Sites and content purveyors are removing DRM, the digital rights management software that restricts use of their material. There are various reasons, including the hassle to legitimate customers -- keeping them from making legitimate use of something they buy on multiple machines, for example -- while not really stopping people who want to make illicit copies. Burning, ripping and copying software is freely available and relatively easy to use.
Then there’s the issue of pilfered content like photos or text or video taken from TV shows, which also is hard to control or stop.
In come the tracking companies, like Teletrax and Attributor, both of which (full disclosure) my company has worked with and I've covered. I notice that these companies, that may be seen as helping police the Web, are now positioning themselves as business partners: We’ll not just help you find out where your content’s going so you can slap others’ wrists (or sue their pants off, if need be), not only be digital police, but ALSO be business partners. We’ll help you gently request that whoever’s using your stuff, and, say, putting ads on it, cut you in on that ad revenue.
It’s an appealing model for someone who wants to see win-win solutions, and make at least incremental revenue relatively hassle-free, instead of the lose-lose solution of lawsuits and wrangling and all that. But can it really work in our legalistic, lawyer-heavy sytem? Ultimately the sites that cooperate will do so if they see the threat of punishment for not. We’re talking everyone from fly-by-night link farms to the Google/YouTubes of the world.
iPhone, Limited, Locked, but Desired
A woman with an accent, European it seemed, came into the Apple Store near the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan today and asked a salesperson if she could buy some iPhones for her friend who was returning home. The clerk told her limit was five, she could not use cash, and they were locked to AT&T in the US (but he also said they couldn't say what she did with them after they brought them home). Tacitly, a recognition that folks will buy the phones, hack them and do what they want. And, silly, that Apple limits purchases in this way. A sign of non-internationalization ... who wants a phone locked to one country's network?
DTV Switch-a-thon Gets Going in Earnest
As all the coverage of CES shouts really loudly over in Vegas, an equally important technological drumbeat has begun in earnest, with explainers and even a government coupon program to help people (like me) who still have broadcast TVs (in my case along with digital cable), and want to be able to keep using them after the switch over to digital broadcast signals next year.
The coupon program, according to the AP, offers $40 coupons for the first 22 million homes that request them -- we'll see if that's enough, and what kind of crunch there is next Feb when TVs start going blank. AP says the converter boxes will cost $50 - $70. (Which means even with teh coupon everyone's going to have to spend the price of, say, a DVD player to get each TV switched over). I've registered. I'm the kind of guy who will use both modern tech -- running my various Apples and Windows machines through a wireless network, Slingbox, etc -- and also jury-rig an old coax-only TV with rabbit ears to see if I can milk some more life out of it in a spare bedroom.
The coupon program, according to the AP, offers $40 coupons for the first 22 million homes that request them -- we'll see if that's enough, and what kind of crunch there is next Feb when TVs start going blank. AP says the converter boxes will cost $50 - $70. (Which means even with teh coupon everyone's going to have to spend the price of, say, a DVD player to get each TV switched over). I've registered. I'm the kind of guy who will use both modern tech -- running my various Apples and Windows machines through a wireless network, Slingbox, etc -- and also jury-rig an old coax-only TV with rabbit ears to see if I can milk some more life out of it in a spare bedroom.
Disemvoweled
Aside from the pathos of reading the final 3,000-word post of an intelligent and thoughtful military man, I also found use of the word "disemvoweled" -- removing unwanted comments -- clever. (via Rocky Mountain News and mediabistro.com)
An Internet Generation is About Three Years
Forget about Gen Y, Gen X, and other typical ways of defining a generational gap, says Blake Comargere, co-founder of Mogad (kind of a DIGG for friends). The typical Internet generation is about three-four years, he said at a Venture Summit panel (video from Always On). “The usage patterns and behaviors and comfort levels of certain things on the Internet are radically different from people that are just three years younger than you. ... IM is something that grandpas use,” he said. “They leave Facebook messages on my wall saying things like ‘Let’s have lunch.”
Keen Observations
Andrew Keen’s book, “The Cult of the Amateur,” got a bit more life New Year’s Day when a rebroadcast of a 2007 interview, along with Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing, NYU’s Clay Shirky, and Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia. The broadcast got me to go back and look at a lot of what was said. Lessig in a parody calls http://www.lessig.org/blog/2007/05/keens_the_cult_of_the_amateur.html him a self-parodist. Many note he made a lot of mistakes in his own book, so became his own debunker in asserting books are more accurate than the Internet. Boing Boing goes on at length. And Jarvis debunks Keen perfectly by pointing out how the crowd hauled Jarvis himself in, pointing him to the crowd-sourced Wikipedia, so he could update and correct a mistake in a post he’d written about Keen’s book. Jarvis refused to debate Keen live but I can agree with Jardin for doing so. What’s wrong with the live, broadcast version of debunking akin to the blog commenting conversation? More people are hit with the message that way, and more may be swayed.
Now, a word about some oddly guilty feelings I have about writing about this now, a half year after its first wave of information and commenting. I have the journalist thing in me where I need an excuse to write something now because if I’m commenting on something from months ago, it can no longer be valid. It’s been out, people have had their say, it’s done. But while it’s important to be aware of the conversation, generally, there are so many concurrent conversations it’s impossible to keep up on all of them at the same time, and sometimes you have something to say a long time later that still may be relevant, especially in looking over some old material. That, in a way, is what academics do, to great effect. They study past data and narrative and so on, picking out the most truly relevant information, analyzing and digesting it, and bringing new intelligence to it. I’m not that -- at least not formally -- but I can try to use their techniques.
Now, a word about some oddly guilty feelings I have about writing about this now, a half year after its first wave of information and commenting. I have the journalist thing in me where I need an excuse to write something now because if I’m commenting on something from months ago, it can no longer be valid. It’s been out, people have had their say, it’s done. But while it’s important to be aware of the conversation, generally, there are so many concurrent conversations it’s impossible to keep up on all of them at the same time, and sometimes you have something to say a long time later that still may be relevant, especially in looking over some old material. That, in a way, is what academics do, to great effect. They study past data and narrative and so on, picking out the most truly relevant information, analyzing and digesting it, and bringing new intelligence to it. I’m not that -- at least not formally -- but I can try to use their techniques.
Gain and Loss of Social Self
Who owns you? This is part of the battle brewing over social networks, and networking applications like Facebook. Robert Scoble, the Scobelizer, complains that when he tried to run a “script” on his profile on Facebook, Facebook detected it and kicked him off. He’s appealing the decision. He won’t say what the script is -- says he’s under a non-disclosure agreement with the company that wrote the bit of code that will somehow do something to Scoble’s Facebook profile -- but it seems to be something that would somehow take the info on Facebook, and run some other application on it.
A clue comes from a comment Scoble writes in response to someone who says that in a “walled garden,” the point is that it is walled. “We fundementally (sic) DON’T want someone wholeheartedly using our graphs. Especially not a friend, who we trust to not do that,” writes the commenter. Scoble replies: “What about info you’ve made public? Like, your name? And other stuff that’s on your public profile on Facebook? Are you saying that no one has the right to use that? How about this? Can I write down your email address and put it in my address book? Or, how about your birthday?
“So, why am I allowed to write down your phone number or email address, but my computer can’t take it out of Facebook and put it into Outlook for me? Or another program or service I’m using?
“How about something that actually ads value, like something that’d see that you’re on both Facebook and Twitter and Flickr and could mash those three together?”
So, Scoble is implying that what he wants to do is use publicly available information for private uses that he’d have permission to regardless of technology. This, I would guess, would be legal -- putting aside the Terms of Service issue -- in the same way that making copies of material for purely personal use are also legal.
He also alludes to a holy grail of social networking I think we’ll see more of this year: the social network mashup, applications that allow use of networking and profiles across platforms. Google’s Open Social is a step in this direction, though one that’s more push out than inbound in the way Scoble describes. Media companies and publishers are signing on with Google’s scheme so they can, say, write a widget once and have it spread across myriad platforms, rather than having to write or tweak new code for each. (And then they’re still having to write for Facebook, if they want to reach its millions of users. MySpace is a whole ‘nother issue.) I would expect to see a bunch of such apps come out this year, many with funding, and a few to catch on.
We’ll see, too, continued battle over closed vs. open that’s been part of the conversation since the earliest days of AOL and Prodigy vs. Netscape and Mozilla (and Internet Explorer, which provides the enticement of openness AND the control of digital rights management).
In a way, Scoble is arguing both sides of the coin. He owns the right to scrape his own profile, his own information -- though in joining Facebook, he signed terms of service that said he couldn’t run such applications on the closed network. Facebook, too, is trying to have it both ways. When they were exclusive to the academic community, they had a closed system that, while potentially very large, was limited to people with some similarity in mindset and orientation, at least in the broadest sense, and, probably, less likely to use the system for certain kinds of commercial behavior. By now allowing anyone from any background to register and use Facebook, and open up the API to all developers, the company is trying to reap the benefits of openness, but still with a closed system.
Facebook now has many millions of users. But how long will those millions remain when they are a) hit with an increasing number of unwanted marketing messages, un-needed invitations from non-”friends,” ever more mass messages, fewer directly relevant personal messages, b) finding it increasing difficulty to manage it all, and c) Open Social is on the way? We’ll see shakeouts this year among social networking applications, and an increasing number of profiles lay fallow. Facebook won’t die, and they’re smart enough that they may come up with a graceful solution that leads to more openness and integration with other platforms. The apology they gave due to the controversy that broke out over their Beacon system proves they are a company that’s able to hear complaints and try to adjust. But they will having a tough time overcoming the tension between walled garden and open access.
A clue comes from a comment Scoble writes in response to someone who says that in a “walled garden,” the point is that it is walled. “We fundementally (sic) DON’T want someone wholeheartedly using our graphs. Especially not a friend, who we trust to not do that,” writes the commenter. Scoble replies: “What about info you’ve made public? Like, your name? And other stuff that’s on your public profile on Facebook? Are you saying that no one has the right to use that? How about this? Can I write down your email address and put it in my address book? Or, how about your birthday?
“So, why am I allowed to write down your phone number or email address, but my computer can’t take it out of Facebook and put it into Outlook for me? Or another program or service I’m using?
“How about something that actually ads value, like something that’d see that you’re on both Facebook and Twitter and Flickr and could mash those three together?”
So, Scoble is implying that what he wants to do is use publicly available information for private uses that he’d have permission to regardless of technology. This, I would guess, would be legal -- putting aside the Terms of Service issue -- in the same way that making copies of material for purely personal use are also legal.
He also alludes to a holy grail of social networking I think we’ll see more of this year: the social network mashup, applications that allow use of networking and profiles across platforms. Google’s Open Social is a step in this direction, though one that’s more push out than inbound in the way Scoble describes. Media companies and publishers are signing on with Google’s scheme so they can, say, write a widget once and have it spread across myriad platforms, rather than having to write or tweak new code for each. (And then they’re still having to write for Facebook, if they want to reach its millions of users. MySpace is a whole ‘nother issue.) I would expect to see a bunch of such apps come out this year, many with funding, and a few to catch on.
We’ll see, too, continued battle over closed vs. open that’s been part of the conversation since the earliest days of AOL and Prodigy vs. Netscape and Mozilla (and Internet Explorer, which provides the enticement of openness AND the control of digital rights management).
In a way, Scoble is arguing both sides of the coin. He owns the right to scrape his own profile, his own information -- though in joining Facebook, he signed terms of service that said he couldn’t run such applications on the closed network. Facebook, too, is trying to have it both ways. When they were exclusive to the academic community, they had a closed system that, while potentially very large, was limited to people with some similarity in mindset and orientation, at least in the broadest sense, and, probably, less likely to use the system for certain kinds of commercial behavior. By now allowing anyone from any background to register and use Facebook, and open up the API to all developers, the company is trying to reap the benefits of openness, but still with a closed system.
Facebook now has many millions of users. But how long will those millions remain when they are a) hit with an increasing number of unwanted marketing messages, un-needed invitations from non-”friends,” ever more mass messages, fewer directly relevant personal messages, b) finding it increasing difficulty to manage it all, and c) Open Social is on the way? We’ll see shakeouts this year among social networking applications, and an increasing number of profiles lay fallow. Facebook won’t die, and they’re smart enough that they may come up with a graceful solution that leads to more openness and integration with other platforms. The apology they gave due to the controversy that broke out over their Beacon system proves they are a company that’s able to hear complaints and try to adjust. But they will having a tough time overcoming the tension between walled garden and open access.
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