up your own chat or BBS or listserv. Now it's part of the tool set for millions of people, and it's mostly free.

The Open Laboratory

In a sense, turning blog posts into a book - a blook - misses the point, which is that blogs are living, interactive things. Equally, if blog postings can thrive in that form, who am I to gainsay the move?

Certainly, I wish the splendidly-named The Open Laboratory (available from Lulu.com) every success. It's " a collection of 50 selected blog posts showcasing the quality and diversity of writing on science blogs".

Science blogs are, indeed, some of the most readable around, probably because their subject-matter tends to be more substantial than the usual fluff you find in the medium (and I speak as someone who has produced a fair amount of fluff in his time.) It's also probably significant that the ScienceBlogs site is one of the more successful attempts to unify and consolidate related blogs.

Of course, you can still read the posts online (or the longer list of suggestions for inclusion), which makes the collection thoroughly OA. (Via Open Reading Frame.)

Death of Venice

Joost? Joost??

The Tragedy of the Enclosed Lands

How could I resist a blog entitled "From Sink Estates to SQL", with the subtitle "Thoughts on Housing, IT, FOSS and Politics" - to say nothing of posts called "The Tragedy of the Enclosed Lands" with long, sad tales like this:

Last year I attended a demonstration by some companies looking to supply us with a GIS solution. I did not get to hear any costs at this point, but what maddened me somewhat was the level of restrictions the data suppliers wanted to put on any information they gave us.

These included :

- Insisting that if we put map data on our intranet we'd have to buy a licence for every potential user, i.e. every person who has access to our intranet. Considering this is over a thousand people now (and growing) this is fairly ridiculous.

- Advising us that we would only be able to print out maps (to include in publications to customers) if we got additional licences for this.

- If we decided not to renew our licence for the data, we'd have to destroy all maps produced/printed as well as the more obvious step of deleting all data we'd produced and uninstalling the software.

Reasons why proprietary approaches are doomed, No. 4,597. But do read the rest of the post, it's very thoughtful, and concludes stirringly:

I actually believe that mapping data will be de-facto public domain within the next decade. Until then though, we have alternatives. Of the data we collect, I intend to submit it all to the Open Street Map project (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Main_Page) which is an excellent attempt to bypass some of the legal faggotry in the copyright datasets. Collectively, we can tear down the enclosures. We can rebuild a commons which can help organisations of all sizes innovate with GIS technologies (surely something which can only increase with better mobile devices?)

Prague: The MMORPG

If online games and virtual worlds are becoming realistic to the point of blurring the boundary with the real world, it is perhaps inevitable that the real world itself should turn into an MMORPG:

This is the Prague Files, the first "live game" from Live Games Network, and I spent two weeks in December playing through the title with other players from across the US. It's a new kind of web-based game that enlists players as secret agents, but it's not all virtual—when several players from New York head down to the accident site, they actually find a crashed car and an unsavory thug keeping an eye on it.

Red Hat's Balkan Mystery

This sounds wonderfully cloak-and-daggerish:

Serbian minister of science Aleksandar Popović and Red Hat Corporation vice-president Werner Knoblich will sign a letter of intent on January 15, the government said in a statement.

Aha! But intent to do what....?

Is the Great God Google Too Good?

A few weeks back I wrote about how that nice Mr. Google was sending me around 50% of my traffic to these 'umble pages. I have a confession to make: I was wrong, it's not 50%. It's more like 60%, going on 70% some days. In fact, if the graph of visitors sent to me by Google continues to climb at its current rate, I shall probably soon have the entire planet visiting every day.

And it seems I'm not the only one impressed by Google's ability to deliver what we used to called "eyeballs" in those good old Web 1.0 days. Here's what The Daily Telegraph's "digital editor" (impressive, I'm still analogue myself) says:

“The most important driver of all readers [to our site] is Google, except for people who know us and come directly. It plays a critical part of exporting our brand, particularly to the U.S.”

At least I don't seem to have sunk quite so low as The Times, which

“is training journalists to write in a way that makes their articles more likely to appear among Google’s unpaid search results.”

Maybe Google is becoming a little too efficient at this game - to the extent that it's warping the world it's supposed to be serving.

This is the House the Fabbers Built

More signs that the fabbers are marching towards us from the future - this time, building houses as they go:

It involves computer-controlled robotic nozzles which pipe quick-drying liquid gypsum and concrete to form walls, floors and roofs.

Inspired by the inkjet printer, the technology goes far beyond the techniques already used for prefabricated homes. “This will remove all the limitations of traditional building,” said Hugh Whitehead of the architecture firm Foster & Partners, which designed the “Gherkin” skyscraper in London and is producing designs for the Loughborough team. “Anything you can dream you can build.”

The robots are rigged to a metal frame, enabling them to shuttle in three dimensions and assemble the structure of the house layer by layer.

(Via Slashdot.)

Sock Bots

After sock mobs, Jamais Cascio warns us about sock bots:

as politics and political figures move into the virtual worlds such as Second Life, we should also expect to see a parallel phenomenon there, taking advantage of the unique characteristics of the space.

Let's call the fake personae that are likely to show up in a virtual world trying to appear as a political mass Sock Bots.

Opening Up

Barely a week after Linden Lab freed the code of the Second Life viewer, we have a fork: Open SL. Not much there, yet, but this is going to be fun.

Snap Decision

As you have probably noticed, there are no images on this page. This is largely to speed the loading: with pix, it would take much longer, and generally slow down the experience of reading the blog.

Clearly, though, much of the Web is graphical in nature, and many Web pages are visually attractive. So it's a pity not to be able to show this as an enticement to explore the links in these posts further.

But I think I've found the solution. I've decided to install Snap Preview Anywhere on these pages. When you move the mouse pointer over an external link, you should see a small floating image of the page linked to (you need Javascript enabled for this to work). To follow the link, either click on it as usual, or click on the image of the page it leads to. More details here.

I hope you find this useful - I know I do on other sites that have installed it. If you don't, you can turn it off by clicking on Options in the floating window, and disabling it.

Update: Following suggestions in a comment (for which thanks), I've now activated Snap Preview for internal links. And you'll notice a small search box in the pop-up window: this leads to Snap's search engine, which also uses its preview technology to good effect. Feedback on these moves is always welcome.

Open Source War and Google Earth

How's this for a confluence:

Terrorists attacking British bases in Basra are using aerial footage displayed by the Google Earth internet tool to pinpoint their attacks, say Army intelligence sources.

Documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google.

The satellite photographs show in detail the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked.

Written on the back of one set of photographs taken of the Shatt al Arab Hotel, headquarters for the 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group, officers found the camp's precise longitude and latitude.

So what do they do? They try to censor the images. But guess what? That's not going to work, and it's going to get worse. The two main solutions are (a) change the way you fight wars or - rather better - (b) don't fight wars in the first place.

iPhone = Crippleware

Quite.

Getting it Right on Copyright in Europe

The European Union is commissioning some seriously serious research these days. Yesterday I wrote about the impressively named and indeed impressive "Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU"; and now here we have one entitled "The Recasting of Copyright & Related Rights for the Knowledge Economy".

I can't pretend to have read all 305 pages of it, but I did spot a couple of sections in the Executive Summary that suggests it has its heart (and head) in the right place:

Holders of neighbouring rights in performances and phonograms have expressed concern that the existing term of protection of 50 years puts them and the European creative industries, in particular the music industry, at a disadvantage, as compared to the longer protection provided for in the United States. Chapter 3 examines these concerns, first by describing and comparing the terms in the EU in the light of the existing international framework and existing terms in countries outside the EU, secondly by examining the rationales underlying related (neighbouring) rights protection and finally by applying economic analysis.

The authors of this study are not convinced by the arguments made in favour of a term extension. The term of protection currently laid down in the Term Directive (50 years from fixation or other triggering event) is already well above the minimum standard of the Rome Convention (20 years), and substantially longer than the terms that previously existed in many Member States. Stakeholders have based their claim mainly on a comparison with the law of the United States, where sound recordings are protected under copyright law for exceptionally long terms (life plus 70 years or, in case of works for hire, 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation). Perceived from an international perspective the American terms are anomalous and cannot serve as a legal justification for extending the terms of related rights in the EU.

This too was perceptive:

An assessment of the acceptance of copyright by the general public is more difficult to make. For this purpose empirical data on p2p file sharing and software sharing were analysed as ‘indicators by proxy’. These surveys make clear that unauthorised use and distribution is the norm for approximately 50 per cent of the populations concerned. However, a much larger share of the European public does recognise the equitability of and the need for copyright protection.

However, in such circles as student communities as well as the ‘virtual communities’ that are p2p networks, the prevailing ethical norm is not so much one of complying with copyright, but rather one of sharing. It was furthermore found that consumer behaviour is also informed by a weighing of the advantages and disadvantages of file sharing versus legally purchasing copies. If a commercial content provider offers the consumer a ‘bad bargain’ in terms of limited availability, high prices or restrictive use conditions (e.g. portability), then the consumer is not likely to find it unethical to opt for p2p file sharing instead.

Virtual Citizenship Association

Behold the Virtual Citizenship Association, a move from the people who tried to buy Ryzom:

We spend more and more time in online universes, talking with friends, playing, working, creating... Virtual societies are emerging everywhere, and are becoming more important every day. However, most of these universes are controlled by commercial companies, which isn't without causing a number of issues.

Decisions, impacting everyone's virtual life, can be taken against the interest of the world residents. Privacy and individual rights can be (and are!) easily dismissed, as nobody is looking over the shoulder of the local police - the world owners. Transparency and honesty are often a remote dream.

Our mission, as stated in the Social Contract, is to protect our elementary rights; living in a virtual world gives us the status of citizen there, and our rights have to be recognized and enforced.

Raph Koster, he of the Declaration of the Rights of Avatars, has his doubts.

Fortress: Sun's Open Fortran

Ayo, this brings back too many memories of punched cards at midnight:

Sun Microsystems took a new open-source step this week, enlisting the outside world's help in an attempt to create a brand-new programming language called Fortress.

On Tuesday, the company quietly released as open-source software a prototype Fortress "interpreter," a programming tool to execute Fortress programs line by line. "We're trying to engage academics and other third parties," Eric Allen, a Sun Labs computer scientist and Fortress project leader, said about the open-source move.

Fortress is designed to be a modern replacement for Fortran, a programming language born 50 years ago at IBM but still very popular for high-performance computing tasks such as forecasting the weather.

Still, another good move for Sun.

Update: Sun's Simon Phipps has some more details.

Turning up the Heat on Google Earth

Interesting use of heat maps for data representation. This shows how Google Earth and similar could become a really useful mesh for showing all kinds of statistical data with a geographic component (Via Ogle Earth.)

Enclosing the Urban Commons

You don't usually think of cities as being a commons, but here's an interesting perspective that proposes precisely that:

Community development activists, urban planners, and city government officials are increasingly taking note of a disturbing trend: escalating housing costs are forcing lower-income and working- and middle-class residents to leave our nation’s cities. Gentrification and subsequent displacement are rampant. Across the country, millions of us can no longer afford to reside in our major urban areas.

...

Or, to put it in the vernacular of the commons, many of our most vibrant urban areas are being “enclosed.” Our cities which once were centers of diversity (ethnically, culturally, and in terms of income levels) are now becoming modern-day analogues to the medieval walled cities of Europe – available to the wealthy elite (and single, young, college-educated professionals with high levels of disposable incomes) while the people who make those cities function (service workers, teachers, police and firemen, city employees) must move to inner and outer-ring suburbs.

Xbox 360: the Next Windows PC?

More evidence of the convergence of PCs and gaming - and from a rather surprising source:

In what may prove to be a controversial statement, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has described the Xbox 360 as “a general purpose computer”, echoing similarly controversial comments from PlayStation boss Ken Kutaragi when describing the PlayStation 3.

Speaking to the San Jose Mercury News earlier this week, Gates stated that, “We wouldn't have done it if it was just a gaming device. We wouldn't have gotten into the category at all. It was about strategically being in the living room. This is not some big secret. Sony says the same things."

Blizzard Wizard in the Middle Kingdom

Whether we like it or not, this is something of a milestone:

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that World of Warcraft, its subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), is now played by more than 8 million gamers around the world. World of Warcraft has also achieved new regional subscriber milestones, with more than 2 million players in North America, more than 1.5 million players in Europe, and more than 3.5 million players in China.

Eight million is impressive enough, but for me the real eye-opener is the last one: nearly half of these inhabitants of the World of Warcraft are Chinese. This says a lot about the way the world is going - to say nothing of the virtual world....

Firefox 3: the Great Paradise?

It's been hard to say until now, when Firefox 3 was more a hope than a project. But behold the Product Planning Doc for:

Firefox 3, code-named "Gran Paradiso", presently under development with an expected release in Q3 2007.

The salient bits of which are:

High-Level Feature Plan

The proposed major theme for Gran Paradiso is “improved information and content management”. This is the area that we’ll do the most innovation in. Gran Paradiso will continue to improve in areas where we’ve traditionally been strong in: security, usability, extensibility and customization, performance, web standards and compatibility.

Features for Gran Paradiso will fall into one of the following categories.

For Users

* Information Management includes Bookmarks, History, Content Handling, Content Editing, Printing and Microformats
* Security including Privacy, Phishing Protection, Addons and Password Management
* Usability/UI Improvements including Search, Tabbed Browsing, OS Integration & Accessibility
* Customization - ability to discover and manage addons
* Performance - how fast Firefox operates
* Localization - operating in non US English
* Installation & Auto-Update
* Support & Help

For Developers

* Web Standards & Compatibility (e.g. ACID2, CSS2.1, SVG via Gecko 1.9, EV certs, etc.)
* Web Developer Tools
* Extension Developer Tools

To say nothing of the cool name. (Via Read/WriteWeb.)

Free Software by Numbers

With my previous caveat, this report from Rishab Aiyer Ghosh into the state of free software in Europe looks to contain important material, with some eye-catching figures:

• The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally. This code base has been doubling every 18-24 months over the past eight years, and this growth is projected to continue for several more years.

• This existing base of FLOSS software represents a lower bound of about 131 000 real person-years of effort that has been devoted exclusively by programmers. As this is mostly by individuals not directly paid for development, it represents a significant gap in national accounts of productivity. Annualised and adjusted for growth this represents at least Euro 800 million in voluntary contribution from programmers alone each year, of which nearly half are based in Europe.

• Firms have invested an estimated Euro 1.2 billion in developing FLOSS software that is made freely available. Such firms represent in total at least 565 000 jobs and Euro 263 billion in annual revenue. Contributing firms are from several non-IT (but often ICT intensive) sectors, and tend to have much higher revenues than non-contributing firms.

• Defined broadly, FLOSS-related services could reach a 32% share of all IT services by 2010, and the FLOSS-related share of the economy could reach 4% of European GDP by 2010. FLOSS directly supports the 29% share of software that is developed in-house in the EU (43% in the U.S.), and provides the natural model for software development for the secondary software sector.

(Via Erwin Tenhumberg.)

From Mixed Doubles to Mixed Reality

As a Brit, my childhood summers always had the Wimbledon tennis championship as a kind of vague backdrop; this seems to have inoculated me against too much enthusiasm for the game these days. So news that IBM has created a recreation of the Australian Open would normally leave me breathing in more air than usual.

This aspect of it, on the other hand, sounds seriously cool:

data is pulled directly from IBM tracking technology used to collect data on live Grand Slam tennis matches. This data is applied in near real-time to a virtual tennis ball and two participating avatars in a 3D reconstruction of the Melbourne Tennis Centre. Those watching the match are able to view the proceedings from the bleachers and also from the eyes of the players.

I also like Tony Walsh's description of this situation as "Mixed Reality".

Open-Mouthed...

...I am, if this "sea-change" turns out to be true (a sceptic of the UK Government writes):

The way the government makes its vast amounts of data available to the public could be about to change.

It has decided to make access to a database of UK laws completely free for the public to access and re-use.

It marks a "sea-change" in the way government information becomes available to the public, a senior civil servant has told the BBC News website.

Please, please, please, please, please.

Taking Virtual Stock of Old Stockholm

It's coming:

These drawings and architectural plans would actually be an amazing resource for a virtual reconstruction of historic Stockholm, built with SketchUp. The drawings could provide both shape and texture to 3D buildings, while the maps pinpoint location. You could then fly around an accurate 3D rendition of Stockholm as it was documented hundreds of years ago!

And if the conversion tools mature, as I have no doubt they will, you could soon port all this work into Second Life, and then walk around in it, wearing nothing but 18th century fashions.

Open Radio

After open source radio management, here's a piece by Richard Poynder about open radio itself:

I realised that KRUU is more than just a community radio station: it is also a grassroots initiative with a deep commitment to the principles advocated by the various free and open movements. Or as station manager James Moore more extensively described it during the inaugural Open Views programme, KRUU is "grassroots, community, public, non-profit, open radio."

Moore's use of the term "open radio" caught my attention. What, I wondered, did he mean?

Open Source Radio Station Management

Is there nothing open source cannot do?

Campcaster is the first free and open radio management software that provides live studio broadcast capabilities as well as remote automation in one integrated system.

It comes from Campware (right....); GNU/Linux, GPL'd, in case you were wondering; screenshots here. Amazing.

I swear that free software for pigeon-fanciers can only be a matter of time. (Via tuxmachines.org.)

Open Second Life in Practice

Just to show that it's not all theoretical:

I've now successfully built Second Life from source on both Mac OS X and Ubuntu. The Mac OS X build in Xcode went smoothly. The build in Linux was a little more finicky, but not bad considering that it's still alpha. Read on if you'd like to vicariously live the gory details.

Kudos.

Google's Patry on "Patry on Copyright"

It would be hard to imagine a more definitive study of the field of copyright than this: over 5,500 pages, in seven volumes, occupying 25 in./63 cm of shelf space. Although there are no figures on the weight, these are clearly weighty tomes.

It takes a particular kind of individual to devote seven years of their life to writing such a treatise (and goodness knows how many more acquiring the ability to do so), but the author, Bill Patry, seems to have the perfect biography for the task:

Bill Patry is a renowned expert on Copyright Law who currently serves as Senior Copyright Counsel to Google Inc., where he is involved in diverse cutting edge issues. Patry has practiced copyright law for 25 years, 12 years of which have been in private practice, including appellate advocacy. He has been cited numerous times in landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

As a full-time law professor for 5 years and an adjunct for another 5 at the Georgetown University Law Center, Mr. Patry appreciates the importance of teaching and scholarship.

From his eight years in working in the U.S. House of Representatives and Copyright Office, Patry is familiar with the nitty-gritty of legislation and the broader policy issues that Congress deals with. He has testified before Congress, and been retained as an expert witness on numerous occasions.

Patry is the author of numerous law review articles and several books. He also served as editor or editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA for over ten years.

Given the centrality of Patry's expertise for many of the areas covered in this blog - notably open content and open source, to say nothing of intellectual monopolies - and his current position at Google, which allows him a privileged perspective on the online world, I thought it would be interesting to ask him a few questions about his work.

Glyn Moody: As background to yourself, could you say briefly what exactly the Senior Copyright Counsel to Google does - what sort of things do you get involved in that readers might know about?

Bill Patry: Google's legal department is uniquely organized. We have the traditional litigation and transactional lawyers, but we also have "product counsel," counsel who work on particular products, like Books or Videos. We also have policy and government relations lawyers. People tend not to be segregated though, and will work on projects across what in a law firm would be called a department. And that's my role par excellence: I deal with copyright issues wherever they arise.

Glyn Moody: How did the copyright treatise come about - is it something you'd been dreaming of doing for years? Was there any particular inspiration?

Bill Patry: The book started out as a second edition to an earlier work and had I stuck with that, it woudn't have taken so long. But I got into a dispute with my prior publisher, pulled the book, rewrote it almost entirely and expanded it about three fold. My idea was to write a book that drew on all the things I done and to also rethink the way legal treatises are written and used. Blogging has been an important part of that process, making the exchange of ideas interactive and not just one-way.

Glyn Moody: Could you give a few facts and figures about it for those of us who won't have the opportunity to get our hands on the real thing?

Bill Patry: The book is 7 volumes, no appendices, about 5,832 pages, 25 chapters. It is the first new multivolume treatise on copyright law in the U.S. in 17 years, is the largest by almost 100% (in text), and is I think one of the largest legal treatises even written by a single individual.

Glyn Moody: How will the The Patry Treatise Blog function alongside the book? What do you hope to achieve by creating it?

Bill Patry: I have high hopes for the blog as helping in a number of respects. It provides a way for people to give me feedback, suggest things, ask me what I meant etc. All of us have read things and have not been sure what the author meant. We're reluctant to ask the author and it takes time to write letters. With a blog, you can do it quickly, easily, and get very fast answers. I also want to be able to provide readers with important updates before the actual updates come out and to try out concepts.

Glyn Moody: Looking to the future, do you think there will ever be another such hardcopy treatise on copyright, or is this the last one before everything is purely online? Any hope the next one will be free and accessible to all?

Bill Patry: I'm not a futurist; I can't understand the past or present, much less the future.

Glyn Moody: As a copyright scholar, what's your view of Richard Stallman's GNU GPL, which draws its power from copyright? Is there any weakness in the GPL's approach to granting software freedoms from a copyright point of view?

Bill Patry: I met Stallman about 20 years ago, but haven't folllowed him since.

Glyn Moody: What impact do you think Google and its various projects will have on the field of copyright?

Bill Patry: Don't know.

Glyn Moody: From a historical perspective, how important do you think open content and the Creative Commons movement will prove? Are we moving from one copyright era to another? Is the role of copyright changing?

Bill Patry: I think Creative Commons has been wonderful in providing a way for people to license their works as they see fit. Recently, I did a post on the "Long Tail" and its effect on copyright. Copyright is an economic right and it will follow, willingly or not, where the market eventually goes.

Glyn Moody: From a theoretical viewpoint, in the best of all possible worlds, how would copyright evolve to create a legal structure that allows all these new kinds of uses to flourish? Similarly, drawing on your knowledge of copyright in the past and present, how do you think copyright will actually evolve - both in the US, and globally - in the short term and longer term?

Bill Patry: I think copyright has become less and less responsive to the balance of incentives and exceptions that the 18th century English common judges grasped intuitively. Our ability to adapt has been seriously hampered by trade agreements, and that's a big problem.

Glyn Moody: Do you have any words of advice for people like Larry Lessig who are trying to change the legal framework of copyright to allow more sharing and collaboration?

Bill Patry: I have trouble enough figuring out my own problems.

Glyn Moody: Any other comments you'd like to make about your treatise or copyright?

Bill Patry: Please buy it, use it, and give me feedback.

Tony's Message from the Gods

Iris is one of the messengers of the gods. Project Iris is a UK border biometric control system. Make that a failed UK border biometric control system:

An evaluation of the Home Office scheme to operate border controls via iris recognition "pretty much fails" Project Iris, according to Tory MP Ben Wallace. Wallace has been doggedly pursuing the results of the evaluation since autumn 2005, and these were quietly placed in the House of Commons library in late December. They reveal, according to Wallace, that Project Iris "failed half its assessments."

I think there's a message here for Tone and his ID card, one of whose utterly foolproof biometric control systems was, er, iris recognition.

Drawing Closer: Location Awareness

I'm afraid this is proprietary for the moment, but the idea's clearly generalisable:

Skyhook Wireless Inc....today announced at the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that ReignCom, a Korean manufacturer of media devices, will launch the Wi-Fi enabled iriver W10 portable media player with the Wi-Fi Positioning System from Skyhook Wireless. This device will be the first commercially available media player with location awareness...

The iriver W10 media player is designed for the 'urban explorer.' At a slim 14 mm thick, the iriver W10 comes loaded with full-function multimedia capability. The Wi-Fi Positioning System provides accurate location information by detecting Wi-Fi access points in range and comparing them against a database of geo-located points. Unlike GPS or cell tower systems, the WPS works indoors and in dense urban areas. Not only can a W10 user listen to music, watch movies, or play games on the go, but can also navigate and retrieve information about what is around them.

Openness: To Be, or Not To Be?

If for nothing else, Denmark is notable for two things: Hamlet, and being the seat of the Microsoft's largest European development division. This makes the question of openness a real political hot potato. If you've ever wondered how the drama is unfolding in said country - and admit it, you have often wondered - here's a handy history from John Gøtze.

The Sound of Music

Here's an interesting idea:

Use Linux or Microsoft Windows, the open source sndpeek program, and a simple Perl script to read specific sequences of tonal events -- literally whistling, humming, or singing at your computer -- and run commands based on those tones. Give your computer a short low whistle to check your e-mail or unlock your your screensaver with the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Whistle while you work for higher efficiency.

(Via LXer.)

Sock Mobs

An interesting post from Douglas Rushkoff:

There's a relatively new phenomenon occurring online these days - an illusion of populist group hostilitiy I've come to call "Sock Mobs," after the "sock puppets" people use to feign multiple identities in online conversations. It works like this:

An anonymous poster picks a fight with his presumed enemy. Whether or not that enemy responds, a number of other posters appear to chime in - agreeing to whatever the accusation might be. "This guy is a commie." "This doctor is a quack." "This guy wants Israel to be abolished." "This professor is corrupting college students." The accusation comes along with twisted supporting evidence. Every once in a while, an underinformed but real person agrees with the accusations; after all, it appears from the posts that this enemy of all things good and proper really might be a threat. All this makes it look like there's a lot of upset people.

(Via Smart Mobs.)