O'Reilly Digital Media

Related link: http://www.feedmap.net/BlogMap/

I recently started seeing blogmaps showing up on people’s blogs, and immediately I liked this concept. It’s fun being able to see the location of the bloggers around you.

BlogMap is essentially a directory of blogs based on the URL of the blog and the longitude and latitude of your location. To add your blog, the best way to do it is to add the longitude and latitude in a meta tag in your header. There is a way to initially add a blog using your address, but it’s not possible to update the location of your blog this way. Also, note that it’s currently not possible to remove a blog from the directory once added through the interface (although an email to the site manager will probably do the trick).

Also, note that BlogMap only works with feeds, not webpages. So if you try to add the geo location to a regular web page and submit that, it won’t work.

First, you’ll need to find the longitude and latitude of your location. A great online resource for this is Terra-Server USA. Type in your address in the form on the left and click Go. If it works, it will match your location and give you a choice of images. Click on the Arial Photo Image (if available), and you’ll see your location and hopefully, the longitude and latitude of this location will be filled in for you on the left panel, underneath where you typed your address.

You can click on Info above the image to see the longitude and latitude of the quadrants around your area, and to find the latitude and longitude of locations that do not have an address.

Now, to create a map for your own blog, edit the template that generates your blog feed and add the following meta tag to the header:

<meta name="geo.position" content="[latitude];[longitude]">

Save your template and republish your blog. Now you can submit your blog to BlogMap here. Once, you’ve submitted your blog, you can now add your blog map to your blog with the following HTML/Javascript; again, edit your template to add this code to your blog:

<div><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.feedmap.net/blogmap/blogapi.ashx?method=blogmapbadge&feed=http://[URL of your feed here]"></script></div>

BlogMap will generate the correct code for you to add to your webpage, so you can just cut and paste from the site after submitting your blog.

Related link: http://www.apple.com/podcasting/

Do a software update on your Mac this morning, and you’ll get a new version of iTunes and iPod Updater that support podcasts. Apple announced this morning that iTunes is supporting podcasts directly.

When you run the new version of iTunes, you’ll see a new section in the source pane on the left, Podcasts:

Click on Podcasts and you’ll see in the bottom of the main window a link to the Podcast Directory. Clicking here takes you to the Podcast Directory at the iTunes Music Store:

To listen to a podcast, simply select the one you want and iTunes creates a list of the available streams. The top of the browse window shows information about the show, just like in the normal iTunes music store shows information about an album, and underneath is the list of shows. Click on the subscribe button, and a link to the podcast is added to your podcast directory:

You can also subscribe to a podcast directly by selecting Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast and entering the URL.

Synching podcasts with your iPod is easy. Choose iTunes Preferences, then click on the Podcasts tab. You’ll see “Set which Podcasts are copied to your iPod: iPod Preferences”. Click on iPod Preferences, and you can choose which podcasts to synch with your iPod, and how many episodes (all, most recent, etc.). Click ok, and the podcasts you’ve downloaded will be synched automatically.

I really like that I no longer have to use a separate application to manage my podcasts.

What do you think of the iTunes Podcast support?

At the E3 show this year, I had a nice discussion with a charming young fella who had worked on a game called “Call of Juarez.” A nice looking game. Which often triggers a fear in me that the game might be all looks and no fun.

I asked him about the game, and he started to talk on and on about the physics. After a while, I said, well, what about gameplay? And he said, “Physics is the game.”

So what I shoulda done is WHOP HIM UPSIDE HIS FAT HEAD WITH A BASEBALL BAT, and then said, “There. How do you like my GAME????”

Idiot.

And I mean that in the nicest way possible…

OK, OK, tell me how wrong I am. But in your heart, you know that Mario Kart is every bit as fun as Grand Tourismo.

Ernest Miller: Case Muddies the Law

I just got off the phone with Ernest Miller, author of The Importance Of … blog (I interviewed him last year about the failed Induce Act). Here are his thoughts about the decisions:

Overall, Miller said, it’s a muddled result. “If I were Intel or Apple, I’d be quite happy. If I were a smalltime innovator, I’d be less comfortable.” Major techs should easily be able to avoid the appearance of inducement and in any case would have the deep pockets to fend off liability suits. Small companies wouldn’t have those resources and would be more vulnerable.

“To a certain extent, there remains a lot of uncertainty. There’s certainly more certainty that there was. Is there enough for everybody? I don’t really think so.”

Essentially, Miller said “the Court didn’t draw as bright a line as they might have” on what constitutes contributory liability. “It seems to me that things like “they made money because of violations … to use that as evidence of intentionally inducing” is confusing. He’s referring to a part of the decision that suggests that the networks’ business model leads to infringement.

“It is is useful to recall that StreamCast and Grokster make money by selling advertising space, by directing ads to the screens of computers employing their software. … The more the software is used, the more ads are sent out and the greater the advertising revenue becomes. Since the extent of the software’s use determines the gain to the distributors, the commercial sense of their enterprise turns on high-volume use, which the record shows is infringing. This evidence alone would not justify an inference of unlawful intent, but viewed in the context of the entire record its import is clear.”

So, a high-traffic, online-advertising based business model is illegal, or at least puts a company at higher risk? To Miller, that’s where the uncertainty is. For Apple or Intel, advertising is a small percentage of their total revenue. They may choose to eliminate that business. For small companies, advertising may be their only revenue. Does that make them vulnerable to charges of inducement if users start using it for copyright infringement?

Miller participated in the Wall Street Journal’s public roundtable on the decision and put the question this way:

In this decision, the Court emphasizes that StreamCast and Grokster followed in the wake of Napster and wanted to capture Napster’s users. But, heck, iTunes wants to capture Napster’s users as well. What would StreamCast and Grokster have to have done in order to avoid liability for following in the footsteps of bad actor Napster? What will the next developer of P2P have to do if Grokster and StreamCast are found liable in the lower court?

Does the next company that deploys a Grokster-like or gnutella-based network become illegal? “That is unclear,” Miller said.

I asked Miller is BitTorrent would be vulnerable to lawsuits now that the decision has been issued. “BitTorrent is probably not vulnerable,” he said. “But the BitTorrent search engine possibly raises questions. It remains murky because of the intent issue.”

Despite claims of “complete victory,” the opinion is anything but, Miller said. Hollywood was looking for a refutation of Sony or at least a narrowing of it. While the majority decision declined to re-examine Sony, the existence of the two concurring opinions regarding the landmark case serve again to muddy the waters.

Any lower court looking at Sony now has three opinions to point to - the original decision, Ginsburg’s opinion urging a narrowing of Sony, and Breyer’s opinion reasserting the scope of the decision. “Sony is up for grabs,” Miller said.

At the end of the day, Grokster’s road is not yet over. The case now goes to trial and although the trial court is under orders to find Grokster guilty of inducement, the court might still invoke Sony and it might find its way up to the Supreme Court again. Very likely it will wind up in the Court of Appeals.

A final note. The case is likely to put a stop to congressional action for an INDUCE bill, which was introduced and failed last year. Miller says: “The Supreme Court didn’t give them the INDUCE Act but it gave them (Hollywood) a lot. That makes it difficult to get INDUCE through Congress now.” If Grokster and its brethren go down because of this ruling, that may have to satisfy Hollywood for awhile.

Understanding Grokster

In the Grokster case, the RIAA, the MPAA and various other copyright holders sued Grokster and StreamCast because of the widestread illegal downloading of copyright content from the services. Both the trial court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found the P2P companies had no liability because the Sony decision protects companies whose technology is capable of “substantial noninfringing uses.” The Appeals Court found no liability unless “the distributor had actual knowledge of specific instances of infringement and failed to act on that knowledge.

The studios had asked that the Supreme Court use this case to revisit Sony and overturn it or issue a narrower interpretation of it, so that the pendulum of liability would swing more towards the copyright holders.

The Court declined. The Appeals Court’s “view of Sony, however, was error,” Justice Souter writes for the majority, “converting the case from one about liability resting on imputed intent to one about liability on any theory.” Because of this error, “we do not revisit Sony further, as MGM requests, to add a more quantified description of the point of balance between protection and commerce …”

Sony, the Court explained, said that a company couldn’t be held liable merely on the basis of distributing a technology that is capable of infringing uses. It doesn’t preclude liability based on other corporate behavior.

And in this case, the Court finds plenty of unsavory behavior. Basically, the companies engaged in all kinds of marketing designed to promote the services for the purpose of illegally downloading copyright material. The Court thus offers a new theory of contributory liability, an inducement theory. The Court sent the case back to District Court with a strong suggestion that Grokster and StreamCast be found liable under this inducement theory.

“Evidence of the distributor’s words and deeds … shows a purpose to cause and profit from third-party acts of copyright infringement. If liability for inducing infringement is ultimately found, it will not be on the basis of presuming or imputing fault [unacceptable under Sony - RK] but from inferring a patently illegal objective from statements and actions showing what that objective was.”

So Grokster and StreamCast go back to trial where they must be found liable under the Court’s decision today. End of story?

Not quite. There were two other opinions issued in this case, both concurring with the majority decision. Justice Ginsburg’s opinion, which was joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Kennedy, looks askance at much of the evidence presented to show that noninfringing uses were occurring on the networks. Indeed she calls it a “motley collection of declarations.” She doubts that there is very much on the P2P networks that is not copyrighted content, and cautions that “if … the case is not resolved … in favor of MGM based on Grokster and StreamCast actively inducing infringement, the Court of Appeals … should reconsider, on a fuller record, its interpretation of Sony’s product distribution holding.”

Justice Breyer, meanwhile, wrote a concurring opinion disagreeing with Ginsburg and restating the correctness of Sony. “A strong demonstrated need for modifying Sony (or for interpreting Sony’s standards more strictly) has not yet been shown.

EFF: ‘An era of uncertainty’

EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann says in the EFF press release that the decision includes a new theory - inducement of copyright violation - that spells trouble for technology companies:

Today the Supreme Court has unleashed a new era of legal uncertainty on America’s innovators. The newly announced inducement theory of copyright liability will fuel a new generation of entertainment industry lawsuits against technology companies. Perhaps more important, the threat of legal costs may lead technology companies to modify their products to please Hollywood instead of consumers.

THE OPINIONS (PDFs)

The opinion of the Court (Souter)

Concurring opinion (Ginsburg)
Concurring opinion (Breyer)

PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE - BETAMAX RULE ‘RE-EMPHASIZED AND PRESERVED’
Here’s a statement on the case from Public Knowledge CEO Gigi Sohn (via Ernest Miller’s The Importance Of …):

… [T]o the extent that providers of P2P technology do not intentionally encourage infringement, they are exempt from secondary liability under our copyright law. The Court also acknowledged, importantly, that there are lawful uses for peer-to-peer technology, including distribution of electronic files ‘by universities, government agencies, corporations, and libraries, among others.’

The Court is clearly aware that any technology-based rule would have chilled technological innovation. That is why their decision today re-emphasized and preserved the core principle of Sony v. Universal City Studios — that technology alone can’t be the basis of copyright liability — and focused clearly and unambiguously on whether defendants engaged in intentional acts of encouraging infringement. The Court held expressly that liability for providing a technological tool … depends on ‘clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement.’ What this means is, in the absence of such clear expression or other affirmative acts fostering infringement, a company that provides peer-to-peer technology is not going to be secondarily liable under the Copyright Act.”

MGM won on paper today, but my first reading of the opinion makes me wonder whether the victory will have any bite outside of this specific litigation. Intent-based standards, after all, are among the easiest to avoid. Just keep your message clear — tell everyone that your technology is designed to facilitate only authorized exchange — and you have no risk of accountability.

Lichtman filed a brief in support of the studios and was looking for a much broader decision - to allow liability based on a company’s failure to take technical steps to block illegitimate uses. He didn’t get that, and that God. Such a decision would have set the courts up as arbiters of what is technically feasible and what is not. Going down that road would be a very sticky path. You can already see companies selecting architectures based on plausible deniabiity rather than technical efficiency.

UNANIMOUS RULING AGAINST GROKSTER - The Supreme Court has decided unanimously against Grokster in the MGM v Grokster case. [Associated Press]

The decision settles the question of whether Grokster can be sued for the behavior of its users. The case is now cleared to go to trial. A trial court would have to decide whether Grokster and Streamcast induced users to break the law. It doesn’t appear that lawbreaking without inducement would be sufficient for liability.

“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by the clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties,” Justice David H. Souter wrote for the court.

Things don’t look for Grokster, though. “There is substantial evidence in MGM’s favor on all elements of inducement,” Souter wrote.

How do you feel about the Grokster decision? How will it impact your business?

Related link: http://www.gnomedex.com

Hobie Swan started off the morning with an extended demo on MindManager, a brainstorming tool that makes use of MindMaps. Although Hobie concentrated on the software, there’s a lot of interesting information out there about how to approach creative activities using MindMaps. As an aside, the concept grew out of Tony Buzan’s work and he’s got a great book on the topic The Mind Map Book. We often use MindMaps when developing the material for the Head First series.

MindManger looks like a solid application for MindMapping, including some fairly sophisticated integration that I haven’t seen in other similar applications (including exporting to MS Project, XML, etc.). It also has some RSS support built in, which seems interesting, but I’m not quite sure how that would be used in practice. While I think the demo could have introduced the topic more generally, it is nice to see a presentation on the subject.

The highlight of the morning (if not the entire show) was Julie Leung’s talk. Julie narrated a sequence of pictures and simple text that wove together a personal story of life, family, kids, love and death and its relation to personal expression and blogging. If you have the chance to see this talk at another conference, see it. I won’t try to do this talk justice with a summary, but it is one of the best I’ve seen in a long time and brings us all back to why we ultimately create all this technology.

Julie’s talk was followed by a panel session on the RSS of tomorrow. On the panel: Mark Fletcher (Bloglines), Scott Rafer (Feeders), Bob Wyman (PubSub) on Tomorrow’s RSS. This session might be relabeled RSS & advertising - it included a fair amount of debate on the ad model (reminscent of early web debates on the same topic). The consensus came down on the side that advertising via RSS is still in the expermental mode, and expressing itself in a few ways:

• Explicit advertising in feeds.
• Publish excerpts that tease readers back to your site (where conventional advertising kicks in).
• Publish full content as a means of advertising expertise, etc.

Some discussion was also spent on RSS specifications, including ATOM vs RSS as well as discussion of how to publish your own feeds (publish all the formats you can? or keep it simple?). After much discussion Dave Winer jumped in and invoked the “Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive” mantra. On ATOM vs RSS, most agreed RSS will be with us forever, but ATOM may allow some publishers to do things they can’t currently do with RSS.

Related link: http://www.mindjet.com/us/

Hobie Swan from MindJet Software kicked off this morning’s Gnomedex with a demo of Mind Manager, a really cool mind mapping application. He demoed the software on a tablet PC, which is exactly how it should be used, because it enables quick gestures to add and organize the mind map, as well as drawings that can be added to the mind map directly. This is a big advantage over software such as Free Mind (a rockin’ open source Java mind mapping application) which doesn’t support the pen tablet or drawings, although it does support images.

For those not familiar with mind maps, they are a visual technique for generating ideas and enhancing creativity. Developed by Tony Buzan, mind maps are great for brainstorming because they take advantage of the “right brain” creativity by using non-linear ideas, and graphics and drawings. When you write a text-only, top-down outline, your brain is in logical “left brain” mode. Opening up your idea generation to allow ideas to sprout in any direction, and to feel free to add color and drawings gets your creative juices flowing.

I use mind maps extensively in creative endeavors, including planning out and generating ideas for Head First books. So does my friend and co-author, Kathy Sierra. She blogged about this software recently after she saw a demo of Mind Manager on a tablet PC at ETech 2005. She said it almost convinced her to buy… gasp… a Windows machine just so she could mind map with a tablet and with pictures.

Good news - she doesn’t have to! Hobie revealed that yes, MindJet is working on a Mac version of Mind Manager (yay!). So if we can just convince Steve Jobs to develop iTablet, we’ll be set. In the mean time, I’ll have my Wacom tablet next to my iBook, ready to go.

gnomedex

Do you use mind maps?

Related link: http://www.gnomedex.com/

First, new gnomenclature from Chris Pirillo:

scobull, wi-fud (no wireless available - thanks to the large attendence at Gnomedex this morning, we actually had a wi-fud for a little while! but was soon fixed, just in time for the demos to start), googie (any app builder or app itself built on top of google), quackback (facetious trackback), fraudcast (podcast whose owner gets bored after a while and moves on to some other project), arressess (mythical orange beast), canterize (to interrupt enthusiastically), bitchtorrent (the act of automatically dismissing any competing data transmission), slashdork (one who comments just to comment), swuck (useless swag that gets thrown away), firefoxy, rubelicious (the feeling of being a PR hotshot), curryq (an old hair style that you wish you’d never had), technoerrati (feed entry that just keeps showing up…), winerd (one who reads scripting new while brushing their teeth in the morning).

After the vocabulary lesson, Dave Winer kicked things off with a keynote about his new OPML editor. He’s releasing this in open source within a month or so, and hopes it will take off as a way to manage lists effectively without having to get into editing XML and RSS, etc. directly. It includes a directory building structure for podcasts as well. Dave talked about how he considers both RSS and OPML and document formats; RSS for news outlines and OPML for lists and hierarchies. Check out this article Dave wrote about the OPML editor recently for more.

Dave also talked about how he sees blogs working at work: that is, narrating your work. He says it has been useful for him and his virtual workspace that he shares with a few employees/developers - he likes that he can keep track of what people are doing via their blogs, and also said that he likes working with people who are enthusiastic about narrating their work regularly and in an organized way, better than those who can’t seem to do this.

Dave closed with a … ahem… slighly off-key version of Yellow Submarine, joined by several audience members. A memorable way to end a keynote.

Dean Hachamovitch from Microsoft then took the stage for the keystone address. He and an associate whose name I didn’t catch talked about RSS support in Longhorn. They demoed IE7 and a couple of apps they’ve built in Longhorn that make use of what they call the “common feed list”, which seems to be simply that a user’s subscriptions are stored in a common area available to all apps, not just the browser. Finally catching up to Safari and Firefox, IE7 will support RSS directly, including automatically detecting feeds on a page, and displaying a view of an rss feed in the browser. An API for accessing the common feed list will be available in the various Longhorn developer suites, which they demoed with simple applications to pull enclosures into other apps (e.g. ics enclosures into Outlook, and photo enclosures into a custom app for a slideshow).

They also talked about extensions that Microsoft is making to RSS to allow more rich metadata that they’re making available through a creative commons license and which they hope will become standard. For example, they demoed an RSS feed with extensions to support lists (that is, a feed that can be both added to and removed from, as well as sorted) and Amazon item data from the Amazon web services feeds.

I had fun hanging in the Cove, which was the overflow room for the conference, with other late-comers to the conference, including Chris’ energetic and very friendly mother Judy, who provided running commentary about the conference and her son too. Thanks Judy!

gnomedex

Your feedback about Gnomedex?

Related link: http://www.gnomedex.com

Dean Hachamovitch, GM of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team is here to tell us that Microsoft gets RSS, and gets it big. So big they want it to permeate Longhorn.

Wearing a “Longhorn HEART RSS” t-shirt, Dean described Longhorn as an OS that produces and consumes RSS at every turn. In the first public viewing of IE7, Dean showed how visiting a page with an RSS feed automatically enables the orange RSS button in the brower’s toolbar. Clicking on the button allows the user to preview the feed and also to subscribe. Further demos showed Outlook consuming .ics calendar files that were embedded as RSS enclosures (after developing some glue code to make it all work) and a custom photo slideshow based around RSS feeds with .jpeg enclosures.

If you’re scratching your hand thinking “so what? I can do all this on my Mac now,” you’d be in sync with most of the audience. That said, there is a bit more to the story: what Microsoft has done is essentially build an RSS aggregator into the OS and expose API’s that any application can make use of to produce or consume RSS. That’s a little more interesting (and perhaps would have made for a more interesting talk and discussion).

Related link: http://www.gnomedex.com

Dave Winer presented the opening keynote in a style he called bloglike, which
means he provided a title and description of the talk, and let the rest of the
keynote be driven by “comments” and “trackbacks” from him and the crowd
(I have a feeling Dave gave talks like this long before Blogs or RSS).

Although Dave (and everyone else) was plagued with network problems, Dave did manage to give a demo of what he calls THE OPML Editor. In the demo Dave showed how he uses the editor (which will look familiar to anyone that has used the Userland editor) to publish and manage the content on Scripting News.

Dave said that Userland had tried to get the editor out there, but it didn’t lift off the way he’s hoped, so now he’s hoping open source will be a better path. Currently the open source effort has an early version of a Windows application and they are working hard on a Mac port, which Dave says is their biggest limit to growth right now. About 60 people are using the existing version and this will be expanded once the software “can give 80% of people a good experience”.

Related link: http://www.gnomedex.com/

I’m off to Gnomedex this morning to catch the opening keynote by Dave Winer and check out some of the other sure-to-be-interesting presentations.

Other O’Reilly folks heading up to Seattle for the event include gadgeteer Phillip Torrone of MAKE magazine, and Eric Freeman, who is my partner in crime on the Head First series. We’ll be blogging along with another 200 or so bloggers who will be there.

Gnomedex is presented by Chris Pirillo of lockergnome and The Chris Pirillo Show. Chris recently moved to Seattle (and posts occasionally on Metroblogging Seattle as well). He managed to drum up quite a bit of publicity from the local papers, which was great - I learned more about Chris than Gnomedex, but he’s an interesting (and apparently very energetic) guy! Check out the articles at the Seattle Times and the Seattle PI. I had no idea you could rent out his chest; now *that’s* a novel idea (and not even that geeky either).

But Gnomedex promises to have plenty of geek appeal. As John Dvorak (PC Magazine) says, “Gnomedex “is very nerdy. The speakers are up there and only about 10 percent of the people will be watching. The rest will be blogging it. It looks like one of the reporters’ nooks at a baseball game.”

There’s no shortage of reportage from Gnomedex already, and it’s barely started. Check out the del.icio.us gnomedex tag, the flickr gnomedex tag and the Gnomedex Wiki to get in on the action. I’ll be reporting more from this completely wired event throughout the morning.

gnomedex

Your thoughts on Gnomedex?

Related link: http://www.gnomedex.com/

I’m heading to Gnomedex this Friday and Saturday. Check in for comments on the conference. PT of MAKE Magazine is demoing during the breaks and Winer and Curry are both keynoting. Looking forward to it.

This also happens to be my first O’Reilly.net blog!

Related link: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/

I installed Tiger (10.4) on my iMac G5 about a month ago and I haven’t looked back. I have found only one bug so far - when I plug in my headphones to the sound out jack in the back and then pull them back out, I can’t get the sound to go back onto the speakers unless I reboot.

Anyway, the reason I’m posting is because one of the things I love about Tiger is dashboard widgets! Many of them are completely useless, but tons of fun. But there are a few that I’ve quickly found to be indispensible:

• Dashflix: a Netflix widget that shows me what’s on my queue and what movies I have out. Very quick and handy way to get Netflix updates without going to the site.
• US Weather: a weather map that I keep on “current weather”. When I click on it, it zooms in and gets big. Very cool.
• AccuWeather: a forecast widget with lovely graphics showing the highs/lows and sunny/rain for 5 days.
• Wikipedia: A little window into the best encyclopedia online. I look up everything I want to more about on Wikipedia already, so this widget just makes it even more handy.
• Dictionary/Thesaurus: A must for writers :-)
• RabbitRadio: NPR all the time.
• Movie Finder: Easy way to check on movies playing in my local area.
• Last but not least: the Daily Tao, a widget with a verse from the Tao Te Ching each day to help get my mind in the right place.

What’s on YOUR dashboard??

What’s on YOUR dashboard??

Related link: http://www.flashforwardconference.com

July 6th-8th in NYC is going to be hotter than you think.

FlashForward is always a hopping event, but this year should be extraordinary. With the uptick in technology spending, the Flash/ActionScript job market has really heated up. Companies of all sizes in the NYC area have been desperate for skilled developers as of late. With Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia and Flash 8 in the wings, the demand is just going to increase.

So whether you’re new to Flash, a budding ActionScripter, or an experienced developer, FlashForward will teach you a lot and help advance your skills and career. There is always great technical information, the inside scoop from Macromedia (sneak previews), and networking opportunities galore. If you’re a developer, it is a great place to find work. If you’re looking for Flash/ActionScript talent, you’ll find it in droves.

Check out the details at http://www.flashforwardconference.com

You won’t be sorry.

If you’re from out of town, there are other FlashForward conferences venues, including the SF show (usually in March). But if you’re near NYC, this is the one to catch.

Related link: http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=889

My first in a regular series of open source geospatial articles garnered some interesting comments/discussion. It was a general “Benefits of Open Source” article - particularly geared toward the geospatial industry. Unfortunately the initial comment that sparked the reactions was removed today, but you still get the idea.

Jo Walsh, co-author of Mapping Hacks, had some further interesting comments in this blog: http://mappinghacks.com/index.cgi/2005/06/20#osgis_hump

My monthly articles for Directions Magazine are focused on open source geospatial technologies and concepts.

Related link: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/arts/2005/03/11/ohbearme.jpg

Dying might very well be like getting your first cel phone, I think.

It seems like everybody’s doing it, despite the fact that they were fine before.

You put it off for as long as you can, but it’s inevitable. You’re going to do it.

And you know what?

Once you do it, it’s probably going to turn out to be not quite so bad as you thought it would be.

C’mon Back!

You shouldn’t smoke,
and you should wear a belt.

Because otherwise,
you’ll get cancer,
and your pants will fall down.

You gonna argue with that?

This story takes place in three parts. Stick with me, now!

1. On the first day, I was reading a book about history–”Weird History 101.” I learned that Attila the Hun wore very plain clothes. His officers, on the other hand, wore very ornate clothes, fancy weapons, gold, jewels, and the scalps of people they had killed, sometimes sewn into fancy napkins or made into sharp outfits. But the Big Man kept it simple.

2. On the second day, I was researching Gandhi, because my parents had sent me a photo of an inscription they had seen at his memorial site. The inscription intrigued me, and applied to my life in an interesting way, so I wanted to investigate and savor the quotation. Maybe you guys have heard of his “Seven Social Sins,” but I hadn’t, and here they are:

Seven Social Sins

*Politics without Principle
*Wealth Without Work
*Pleasure Without Conscience
*Knowledge without Character
*Commerce without Morality
*Science without Humanity
*Worship without Sacrifice

- Young India, 22-10-1925

Cool, huh? I banged around on this web site for a while, and of course, gathered much information and inspiration. http://www.mkgandhi.org/FAQ/faq_index.htm

Stay with me now, here comes the good part.

3. So on the third day, I’m in a very fancy jewelry shop in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and I’m considering buying a nice turquoise-and-silver watch to go with my priceless museum-quality rhinestone cowboy suits. But I didn’t get one. Because a little voice in my head kept saying:

“What would Gandhi and Attila the Hun do?”

What does _your_ little voice say?

A few months ago we got a new Dell 1U server in house specifially for use as a monitoring machine. Our existing methods of monitoring, particularly for looking at bandwidth utilization, were not scaling well.

The box is now running several applications:

• Cacti: PHP/MySql-based network graphing
• Nagios: Server monitoring
• Smokeping: Excellent network latency monitor
• Netflow: Cisco monitoring tools based on this setup

In the process of getting all these tools set up and configured, I had first attempted to use Fedora Core 3, which at the time was the current release. I ran into quite a few problems particularly with MySQL for Cacti, and some other missing things.

If you’ve spent any time around Linux on a server, you know the drill: You need package X. You attempt to install package X using apt-get or yum or whatever package mangler your distribution has, only to see something like

This package needs Package Z, Package ZZ-dev, Packages foo through bar
or
You can’t upgrade Package Z because Packages A-Y depend on it

Which is exactly the problem I ran into with Fedora Core 3 at the time. My solution was to install Fedora Core Test 1 and see if it worked, which it did. I’m not thrilled about using a test release for a production server, but the box is not hosting critical services, so I went ahead.

This week with the release of Fedora Core 4, all I had to do was downlaod the ISOs, boot from the CDs I made, upgrade the OS, reboot, and everything just works.

Normally I don’t upgrade operating systems. I’ve had too many bad experiences. But this one just worked, it was clean, it was fast and I really have to give the people who make Fedora a big hand for making what would be very painful an easy and quick install.

As I’ve been thinking lately about file-sharing and the “Information wants to be free” argument, I’ve had a couple of reminders that all property is intellectual property:

1) I went hiking in the Santa Lucia Mountains above Carmel Valley, California. I saw beautiful landscapes such as this one:



And I passed a sign letting me know that while my previous steps had been on public property, the next ones would be on private property:



What was the difference? If I had asked the trail I was walking on, it would have had nothing to say on its legal status. Some people decided that part of this land is public, and part is private. If we all agree, the private part can be bought, sold or rented for money.

2) I learned recently that the “real” in “real estate” doesn’t refer to reality, but to ownership by the king. (Does everyone else already know this?) Here’s an explanation from laborlawtalk.com:

“…in a monarchy, all land was considered the property of the king. Thus originally the term real estate was equivalent to “royal estate”, real originating from the French royale, as it was the French-speaking Normans who introduced feudalism to England and thus the English language; cognate to Spanish real.”

3) Today, we bought some crackers from Whole Foods, a great organic food store which nevertheless is sometimes referred to as Whole Paycheck. The crackers were eight in number, and $5.00 in price. 62 cents a cracker. What is being sold here is not the crackers, but the experience of paying that much for crackers. It makes you feel, uh… Healthy? Wealthy? Inattentive? Well, one of those things, but it ain’t the crackers.

Property is an intellectual concept, in the real world or the digital world, and it’s up to us to decide what gets paid for and how much, not some mystical quality in being information — it’s all information.

What does make information free?

Related link: http://www.npd.com/dynamic/releases/press_050607.html

Not everyone believes the numbers in the widely reported (including by me) NPD Group study that claims the for-pay iTunes is the 2nd-most popular digital music service, tying with the free P2P service Limewire. The NPD study said that “Both iTunes and LimeWire were used by 1.7 million households. The most popular digital music service that month was WinMX, which was used by 2.1 million households to download music.”

Tom Mennecke of slyck.com wrote to me to say he believes the study’s results to be “completely false.” Mennecke argues, “They are saying that 1.7 million households downloaded a song in March 2005 using iTunes. The same amount of households downloaded… using LimeWire. Do you really think that is true when billions of files are transferred via P2P every month, with hundreds of millions being traded every day?”

P2Pnet.com is also skeptical, to put it mildly: “…complete and utter nonsense. The corporate online music business exists only in the minds of the media and those trying to promote it and iTunes’ sales of some 300 million since it started in September, 2003, don’t even merit a statistical blip against what’s happening in the real world of online music… P2P research firm BigChampagne says in the US in May, on average 6,290,327 people were logged onto the p2p networks at any given moment. The global statistic was 8,665,319.”

And a March 9 article in USA Today, drawing on Big Champagne research, set this context: “Most of the action… remains outside industry confines. While paid downloads skyrocketed to 140.9 million tracks in 2004 from 19.2 million in the last half of 2003 (no earlier figures are available), unauthorized file-sharing dwarfs purchases. Since mid-2003, 19 billion peer-to-peer transactions have occurred, predominantly current hits.”

Note that the NPD study measures how many people used a service, not how many files were downloaded. So it seems reasonable that even if roughly equal numbers of people used iTunes and Limewire, for example, the Limewire users may have downloaded many more (free) files. I haven’t heard back yet from NPD in response to questions about the study.

Securities research firm Piper Jaffray has reported that iTunes sold 85 million songs in the first two months of this year, for an average of about 1.5 million a day during that period. That’s a steep growth curve from about one million sold in iTunes Music Store’s first week two years ago, which was itself an impressive achievement. But a match for free P2P? Maybe not.

If you know the way to San Jose, the self-proclaimed capital of Silicon Valley, please drop by the Stevens Creek Barnes & Noble on Thursday, June 16, at 7:00 p.m.

Kelli Richards and I will be signing copies of our new book and DVD, The Art of Digital Music, which features interviews with two of the coolest sound designers I know, Jim Reekes and Dave O’Neal. Both of them are also Silicon Valley citizens, and both will be on hand. What will happen when Jim (who created the Macintosh startup sound and the notorious “Sosumi”) meets Dave (who crafts gigantic guitar sounds from cigarette box amps and software) is anyone’s guess, but I’m sure looking forward to finding out.

Can’t make it? Check out Dave’s inspired music and sounds at the Flash site 8Legged.com, where Tako the octopus chef is cooking your dinner. Or boot up a Mac.

Book ’em, Dave O….

Let me make some assertions leading up to an application idea I call CornerScreen Networks that I believe will add a lot of utility to the online experience.

RSS has made it systematic for both content producers to syndicate their content and for consumers to aggregate their feeds of interest. At the same time, with so much really good, specialized content available online, separating “signal” from “noise” has never been a bigger challenge.

Meanwhile, given the multiplicity of discrete content types now available (think: blogs, photos, podcasts, videos, news), a whole new category of sites are beginning to pop up that provide improved ways of organizing each type of content. Flickr is a great example where by enabling users to add tags and notes to photos, and by making that metadata searchable, a more than the sum of the parts experience has been created with respect to photo sharing.

In my opinion, this trend is just beginning, and new apps, or perhaps more accurately, meta-apps, will emerge that hook into and extend these specialized content portals and syndicated content feeds. One such example is a Flickr-related tag browser that an interactive design firm has built which creates a hyperbolic photo tree sorted according to Flickr tags. Further, there are already a number of RSS readers available, like NewsGator, and Apple is doing some interesting stuff with Dashboard.

While all of this has been going on, a bunch of new online advertising networks have emerged, like AdBrite and the ubiquitous Google AdSense that are systems which contextually align targeted ads with relevant content. By doing so, they have provided both a great way for web sites of all sizes to make money and for advertisers to generate more qualified leads than with traditional search engine related ads.

Enter CornerScreen Networks. CornerScreen Networks leverages the emergence of three trends — user-defined RSS feeds, enhanced tools for organizing online content and Google-style advertising networks — and unifies them within a slide viewer application that runs in a corner of your computer screen.

The premise, which takes its inspiration from PointCast, the innovative but ultimately doomed consumer “push” client software innovator, has the following attributes from a user utility perspective.

First off, it’s tuned for the short attention-span generation. It takes every topic and underlying feed of interest and presents them in a rolling “slide presentation” format. If you see a “slide feed” of interest, you can click on it, and the full content loads in your browser. What this means is that you can have hundreds or even thousands of items fed to you throughout the day, and only “nibble” when an item captures your interest. Contrast that with a typical RSS reader where more than a handful of feeds quickly become overwhelming.

Second, the approach lends itself quite naturally to the contextual advertising network model since a portion of the slides can automatically be allocated to ads. As a consumer, I am much more likely to click on an ad of interest if it is both non-disruptive and relevant. Arguably, as such targeted ads are an algorithmic reflection of not just a single web page but my aggregate interests, they should be even more relevant to me.

Third, such an application lends itself to further personalization through play lists. By play lists, I mean the ability to create a customized set of feeds that I am interested in viewing. Perhaps in the morning, I am only interested in technology and business oriented news feeds so I load up that play list. In the afternoon, it’s entertainment and general topics of interest. At the end of the day, it’s the community calendar of interesting events, people connections and stuff for sale. Even better, if I can share these play lists with friends and like minds, the model becomes viral.

To my knowledge, while Tiger has a new RSS-enabled screensaver and Microsoft offers a RSS Screen Saver Starter Kit in C# Express, nobody has connected the dots along the lines I am suggesting.

Would you use it? Does it sound compelling? What am I missing or forgetting?

Related link: http://tb.news.com/tb.cgi/2100-1027_3-5735493

Market research firm NPD Group says iTunes ranks second on its list of the top 10 most popular digital music services. Paid services Napster and RealNetworks’ RealPlayer store also made the list. A summary of the study is at npd.com.

For paid music services to succeed, free doesn’t have to be impossible, just inconvenient. iTunes is super-convenient and so feels like a better value than free for its users. But does the value proposition work across generations? The NPD study notes that most users of paid services are over 30. It’s believed that they fear litigation more, and that they value their time too highly to spend it searching for free music files. Presumably it was similar considerations that stopped most adults from wasting time dubbing their video cassettes for their friends.

Young people are technically savvy enough to scout out the latest ways to beat digital rights management systems, and are willing to invest the time doing so. It looks likely that there will always be ways to beat DRM, so possibly the youth demographic is largely lost to the paid world going forward. It’s also possible though that as each youth cohort ages, it too will adjust its priorities, and will start paying for music.

Related link: http://www.directionsmag.com/editorials.php?article_id=876

Directions Magazine had an excellent “Open Letter to GIS/Geospatial Software Companies”. It touched on 9 main points of change now weighing on the traditional GIS vendors. They basically state: “Here’s where things are headed” and ask: “How are you going to keep up”? I look forward to their response.

How do you think the big guns are going to tackle these problems?

The hotel clock radio is hurting the economy: It’s waking millions of us up at the wrong time and making us very cranky.
Here’s the problem: every time you go to a hotel room, it’s equipped with an unfamiliar clock radio. The radio has a terrible interface, and the alarm is always set for the previous guest, who always had an early flight to catch. We need some kind of federal code to enforce minimum interface design standards for these things, because they are doing a lot of damage. I propose we start with these:
- There must be a vivid warning indication that ALARM IS ARMED.
- There must be a single, big, prominently placed button marked TURN OFF ALARM.
Once again, I have been caught by surprise by one of these sneaky devils. In this case the culprit is an RCA 3740:

It has woken me up with supposedly soothing synthetic surf sounds. Not actually very soothing, under the circumstances. I search its occult interface in vain for some way to disable the alarm. I fail. I unplug it, and - well, what do you think might be a good design choice here? Possibly you might anticipate that the user wants to turn the thing off. But in this case… a loud beeping starts, and won’t stop. Presumably to alert the user that SOMEONE IS ATTEMPTING TO DISABLE THE CLOCK RADIO!
Oh yes, someone is. From now on, I travel with a hammer.

Related link: http://wsj.com/

Very useful article on silencing PCs in today’s Wall Street Journal (page A1, June 2, 2005). The online version is only available to subscribers, but if you’re not a subscriber it’s worth getting hold of the paper version if you, like me, want your computer to be as quiet as possible. A couple of links mentioned:
SilentPCReview.com
EndPCnoise.com
You might also consider furniture: I use a Raxxess Isoraxx enclosure to house a Mac, PC and external drives.

Related link: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1822559,00.asp

PC magazine just reviewed the new Altec Lansing inMotion iM7, comparing it to several other portable, powered speakers for digital music players. Midway through the review, I came across this curious line:

The sound quality of the iM7 is quite impressive. We cranked it up all the way and found minimal distortion—significantly less than when we maxed out the volume on our [Bose] SoundDock.

I’ve seen this kind of “testing” in many other magazine and Web reviews. And so I wondered again: What does it prove? Should the manufacturer have clamped a governor on the volume knob so that it couldn’t distort? I don’t think so; there are cases where volume is more important than fidelity.

Dan Brown once told a funny story about taking revenge on a neighbor who was pounding on his wall: Dan aimed his amp at the wall, leaned a guitar against it, and then turned up the gain until the amp started shrieking with feedback. He left it going until the police came.

Which reminds me of another powered speaker review I read recently: The reviewer wrote that he had cranked the system so loud that his deaf neighbor complained! She couldn’t hear the music, but the force of the sound had knocked the hanging pictures off her wall.

Anyway, my point is that (A) loud-and-distorted is sometimes worthwhile, and (B) most people who buy powered computer speakers probably want to know how they sound at normal listening levels, because that’s how they’ll be using them.

Specs Offenders

Last year at the notorious Project Bar-B-Q computer music conference, I moderated a brainstorming group that wanted to devise a meaningful way to measure sound quality. Somehow, every year BBQ tries to determine what quality audio is, and every year it reaches an impasse. Indeed, I began the two-day session by telling the group to take a new approach, because I didn’t want them to waste my time. That was pretty arrogant of me, considering that the group was composed of bigwigs from Audio Precision, Analog Devices, Dolby, DTS, Intel, Sigmatel, Waves, and more, but they rose to the challenge.

Here is their report and recommendation, “A Whole-system Testing Framework for PC Audio.” It starts by acknowledging that audio specifications are so misused that they’re often meaningless, and then suggests a daring solution.

Incidentally, Project Bar-B-Q is hosted by the Fat Man, who writes an O’Reilly blog as well. Drop by and tell him what computer audio problems you’d like the BBQ Brain to attack this October.

How do you test speaker quality?

The Fat Man’s Daily Dedication for Artists and Workers

This was written on 3-4-’5, and sent fresh off the grille to my beloved peers.

From the unwritten book;
“The Fat Man Says the Darndest Things”
————————————————————————–

If it serves Creator,
may my day be dedicated to bringing happiness to others.

May my consciousness be focused on work that will bring this about.

May the positive results of my work radiate to the Universe and help elevate all Beings.

I pray to have faith that work done earnestly and from the heart will have these positive effects.

I pray to have faith that work done in this way is as good as any activity in which a living person can engage.

I do not pray that this work will result in praises for myself. I do not pray for material gain. I do not pray for a final product that I can hold in my hand, or that will last forever. I do not pray to know that I have progressed in my skill or wisdom.

I do not pray for reassurance that I have been wise in how I have spent my time.

I only ask for the blessing of a day of work, focused on bringing good to all Beings.

If the focus does not come, may I have the faith to know that the Universe has brought me to a better path than the one I had planned.

If, on the other hand, the day seems at its end to have vanished into nothingness, if it seems to have come up missing, to have been taken away from me, to have disappeared irretrievably into work, and that work seems to have disappeared with less effect than I had planned, with less seeming result, with less praise than I had hoped, and with very little reassurance that I have achieved something,

Then I pray for the faith to take these as signs that this prayer may have been answered, and rejoice in that!

Amen.

You’re just jealous because the voices only talk to me

Related link: http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/manifesto.html

Please click on the link above and read, if you haven’t already, a beautiful critique on what games have become.

THANKS to Brian Johnson for sending me the link.

Or do you think games should have worse AI and more BS about graphics?