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Monday, July 08, 2002

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Link to instructions for displaying a list of recent posts on a Radio blog

Right-thinking on Copyright

Congressman Rick Boucher is for real and one of the few people in Congress who understand copyright well enough to draft intelligent laws (for unintelligent law see: "Berman Proposal A Publicity Stunt.") Boucher is the first sign of Intellectual Property intelligence to show up in DC since 1997. Read on through to the end of Jenny Levine at TSL's post and then contact your Congressman to support this idea.

Boucher To Fight The Good Fight. Rep. Boucher Outlines 'Fair Use' Fight "U.S. Congressman Rick Boucher, moving to strengthen 'fair use' provisions under federal copyright law, said he is introducing a bill that would essentially restrict the record industry from selling copy-protected CDs....

During a keynote address to the seventh annual Plug.IN digital music conference sponsored by Internet research firm Jupiter Media Metrix, the Virginia Democrat urged the record industry to reconsider int... [The Shifted Librarian]


FileMaker Goes XML

FileMaker to push universal information exchange. Upgrade focuses on XML data interchange, app integration [InfoWorld: Top News]

How To Think Out Loud

In this post "Jon Udell" takes an example of a quality weblog post and, in his typically cogent fashion, points out some of the most useful products of this activity.

I don't always agree with Jon -- sometimes he's so far out in front of the technology that I can't connect -- but I believe his points on the value of effective weblog usage are sound. William Zinsser's Writing to Learn is a classic text on how putting ideas to paper -- in an appropraite fashion -- clarifies thinking. (Sadly, I can't tell that such skills are any longer taught in public schools.) What Dave Winer calls narrating the work is a prime example of this. Jon's other points about the impact of a weblog are equally valid.

For any company to succeed at knowledge management -- or have an effective virtual company since they are artifacts of the same process -- there must be an emphasis on getting people to think out loud effectively. Virtual collaboration and knowledge management are not about application training, or technologies, or protocols.

They are about getting people to expose their thoughts to one another, and to do so in a way that is both useful and inviting. This does not come naturally to most people. It takes work. It takes guidance. And it takes some encouragement and support -- along with the right technology. But in the end the technology matters little, be it a weblog, a discussion group, or even e-mail. It is the human factors that are most important in trying to build dialogue.

Jeffrey P Shell thinking out loud about Zope. Here's Jeffrey P Shell thinking out loud about a Zope optimization puzzle: [...]

Although Jeffrey reaches no conclusions in this posting, I find his thinking-out-loud process incredibly valuable. Writing is a way to clarify thinking. Doing such writing on a weblog is the primal act of knowledge management. Here are some of the useful outcomes:

- Jeffrey thinks a little harder about this bit of analysis, because he's making it public.

- The fact that Jeffrey is wondering about these issues creates the possibility that, by manufactured serendipity, answers will come to him from people made aware of his interest.

- Now that I know Jeffrey's on the case, I'll remember to check his weblog (or contact him personally) when I next encounter a similar problem.

Thinking out loud isn't always useful, of course. You have to think about interesting things, and articulate them in useful ways, as Jeffrey always does. Dave Winer calls this "narrating the work." Knowledge management is really just about cultivating that habit and that skill. [...] [Jon's Radio]


Success and the Private RSS Feed

Great heaping gobs of success! I love it when a plan comes together. After many niggling errors and fubars -- caused by a loose nut connected to the keyboard -- I have finally succeeded at How to publish a category to a different FTP server, published that Category into a separate password-protected directory, and managed to get my News Aggregator to suscribe to Private RSS with User Authentication in Radio.

Woo Hoo! Big day at the races.

This is cool, as it has all sorts of implications for KM apps, client relations, etc. Very nice. Thanks to everyone on the Radio discussion group who helped me over the steep end of the learning curve.


Technology Review -- Do Readers Matter and DRM

This article from TR relates to the Do Readers Matter approach to DRM. Clearly to the networks the answer is "only as much as you watch the commercials." Just as the broadcast industry has come to see viewers as lifeless commodities, we should return the favor -- holding no interest in their survival, profitability, or long-term prospects.

No argument can be made that the broadcast industry is critical to any national or social interest and people like Kellner deserve a rude awakening to marketplace realities. Their investments are irrelevant, their history of import only to academics, their job base relevant only to the extent it produces something of actual value to the consumer.

In Kellner's world networks exist only as a delivery vehicle, transporting the sheep of a viewing audience to the slaughterhouse of advertisers. This model is of questionable value to society -- to the extent that Kellner thinks it should drive legislation it is a detriment.

Broadcasters, record companies, and (to a large extent) newspaper and book publishers have grown over enamored with their past success and lost sight of who's in charge. They have lost the sense of serving the customer that all their founders embodied.

There are certain technical advantages to, and justifiable uses for, specific DRM protocols and applications, but we should demand they justify themselves in the open market and not tolerate the subversive use of legislation to sustain outmoded, counter-productive business practices.

MIT's Technology Review - Treating Viewers as Criminals. Networks say watching TV without the ads is theft. Will blipverts be next?

The 1980s science fiction series, Max Headroom, depicted a society "twenty minutes into the future" ruled by powerful television networks locked in ruthless competition for viewer eyeballs. Concerned by the growing trend towards channel surfing, the blipvert was developed as a rapid-fire subliminal advertisement which pumped its commercial messages directly into consumers' brains before they had a chance to change the channel.

Unfortunately, the blipvert had the unanticipated side effect of causing spontaneous combustion in a certain number of overweight and chronically inactive couch potatoes. This outcome was viewed as an acceptable risk by the networks, even though it potentially decreased the number of viewers for their programs.

I could not help but think about blipverts the other day when I stumbled across the recent comments of Turner Broadcasting System CEO Jaimie Kellner, who asserted that television viewers who skipped commercials using their digital video recorders were guilty of "stealing" broadcast content. Kellner told an industry trade press reporter that "Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots." He conceded that there may be a historic loophole allowing us to take short breaks to go to the bathroom but otherwise, we are expected to be at our post, doing our duties, watching every commercial, and presumably, though he never said it, buying every product.

Kellner's intemperate rhetoric is, alas, characteristic of the ways that the media industry increasingly thinks about, talks about, and addresses its consumers in the post-Napster era. Napster may--and I stress, may--have been legitimately labeled piracy, but now all forms of consumerism are being criminalized with ever-decreasing degrees of credibility. Once going to the bathroom or grabbing a snack on a commercial break gets treated as a form of theft, the media conglomerates are going to be hard pressed to get consumer compliance with their expectations, making it impossible to draw legitimate lines about what is and is not appropriate use of media content.

[ ... ]

If the networks stopped at name-calling, that would be one thing, but they didn't. Last fall, the networks sued SONICBlue, the manufacturer of ReplayTV, and convinced a Federal Magistrate to force the company to collect data on thousands of individual consumers: what shows they watch, what commercials they skip, and what--if anything--they forward to their friends. Not content to wait and worry, the networks are now invading our privacy to ensure that we make good on Kellner's imaginary contract. Thankfully, the order was subsequently stayed by a higher court.

Confronting such hostility, consumers are increasingly committing acts of passive resistance (flush often!) and forming organizations, such as DigitalConsumer.org, which is making the case that consumers have rights and interests in the negotiations that occur between media producers, technology companies, and policy-makers. To borrow a line from Network, "we are mad as hell and we aren't going to take it anymore." [Privacy Digest]


Udell on Where DRM Fits

Jon Udell, who worked on O'Reilly's leading-edge Safari digital content store, says ubiquitous DRM is not going to help e-Book sales, or better the market. I have to agree. Continued efforts to create Trusted Computing environments that essentially treat all computer users as criminals will not provide any rational basis for growth, nor will it enhance the computing experience for anyone.

To be of value, the e-content has to be as freely usable as a book, not less so. e-Paper is a first step, but one that is still years away...

DRM, active paper, and the future of publishing. Lack of good, ubiquitous DRM is the only thing holding us back from some really cool advances. More than two years ago, Microsoft started making some big bets on e-books... ...
[Jon's Radio]

Weblogs Are Disruptive Technology

Another take on Clayton Christensen's disruptive technology spectrum

Weblogs are to CMSes as pcs are to mainframes. I came across a slightly-too-long but ultimately interesting article called Blogs as Disruptive Tech. The thesis: weblogs are to big, expensive content management systems (CMSes) as the PC was to the IBM mainframe. Very interesting read.
[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]

Inter-link for Multi-User Weblogs and Intranets

Not sure where this fits. It isn't specific to Radio -- I don't think the Moveable Type TrackBack even works in Radio -- but I wanted to capture the thought about automatically linking certain entries to different logs, i.e. a project team working on customer service systems might want to link to the log kept by the CSRs for problem resolution, etc.

Using MT TrackBack for Cross-functional Team Blogs.

Just yesterday Glen and I were talking about what balance to strike between multi-author weblogs and individual weblogs on our intranet. I think that eventually we would evolve our blogs on the intranet to single-author but enable some way to port or otherwise indicate certain of their posts for diffferent teams the writer might be on. We use MovableType and had not yet come up with an elegant way to do this that still met our needs (it is partially a taxonomy challenge, of course!).

The new MT TrackBack might fit the bill:

Multiple "authors" without author accounts

Say you want to have your readers contribute to your blog, but do not want to add them as an author; either because you want to limit the number of authors or you don't want the work of having to add new people each time someone wants to post something interesting. Or, you may not want their posts to "weigh" as much as your official set of multiple authors.

With TrackBack, you can set up a section of your site to receive pings.

Kristine, one of our beta-testers, used her site, The Red Kitchen, as an example:
"If I had a category named 'Red Kitchen Guests' and allowed pings to it... then anyone with an MT blog could post a recipe on their page and ping my guest category. Then it could automatically list a ping link and excerpt on the Guest category page."

With this we could set up team weblogs that just gather TalkBack pings from team members who are writing klog entries. Ideally I would like for individual writers to set one or more of their categories to auto-ping relevant team klogs when a new entry of that category is posted. I'm not sure that TalkBack supports category auto-pinging right now but maybe we could do it somehow via category templates.

I'm looking forward to experimenting with this. [High Context]


e-Bay Seeks PayPal Purchase

Interesting business model -- start out by becoming the world's largest flea market, end up being the world's largest e-commerce banking service. Out of all this may come the only dot.com that belongs in the S&P500.

eBay buys PayPal. $1.5bn in stock
[The Register]

Taking the Long View on e-Books

Jenny Levine at TSL certainly understands e-Books. I've seen a lot of money and effort get poured down the e-book drain in the hysterical hope that some paperless book revolution was going to make everybody rich. As usual both the naysayers and zealots are wrong. Jenny has her feet planted firmly in the middle, which is where we all belong.

Ebooks Don't Need To Fly Off Shelves. E-Books Not Exactly Flying Off The Shelves "But a couple of months ago, BookExpo America 2002 in New York was virtually devoid of e-book chatter. The two-year-old International eBook Award Foundation folded this year due to lack of funding -- and interest. About the only time you hear the topic mentioned in publishing circles these days is when this question comes up: Where have all the e-books gone?

There are those in the industry who continue to emote about the e-book and prais... [The Shifted Librarian]


Weblog Compendium.

Weblog Compendium. Here's an interesting list of tools and weblog-related stuff: the Weblog Compendium. All kinds of stuff, and you can add your own resources. [Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]

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