conflux
The New York Times Magazine
The Lives They Lived
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"This is the eighth incarnation of ''The Lives They Lived,'' our annual tribute issue, and it was probably the most difficult one to put together, for the all-too-obvious reason. In a year in which so many died together and horribly and right before our eyes, did it make sense to celebrate the lives of a chosen few?
The answer, or at least the one we came up with, is yes."
12:31 AM 0 comments
The Christian Science Monitor
After the dot.com crash
"On the surface, it was a bad year for the Internet.
The dot.com bust left hundreds of companies out of business, thousands of people out of work, and millions of investors out-of-pocket.
But as investors and the economy tried to avoid being sucked down in the whirlpool created when dot.com companies and their stocks capsized, the actual, everyday world of cyberspace continued to transform the ways we live, work, study, play, and just, well, waste time.
"The Community Wireless movement is a fantastic example of how something unreliable can be cool, useful, self-sustaining, and utterly devoid of revenue potential. Wireless ISPs like Mobilestar charge a small fortune for network access at airport lounges and Starbucks in a handful of cities, and are still going broke, while a ride in a taxi through midtown Manhattan with an iBook will yield a new open network at every stoplight. Mobilestar's $60/month gets you a service that is only slightly better than what a mass of public-spirited (or security-impaired) WiFi users have accomplished without even trying. It's just too damned expensive to provide the kind of reliability that stress-feeding mobile execs demand. Meanwhile, the cranky, kludgey world of open 802.11 base-stations gains ground every day. It'll never be good enough for people who use phrases like "mission-critical," but it'll be just fine for the rest of us."
redux [10.08.01]
"But it is reasonable to expect that we have not yet really discovered what the Internet is best suited for. Mind you, the steamship was not a great improvement over the first sailing ships. Up until the end of the 19th century, most of the world's ocean freight was still carried by sail. What eliminated the sailing ship was that it takes several years to learn to be a sailor, while it takes 10 minutes to learn to shovel coal into the steamship boiler. The sailing ships died because they couldn't get crews and the steamship crews are unskilled. You need only a very few skilled people on a steamship. To furl and unfurl sails is highly skilled? But the railroad immediately created mobility, on the land, which had never existed.
Today, the Internet eliminates distance for communication."
10:40 PM 0 comments
The New York Times
The Third Verse of Christmas
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"For Americans, Christmas has often been a feast of excess in an age of abundance and optimism. But in most other times since this day was first celebrated, and in many places today, Christmas has really been a feast of bare sufficiency in a world of insufficiency. The old songs make this clear if you sing right on into the later verses. Christmas comes not to ratify wealth or measure prosperity but to brighten the hungry darkness of winter, to offer warmth in the dire cold, to signal spiritual and physical renewal, to forestall for a few days and nights what the rest of the year cannot promise to forestall. In the worst of times, people have continued to go through the Yuletide motions because, they soon discover, the motions have a way of warming them up and so of ceasing to be mere motions."
10:19 AM 0 comments
Ananova
Military officials almost forgot to track Santa with satellite
"Canadian Army Major Douglas Martin told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel : "Normally we contact Santa at the end of September, early October, to discuss some of the features of the technology. Because of the horrific events of September 11, we literally forgot to contact him this year."
He says Santa eventually sent an email saying: "I realise how busy you have been lately, but would you kindly track me again this year? I find it so convenient because the children know they have to go to sleep before I arrive.""
5:45 PM 0 comments
Salon
The techno-thrill is gone
"My lack of excitement for ensuring that my browser software is up to date and there's enough RAM on my system and that I've got the right add-on cards for my PDA isn't because I think technology is bad. It's because the events of this year have left me craving something more real. There's a place for technology -- even the most seductive consumerist gizmos, which sales figures suggest are unexpectedly flying off the shelves this Christmas -- in that search for the real. But it's not to be found in the comforting idea that progress is inherent in the inevitable advance of chip speed and jaw-dropping graphics."
11:54 PM 0 comments
Online Journalism Review
Independents Day
"Everybody knows about the 800-pound gorillas of online news — nytimes.com, CNN.com, MSNBC — but there's another group that's contributing mightily to the craft of Web journalism: the solo, lone-wolf operation.
These outfits, each created and operated largely by one person, show that you don't need a large staff and venture-capital seed money to do news on the Net."
"The Internet and specifically its graphic interface the World Wide Web is reaching a level of saturation and widespread adoption throughout the world. Specifically for journalism practiced online - in the discipline of computer-assisted reporting (CAR) and a specific kind of journalism: online journalism - we can now identify and theorize about the impacts the global system of networked computers has had on journalism. This paper signals four particular journalisms online as these have emerged in the 'first generation' of newsmedia on the World Wide Web (1993-2001), discusses the key characteristics - cf. hypertextuality, interactivity, multimediality - which determine the 'added value' of these journalisms, and provides three specific strategies journalists may use to further enhance the potential of journalism online: annotative reporting, open source journalism and hyperadaptive news sites."
5:35 PM 0 comments
SFGate
Community Broadbrand [sic]
"Sean Berry shares his broadband Internet connection with three neighbors - - including one across the street -- but doesn't have any wires running out of his windows or doors.
And in return, his neighbors sometimes pitch in to help pay the monthly $80 DSL service fee."
redux [11.27.01]
"It’s an increasingly common scene: a telecommuter perched on a park bench, pecking away at a laptop. But a peek over her shoulder reveals a more startling sight: she’s surfing the Web, outdoors and cable free.
Anywhere, anytime Internet access is gaining ground across the United States as wireless networks owned and run by their users spring up in more cities each month—25 at last count."
"Imagine the scenario: you get together with the occupants of your block (be it a block of flats or group of homes). You decide to buy one Internet connection for the entire block. You hook a broadband cable or ADSL modem up to a Wi-Fi access point, and presto: everybody within 100 metres of the access point has high-speed Internet access for virtually nothing. You can split the cost of the Internet access - divided among 20 or 30 people the cost is negligible, maybe a few dollars per person per month. What's more, you can communicate within this community quickly and easily. You could even set up community network printers and scanners and the like.
It may sound far-fetched, but in fact with Wi-Fi it is very easy to do. The difficult part would be maintaining access control so only the people who paid could access the Net connection."
"Wireless hotspots using public access local area networks in airports, hotels and even on Japanese trains may face temporary problems like the rest of the telecoms industry. But the mid-term predictions are for massive growth. And as Clive Couldwell point outs, they will not only be an increasing threat to mobile operators but also provide plenty of opportunity for fixed-line operators and isps to add some mobile services cheaply."
"Mobile operators should certainly be worried. The combination of no licence fees - because they operate in the unlicenced 2.4 ghz band - relatively cheap and easy installation, a wide and growing potential customer base and high-speed connectivity - offering data rates of up to 11 mbps to wireless-enabled laptops or handhelds within 50 metres of any access point - means that these wireless hotspots will spread ever faster across the world."
"Fast Internet access over small wireless networks in restaurants, hotels and airports will soon start hurting telecommunications operators, a new survey found Monday.
More than 20 million Europeans will use some 90,000 open Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) by 2006, market research group Analysys said. Today there are up to 20,000 WLAN users, most in the United States."
redux [08.26.01]
"AN UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT to deploy free wireless access zones in metropolitan areas is taking hold. If it turns out to be successful, wireless network operators may be fighting against a grounds-up movement that could undermine their multibillion-dollar campaign to offer next-generation 3G (third-generation) wireless services in major metro areas.
The movement, called by some the "parasitic grid" and by others more simply the "free metro wireless data network," has already installed itself in New York; San Francisco; Seattle; Aspen, Colo., Portland, Ore., British Columbia; and London."
redux [04.14.01]
"Permit me to throw a stick of dynamite in the room: Third generation, or 3G , wireless is dead before it was even born. And after billions wasted on 3G, it's going to be replaced by free wireless local area networks, or LANs.
A technology that the cell-phone industry is spending untold billions on, 3G promises to deliver high-speed data precisely where you don't need it -- on your phone. On the other hand, homes, offices, coffee shops, airports and hotels are building out cheap and grass-roots wireless local area networks that deliver even higher-speed access where you do need it -- your personal digital assistant and your laptop."
redux [09.09.01]
"Burton subscribes to the term "Open Network Access Point," believing the scale that could be achieved by widespread adoption of wireless access point would be amazing.
But as with many stories, there is a dark side. Both Burton and Pozer agree individual providers of these access points, which can cost as little as $150, must be aware of the legal implications."
""The Internet has always been revolutionary," Burton said. "What you're seeing now is the old school revolting.""
"That was funny. I laughed and laughed. It doesn't feel very parasitic every month when I pay my DSL bill. There's nothing parasitic about a community network. The bandwidth is paid for. People are taking their existing connections and letting other people share it. There's nothing new.
I think what has people scared is that, as I know and others know, bandwidth is significantly oversold. If everybody wanted to request their 384 kilobits or their 1.5 Mbps at the same time, you'd have the same thing happening that you had in the twenties with the run on the banks. The infrastructure can't support it, even though it's sold as such. I think that's where the fear is coming from on the telco side."
redux [08.15.01]
""This is why I love New York," says Anthony Townsend, standing in the middle of Washington Square Park, holding his laptop computer like a butler's tray and scanning the adult playground the place becomes on hot summer evenings. Where else, he asks, can you walk around with a computer, surf the Web, and go utterly unnoticed?
As if to prove his invisibility, or perhaps to demonstrate that he belongs, he hoists his machine like some digital prayerbook and begins chanting: "Jesus! Jesus! Thank you!"
No one - not the guy playing the Ramones on acoustic guitar, not the tonguing teenage lovers - notices this modern miracle worker or the cybernet he has cast around them. Along with some 30 other volunteers in a group called NYCwireless, Townsend's on a crusade to set up wireless Internet access zones: small areas, often called free networks, where people can tap into high-speed connections, without cables or phone lines, at no cost"
redux [12.10.00]
"With its meticulously preserved rows of army barracks and offices, San Francisco's Presidio neighborhood gives off the illusion that it's still the 1800s, when it was a bustling spit-and-shine military base.
The wireless Internet antennas sprouting everywhere suggest something else: Today's civilian community is home to a very unregimented attempt to build a homemade wireless Web that seeks to rival the expensive plans of telecommunication conglomerates and other corporations."
""I use it in bed, at the cafe, in the car, on the grassy fields," says Brewster Kahle, a 40-year-old high-tech entrepreneur who lives and works in the area. "I'm living a wireless existence."
"Matt Westervelt and three of his friends had tinkering on their minds when they started building their own high-speed wireless network in June. Climbing on the roofs of their Seattle homes, building antennas and trying to make them work with Ethernet protocols sounded like fun. Plus, if the whole shebang actually worked, they figured they'd be able to access their home computer files from the local cafe, play Net-based games while sitting on each other's couches and stream video onto their personal data assistants -- all at speeds of up to 11 megabits per second, far faster than what cellphone operators or other wireless providers offered."
"Call it "the free-network movement" -- a bubbled-up-from-the-underground effort to spread high-bandwidth wireless connectivity everywhere."
7:57 PM 0 comments
Salon
Don't steal music, pretty please
"Indeed, the pointless attempt to control copyrighted data every step of the way from musician's voice to listener's ear is the biggest roadblock to success for online music. Just as HBO doesn't try to stop you from taping its movies, so music sellers need to let go and trust their customers. Remove the incentives for people to steal, rather than imposing more technology that treats customers as would-be shoplifters. Even former BMG head Strauss Zelnick, who says he has no problem throwing big-time bootleggers in jail, agrees the industry's challenge is to come up with an attractive alternative to Aimster and its ilk. "We need to give consumers a service they want, at a price they're willing to pay," he told me in an interview this summer. "People don't like to think of themselves as criminals." But ironically, the more anti-theft hurdles crammed into the legal products, the more attractive the pirate alternatives become."
redux [12.11.01]
"The major record labels have rolled out their much-anticipated subscription music services -- the ones that are supposed to be legitimate alternatives to the free file sharing services spawned by Napster. MusicNet went online last week. Details of the upcoming PressPlay service were officially unveiled today. But they come at a moment when more people than ever -- even more than in Napster's heyday -- are using FREE services."
redux [11.29.01]
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"Data to be released next week is expected to show that the number of people exchanging music simultaneously on the most popular free service, a network called Fast Track, which is based in Amsterdam, now exceeds the use of Napster at its peak.
Webnoize, a research firm, said it expected the figures to show that the number of people typically logged on to Fast Track surpassed 1.57 million; that was the peak level of popularity enjoyed in February this year by Napster, the pioneering free music service that shut down after being sued by the record labels, which accused it of abetting copyright infringement."
redux [09.21.01]
"As the major record labels prepare to roll out online subscription services, a new report suggests young people are not yet ready to pay to download music from the internet.
Researchers found that 62% would continue to access MP3 music files for free and had no plans to stop."
redux [07.24.01]
""In some respects, this brings the labels back to square one," Mooradian said.
One label executive agreed, saying, "I fear we're getting into a game of whack-a-mole, where we sue Napster, then we sue Aimster and so on and so on."
"If (the labels) killed Napster -- and that's 'if,'" said Johnny Deep, CEO of Aimster, "they killed their only chance of a viable online strategy. Napster was easy enough to use, and there was loyalty and confidence in the brand. That's something the labels can't recreate, even if they spend a hundred million.""
"It didn't have to be this way, of course. The music industry has had the opportunity for several years now to begin offering reasonably priced access to comprehensive catalogs of digital music across the Internet, sweetened with special premium additions for fans willing to pay even more. Such a service could satisfy the hunger of millions of people for ready access to new and old music while preserving a reasonable income for the artists who make that music. Fear has stayed the industry's hand -- fear that today's unconscionably high CD prices can't be sustained; fear that the many layers of middlemen in today's industry might find themselves out of jobs; fear that the superstar system couldn't survive such a change; fear of the unknown.
The industry's paralysis is a tragedy for anyone who believes that artists should be compensated for their work as well as for anyone who loves music, period. But it's clear that the record labels would rather sue than find a sensible rapprochement with the new world of digital distribution."
redux [05.02.00]
""The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway.
There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers.
And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt."
9:14 PM 0 comments
News.Com
An e-government pill for the tech sector
""Government is our biggest vertical market," said Kevin Fitzgerald, senior vice president of Oracle's government, education and health care unit, who noted that government is likely to become an even bigger customer. "The government is reaching out to industry and focusing on high-impact, high-return areas.""
"It's the first time the government had put a serious process behind e-government," Fitzgerald said. "Before, they were sitting in a back room doing white papers.""
"BBC Click Online's Simon Hancock reports on some of the best e-government projects from around Europe recently showcased in Brussels.
The European Commission wants Europe to embrace new technology and give health, welfare, education and government services an electronic coat of paint."
"The Government Online Study (GO) is a syndicated marketing information report designed to measure the impact of the Internet on government globally and nationally.
The study is a result of interviews with over 29,000 individuals across 27 countries. The GO study was researched and written by Taylor Nelson Sofres. It provides global and national benchmarks relating to the use of government services online and perceptions of safety when providing personal information to Government."
9:48 PM 0 comments
The New York Times
Experts Say Decision Could Undermine Online Journalists
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"Free speech advocates are worried that a recent federal appeals decision could have a chilling effect on online journalists who use hyperlinks to direct readers to relevant, newsworthy sites that contain illegal material."
"KPMG, an international services firm, prides itself on its "e-business" savvy, and it charges companies boatloads to improve their "new economy" businesses.
But this week several website owners were wondering whether KPMG's Internet acumen was really worth anything at all, as it announced a policy that seemed to breach the most basic freedom on the Web -- the freedom to link to any site you want to."
redux [05.30.00]
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"When a federal judge issued a decision last week in a case involving "deep linking," many reports suggested that the controversial Internet practice was now unambiguously legal. But the story is more complex than that. In fact, deep linking -- the practice of linking to a page deep inside another Web site, bypassing its home page -- still appears to be in legal limbo."
8:39 PM 0 comments
The New York Times
Pooh-Poohing the Purists, a Scholar Revels in Netspeak
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"Dr. Crystal argues that the evolving discourse of the Internet is quite different from writing, in part because writing's prime characteristic is its stability. "You expect writing to stay in place," he said. "When you refer to a page you've read earlier, you expect it to remain the same. You'd be very surprised if it had changed its character." That's not true for computer-mediated communication, he said, which has a characteristic fluidity reflected, for instance, in Web pages that change or in e-mail that is cut and pasted to create a new message."
redux [08.10.00]
"This paper began from the premise that every new medium changes our definitions of, approaches to and views of knowledge. It claimed that networked computers (as enabled by the Internet), cannot be understood as simply yet another medium in a long evolution that began with speech and evolved via cuneiform, parchment, manuscripts to printed books and more recently to radio, film, and video. Computers offer a new method of translating information from one medium to another, wherein lies the deeper meaning of the overworked term multimedia. Hence computers will never create paperless offices, they will eventually create offices where any form of communication can be transformed into any other form."
"A half century ago pioneers such as Havelock, Innis and McLuhan recognized that new media inevitably affect our concepts of what constitutes knowledge. The mass media epitomized this with McLuhan’s pithy phrase: "The medium is the message." Reduced and taken in isolation, it is easy to see, in retrospect, that this obscured almost as much as it revealed. The new media are changing the way we know. They are doing so in fundamental ways and they are inspiring, creating, producing, distorting and even obscuring many messages. New machines make many new things possible. Only humans can ensure that what began as data streams and quests for information highways become paths towards knowledge and wisdom."
"Our dialog with technology is a dialog with ourselves. Technology can indeed have a powerful effect upon the subsequent development of culture, but it is the kind of effect that powerful meanings have. This must be distinguished from any mechanical sort of cause and effect.
I draw on the work of Owen Barfield to indicate how the development of both printing press and perspective art, as companion movements toward abstraction, fit into the broad evolution of western consciousness. My conclusion is that, once we take this evolution into account -- and reckon especially with our own place in it -- we cannot say, in quite the way it is often said, that technology "causes" a radical transformation in the conditions of intellectual life."
"Ong pulls together two decades of work by himself and others on the differences between primary oral cultures, those that do not have a system of writing, and chirographic (i.e., writing) cultures to look at how the shift from an oral-based stage of cons ciousness to one dominated by writing and print changes the way we humans think. His approach to the subject is both synchronic in that he looks at cultures that coexist at a certain point in time, and diachronic in that he discusses the change in the Wes t from being oral-based to chirographic which began with the appearance of script some 6,000 years ago. In addition to pinpointing fundamental differences in the thought processes of the two types of culture, he comments on the current emergence in Western society of what he calls a second orality. This second orality, dominated by electronic modes of communication (e.g., television and telephones), incorporates elements from both the chirographic mode and the orality mode which has been subordinant for some time."
8:18 PM 0 comments
Wired News
MS TV: It'll Be Watching You
"Microsoft announced on Tuesday it will be using Predictive Networks' technology to track the viewing habits of people who use Microsoft TV interactive television products."
""I don't want my TV taking notes on what I'm watching. I don't want my kid's game console tracking what he's playing. I don't want my CD player collecting data on my music collection," said Kelley Consco, who was shopping for holiday gifts at Radio Shack. "It's just too creepy.""
redux [06.25.01]
"Are you watching your television set or is it watching you? The same technologies that are threatening privacy on the Internet - including consumer data collection, profiling and targeted advertising - are now being adopted by the U.S. television industry, according a report to be released Tuesday."
"To advertisers, the development of a technology that combines the Web's interactivity with television?s element of dedicated spectatorship is a dream come true for they will now have access to a new breed of couch potato, one that both enjoys the warm glow of the tube and craves the personal touch of the Internet, the report finds."
redux [09.11.00]
"Even if you've always wanted to be a Nielsen family, ensuring that your television watching habits help shape programming, would you really want a company to know each and every time you flip to "Felicity?"
TiVo's CEO Mike Ramsay wants to use that information to sell targeted advertising and aggregate data to the networks about TV viewing habits. Sure, you'll get some benefits when you buy TiVo's set-top box ($399), and sign up for the monthly service ($10) -- like the chance to search for programs you want, save up to 30 hours of programming and even fast-forward through the commercials. But don't forget: While you're watching your favorite programs, the TiVo is watching you, recording every channel click and timing how long you spend watching "Family Feud" and noting every Pampers ad you skip."
[requires 'free' registration]
"The TiVo and Replay boxes represent the greatest leap of all. They accumulate, in atomic detail, a record of who watched what and when they watched it. Put the box in all 102 million American homes, and you get a pointillist portrait of the entire American television audience. And that raises the second and more disturbing question to which the TV industry must respond: what do you do when you actually know who is watching and why? Already, TiVo and Replay know what each of their users does every second, though both companies make a point of saying that they don't actually dig into the data to find out who did what, that they only use it in the aggregate. Whatever. They know."
"Personal information has become the new currency of online commerce. Decentralized Internet protocols have made computing resources increasingly pervasive, empowering individuals with an unprecedented amount of control. One result is that very few Internet consumers actually pay for network content, instead offering up personal information as they go. Content providers then collect, buy, and sell this information. To bring the Internet economy into its next stage of development, complementary software and legal architectures must be created in which personal information is regarded as a commercial property right, and accorded corresponding monetary value."
10:43 PM 0 comments
NPR: All Things Considered
Internet Music Services
" The major record labels have rolled out their much-anticipated subscription music services -- the ones that are supposed to be legitimate alternatives to the free file sharing services spawned by Napster. MusicNet went online last week. Details of the upcoming PressPlay service were officially unveiled today. But they come at a moment when more people than ever -- even more than in Napster's heyday -- are using FREE services."
"When MP3.com Inc. and Napster Inc. made songs available on the Internet without seeking the permission of artists, the world's largest music corporations launched a blistering legal attack to shut them down."
"Now those same corporations are starting to roll out their own online services to great fanfare. And once again, many artists say, no one is asking the musicians whether they want their songs to be included."
[requires 'free' registration]
"The drumbeat beckoning consumers to entertainment-subscription services on the Net grew louder Tuesday as leading media and technology companies introduced products and services."
"The various services and products are designed to entice Internet users, long accustomed to receiving music and entertainment via the Net for free, to choose paid offerings. Whether consumers will buy into the subscription model remains to be seen, given that no-cost music-swapping services popularized by Napster's early success continue to proliferate."
redux [11.29.01]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Data to be released next week is expected to show that the number of people exchanging music simultaneously on the most popular free service, a network called Fast Track, which is based in Amsterdam, now exceeds the use of Napster at its peak.
Webnoize, a research firm, said it expected the figures to show that the number of people typically logged on to Fast Track surpassed 1.57 million; that was the peak level of popularity enjoyed in February this year by Napster, the pioneering free music service that shut down after being sued by the record labels, which accused it of abetting copyright infringement."
"A Dutch court on Thursday ordered file-swapping software maker Kazaa to prevent people using its product from engaging in copyright infringement or face thousands of dollars in fines."
""We don't know how the judge wants us to stop copyright infringement," Kazaa attorney Christiaan Alberdinck Thijm told CNET News.com's affiliate in the Netherlands on Thursday. "We feel as if the judge didn't put much time and effort into this part of the verdict.""
redux [09.21.01]
"Droves of Napster clones are proving that it's still cheap and easy to create file-swapping services under the nose of the entertainment industry--but such ventures promise mostly high risks and little pay for the people behind them.
Even as the U.S. courts have effectively shut down file-trading giant Napster, numerous would-be replacements have taken root. Most hope to avoid legal entanglements and eventually profit on the immense popularity of services that offer free access to popular music, videos and other files."
"Although consumers continue to flock to peer-to-peer services, it's unclear whether large numbers will ever translate into large profits."
"As the major record labels prepare to roll out online subscription services, a new report suggests young people are not yet ready to pay to download music from the internet.
Researchers found that 62% would continue to access MP3 music files for free and had no plans to stop."
redux [07.24.01]
""In some respects, this brings the labels back to square one," Mooradian said.
One label executive agreed, saying, "I fear we're getting into a game of whack-a-mole, where we sue Napster, then we sue Aimster and so on and so on."
"If (the labels) killed Napster -- and that's 'if,'" said Johnny Deep, CEO of Aimster, "they killed their only chance of a viable online strategy. Napster was easy enough to use, and there was loyalty and confidence in the brand. That's something the labels can't recreate, even if they spend a hundred million.""
redux [07.20.01]
[requires 'free' registration]
"The record industry's largely successful effort to cripple Napster, the online music site turned social phenomenon, has left it facing something potentially worse: a new generation of music-swapping sites, more numerous and much harder to police.
Figures to be released today show that a precipitous drop in Napster's traffic over the last several weeks has been paralleled by marked growth in more than half a dozen less centralized services. Those services, some of them based overseas, not only welcome millions of Napster refugees, but also complicate matters for the industry by scattering a once-concentrated audience, and relying on technology that may be insulated from legal attack."
"It didn't have to be this way, of course. The music industry has had the opportunity for several years now to begin offering reasonably priced access to comprehensive catalogs of digital music across the Internet, sweetened with special premium additions for fans willing to pay even more. Such a service could satisfy the hunger of millions of people for ready access to new and old music while preserving a reasonable income for the artists who make that music. Fear has stayed the industry's hand -- fear that today's unconscionably high CD prices can't be sustained; fear that the many layers of middlemen in today's industry might find themselves out of jobs; fear that the superstar system couldn't survive such a change; fear of the unknown.
The industry's paralysis is a tragedy for anyone who believes that artists should be compensated for their work as well as for anyone who loves music, period. But it's clear that the record labels would rather sue than find a sensible rapprochement with the new world of digital distribution."
redux [05.02.00]
""The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway.
There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers.
And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt."
9:24 PM 0 comments
First Monday
Code, Culture and Cash: The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development
"The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this trend undermines cultural arguments about "hacker ethics" and "post-scarcity" gift economies. It suggests that classical economic theory offers a more succinct explanation for the peculiar international distribution of open source development: hacking rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost. This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them."
redux [12.03.01]
"How will IBM make money on free software? The idea is to use Linux to not only sell expensive computers but also high-margin software and big-ticket support and consulting services. Because nearly 60% of IBM's revenue comes from software and services, Linux plays into IBM's business model better than any other computer maker's. IBM believes the new sales will greatly exceed any revenue loss incurred from giving away the Linux operating system. Consider MDS Proteomics, a Toronto-based drug-research company. MDS bought a Linux supercomputer from IBM to do complex chemical calculations. MDS CEO Frank Gleeson says 50% of its multimillion dollar deal with IBM went toward consulting services and software, while the rest was spent on hardware and a joint-development effort with IBM researchers."
"Turning to the subject of Ximian Connector, I asked if Ximian expected flamage from the community for selling a proprietary software package. He replied, "We expect less than we would have expected awhile ago. I think that people understand that businesses have to survive. And the people know that the bloody carcasses of Open Source companies line the horizon right now.""
redux [11.21.00]
"The ideological purity of the open-source software business is being diluted by a new era of pragmatism as start-ups adjust to the economic slump."
"Where is our business model if everyone else can copy it?" asked Holger Dyroff, former CEO and now director of sales for Linux software seller SuSE. "The question is where we can make money now. Nobody cared about profitability two years ago."
"The new thinking often involves a proprietary product that has been built on top of an open-source foundation--a situation that could be considered the best, or worst, of both worlds."
"How to make money with the GPL. How to promote and spread free software. How open source's experience advantage with developers gives companies a competitive edge. Sleepycat President and CEO Michael Olson shows us what happens when free software meets intelligent business strategy."
"I love open source. I love what it stands for and I love the fact that as a connected society we've perfected the concepts surrounding 'division of labor' to such a degree that we're now afforded both the luxuries and opportunity to do what we want for the sheer enjoyment of it, even if that means coding into the wee hours of the night! I love business, I love creating them and working with people to run and fine-tune them. I especially love making money, whether it be for business, myself or others. Money has afforded me the freedom to pursue my other passions in life: travel, thinking, writing, creating and oh yea, partying! Most of all, I love it when I get to put all my loves together... all at the same time!
Must all mis amores live separate lives? Can't they just get along? I think they can. I think they will."
"Software pioneer and MIT research affiliate Richard M. Stallman has been named as a co-winner of the 2001 Takeda Award for Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement for Social/Economic Well-Being."
"Stallman has been recognized for his work leading the GNU operating system development project, and for starting the free software movement. GNU is an acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix,” a reference to the fact that the popular Linux operating systems actually operate off of GNU."
"Stallman hopes that software companies will eventually shift their source of income to custom software, support, and custom installations rather than proprietary software. “It is not impossible to make money from free software,” Stallman said."
"On November 5, 2001, IBM announced its donation of $40 million worth of tools to the Eclipse project. Eclipse, a fully functional software development environment that is written in Java, and that runs on both Linux and Windows, is intended to solve many of the problems of tool interoperability faced by developers of conventional tools."
"As analysts from the Hurwitz Group concluded, the move is consistent with IBM's commitment to Linux and growing tradition of incorporating open source code into its product lines: "With its experience with the open source application server Apache, and the Linux operating system, it makes sense that IBM would now move to provide the developer community with an open source development platform. The challenge for IBM and the Eclipse organization will be to draw strong and broad tool-vendor support to advance the platform, and to demonstrate that it is truly an open platform that enables straightforward tool integration to make it worthwhile for organizations to adopt. In addition, Eclipse needs to capture and enlist the efforts of the developer community at large, to test and refine the platform and add their innovation."
"This paper analyzes the evolving economic substrate of the open-source phenomenon. We first explode some prevalent myths about the funding of program development and the price structure of software. We present a game-theory analysis of the stability of open-source cooperation. We present nine models for sustainable funding of open-source development; two non-profit, seven for-profit. We continue to develop a qualitative theory of when it is economically rational to be closed. We then examine some novel additional mechanisms the market is now inventing to fund for-profit open-source development, including the reinvention of the patronage system and task markets. We conclude with some tentative predictions of the future."
redux [04.02.00]
" Open source is good for business. Now I should add that open source is not for everything in software. We have a very large and successful software business, and we're going to retain that. But open source is great for infrastructure code. The reason is that to make open source work, there has to be an overlap between the people who care about the software and the people who make the software better. As you get further up the application stack, those two groups become disjointed...so the software that checks you into a hospital will never be open source because the people who care about that can't write software."
5:38 PM 0 comments
CIO.Com
Patterns of Progress
"Despite all the fanfare about interactive applications and e-commerce, the killer app for the Internet is the same today as it was two decades ago—person-to-person communication. Although Web traffic is 20 times the volume of e-mail traffic, it is e-mail that delivers the highest value to consumers and businesses. And in the wireless data business, short-messaging service—used to send messages of up to 160 characters to mobile phone customers—is the unheralded killer app, not the fancy mobile commerce, news and entertainment applications that service providers love to talk about. The lesson is that value hides in the strangest of places, and killer apps sneak up on you from directions you least expect."
redux [10.16.01]
"What can operators do to boost traffic and maximise transport revenues?
The answer seems obvious: person-to-person communication. The success of text messaging relative to WAP shows that people like to use their phones to communicate with each other, rather than to download information from content providers. In the words of Andrew Odlyzko, a former AT&T researcher who is now at the University of Minnesota, "Content is not king - connectivity is more important." Indeed, he argues that the killer app for 3G phones might turn out to be increased voice traffic."
redux [03.19.01]
"Email is the gateway drug of the internet, because once email is in place, people begin to expect full interoperability."
"In fact, in a news flash that seems to have caught the entire telecommunications industry by surprise, people who buy mobile phones often like to communicate with one another. Had this not been such an absolutely unpredictable occurrence, maybe somebody at the WAP consortium could have predicted that when you add text to the phone, users might like to communicate with one another via text.
Access to email is the #1 feature customers want in a wireless text device (duh), and all those wireless auctions where the telcos spent 22 gajillion Zlotys to own the customer now look like a giant shell game, because the users don't want to get headline news. They want to talk to one another, and they will switch carriers until they are allowed to. Email is the thin end of the interoperability wedge, and this will be true of interactive TV as well."
redux [06.21.01]
"The Internet is used by almost three-quarters of U.S. teen-agers, a new report says. And nearly all of them are using instant-messaging technology in ways that may be transforming the manner in which kids deal with one another.
"It's kind of like having lots of telephones," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which conducted surveys late last year that were used in the 46-page report. "Because it's synchronous conversation, it's the quick-hit kind of stuff that a phone conversation would have, except you're having it in many cases with many, many people.""
redux [05.09.01]
"Conversations are an important part of our daily lives. For most people, in fact, they are the most important way to acquire and spread knowledge during a normal working day."
"Conversations provide a comfortable medium in which knowledge flows in both directions, and where contributors share an inherent context through their subjects and relationships. In addition to old forms of conversations--direct interaction and communication over the phone and in person--conversations are becoming an increasingly important part of the networked world. Witness the popularity of email, chat, and instant messaging, which enable users to increase the range and scope of their conversations to reach those that they may not have before."
"Still, little attention has been paid in recent years to the popular Internet channels that most naturally support conversations."
redux [02.18.01]
"The Internet is widely regarded as primarily a content delivery system. Yet historically, connectivity has mattered much more than content. Even on the Internet, content is not as important as is often claimed, since it is e-mail that is still the true "killer app."
The primacy of connectivity over content explains phenomena that have baffled wireless industry observers, such as the enthusiastic embrace of SMS (Short Message System) and the tepid reception of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Combined with statistics showing low cell phone usage, this also suggests that the 3G systems that are about to be introduced will serve primarily to stimulate more voice usage, not to provide Internet access.
For the wired Internet, the secondary role of content will likely mean that the dangers of balkanization are smaller than is often feared. Further, symmetrical links to the house are likely to be in greater demand than is usually realized. The huge sums being invested by carriers in content are misdirected."
redux [02.04.00]
"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."
"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."
8:35 PM 0 comments
News.Com
AOL: Just a cog in big media's wheel
"Old media officially took control of new media within the world's largest media company Wednesday, when CEO Gerald Levin unexpectedly announced his retirement. By selecting former Time Warner executive Parsons as his successor less than a year after the AOL-Time Warner merger, Levin disproved many assumptions about the direction of a company conceived at the height of dot-com power--and about the role of the Internet in creating a brave new world of media. Essentially, the establishment neutralized the revolution.
"In its role in a diversified media company, the Internet has a place as does any other medium," said Mark Mooradian, an analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix, commenting on the significance of the power transfer. "The Internet is simply another one.""
redux [07.08.01]
"Like its earthly manifestation, which also encompasses portions of Rockefeller Center eight blocks downtown and AOL's digs in Dulles, Virginia, the intangible cultural sprawl of AOL Time Warner is also vast and diverse. With content spanning much of mainstream music, movies, television, magazines, and other media; with access to the distribution of cable and online services; with some 90,000 employees including some 17,000 at Time Inc. and CNN; and with a combined customer base 130 million subscribers strong, the new company is dealing with the convergence of old media and new on an incomparably large scale. Because of its sheer size and the strength of its news brands, CNN and Time Inc., the forces and patterns set in motion by AOL/TW may well affect everyone in journalism -- in print, on TV, and in the evolving online frontier."
redux [03.09.01]
"In the Time Inc. division, which is the largest magazine outfit in the U.S., concerns are multiplying faster than staffers initially imagined. Some at Time Inc. are increasingly wary that the magazine business could be threatened by AOL?s lack of journalistic savvy and the huge pressure to meet AOL Time Warner?s extremely aggressive financial goals ? including increasing cash flow 30 percent this year ? amid an ever-deteriorating advertising climate."
"AOL Chairman Steve Case?s answer: The pressure would force people to abandon old ways of thinking and forge new relationships across its various units."
redux [02.21.01]
"From the Web's beginning, in 1995, a debate has simmered over the ethics of online journalism. Most established media have maintained as clear a distinction online as they do in print between news and commerce. Pure dot-coms, by contrast -- and so-called portals, in particular -- have been willing, even eager, to pair editorial and sales in ways that aren't entirely transparent to readers.
"AOL's purchase of Time Warner and its Time Inc. publishing unit -- a prominent ASME member -- has, overnight, transformed the world's largest and most profitable dot-com company into the world's largest and most prestigious magazine publisher as well. It has thus moved the debate over the Web's journalistic ethics from the realm of the theoretical to the intensely practical. The issue is: Whose standards should prevail -- those of AOL Time Warner the publisher or those of AOL Time Warner the newsstand aggregator?"
redux [04.11.00]
"America Online's president sees home entertainment and communications as a collection of boxes. The TV set is the ''tell-me-a-story box.'' The personal computer - ''the manage-your-life box.'' The CD player? ''The give-me-a-mood box.''
The roles for those machines