It's Blogging - But Not As We Know It

A few weeks ago I interviewed Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg. As I wrote in the article that resulted, there are close similarities between him and Richard Stallman. Both have conducted a single-minded - not to say lonely - campaign for their respective projects, both have achieved miracles, and both are, er, colourful characters.

In the course of my discussions with him, I recommended that he start blogging. He has been a prolific and fascinating wordsmith for decades, but I thought that the medium of the blog would allow him to reach out to new audiences.

So I was intrigued to receive an email from him recently in which he spoke about a new introduction to his blog. As you will see, this is an interesting interpretation of the blog format - a kind of retro 70s ASCII blog.

But don't let that put you off. What Hart has to say is interesting and important. Indeed, I think he will go down in history as a highly significant figure. Even if he has unconventional ideas on blogging - and on much else.

It Can't Get Any Worse - Or Can It?

You may think that the US DMCA is bad enough, since it "criminalizes production and dissemination of technology that can circumvent measures taken to protect copyright, not merely infringement of copyright itself, and heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet", as Wikipedia puts it.

But if you take a look at this news story, you'll see it can still get worse. It seems that the IP maximalists really want to nail everything down - even if that means soft parts of your anatomy get caught in the process.

And if you live outside the US, you can wipe that smile of smug satisfaction off your face. The DMCA has already led to the pernicious EU Copyright Directive; if the Americans are blessed with the joy and privilege of a DMCA++, rest assured that it will only be a matter of time before "IP harmonisation" demands that we follow suit.

Access to Knowledge - or Not...

I came across the Access to Knowledge conference, which is currently running at Yale under the aegis of the Information Society Project. The latter's sub-head is "memes, genes and bits", so you can see why my interest was piqued.

Unfortunately, the main conference page given above uses a crazy non-transparent navigation system - so much for Access to Knowledge - so I can't give direct links to some of the more interesting sections. At least I can point to the obligatory conference wiki; there's not much there at the moment, but in the days to come it should fill up with some juicy light reading for those of us that way inclined.

Shopping Made Delicious

Well, it had to happen. After all the innocent tagging fun at bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, somebody has now come up with a vulgar commercial application: social shopping. It's called Stylehive, it has a nicely minimalist site, and seems a paean to pointless consumerism. (Via Techcrunch).

The Unadmirable Miró Family

As you probably noticed, Google put up one of its snazzy logos yesterday, in homage to the Catalan artist Joan Miró. Molt ben, you might say.

But sadly the family of Miró seem not to partake of their ancestor's largeness of spirit: some puffed-up representative or other blithered on about "underlying copyrights to the works of Miro" - as if you could copyright a style (individual works, yes; the overarching idea behind them, no). Google took down the logo early.

Once again, IP petty-mindedness plays the killjoy.

Music to My Ears

There's a fascinating story over on BBC News, nominally about Madonna, but really about a new commons. It reports on how concerts are becoming ever-more important to rock stars, as sales of their recordings diminish.

The latter fact may be due to the Internet; but whether it is or not, the future seems to be one where the digital stuff - the song - is essentially free, and the stars make their dosh from the analogue side - concerts. So here we have pop songs as a new commons, where the creators of that commons make a more than decent living.

Two quotations in particular are worth noting. One is from Alan Krueger, an economist, who provides the figures to back up this idea:

Only four of the top 35 income-earners made more money from recordings than live concerts. For the top 35 artists as a whole, income from touring exceeded income from record sales by a ratio of 7.5 to one in 2002.

The other is from the ever-perceptive David Bowie:

music itself is going to become like running water or electricity

Now that's music to my ears.

Closing Ranks

Talking of Microsoft, I see that my old chums at Reed Elsevier (disclosure: I used to work there a long, long time ago) are cosying up to none other than the same. I particularly enjoyed the following paragraph:

"We provide access to a very large collection of proprietary content to millions of professional users around the world. This includes more than 4.6 billion searchable documents through LexisNexis.com and 6.7 million articles through ScienceDirect,” said Keith McGarr, chief technology officer at Reed Elsevier. “Technology from Microsoft has played, and continues to play, a key role in our ongoing, aggressive online strategy."

What's amusing here is not just the fact that Reed Elsevier is using Microsoft's technology to be "aggressive" - "go on, bite 'is 'ead off" kind of stuff, I presume - but the way the word "proprietary" is added so gratuitously. It's almost as if Reed Elsevier wants to emphasise its close kinship to a certain other proud pusher of the proprietary. And it's rather drole to see this relationship made explicit like this, since half-jokingly I have been calling Reed Elsevier the Microsoft of the open access world for some time.

Signs of Eclipse

Microsoft never gives ought for nought. Few remember that originally you had to pay for Internet Explorer, which formed part of something called Windows Plus; it was only when beating Netscape Navigator became a priority that Internet Explorer suddenly became an indissoluble part of Windows that could never be removed without destroying the whole system (funny that I remembering uninstalling it without causing any global chaos).

So the news that Microsoft is making Visual Studio Express free begs the question: why? Since we can discount the theory that Steve Ballmer has become a closet communist, we might suspect that there is a competitive reason. Surely it couldn't be because that funny old Eclipse project is beginning to, well, eclipse Microsoft's own offerings among the "18 million recreational and hobbyist developers" that the press release mentions by the by?

Measuring the Commons

The commons is clearly important, but it's hard to get a handle on just how big it is these days. So the release of some figures from the Creative Commons project, detailing how many of which kind of licence has been adopted, makes fascinating reading.

It also has some useful links: to more licence statistics, and to "curators" of Creative Commons material, complete with figures showing the size of their respective holdings. Interesting to see that Flickr towers over everyone.

Paying the Price for Free Software

Sometimes, I think they do this kind of thing on purpose, just to annoy me.

Somebody writes some free software; somebody later "patents" the same software/idea (as if you could patent either software or an idea) - and then accuses the free software author of infringing on their patent and causing them financial loss by daring to give away an open source program, and tries to recover a mere $203,000 as compensation.

So let's count them, shall we? Patenting an idea, patenting something blindingly obvious, patenting something that has prior art - and then having the temerity to harass someone who actually came up with the idea first by demanding money they don't have from not selling the program because they generously give it away: only in America. (Via Right to Create).

I hope.

The Euston Manifesto

After the right espousing open source and related open goodness yesterday, today we have the left. More specifically, we have something called The Euston Manifesto (via Compromiso Social por la Ciencia). This may sound a bit like an Ealing Comedy, but it includes the following rather surprising paragraph:

14) Open source.
As part of the free exchange of ideas and in the interests of encouraging joint intellectual endeavour, we support the open development of software and other creative works and oppose the patenting of genes, algorithms and facts of nature. We oppose the retrospective extension of intellectual property laws in the financial interests of corporate copyright holders. The open source model is collective and competitive, collaborative and meritocratic. It is not a theoretical ideal, but a tested reality that has created common goods whose power and robustness have been proved over decades. Indeed, the best collegiate ideals of the scientific research community that gave rise to open source collaboration have served human progress for centuries.

Amazon Plays Tag, Blog and Wiki

For all its patent faults, Amazon.com is one of my favourite sites. It has repeatedly done the right thing when mistakes have been made with my orders, to the extent that I can even forgive them for doing the wrong thing when it comes to (IP) rights....

So I was interested to see that Amazon.com now lets users add tags to items: I first noticed this on Rebel Code, where some public-minded individual has kindly tagged it as open source, free software and linux. Clicking on one of these brings up a listing of other items similarly tagged (no surprise there). It also cross-references this with the customers who used this tag, and the other tags that are used alongside the tag you are viewing (a bit of overkill, this, maybe).

I was even more impressed to see a ProductWiki at the foot of the Rebel Code page (it's rather empty at the moment). This is in addition to the author's blog (which I don't have yet because Amazon insists on some deeply arcane rite to establish I am really the Glyn Moody who wrote Rebel Code and not his evil twin brother from a parallel universe). Mr. Bezos certainly seems to be engaging very fully with the old Web 2.0 stuff; it will be interesting to see how other e-commerce sites respond.

Bloggers Do It Openly

So bloggers do matter after all, according to this Guardian piece. That there exist groups of people who wield a power disproportionate to their numbers is nothing new: it has happened throughout history. What's novel here is that this is being done in a completely transparent way, whereas in the past all the discussions and verbal derring-do would have happened behind closed doors.

So say what you like about bloggers - and heavens knows, I've done my bit - at least they do it openly.

Their Words, Not Mine

Since this whole blog is predicated on the commonality that exists between open source, open genomics, open access, open content, and open blah-blah-blah, my own posts that argue for the power of openness will hardly come as a surprise.

So it is always handy when I can point to somebody else who is saying exactly the same thing - particularly because in this case that "somebody else" is about as far as you can get from your stereotypical sandal-wearing, Guardian-reading, weedy liberal.

It comes from the US Committee of Economic Development - "the best of business thinking", no less - which "has addressed national priorities that promote sustained economic growth and development to benefit all Americans," apparently, so nothing wishy-washy there, then.

And yet its latest report is entitled Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness. Its peroration is positively dithyrambic:

Openness is not an overriding moral value that must prevail in every circumstance. But, its extraordinary capability to harness the collective intelligence of our world requires us to consider its implications carefully, nurture it where possible, and avoid efforts to foreclose it without compelling reason. We should not miss the opportunity to harvest the benefits openness might bring.

Their words, not mine.

Lear's Fool, Mac OS X, Windows and Open Source

Misled by his intentionally-provocative columns, people tend to treat John Dvorak as some kind of industry buffoon. But as his biography indicates, he's been around a long time, and certainly knows the computer industry inside out. That doesn't mean he's always right, but it does ensure that he writes from insight not ignorance. And let's not forget that the figure of the Fool in King Lear is the one who sees more than most, for all his jests and jibes.

Dvorak's latest effort is more of the same. It is entitled "Apple Needs to Make OS X Open-Source". What interests me most is not his argument, but the fact that the solution is open source. Moreover, the worst-case scenario is that Apple does nothing - in which case, open source can just sit back with Olympian detachment and watch Microsoft and Apple pull each other's hair in the closed-source playground.

Does Larry's Linux Stack Up?

The tantalising story in the FT that Oracle is ruminating upon acquiring one of the main GNU/Linux distributions - well, Novell - is bound to re-ignite speculation about Oracle's intentions and ultimate impact in this sector. An earlier rumour that Oracle was about to buy JBoss - obviously not true - led to a similar spate of comments, for example that Oracle was about to wipe out open source itself.

But as I wrote back then, it would seem that Larry Ellison really doesn't get this free software lark if he thinks he can wade in with a cheque-book and walk out with anything perdurable. Basically, the moment he tries to throw his weight around in any newly-acquired open source company, he will find that everything valuable in that company - its coders - will walk out of the door and work somewhere else (like Red Hat or IBM). So the idea he will snaffle up one of these cute little old GNU/Linuxes to complete his collection of netsuke rather misses the point.

What is really interesting about the FT story is that Mr. Ellison says "I’d like to have a complete stack." The stack refers to the complete set of software layers, starting at the bottom with the operating system, moving up through middleware and on to the applications. This shows that he may not quite understand the answer, but at least can articulate the question, which is: what does a software company do when the layers of the stack are commoditised one by one?

Things started even below the operating system, at the level of the network, when TCP/IP became the universal standard. But what many people forget is that once upon a time, there used to be three or four or more competing network standards, including Novell's IPX/SPX: it was Novell's dogged support for its protocols in the face of TCP/IP's ascendancy that nearly destroyed the company.

Similarly, not everyone today realises that once there were alternatives to the now-ubiquitous GNU/Linux operating system, including an older approach from a company called Microsoft, also destroyed by clinging too long to outdated closed-source solutions (this information sponsored by the year 2016).

What Ellison's comments indicate is that there is growing awareness that the free software approach is seeping inexorably up the stack. It will be interesting to see his response when it starts to dampen the application layer, and databases like Oracle's flagship start looking as soggy as IPX/SPX....

Update: There's a good table in this C|net article on how the competing stacks, er, stack up.

The Open Research Web

Aside from the strong moral arguments for open access - based on the fact that much of the research published in journals has been paid for by the public, who therefore have a right to see the stuff - there are also strong utilitarian grounds for making materials freely accessible.

A group at Southampton, including the irrepressible Stevan Harnad, have put together an excellent discussion of some of the amazing things that thoroughgoing open access will permit in the future.

Many of them - there are 28 in all - are positively gob-smacking, and make explicit the way in which the open access revolution will render ordinary impact factors, one of the great bugbears of academic research, obsolete by bringing in far richer metrics for measuring influence and achievement.

This is the sort of stuff that will make traditional publishers break into a cold sweat at night; but it will warm the cockles of the growing band of OA supporters because it breaks the vicious circle of "high-impact" journals being favoured by top researchers simply because they are "high-impact", not because they are the best vehicles.

Open Access Books Are Like Buses...

...you wait for ages, and then three turn up at once.

Well, two at least: I wrote recently about Willinsky's The Access Principle, and now here, hard on its heels, comes Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks.

If the name Benkler is unfamiliar, you might want to glance at the suggestively-titled Coase's Penguin (yes, that penguin), which is effectively a sketch of the present book. Both, then, are about how the network changes everything, and how all the opens and the various kinds of commons that are central concerns of this blog lie at the heart of one of the most profound economic, social and political transformations seen in recent years.

But don't take my word for it, listen to what Larry Lessig has to say, with typical generosity:

This is — by far — the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years.

Then buy/download the thing (CC licence, of course) and read it. I know I will. The fact that I haven't yet finished its 500+ pages is not just another reason not to listen to me: it's also a further hint of why eventually all books will be freely available as digital downloads online. Basically, reading on a screen and reading text placed on a physical object are two quite different experiences, and warrant two quite different business models.

"The Access Principle" Made Accessible

One of the jibes that the anti-open access lot like to lob is that many of those writing in favour of these ideas often do so in non-open access outlets. But the fact is, we don't always have a choice if we want to reach traditional audiences who aren't yet used to reading open access titles/media. Against this background, it's good to see some traditional publishers proving amenable to releasing open access versions of works dealing with open access alongside the hard-copy versions.

A case in point is The Access Principle, The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship, by John Willinsky. I've just discovered (through the indispensable Open Access News) that the enlightened MIT Press has made this freely available (apart from some mild registration): kudos for that.

I've only skimmed through the first few chapters, but already it looks to be about the most important book on open access so far. This is hardly surprising given the author's work as director of the Public Knowledge Project - and the fact that he wrote an essay entitled "The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science", which sounds strangely familiar as an idea.

So now there's no excuse for anyone not to rush out and buy it/download it and read it.

End of the World Nigh: VCs Clueful on Patents

And now for some good news about patents - no really. Judging by this article on the excellent Techdirt, a few of the brighter VCs are starting to get the message about software patents. Next thing you know, even the lawyers will join in - then we'll know that the end of the world is really nigh.

Right-minded Right to Create

As you may have noticed, some of the more outrageous abuses of the patent system tend to make me go a funny colour. So I was interested to discover (via Techdirt) that there is an entire right-minded site called Right to Create offering a concentrated helping of bile directed at the manifold insanities of the patent system.

The only trouble is, having read it, I think I need to go and lie down for a while.

PageRank on a Stick

Googlejuice: everybody wants it. It's measured in that mysterious coinage of the cyber-realm known as PageRank, and everybody wants to know how much they've got. Enter Webmaster Eyes, which tells you (via Digg). And if you were wondering, Google's GoogleJuice is 10 (and this site is a middling 6).

Windows Live Academic Search Goes Live

Microsoft has rolled out the first beta of its academic search engine. It has some nice Web 2.0-y features that make it look far cooler than Google Scholar (Google, are you listening?). One of the FAQs made me smile:

What about open source repositories? Do you have content from them in your index?

Academic search has implemented the Open Architecture Initiative (OAI) protocol for indexing OAI-compliant repositories. For example, we indexed the content present in ArXiv.org for the launch. We will continue to index more repositories after the launch.

I don't know of anybody except Microsoft that calls these OAI repositories "open source": you don't think that Microsoft's hung up on something?

Another FAQ talks about something new to me: the OpenURL. This turns out to be a wonderful piece of Orwellian double-speak, since it is a way of ensuring that people only get to see the content they are "entitled" to - that is, have paid for. In other words, OpenURL is all about closing off your options.

What a Tangled Bank We Weave

If you've not come across the Tangled Bank miscellanies, take a look at the latest one, hosted on the fine Discovering Biology in a Digital World blog. As the Tangled Bank home site puts it, these collections are a "weekly showcase of good weblog writing, selected by the authors themselves," in the realm of science. And yes, I'm afraid there's something by me.

But it's still worth reading.

From Blogroll to Searchroll

I confess it: I'm a sucker for analogical thought. So taking the idea of a blogroll - even if I don't actually use the things - and coming up with a "searchroll" - a personalised list of sites across which you can carry out searches - is intrinsically appealing. This is what Rollyo has done: I know it's not exactly new, but the last time I looked there wasn't much to see. Now there is.

For example, I was rather taken with this Russian library searchroll, which somehow makes the idea nicely concrete. I can see that you might well want to search through a group of related sites, rather than wade through several million Google hits.

The only problem, of course, is that you either have to set up the searchrolls yourself, or try to find one that suits your needs. Fortunately Rollyo has done the obvious, and come up with a search engine for search rolls. From here you can enter keywords and try to piggy-back off someone else's collection (all in the spirit of sharing, of course).

I was impressed with the range of open source searchrolls that are already available. Open access searchrolls are thinner on the ground, while open content is waiting for its first example. Any offers?