Ten Reasons Why

Wired has a good profile of Lessig that summarizes the Eldred v. Ashcroft case well.

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17 Reasons Why

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Today someone found their way to this blog by searching for “reasons why not to send email to a guy when it was meant for a girl.”
Man, there’s gotta be a story behind that.

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Serious Instructional Technology’s David Carter-Tod called me out for not having an RSS feed to allow people to subscribe to this blog.
For the uninitiated, RSS is Really Simple Syndication, a spec that allows information to be represented in an XML format that can then be grabbed by software called news aggregators (or RSS readers). I’ve never been really enamored of news aggregators. I don’t mind going to the source, instead of dragging the content from the source sans the format, design, and frequently the context that makes it valuable, so I can get one big ugly long list of acontextual content.
But hey — if my loving audience demands RSS, who am I to deny them? :-) Blogger Pro has RSS built in, I believe, but I’m still a cheapskate making do with Good Ol’ Blogger Classic. Without native RSS, I’ve turned to a niftly little service called RSSify to generate the requisite XML files in RSS 0.92 format. You can right-click on the XML icon over in the right column and copy the URL for my RSS feed. The downside of RSSify is that it probably doesn’t generate a very pretty feed. I don’t use a news aggregator, so I really don’t know what it’s going to generate, but the XML looks like it chops up the post in a really hinky way. What the hell. If you’re not happy with it, you can send me 35 bucks and I’ll upgrade to Blogger Pro. :-)
And speaking of RSS, there is an enourmous amount of nonsense going on around the spec now. I think Dave Winer of Scripting News is generally considered the progenitor of the spec (although many claim he was building off work by Netscape). Although Winer let RSS languish at, I think, version 0.93, he went ballistic when someone else picked it up and started to define RSS 1.0. Apparently he didn’t like the fact that they were changing “his” spec. For someone who frequently waves the flag about community collaboration on open standards, he sure seems to have gotten pissy when people want to take the spec in a new direction. So while RSS 1.0 is being hammered out, Winer puts out RSS 2.0. Now the RSS 1.0 people are talking about renaming their’s RSS 3.0. Sheesh. An RSS cold war. And I thought I had a lot of time on my hands.

Syndication & Aggregation

You know those Nigerian email scams floating around? Where you can “earn” millions of dollars by flying to Holland to retrieve the hidden money of the wife of the former Nigerian president? This guy is scamming the scammers. Oh, he sent them the requested photocopy of his passport. Of course, his passport says he’s Capt. James Tiberius Kirk.
This scam saga has been going on for over two weeks now, and is coming to a head…the scammer is supposed to meet their mark in Dam Square in Amsterdam. They are to dress all in yellow and hop on one foot to be recognized.
Priceless.

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“The whole purpose of the clause in the Constitution that says that Congress’s power is to “promote the Progress of Science” is to induce a spread of new learning. If the government is going to be handing out monopolies to authors and inventors, and expending significant state resources to enforce their monopolies, then a bit of learning, 7 or 14 years later, is not a terrible price to pay.”, Lawrence Lessig.
By training, I’m a writer. There was actually a point where I made a living writing. A lousy living, but I paid rent. So, trust me, I believe in copyright. But there’s just no reason that copyright — which in most media is acquired by a corporation and not even owned by the original creator — should last for over a century. And there’s lots of good reasons it shouldn’t.

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Clearly I’m in major gadget buying mode. Earlier this week the new DVD player arrived in the mail. Yesterday evening I came home from work to receive my new Dell Inspiron 8200.
I’m scared of it.
I mean, damn, this is a big, fancy, powerful machine. 1.8 Ghz?!? Good gravy. I’m not sure what to do with that. And it’s friggin’ big — it’s got a 15″ display at 1400 x 1050 resolution, for crying out loud. I’ve had smaller CRT monitors. There so much screen real estate I could rent some of it to a small third world nation.
It’s sitting here on my desk next to the last laptop I bought, a Gateway2000 Solo purchased refurbished back in 1996. (Of course, since 1997 or so, I’ve always had an IBM Thinkpad provided by work.) It makes the old Gateway look like one of those toy computers you buy for your four-year old niece. Tell the truth, some of those toy computers probably have more power than the ol’ Gateway (90 Mhz Pentium, 16 MB RAM). Hell, the video card in this new Dell has four times the RAM of the entire Gateway.
And then there’s Windows XP — all blue and bubbly and 3-D. And it wants to be my friend. Really badly.

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I finally bought a DVD player. Now I’m addicted. I think the commentary on the This Is Spinal Tap DVD may be the funniest thing on the planet.

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Slate is hosting a conversation between journalist Kurt Anderson and Andrew Sullivan (of Andrewsullivan.com weblogging fame. Yesterday’s posts (which are bizarrely framed as emails — wouldn’t a blog tool have been more appropriate) frame the discussion, which has continued today (and presumably will continue the rest of the week).
Today, Sullivan said:

Blogger NZBear weighs in as well, in a meta-meta-blog on this meta-blog. He writes: “Slate should have provided a counterweight to his journablogging heavyweight status. Picking a non-journalist, lesser known blogger to complete a trifecta with Andersen and Sullivan would have made the discussion deeply more interesting.” But here’s another piece of blogging’s genius. We just did that! You can rectify editorial choices in real time all the time. If this conversation takes off, we can even continue it without Slate at all!

This is remarkably similar in attitude, if not in phrasing, to Ray Ozzie’s essaylet of a few weeks ago about the “rebirth of public discussion.”
I have the same problem with Sullivan’s response as I have with Ozzie. Weblogs may be public, but “public” does not necessarily translate to inclusive. In contrast to Sullivan and Ozzie, I would argue that the “individualism” of weblogs, technologically represented in the lack of a standard way to discover and reference other weblogs that are commenting upon a post, replicates — or at least has the potential to replicate — the exclusiveness of traditional media.
Because weblogs are decentralized (as opposed to, for example, threaded discussion forums), without an effective means to discover the other components to the conversation (i.e. other blogger’s posts), the the original blogger writes in isolation and only includes other voices as he/she sees fit. Sound like any traditional media you know?
Sullivan apparently revels in this. He says:,

“The one wonderful thing about blogging from your laptop is that you don’t have to deal with other people. You can broadcast alienated, disembodied, disassociated murmurings into a people-free void. You don’t have to run something past an editor, or frame your argument to an established group of subscribers. You just say what the hell you want.

What I read in that, though, is “I don’t have to be accountable.” Sure, a bevy of other bloggers might correct him — or agree with him. However, like with traditional media, there is no mechanism (short of including a comments feature in your blog, which Sullivan doesn’t) for those bloggers to “insert” their responses, or even hypertextual references to their responses, into the conversation in a way that Sullivan’s readers can view the whole discussion.
NZBear’s point was that Sullivan and Anderson excluded any other voices from the conversation other than their own . . . and in pointing that out, NZBear gave Sullivan the opportunity to illustrate the exclusion. Sullivan implies that by quoting NZBear, they’ve provided a “counterweight.” But he doesn’t point out that it’s a counterweight that he hand-selected. What about the rest of the responses to Sullivan & Anderson that either haven’t been discovered by the authors . . . or have been purposefully excluded.
Big deal, you say. But as with traditional media, this exclusivity has the potential to result in propaganda.
The solution? I’m not sure there is a perfect one yet. I think weblogging technology needs to evolve to a point where it includes a mechanism for automated discovery of other referencing weblog posts that’s better than referral logs, Blogdex, DayPop, and TrackBack. (TrackBack seems to be coming close.) The web itself may have to evolve to allow for that, but perhaps weblogs can be the driver for that change.

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Normally Slashdot is a pretty good resource for technical information on just about any thing, but I’m pretty disappointed at the quality of the commentary on this Ask Slashdot article from last week.

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