Creative Commons, six years in

December 13, 20008. Some of the top thinkers on copyright in a digital age come together to celebrate the sixth anniversary of Creative Commons. At the Berkman centre, Harvard. There's a lot here, over an hour.

Creative Commons held a special panel and fundraiser on Friday featuring Board Chairman James Boyle, Stanford professor and CC founder Larry Lessig, CEO Joichi Ito, and former Executive Director Molly S. Van Houweling. The event kicked off with HLS Dean Elena Kagan announcing Lessig’s return to Harvard (in fall 2009) and an introduction by Charlie Nesson. Jonathan Zittrain- moderating the session- then zoomed in with his first question: where did Creative Commons start?

From the Future of the Internet blog, by Yvette Wohn.

Happy New Year

George is wondering if the anaemic fellow playing the Tory candidate in The 39 Steps was meant to be him


Sir David has joined the group So The British Aristocracy Has Not Declined And Fallen After All


Tripp has posted a new picture


Bristol commented on Tripp's new picture


Gordon is now friends with Dunkirk


Barack is now friends with Carla, via the People You May Know tool


Butch wants to know "Who are those guys?"


Guido is writing a list


Kevin is no longer friends with Bernard


Stevie G is Offline


Ulrika is feeling shy


Uma is no longer friends with Bernard


Sundance is in Bolivia


Andy is now on Twitter


Jacqui is about to start watching YOU


Kate is now reading The Reader


Sam posted a new picture


Rachel is feeling catty


David became a fan of Running


Santa is considering suing NASA


Baz can hear the sound of money


Pericles, Prince of Tyre is 400


Sarah is now friends with Katie


Big Brother is bored


Jack is getting ready for post-Bush-Doctrine shoot-outs


Roger, Simon & John have joined the group We Hate Paper


Evan wonders how long it will be before Facebook is the New Christian Science Monitor?


JLo is single


Nigella is now friends with Jose


Zavvi is now offline


Emmanuelle is now in Prequel


Eartha and Harold are now offline


Steve says that nobody will read books with E-Readers


Techcrunch has posted a new link: "Netbooks from Apple"


Bill is still a PC


Tim is still Semantic


Dick liked his Darth Vader mask


Arianna and Jon have joined the group What Do We Do Now?


Derek is now Online


Derek is now friends with Peter and Gordon


Tristram is angry about the Library


Tina is now a blogger


2008 is now 2009


Robin is Offline

History needs a regulator? Like the Web?

David Cannadine is now Sir David. But what about "history" in the era of "zeitgeist history".

...Professor Cannadine has just published a book in which he maintains that the morale of professional historians (whose collective name in AL Rowse’s time was reputedly “a poison”, and is now supposedly “a malice”) is at an all-time low. Andrew Roberts, another Downing Street invitee, agrees. He has called for a regulatory authority for historians and suggests it could be called Ofhist. Its task would be to protect what he designates “proper historians” from incursions by “amateurs” into writing history books, and to restrain literary editors from commissioning “Clist celebs” and the writers of “chick lit” to review such historians’ work.

So, where does the truth lie? Are historians the repository of the nation’s past wisdom, essential policy wonks’ adjuncts? Or an endangered species in need of protection from today’s nasty, dumbed-down world? Let’s attempt a historian’s answer: it depends where you stand. Certainly, if that’s in most parts of Europe, the answer would be that the reputation of British historians has never been higher.

From The Times earlier this year.

A must read on reading

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

- Steve Jobs on eBook readers and the Amazon Kindle

Steve Jobs frequently makes disparaging remarks about markets that Apple later enters (MP3 players, mobile phones, games, etc), so there’s little reason to believe that we won’t all have ‘iBooks’ in three years time. Still, the numbers don’t lie - 40% of people in the US (and 34% in the UK) do not read books any more. They may surf the web, or the read the occasional newspaper, but they do not read more than one book (fiction or non-fiction) in a year.

The closer you look at the statistics, the more depressing it gets. In the US, only 47% of adults read a work of literature - and I don’t mean Shakespeare, I mean any novel, short story, play or poem - in 2006. If that doesn’t sound too bad, consider that it’s declined by 7% in only ten years. It doesn’t matter whether you look at men or women, kids, teenagers, young adults or the middle-aged; everyone is reading less literature, and fewer books.*

Adrian Hon on The Long Decline in Reading.

John Bracken's Reading List

is here.

Logic unbundled: not better but more

News is part of the atmosphere now, as pervasive—and in some ways as invasive—as advertising. It finds us in airport lounges and taxicabs, on our smart phones and PDAs, through e-mail providers and Internet search engines. Much of the time, it arrives unpackaged: headlines, updates, and articles are snatched from their original sources—often as soon as they’re published—and excerpted or aggregated on blogs, portals, social-networking sites, rss readers, and customizable homepages like My MSN, My Yahoo, myAOL, and iGoogle. These days, news comes at us in a flood of unrelated snippets. As Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, explains, “The economic logic of the age is unbundling.” But information without context is meaningless. It is incapable of informing and can make consumers feel lost. As the AP noted in its research report, “The irony in news fatigue is that these consumers felt helpless to change their news consumption at a time when they have more control and choice than ever before. When the news wore them down, participants in the study showed a tendency to passively receive versus actively seek news.”

From "Overload" - a long article in last month's Columbia Journalism Review by Bree Nordenson.

And the trust headline of the day is...

...As Another Memoir Is Faked, Trust Suffers.

“You’d think somebody would say, ‘Hmm, that’s amazing, let’s just spend an hour or a day seeing how plausible that is,’ ” said Kurt Andersen, the novelist and host of the public radio program “Studio 360.”

Mr. Andersen compared Mr. Rosenblat to Bernard L. Madoff, the money manager who is accused of defrauding investors of $50 billion.

“The will to believe something that is convenient to believe is strong in all realms,” he said.

The remake can only be moments away

Butch Cassidy: What happened to the old bank? It was beautiful.
Guard: People kept robbing it.
Butch Cassidy: Small price to pay for beauty.

40 years old tomorrow. Still fantastic.

Jeb's the way: new news

Bush doctrine to work?

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush had a good approach to challenging or controversial issues. He would gather the experts and vested parties from both sides of the issue around the table and basically shut the door, telling the group to figure out a workable solution.

If the group came to a stalemate, he’d let them know he had his own ideas on what should be done, and if they didn’t resolve it, he’d make the decision, adding they probably wouldn’t be happy with the outcome. The opposing sides would scurry back to the table and eventually negotiate a compatible solution for most of the parties.

From the Collier Citizen. Here's how.

That is a new path we are going to try to follow at the Collier Citizen in the coming year. We will begin with one community topic at a time and find experts to help initiate the discussion, then watch as community journalists (you and other experts) direct the dialogue with comments, suggestions and solutions.

Think of the possibilities. We can tackle school budgets, county government budgets, fire consolidation, or EMS/Fire consolidation. Of course, those could be just the start. How about if the community were to adopt a school such as Golden Gate High School and create a forum where the community works together to bring that school back from its poor grade showing last year. The possibilities are endless.

More here.

Twitter, YouTube & Gaza

From Wired, but I was alerted via Twitter.

...the Israeli military has started its own YouTube channel to distribute footage of precision airstrikes. And as I type, the Israeli consulate in New York is hosting a press conference on microblogging site Twitter. It's pretty interesting to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reduced to tweets of 140 characters or less ("We hav 2 prtct R ctzens 2, only way fwd through neogtiations, & left Gaza in 05. y Hamas launch missiles not peace?"; "we're not at war with the PAL people. we're at war with a group declared by the EU& US a terrorist org").

By Nathan Hodge.

21st Century starts soon says Washington Post

Barack Obama will have as free a hand as history ever allows to chart a new course and to define a new era. He may or may not succeed, but the country was right to seize the opportunity he offered to put the previous century and its assumptions behind us.

All is explained by E. J. Dionne Jr.

Once in a Media Lifetime

“This was what I say: sui generis,” Zelnick said. “It made its own precedent. It never happened before. It hasn’t happened since, and it probably won’t happen for another hundred or 200 years.”

From the Boston Herald.

Robert Zelnick has enjoyed what many would call a storied career. He’s logged more than 20 years with ABC News, written four books, worked as the Supreme Court reporter for National Public Radio and been portrayed onstage in a hit Broadway play.

The real Frost-Nixon thing.

...sometimes you're saying things that are really in your heart...

Up the Research Budget, now

The most memorable crucible in modern history is, of course, the Great Depression. During that era, several firms made huge bets that changed their fortunes and those of the country: Du Pont told one of its star scientists, Wallace Carothers, to set aside basic research and pursue potentially profitable innovation. What he came up with was nylon, the first synthetic fabric, revolutionizing the way Americans parachuted, carpeted, and panty-hosed. As IBM's rivals cut R&D, founder Thomas Watson built a new research center. Douglas Aircraft debuted the DC-3, which within four years was carrying 90 percent of commercial airline passengers. A slew of competing inventors created television.

"The wonderful growth of the post-World War II period was due largely to the tremendous backlog of innovation developed in the late years of the Great Depression," says Rick Szostak, an economics and technology historian at the University of Alberta.

From Wired.

Evolution in the digital era and beyond...

...

We tend to think of evolution as something involving structural modification, yet it can and does affect things invisible from the outside—behavior. Many people carry the genes making them susceptible to alcoholism, drug addiction and other problems. Most do not succumb, because genes are not destiny; their effect depends on our environment. But others do succumb, and their problems may affect whether they survive and how many children they have. These changes in fertility are enough for natural selection to act on. Much of humanity’s future evolution may involve new sets of behaviors that spread in response to changing social and environmental conditions. Of course, humans differ from other species in that we do not have to accept this Darwinian logic passively.

What does this mean for us the digital consumer in the information sea?


Quote from a long piece in Scientific American.


Titled: The Future of Man.

What else are people doing when online?

From e-marketer , via OUseful.Info, the blog…

The Twitter Mug...

...is self explanatory.

An Excellent Defence of "women's magazines"

But does the economics work? I hope so.

In fact, saying "women's magazines" with an implicit eye-roll is, these days, like calling Brooklyn a hip residential "frontier" or using a VCR: transparently passe. As the earnest compliance with the requests for sit-downs with as many women's magazine EICs who requested them by McCain and Obama made clear, "politicians understand that they can't get elected without women," says Cindi Leive. "So they give us access they never would have two decades ago. Anyone who doesn't get that is sort of trailing the boat, anyway."

Sheila Weller in the Huff Po.

Let's Talk, a plea for Common Sense

The balanced BBC view on Andy Burham's Telegraph interview. Rory Cellan-Jones invites the culture minister to talk.

...yes, Andy Burnham's suggestion that Britain and the US could get together and impose some sort of web code does beg all sorts of questions. Who would decide what was permissible? How would trillions of constantly changing websites be policed? How would it work with existing ratings schemes such as PICS, set up by the W3C consortium? And isn't it up to parents, not the state, to watch over the way their children use the web?

Then again perhaps the blogosphere is underestimating the subtlety of Mr Burnham's approach. After all, it was unlikely to have been the primary audience he had in mind when he made his remarks to the Telegraph. He may be betting that millions of parents share his concerns, and sense of helplessness about the web. He is also probably correct in thinking that governments are more able these days to apply pressure on both ISPs and on major web international brands than web libertarians would like to think.

Tolerance and the web, and transparency

The fields of news and knowledge are foundational to vital democratic society. People who enjoy access to free, fair, and high-quality news media per se become more effective citizens: they understand more about how their community works, and they’re more likely to participate in making the decisions that shape their lives.

Confronted by that sort of transparency, government, business, and other institutions necessarily become more accountable for what they do. The free flow of knowledge makes possible other forms of social change—advances in health care, wealth distribution, environmental policy. The upside is incredible.

Keith Hammonds is a member of Ashoka's new Social Entrepreneurs in Journalism program. More of the interview here.


I found this via an excellent piece that interrogates the Pew Internet 2020 scenarios. It includes the following:

Perhaps the new office of the CIO in the Obama administration may influence the development of the Internet in a manner more conducive to better race relations in the US. The technologies used could well be adapted and adopted in other countries and regions. Citizen themselves can inspire and engender political will, holding rulers accountable for their actions in ways, enabled by new media and the Internet, that hark back to the tenets of direct democracy.

Is this possible, I wonder?

Better Knowledge, three

From the last "world views" column in the SFGate by Edward M. Gomez.

News flash: There is no such thing as objectivity in American journalism. Instead, in large part as a result of the formulaic practices that are taught in U.S. journalism schools, what most mass-media news organizations pursue is what might be described as merely the presentation of the appearance of objectivity (or "objectivity") in their reporting about any particular subject. Thus, on television, the same talking heads from the so-called left and the so-called right (American media incorrectly use the terms "liberal" and "conservative" all the time, but that's the subject of another discussion) routinely appear, simplistically representing their host programs' dutiful attempts to appear "objective."

Here's why this is the last "world views" column:

As this long, memorable and costly - in so many ways, to so many people - year winds down, so, too, is this regular, daily feature of S.F. Gate, the website and related, online edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, coming to a close after a run of several years. Numerous other, familiar features of this website will also be disappearing, and a notable number of employees from the S.F.Gate/San Francisco Chronicle editorial team will be leaving the print/electronic newspaper as its editorial-production staff is dramatically downsized.

Edward Gomez will be launching his own site next month. I wonder how long before coalitions of writers/columnists/journalists begin to publish collectively. And if we can find an economic model - and perhaps more importantly - an influencing model that will nourish our information sea. In the coming weeks I'm going to try and concentrate on the positive aspects of the web, its amazing resources, its power of communication, and, not least, the upbeat values of the "democratisation of doubt". Healthy skepticism, enlightened skepticism if you will, allows for informed debate around the issue of "objectivity", let's go back to first principles, as they say.

Better Knowledge, two

NPR marketplace reporter Sean Cole on coming clean with the personal pronoun.

We all have little “shock of recognition” moments when a world of possibility reveals itself. Sandy Tolan asking, “can you believe me?” on the radio was one of mine. I didn’t know you could refer to yourself in a radio news story. I didn’t know you could “break down the fourth wall” like that, that you could be so direct and frank with your listeners; that you could suggest that you were anything but an incorporeal voice. But listen to that moment again. It’s not about Sandy. It’s acknowledging a question that every listener, right then, was surely asking. It’s a crucial point about the inherent dangers of reporting on oneself. He could have said something more benign like, “There are inherent dangers in reporting on oneself,” and the most interesting thing that happened to me that day would have been my sandwich. His choice was so much more elegant, intimate and, above all, arresting. Paradoxically, Sandy asking, “can you believe me?” is what made me believe him. (Plus, he went on to explain the editorial process for the series.) His “me” did that work for him.

Go Sean. Happy hols!

WOW! Windows on the World for All

This is number one in The Times Tech stories of the year.


The Billion-pixel panorama.


Gigapan.

Better Knowledge, first of a long series

The challenge I see for openDemocracy, in our goal to make better knowledge, is that we need to bring argument and content that comes from the domains that carry their own signals of credibility - activism (including corporate and political action), academia, "people like you and me" - while combining them with the virtues of the best outreach and journalism: accuracy, relevance, and narrative. If we succeed, we will create a space in which analysis that is credible, engaged and accessible can be made. This will not be exactly "citizen journalism", with its connotations of the celebration of the amateur and of the undifferentiated citoyen. Instead, in the economy of knowledge, we will seek contributions from each according to their best abilities, balancing the virtues of the insider, of commitment, with the critical qualities of the outsider, of detachment.

Making up minds by
Tony Curzon Price @ openDemocracy.

Happy christmas, war is (almost) over...

...

Quietly, as the United States presidential election and its aftermath have dominated the news, America’s three broadcast network news divisions have stopped sending full-time correspondents to Iraq.

“The war has gone on longer than a lot of news organizations’ ability or appetite to cover it,” said Jane Arraf, a former Baghdad bureau chief for CNN who has remained in Iraq as a contract reporter for The Christian Science Monitor.

From the NYT.

More Memoir Doubt: Angel at the Fence

This is part of a long New Republic post on December 25.

The battle over Angel at the Fence is part of a larger struggle for control over the Holocaust narrative. Scholars like Waltzer and Lipstadt are disturbed by the media blitz pushing Herman's story to the masses. "My hair is standing on edge," Lipstadt told me. "He has instrumentalized the Holocaust. This is the worst possible thing you can do on so many levels." To them, selling the Holocaust as Hollywood kitsch sanitizes its horrors. "It makes it nice," Lipstadt says. "I just wait to hear in the movie for the violins."

Salomon, the movie producer, disagrees. He believes that the mass appeal of Herman's story is precisely what makes it so important to be told. "The strength of Herman's story is in Middle America," Salomon said. "Because of the candy-coated message of this story, it has picked up resonance all over. Herman's story can do more to teach people about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in a way nothing before has done."

From the New Republic. On Saturday, December 27, Berkley Books announced that it is canceling publication of Angel at the Fence.


And here's today's NYT update:

This latest literary hoax is likely to trigger yet more questions as to why the publishing industry has such a poor track record of fact-checking.

In the latest instance, no one at Berkley questioned the central truth of Mr. Rosenblat’s story until last week, said Andrea Hurst, his agent. Neither Leslie Gelbman, president and publisher of Berkley, nor Natalee Rosenstein, Mr. Rosenblat’s editor at Berkley, returned calls or e-mail messages seeking comment. Craig Burke, director of publicity for Berkley, declined to elaborate beyond the company’s brief statement announcing the cancellation of the book. In an e-mail message, a spokesman for Ms. Winfrey also declined to comment.

One of the many reasons for the problems in Financial Reporting: conflicts of legal interest

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in the New York Review of Books. He's writing about a legal case between The Guardian and Tesco, but the wider implications are there for all, bloggers, lawyers and financial reporters. This is a lot closer to a journalistic reality than much of this year's "missed the credit crunch" hand-wringing.

This sort of financial journalism is notoriously difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. Few reporters have the training to disentangle and make coherent sense of the information publicly available from company accounts, annual reports, statutory filings, and corporate structures. The vast majority of reporters and editors—even those who specialize in business—would not know how to begin to unravel extremely complex corporate structures, which rely for their success on tax havens, partnerships, and tiers of associated financing and holding companies. A financial expert may understand public accounts, but be weak on corporate accounting. A corporate accounting specialist may know little or nothing about taxes. Effective analysis is complicated by the apparent legal impossibility—recognized by both academics and judges—of defining in a precise way the difference between tax avoidance and tax planning.

As we were to discover—if belatedly—the only route to total prepublication self-protection in these matters is to spend tens of thousands of dollars on tax, accountancy, and legal advice. Essentially, the only people qualified to produce wholly authoritative libel-proof assurance are the very people involved in constructing the strategies under scrutiny. They do not come cheap—and many of them have conflicts of interest. Some would give advice in private, but would not speak in public or in court.

And look, here's the Ghost of Christmas Future responding without an answer:

In my various scenarios for the future of news that relies more heavily on independent practitioners and networks, libel suits remain a huge question for which I can’t find an answer.

Says Ebenezer Jarvis.


Hopeful update from John Naughton.

There is, however, a chink of light in the gathering darkness. Rusbridger spells out in great detail the huge cost of retaining the specialist accounting and legal expertise needed to understand the Tesco transactions. But one rule of the new ecology is that there is wonderful expertise out there on the Net, and there might be ways of harnessing all that collective knowledge — rather as Linux harnessed the distributed skills of great programmers across the world to build a ferociously complex operating system; or as Larry Lessig and Charlie Nesson have crowdsourced the task of preparing legal briefs for pro bono cases.

Reason not the need: authority v. celebrity on Twitter

... 'authority' relative to a topic - being knowledgeable about chess, the Napoleonic Wars, or nuclear physics - is not the same as celebrity.

More here by Stowe Boyd at /Message.

One person's decline in "belief in the message" is another's "democratisation of doubt"

The new nihilism? Or something more Promethian?


Thanks to Tony Curzon Price for this by Geert Lovink.

We're operating in a post-deconstruction world in which blogs offer a never-ending stream of confessions, a cosmos of micro-opinions attempting to interpret events beyond the well-known twentieth-century categories. The nihilist impulse emerges as a response to the increasing levels of complexity within interconnected topics. There is little to say if all occurrences can be explained through post-colonialism, class analysis, and gender perspectives. However, blogging arises against this kind of political analysis, through which a lot can no longer be said.

Blogs express personal fear, insecurity, and disillusionment, anxieties looking for partners in crime. We seldom find passion (except for the act of blogging itself). Often blogs unveil doubt and insecurity about what to feel, what to think, believe, and like. They carefully compare magazines, and review traffic signs, nightclubs, and t-shirts. This stylized uncertainty circles around the general assumption that blogs ought to be biographical while simultaneously reporting about the world outside. Their emotional scope is much wider than other media due to the informal atmosphere of blogs. Mixing public and private is essential here. What blogs play with is the emotional register, varying from hate to boredom, passionate engagement, sexual outrage, and back to everyday boredom.

There's much here to consider.

So how do blogs relate to independent investigative journalism? At first glance, they look like oppositional, or potentially supplementary practices. Whereas the investigative journalist works months, if not years, to uncover a story, bloggers look more like an army of ants contributing to the great hive called "public opinion". Bloggers rarely add new facts to a news story. They find bugs in products and news reports but rarely "unmask" spin, let alone come up with well-researched reports.

WalMart: real time retailisation

From O'Reilly.

WalMart is a better example of Enterprise 2.0 than any of these more trendy examples of user contribution systems. If Google's key innovation with PageRank was to recognize that a link was a vote, which could be counted and measured to get better search results, so too, WalMart recognized early on that a purchase was a vote. Each company built real-time information systems to capture and respond to that vote. WalMart built a supply chain in which goods are automatically re-ordered as they go out the door, with algorithms based on rate of sale controlling the reorders. Google built a better search engine, in which pages that were "better linked" were given priority over the ones produced by pure keyword matches. They went on to build real-time systems to measure what John Battelle called the database of intentions, as expressed by people's queries and subsequent clickstream data, as well as an ad auction system that prices ads in real-time based on the predicted likelihood of the ad being clicked on.

Retalisation.

Kidnapped: the Twitter account & the Culture secretary

This one has traction? Call for Derek Draper, surely?

Mike Butcher, who blogs about technology and start-up businesses at Techcrunch, has claimed the username “andyburnham” at Twitter, the short-form blogging service, in an attempt to educate him about some “essential truths” of the internet.

Mr Butcher said Mr Burnham’s interview with the Sunday Telegraph this weekend “betrayed the simple fact that he knows nothing at all about the internet”. He argued that the sheer volume of websites, the difficulty in regulating content hosted abroad and the internet’s constantly changing nature makes it near-impossible to impose a rating system, which Mr Burnham said was one option under consideration in his oft-repeated ambition to apply traditional media’s standards of decency to the web.

From the FT.


Here's Mike's take.

Music is the food of marketing, so play on

And as music becomes a means to an end — pushing a separate product, whether it’s a concert ticket or a clothing line, a movie scene or a Web ad — a tectonic shift is under way. Record sales channeled the taste of the broad, volatile public into a performer’s paycheck. As music sales dwindle, licensers become a far more influential target audience. Unlike nonprofessional music fans who might immerse themselves in a song or album they love, music licensers want a track that’s attractive but not too distracting — just a tease, not a revelation.

But does this model work for any other creative content? I fear this is going to be a bad year for books. From the NYT.

Robin’s, which says it is the oldest bookstore in Philadelphia, will close next month.

More book horror here. In the new year I'm looking for the positives: E-books in particular.

...and it's called "Strictly Come"?

Even the adult films business has suffered, exacerbated by illegal online file-sharing of clips. The Emmanuelle series is being revived with a $50m prequel, partly funded by an X Factor-style international reality show to find the lead actor. Hunting for Emmanuelle might just buck the downward trend.

From today's Observer. So that's the Great Gatsby & Emmanuelle. How about a new version of Chinatown, or a Doobie Brothers revival?





"Mister Gittes, have we ever met?"

Terence Davies to remake "Wall Street"?

No, worse still.

"People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and The Great Gatsby can provide that," he told the Hollywood Reporter. "If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, 'You've been drunk on money', they're not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time, they'd be willing to."

Baz Luhrmann to remake The Great Gatsby.

"It takes two to make an accident."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 3