Follow John Robb and pay close attention to what he has to say, because he has his finger on the pulse. He’s currently promoting the concept of resilient communities, defined here:
A resilient community is the path to a safe, prosperous, and vibrant future for us, our kids, and our neighbors — despite an increasingly chaotic world…. We take control of our future. We implement the only solution that can give us the a safe, secure, and prosperous future. We become resilient. We find ways to help local people, businesses, and municipalities to PRODUCE, and that’s and important word, more of what we rely upon…. Fortunately, we now have the technology and the insights required to produce with quality and efficiency at the local level like never before.
At Pecha Kucha Austin last night, spent some time talking to John Kunz of Waterloo Records, an old friend from the days when I spent a lot of time haunting his store, buying piles of records, CDs and cassettes. We discussed the difficulties of operating an independent record store in a digital world. He told me about Record Store Day and “Third Option,” which is about adding an “independent record store” button to the usual Itunes and Amazon links on websites for artists and records. Glad to see this. I was browsing the new class of high-end vinyl at Urban Outfitters the other day, and jonesing for a turntable and some record-buying budget. Really miss old-school vinyl albums, especially the great covers, which were an art form in themselves.
My pal David Pescovitz at the Institute for the Future blogged recently about the IFTF “Multiverse of Exploration Map,” an overview of the six big stories of science that will play out over the next decade: Decrypting the Brain, Hacking Space, Massively Multiplayer Data, Sea the Future, Strange Matter, and Engineered Evolution. “Those stories are emerging from a new ecology of science shifting toward openness, collaboration, reuse, and increased citizen engagement in scientific research.” A followup post includes a video of Luigi Anzivino from The Exploratorium talking about the relationship of magic and neuroscience.
A scientist says that Stonehenge was inspired by “auditory illusions,” according to a story in Guardian UK. Independent researcher Steve Waller says “the layout of the stones corresponded to the regular spacing of loud and quiet sounds created by acoustic interference when two instruments played the same note continuously.”
“If these people in the past were dancing in a circle around two pipers and were experiencing the loud and soft and loud and soft regions that happen when an interference pattern is set up, they would have felt there were these massive objects arranged in a ring. It would have been this completely baffling experience, and anything that was mysterious like that in the past was considered to be magic and supernatural.
Guardian UK has a review of Bruce Springsteen’s new album, “Wrecking Ball,” described as “as angry a cry from the belly of a wounded America as has been heard since the dustbowl and Woody Guthrie, a thundering blow of New Jersey pig iron down on the heads of Wall Street and all who have sold his country down the swanny.” Springsteen is quoted about the causes for his anger: What was done to our country was wrong and unpatriotic and un-American and nobody has been held to account. There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.” Looking forward to Springsteen’s keynote at the SXSW music conference.
Google glasses (or maybe we should all ’em Google Goggles) will be an interesting AR advance, more science friction happening now, if they do happen. Preview (aka rumor) at 9to5Google.
These glasses, we heard, have a front-facing camera used to gather information and could aid in augmented reality apps. It will also take pictures. The spied prototype has a flash —perhaps for help at night, or maybe it is just a way to take better photos. The camera is extremely small and likely only a few megapixels.
In 2009, Howard Rheingold created an excellent mini-course in network literacy, a substantial resource for those who want to learn more about the Internet. Here’s the introductory video:
Howard’s written a book on network and digital literacy called Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.
Scientists experimenting with Twitter bots found that the bots could “shape” activity on Twitter to some extent. They’re continuing their studies to get a better understanding of what they’re seeing. [Link]
The origin of the study was explained by Tim Hwang, one of the authors of a research paper describing the socialbot experiments. “A lot of people you can hire now say they are really good at community engagement. Can we measure those claims?”
From the paper linked above:
… although each socialbot was able to connect only a relatively small portion of users from its target group, the findings of this study are extremely signi cant. These findings indicate the fi rst successful attempts at automatically and programmatically shaping the topology of online communities. Further, while the scale of this study was relatively small, socialbots are designed to be light, efficient, and entirely automatic { and thus, easily deployable in large swarms. We believe this study marks the rst step towards demonstrating the ability of such technologies to shape online communities at a large scale.
Wonder if this means we’ll have swarms of marketing bots flooding Twitter and other social systems?
At “JOHO the Blog,” David Weinberger has a simple and very cool summary of the meaning of yesterday’s SOPA-induced blackout. “This is our Internet. We built it. We built it for us, not for you. We get to turn off the lights, not you.” Yes, indeed. It took a long time for the the Internet to smell like money to those folks who like that smell more than they like the smell of creativity, innovation, fellowship, commons, etc. Now it’s a platform for all media in digital formats that are easily replicated, therefore distribution is hard to control. Much of what flows across the Internet is freely shared by its creators, and there’s also channels for media that people pay for (like Netflix). A system that facilitates all that sharing, along with a high degree of interactivity, also makes it easy to do the natural sort of sharing that peopel will inherently do. Content providers could spend less time figuring out how to stop sharing, and more time figuring out how to build a business model that works in a social/sharing environment. People who invest time and money in media creation and production have a right to charge for it, but we need to rethink how that works in the 21st century networked world.
A web strike has been called, and many web pages will go black, in response to two proposed bills — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate.
From a high level, these bills may seem reasonable enough. Their stated purpose is to prevent “piracy,” the unlicensed distribution of intellectual property without compensation to rights holders. Pretty much any recorded music can be found online and downloaded for free, as well as a growing number of movies and televison programs. Commercial television programs are routinely recorded and released quickly in digital formats with commercials removed.
The Internet is traditionally a culture with an expectation that content will be free; networks of free distribution of content readily emerged, especially with digital convergence, wherein all media are released in digital formats easy to replicate and redistribute. The growing availability of broadband has meant that content downloads that formerly took hours now take minutes; more and more people are accessing digital content online, legally or not. The Internet has disrupted music, film, and television industries, and while that disruption is not solely attributable to “piracy,” it’s clearly painful to see a product copied and shared broadly online.
Oddly enough, those that share content get no compensation for their efforts — the content is offered for free. And many take it, if only because it’s so much more convenient to do so. They may just as readily pay for downloads or streaming via Netflix or iTunes, or subscribe to content delivery on demand via cable. These legal forms of distribution contribute to the effect of commodifying content, thereby reducing value, another insult to the bottom line of content providers.
Surely it makes sense to pass legislation to protect content providers from outright theft? Wouldn’t it make sense to shut down channels of online distribution, and block access to websites that offer pirated content for free? Pursuing copyright infringement through the courts seems insufficient — it hasn’t worked — and it’s expensive. Wouldn’t it be better to take the “bad” sites down?
In fact, there are pretty large issues with this approach, and that’s why many Internet experts and ‘net-based companies, some of them also content providers, are up in arms. The Internet has thrived as an ecosystem that drives innovation and commerce precisely because it is so frictionless; barriers to entry are low, the means of production inexpensive, and the flow of information unimpeded. You don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to set up a website or build a web-based company. The Internet has resisted efforts to add obstructions within the network. Even in countries like China, which famously has its “Great Firewall,” users find ways to access information.
The approaches suggested by SOPA and PIPA will alter the way the Internet operates. Restricting search engines and domain name services may seem straightforward, but it’s not. DNS filters, a key provision of the bills (though evidently dropped from SOPA this week), would result in security risks and performance issues, according to some Internet engineers. Domain name records would be inconsistent and potentially less reliable. Users may be driven to unregulated alternative systems for domain name resolution, avoiding legitimate regulation and management.
There are also nontechnical civil liberties issues. Whole websites could be blocked, even if there is only one instance of alleged infringement, harming a majority of users because of the actions of a minority. Sites may be blocked incorrectly — who’s to decide what infringes and what doesn’t? What of sites that may facilitate or enable infringement, but don’t infringe themselves? Aren’t they protected speech?
The legislation could have a chilling effect by making site operators liable for the actions of site users, therefore unwilling to host user-generated content. This could have a huge impact on innovative social media websites and technologies.
The problem here is that these laws were driven — if not created by — content industry lobbyists who don’t understand the Internet and are more concerned with protecting the interests associated with older forms of content delivery, versus defining how content delivery can and should work in a digital world. Legislators should drop SOPA and PIPA and have an extended conversation and collaboration with a broad set of stakeholders before they attempt to create policies affecting the Internet.
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