WebWriting.com

Has apparently become a euphemisms for disrobing for the TSA…or am I misinterpreting this political cartoon by Michael Ramirez:

In a stroke of legislative genius, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to restrict access from any library, school or public building to any social website through which independent internet users can post comments or engage in any social behavior. With so many sexual predators sitting at home soliciting minors through social networking, the legislature sought to remove the possibility that anyone might fall vicitim to the Internet version of free candy while under the supervision of responsible librarians, teachers and government officials. In one simple bill, Congress has brilliantly obviated the need to shield public officials from litigation should some kid get into the car of an adult so long as they first met on myspace. Parent’s have been doing such a great job or monitoring their children’s Internet usage that Congress felt it proper to simply disallow any public Internet access that might be used for socialization. In a bout of paranoia paralleled only by that experienced at the height of the cold war, when asked why they might choose to restrict what is arguably the most useful aspect of the Internet an anonymous Congressman answered, “it’s a series of tubes.”

Dave Winer details the 22 steps it takes to download an episode of Meet the Press. To contrast, I have a program on my phone called Egress. It’s not perfect but it does this relatively well.

First time setup:

1. Go to my Bloglines account and search for feeds about Meet the Press.
2. Click on the serach results to preview the feed until one of them has an “enclosure” link in it.
3. Add that feed to my Bloglines (I keep it in a folder called podcasts).
4. On my phone, launch Egress and tell it to add a feed from a synchronized channel (Bloglines)
5. Give it my Bloglines username and password
6. Pick the Meet the Press feed from the list.

In order to get the new show, I click on the update button in Egress. It helps if I’m on a wifi network because the shows are pretty big for EDGE. though sometimes I leave the building before I download ;).

Paul Graham writes wonderful essays on technology an sociology including his recent The Power of the Marginal.  A choice quotation to whet your appetite:

“The big media companies shouldn’t worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. They should worry that people will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that instead.”

I told a friend today that 5 years from now I bet we’d be watching more YouTube than regular televsion.  Then I though about the past few days and realized that today I watch more YouTube than regular televsion.  The Marginal is going mainstream.

Clint Deboer writes 10 reasons why HD DVD is doomed to failure.  There is precisely one reason that HD DVD is doomed to be the next laserdisc (at best): there is nothing better about it.  That is a lie - there is lots of new technological improvements, but if you ask the average consumer what they think, they will tell you that they see nothing new.  Comparing the DVD to HD-DVD transition to the DVD to VHS, most consumers will tell you they buy or rent DVDs because they can skip the previews, don’t have to rewind and the picture never gets fuzzy in the middle of the movie.  Compared with the videophiles who bought DVDs for better quality, most people are only now buying HD TVs and starting to realize that DVDs actually look and sound better.

Clint is right on the mark comparing the HD-DVD format wars to competing video game systems.  Another big difference is that (small children aside) most consumers do not watch the same movies daily whereas people do play the same video games repeatedly.  The only consumer media formats that have gained wide acceptance have been the unified ones: from LPs to tapes to CDs and from VHS to DVDs.  All new DVD players can also play both SACD and DVD-Audio but those formats are dead in the water.  If there was new software (i.e. movies) available exclusively on HD-DVD then we may see increasing interest.  When faced with the proposition of having to buy a new player and then pay double the price for the same exact material (better quality aside), consumers will go with what’s cheap and easy.

Lebanon’s EFXFilms is getting help from LA based 900 Frames to film a public service announcement that they plan to air on Iraqi television.  The message?  Don’t suicide bomb.  The ad is purported to be a graphic depiction of an Iraqi square before during and after a bombing.  I’m sure they’ve considered that this will not accidentally inspire would be suicide bombers who glorify violence in jihad.

William McGeveran at Info/Law thinks that Digital Rights Management should be called access control.  He makes a number of good points.  DRM sounds like it should describe a government process in which the digital rights of copyright holders are managed.  Access control (as McGeveran points out, mirroring language in the DMCA) is really what content creators are after: who can use my creation and how.  Of course renaming DRM does not address the issue that the rights that many governments are granting content creators are not aligned with the best interest of the people or the culture, but it reframes the debate in terms of what legal protections (above and beyond copyrights) we want to award content creators for asserting technological control of their content.

I went out to see V for Vendetta tonight. I rarely go out to see movies, mostly because I have a great entertainment room at home where I can watch DVDs in my pajamas with hot cocoa. V was well worth the trip. Despite less than stellar reviews, I would heartily recommend it to any comic book fans looking for a bit of extremism to escape to. I’ll be buying on DVD when it comes out so that I can enjoy it again with my hot cocoa.

Isaac Garcia explores the Good in E-mail. I am going to dig a little deeper to try and understand why people consistently choose to use e-mail. Taking a hint from Greg Raiz I will take a cognitive load approach to under sanding what’s so good about e-mail. I don’t have the bandwidth to compare these use cases using the many different collaborative suits that are out there but I would encourage their developers to do so.

Persona Alex: para-legal
Use case: Write a memo
Steps to write a memo:
1) Click New
2) Type recipient’s name
3) Type subject
4) Type memo
5) Click Send

Overhead: Steps 1 and 5

Persona Jamie: lawyer
Use case: Read and reply to memo
Steps to read and reply to memo:
1) Click on bold subject
2) Read memo
3) Click Reply
4) Edit response
5) Click Send

Overhead Steps 3 and 5.

Even if there’s no room to remove any steps collaboration software should take no more that five per person to carry on a conversation. Any software that takes more than five steps has complexity working against it. With this use case in mind it is clear that Alex is focused on step 4 while Jamie is focused on steps 2 and 4. The faster they can get there and finish, the more attractive the software is from a cognitive load perspective. The original Palm Pilot managed to skip step 1 in the calendaring application by allowing you to just click on the time you wanted to start an activity and just start writing. An e-mail program might have an empty e-mail ready to go at the top or bottom of the screen. When you start typing it expands and lets to proceed directly to steps 2-4. I am not aware of an easy way to get rid of step 5.

It is important to note that Alex chose to initiate the process. If some collaborative suite could reduce just Alex’s load he might be more inclined to use an alternative to e-mail. This thinking goes directly against systems that require tagging or filing new documents. Shifting the burden of organizing content to the creator is a sure way to guarantee that no one uses the software. Barring corporate mandate Alex will take the path of least resistance and send Jamie an e-mail.

Also note that, as Isaac puts it, “Email is in your face.” Jamie will probably respond using whatever mechanism is easiest. If Alex sends an e-mail with a link to a document on a website or a wiki page, Jamie might be more inclined to respond in that manner. And a wiki, for example, may only take four steps if the link Alex sends is to an editing page: click, read, edit, save.

Although ninety percent of collaboration is between Alex and Jamie many collaboration suites focus on the ability to find information. So for completeness sake here is a look at search. Typically there are two types of e-mail organization: folders and the in-box. People who are very organized spend time moving their incoming mail into folders based on various topics: sender’s affiliation, project, customer, etc. People who don’t organize are forced to search: sort by sender, sort by subject, sort by date or keyword search.

Persona Zack: client
Use case: Review documents from lawyers
Steps to review documents sent by e-mail
1) Click on “Documents from Lawyers” folder
2) Scan subjects
3) Click to read e-mail
4) Click again to read attachment

Overhead: Step 4

or
1) Sort by sender
2) Scan subject
3) Click to read e-mail
4) Click again to read attachment

Overhead: Step 4

or
1) Click Find
2) Type keywords
3) Click Search
4) Scan subjects
5) Click to read e-mail
6) Click again to read attachment

Overhead: Steps 1, 3 and 6

To use organized search the user has to indicate some method of search such as a folder or an attribute. Clicking to read the attachment is a hassle - especially programs that prompt you after you’ve clicked the attachment as to whether you really want to open this attachment. The reasoning is that you may accidentally click on spyware but you’re just as likely to get in the habit of clicking OK and launch it anyways. Personally I’d like to see attachment displayed in-line wherever possible so I can skip step 4 completely.

In the last case is simpler in Apple Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird. Both have a search box into which you can start typing and it will automatically search for matching messages. Neither searches attachments thought and Thunderbird requires that you hit enter after typing in your search phrase.

Tonight On Point’s Tom Ashbrook talks about the future of television news - specifically focusing on Katie Couric’s move to the CBS evening news. Charles Bierbauer notes that news audiences are getting older and dwindling. I wonder if anyone from the X, Y or Z generations watches the news on TV (Naked News doesn’t count). I’m imagining sitting with my kids after dinner telling them stories about how when I was their age we used to go watch the news on TV after dinner.

In case you have not been following the story: Nature set out to evaluate how Wikipedia, the on-line collaborative Encyclopedia, compared to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s on-line resources with regards to accuracy of scientific entries. They sent 42 pairs of edited articles to a number of researchers according to their specialization and tallied the results. Nature concluded that the average Wikipedia entry contained four errors while Britannica averaged three. Britannica issued a statement [pdf] citing numerous fallacies on the part of Nature and defended roughly half the errors that Nature’s reviewers had cited. Most recently Nature responded with their own rebuttal.

I am curious as to why no one has responded from Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, was quoted in the article as saying he was pleased with the results and that their goal was to achieve the same or better accuracy as Britannica. I wonder why Wikipedia has not issued a statement or reported as having corrected the errors cited in the Nature study. Wikipedia has documented the competition in their entry for Britannica.

I had been thinking recently about trying to come up with a collection of so called “move-plot threats” - at phrase seemingly coined by security guru Bruce Schneier. Well, Bruce beat me to the punch by announcing his Move-Plot Threat Contest. Come up with the wildest possible movie-plot threat and he will send the winner an autographed copy of Beyond Fear. What better way to raise awareness of false security?

Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution empowers congress “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” - the beginning of a tumultuous history for copyright and patent legislation in the U.S.

There is a growing community of people who believe that sharing is a perfectly reasonable thing to do with something that they create. Furthermore they are more excited by the unrestricted possibilities that their creativity inspires in others than by the potential for direct financial gain. These movements are powerful, grassroots efforts to promote the the progress of science and useful arts without explicitly securing to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings an discoveries.

The only major risk to sharing, as far as I can tell, is that authors and inventors might not have full control of their writings and discoveries. Since the Constitution only grants Congress the power to secure these writings and discoveries for a limited time, authors and inventors are going to lose control of their writings and discoveries at some point in time anyways (Congress assumes after they are dead).

The largest risk to securing exclusive rights is that we fail to promote the progress of science and useful arts or even, dare I suggest it, hinder their progress. How can giving someone the right to their own writing or discovery hinder progress? Witness this insightful op-ed written by Michael Crichton for the New York Times:

For example, the human genome exists in every one of us, and is therefore our shared heritage and an undoubted fact of nature. Nevertheless 20 percent of the genome is now privately owned. The gene for diabetes is owned, and its owner has something to say about any research you do, and what it will cost you. The entire genome of the hepatitis C virus is owned by a biotech company. Royalty costs now influence the direction of research in basic diseases, and often even the testing for diseases. Such barriers to medical testing and research are not in the public interest. Do you want to be told by your doctor, “Oh, nobody studies your disease any more because the owner of the gene/enzyme/correlation has made it too expensive to do research?”

Why do we enact legislation that has the potential to criminalize an original essay?

Here’s my standard trailer: write your Congressmen, call your Senator, “wake up and do something or I’m voting you out!”

Guy Kawasaki continues to knock ‘em out of the ballpark with his blog posts. He’s on my blog roll but I thought deserved a special mention for writing great entries about entrepreneurship.

Oh boy is this a step in the wrong direction: “New and Improved” Draft Broadcast Flag Bill. I often have to pay to listen to music or watch a video. If I want to watch it again, I have to pay to store and catalog it. I’m an American Citizen, the Constitution says my Congress can artificially restrict what I can and cannot do with music and video that other people create[1]. I don’t want to have to select, purchase, store and catalog every single piece of media that I might ever potentially want to again hear or watch. I want to google for that cool song I heard on the radio and hear it again, or the replay the podcast I downloaded last week for my friends. My Congress is letting Big Media limit my ability to lose everything.

[1] U.S Constitution - Article 1; Section 8: “The Congress shall have Power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;”

The BBC lists 100 things they didn’t know this time last year.

My favorite:
“19. The = sign was invented by 16th Century Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who was fed up with writing “is equal to” in his equations. He chose the two lines because “noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle”.

Scariest:
“92. You are 176 times more likely to be murdered than to win the National Lottery.”