Regarding Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention

As a singer/songwriter in my little town of Zap, North Dakota, I applaud your actions to take on the vile and contemptuous University system in regards to theft of my music. I must personally thank you for this. You are a hero to me and people like me.

Some may call me a failure at contemporary Christian rap/soul/funk/big band music, but I have only one person to blame: The American Education System. It feeds off small composers of fine, easy listening tunes. The Ivory Tower actively encourages its students not to learn about the BIBLE, but to learn about evolution. Where has this gotten us? Thievery. I am only a failure because The American Education System has stolen my music and given copies to students freely! Don’t you see?

You do, I bet.

But, I must say that while your efforts to rob students of their education for stealing popular digital songs (Such as my classic: “Jesus has a six pack and he died for your sins, gangsta”) are most certainly noble, they do not exact enough punishment on students.

I suggest that instead of pulling only financial aid from students of universities that don’t actively seek out and destroy the lives of copyright infringers, you must also revoke all degrees “earned” at such universities.

It is the only way.

The more you know!

Zac Echola
Singer/Songwriter/Interpretive dancer

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Sooner or later I’m going to have to get back to writing about things I actually care about. But I actually did send this to the Congressman. You can read more about the above idiocy here.

I twittered tonight that I was going to watch a movie because the Internet was sucking, but then it (it being the Internet) distracted me again. I know right!

A while back I also twittered–god damn, I hate the Internet sometimes–anyway: I wrote a post on the Web site twitter.com:

I’ve stopped bothering to remember things. Not immediate little things like get milk. Wikipedia has everything I need to know now. It’s official.

Well it’s true, I believe. If someone asks me what I know about NAFTA (who wouldn’t ask me what I know about NAFTA?), I don’t even bother thinking about what I actually know about NAFTA. I just look it up on Wikipedia. NAFTA. Hell, the Wikipedia page for NAFTA is the first page to come up in a Google search for NAFTA. Take that USDA!

Shit, there’s an entire generation of students out there who rely entirely on Wikipedia as a starting point (and oftentimes ending point) for their C-grade papers. The ‘C’ stands for consensus, or decision by committee or most commonly, crap.

Back on topic: Wikipedia contains all knowledge. Or at least approaches containing all knowledge (kinda like .999 repeating approaches zero). So tonight I set off to prove it using completely arbitrary arguments and irrational thought processes.

Here are the rules, arbitrary and irrational as they may be:

• Start at Knowledge because that makes the most sense
• Follow the first link in the article
• Don’t include the disambiguation links, dummy
• Or the links to Wikipedia policies
• Or the links to pronunciations
• Just click the first legitimate link
• Repeat until you can’t go any further

Easy enough.

Knowledge starts out with a definition of knowledge from the Oxford English Dictionary, which, as it turns out, is a dictionary published by the Oxford University Press.

Dictionaries, if you didn’t know (because you are stupid or of stupid-descent), are also known as a lexicons, as well as being books “of alphabetically listed words in a specific language, with definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, and other information.”

You get where this is going. Lexicon begets linguistics begets science begets knowledge.

Shit. Now what? I think we’ve run into a Wikipedia circle. Now, ‘Wikipedia circle’ doesn’t have an entry on Wikipedia, because ‘Wikipedia circle’ isn’t Knowledge according to Wikipedia (yet). I’d add the entry myself, but those snobs over at Wikipedia would delete the page instantly.

Ugh. Sometimes I hate the Internet.

Back on topic: Wikipedia contains all knowledge. Maybe I’m just starting at the wrong point. If Wikipedia contains all knowledge then Wikipedia itself is all knowledge.

So, let’s start at Wikipedia:

• Multilingualism
• Monolingual
• Greek
• Language
• Phenomenon
• Event
• Festival
• Religion
• Prayer
• Deity
• Preternatural
• Natural
• Phenomena

Again. Notice that it’s not a complete circle. Wikipedia takes us on a fun journey, then we get stuck in the phenomena Wikipedia circle phenomenon.

Phenomena are everywhere.

But to the keen eye, you’ll notice that this completely arbitrary system I came up with (not unlike tech bloggers using compete.com for stats comparisons) shows that the Wikipedia path is longer than the Knowledge path.

If I know anything–not that I’d need to know anything anymore. If I know anything, longer is always better.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it tonight.

Now, time for that movie.

Mark Evans has a great post today, and I hope more people stand up and take note:

The blogosphere is an amazing place with great ideas and lots of people willing to get involved in lively conversations. But there’s a dark side to the blogosphere - a place where egos run rampant, the outrageous is becoming a tool to capture attention, and where there’s more bandwagon jumping than original thought.

I hate the echo chamber nature of the blogosphere (and the mere word “blogosphere”) so much, but this bears repeating.

I commented on Mark’s post:

Thank god someone is saying this! I’ve been removing tech blogs left and right from my reader for the past week for the following reasons (in order):

1. Nerdy pissing matchings
2. Outrageousness
3. Facebook posts

I’m instituting a similar policy to my feed subscriptions as I have with email forwards from friends and family:

• First time you send me something annoying, I’ll let it slide.
• Second time, you’re getting a written warning.
• Third time, you’re done and filtered as spam. Sorry, but you’ll have to call me or come over.

Except, I’m at the point right now with tech blogs where I’m skipping steps one and two and just unsubscribing. Sorry, but you’ve all become boring talking heads.

In the past week, my “tech” and “web” folders in Google reader have been trimmed from over 30 feeds to 6–and one of those remaining feeds is Valleywag, which just makes fun of all the egos in Silicon Valley.

First, I think Ryan Sholin and others have got me thinking quite a bit about unbundled media lately. So instead of talking about the serendipity and extensibility of new media landscape this weekend, as planned, I’m going to skip ahead to the final part in my series and talk about media distribution instead.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about doing is kinda wacky, and mostly for fun: I want to create an ideal newspaper.com using only free tools I didn’t make. Flickr for photos, youtube or brightcove or ooyala backlot for video, RSS for text. Distribute as much as possible. I don’t want to worry about building tools, just creating and aggregating content while efficiently spreading a wide net.

I want it to have mobile functionality for viewing and posting. Anybody can send info and there will be an editor (Me).

I have a few thoughts that I’d like to write down soon. Do you have any ideas?

The New York Times finally changed their backwards model for paid archives and content, TimesSelect. Here’s a roundup of what people are saying, since I really don’t have much to add that hasn’t already been said.

• “Whether or not content wants to be free, it is free,” says Jeff Jarvis.
• Jimmy Gutterman asks, Will Anyone Pay for a Newspaper Online?
• “Questioned recently about this, a Times spokeswoman told E&P’s Joe Strupp only that the company was always looking for ways to improve its site and its traffic.” (E&P)
• Henning Fischer at Adaptive Path says: “It’s refreshing to see an older, more established organization begin to question fundamental assumptions about its business and brand. What continues to mystify me is that it took two years to see the writing on the wall.” (Link)
• The Machinist has the best headline at Salon with “TimesSelect: Meets expectations, dies.”
• Adweek speculates on Murdoch removing WSJ’s pay wall here.
• Recovering Journalist, Mark Potts, thinks the glee over New York Times failure is misplaced. Scott Karp parries.
• Steve Johnson at Chicago Tribune talks about the declining value of subscribing to New York Times print product.

I’m sure I’ll be reading much more on this in the next few days.

Google News has closed out their outbound links to AP stories on newspaper.com sites. They’re now posting Associated Press news stories to their own domain, rather than linking to newspaper sites. See here for an example.

Media bloggers, particularly of the newspaper variety are screaming their lungs out about this, blaming Google for all their troubles.

They should really blame the AP.

We, as news organizations, hand our content over to the Associated Press. The AP, in turn, hands that same content over to other newspapers and television/radio stations and they also sell our content to Google. And to Yahoo! And to our other competitors. And we pay the AP for this service. Ha! And that’s on top of the AP directly competing with newspapers on stories. Yes competing!

So this really isn’t Google’s grand scheme to bone newspapers (state wires aren’t part of the deal yet). Smart newspaper.coms have been already using AP content for the same purposes, they just haven’t figured out the scale that Google commands.

While I can sort of see the argument of Google linking our content for their own purposes as “stealing,” in this case, the only people to blame are news organizations who willfully hand their content over to their competition via the Associated Press. For a fee, mind you.

The AP worked in an age where news organizations had a strangle hold on providing general news coverage to their areas, because their geographic locations and their markets access to other, outside media sources were nil. Those times are over.

Maybe now we’ll start to understand what hyper-local actually means.

With that said, here’s some outbound links to more on this issue:

Ryan Sholin has some rational thought here.
Lucas Grindley says ‘I told you so.‘
Joe Murphy points out where newspapers should focus their energy.
Howard, at Etaoin Shrudlu, points out that AP doesn’t sell state wires.
William M. Hartnett says ‘Meh’ to the whole deal.

Clown Co finally has a name–and it sucks.

Don’t know what Clown Co is? It’s the much hyped, poorly executed online video venture from News Corp. and NBCU that was supposed to take on YouTube and other video sites. Bloggers and jokers in the media world dubbed the partnership ClownCo because they announced said partnership long before they had even hired anyone to execute it.

So, let’s get back to the shitty name, Hulu.com. Terry Heaton put it best:

This portal has been so hyped as God’s gift to online video that any name they came up with would likely have bombed, especially with the tech community — which includes the people who’ve written the book on online video without the “help” of the networks or studios. Old media just doesn’t get that new media isn’t created in a board room with fancy consultants (oh shit, I’m a consultant!), because the results are usually just varnished horse crap. Hulu? The first thing people did was research the word in various languages, and the meanings are almost too funny to believe. In Indonesian, it means “butt.” In Swahili, “cease and desist.”

Rather ironically, these were the reasons behind the name, according to Hulu.com CEO Jason Kilar:

Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premier content when, where and how you want it.

I also have to agree with Heaton and the commenters at Lost Remote that beyond thinking up a name with hilarious translations (have I mentioned yet how much I hate made up Internet names like flickr, twitter, tumblr, blogosphere, etc.?), a meatier list of partners would have been killer. Neither ABC nor CBS wanted to stick with the idea. CBS has its own InnerTube, and ABC is building video players for their affiliate sites.

All that said, I signed up for the private beta of the site, coming in October. Here’s hoping it doesn’t suck. We’ll know more if and when I get that invite. I hope Hulu.com isn’t as awful an experience as the Joost beta.

To be honest, News Corp. and NBCU own many of the television shows I love (and pay for through iTunes and on DVD, sometimes twice over). I think it will be a hit, despite the har-hars all over the tech and media blogs today.

MinnPost.com (not to be confused with parked site mnpost.com or news aggregate site minnesotapost.com), a Web only, not-for-profit news organization run by a bunch of laid-off or otherwise out-of-work Minnesota reporters has launched (sort of):

“MinnPost.com is for Minnesotans who are intensely interested in the world around them and want more insight and analysis than they’re getting from their media choices today,” said Joel Kramer, editor and CEO of the new not-for-profit enterprise, who served as editor of the Star Tribune in the 1980s and as publisher and president in the 1990s. “It will combine the best of traditional journalism with new forms of newsgathering and story-telling made possible by the Internet.”

But will it work?

My first impression of the site is this: Where’s the news? It seems like a horrible idea to pretty much launch a site–a news site–and the only news is a list of reporters and a news release declaring the upcoming launch of the site.

My second impression with the site is this: It looks like a blog, but it is not a blog as we know them today. The design flat out sucks. It might not be fair to say that, considering the lack of stuff to fill the page.

My third impression: What is the Web strategy? It is to be an online news source, after all. There’s no RSS, there’s no images (yet), there’s no video, there’s nothing but text and a few links. And they expect to compete with the Strib or the Pioneer Press? This whole site feels old. It’s certainly no Politico or Voice of San Diego right now.

My understanding is that they’re trying to tap into the news junkie market, to MPR listeners and to readers with a political slant, but I don’t know if launching a bare bones site with no features– a site geared towards news junkies–was the way to do it. At best this looks like a soft launch site with the marketing of a hard launch. Not good.

However, looking at the list of reporters, it should be interesting to see what they do. And to see if they can keep afloat as a non-profit, which has been a big talking point this year for many media bloggers. But right now: Yuck.

Here’s a few suggestions:

• Open yourself up to suggestions about your launch, build a community around your product. Start a blog (a real blog). Let people know what’s going on behind the scenes and let people have input.
• Seriously consider re-branding, too. The URL is confusing as it stands and it’s in a cluttered field of similarly named sites.
• Build a community! If this is just another top down news organization, what’s the point? What differentiates you from Pioneer Press, the Star Tribune and, heck, even Minnesota Daily? I want to see a site where I can be as close to the news process as paid reporters and editors. I want to see a site where Little League baseball matters and is reported . Think about Wikis, think about tiered news gathering.
• Read this
• And then read this

Update More on MinnPost.com:

Editor & Publisher
New York Times
Minnesota Public Radio
The Rake
Minnesota Monitor
Bob Stepno
Eyeteeth interview with Joel Kramer
The Deets

I’m not sure what I should be most upset about with the article “Several bystanders witness St. Paul apartment hallway rape.” There’s so much to think about.

First, there was an alleged rape. Rapes are bad and rapists are scum.

Second, there were bystanders who did nothing to stop said alleged rape. It’s a damn shame what fear can do to a person when another is in need of help.

Lastly, the reporting of said rape and said bystanders doesn’t bother saying it was an alleged rape. The Star Tribune comes out and convicts the guy: “When police arrived they learned there had been a rape.” In fact, the word “alleged” isn’t even in the story.

Whether or not the reporters saw any tapes showing the accused hitting and possibly raping the victim, the media are not the law. The media are not a jury. And the media certainly shouldn’t be the judge.

I don’t mean for this to come across as a defense for the accused rapist with the peculiar name, Rage. I mean this to come across as a plea for the media’s respect of one of the basic tenets of the American law: innocent until proven guilty.

I expect the Star Tribune to be more responsible in its crime coverage from here on out.

Addendum: The last two paragraphs are crass and have no bearing on this supposed crime. If you want to write about this phenomena, write about this phenomena. Don’t hide it behind this this particular event.

That is all.

This was first meant to simply be a reply to Pramit Singh’s alarmist post, but it grew into something of it’s own.

Singh says:

Sometimes in future you are going to wonder at the amount of data you have left open online – your pictures which you realize must never have been brought in public, your contacts, your rants, abusive blog posts, silly incoherent writing - it is a long list.

You also realize that you spent most of your online time acting like a voyeur. There are footprints that you left behind.

The real voyeurs are those employers and companies that pry into our online lives unprovoked and unnecessarily.

Much of what is on the Internet is not intended for a mass audience and never reaches that–or any–audience.

It is delusional to think that everything that happens online has any relevance beyond its creator’s ego. In the case of drunken Facebook photos between friends, the intent is for other friends to view the photos, not anyone else.

It’s like doing something you wouldn’t want your employer to know about in front of a picture window in your home. About as many people would see it in the end. And let’s face it, you’re at home. On your free time. If you’re employer wants to control your personal life as well as your professional one, then I say they’re not worth working for.

But the Web is permanent, no? Those naughty photos and message board posts from high-school live on forever, right?

Sure, in a sense, but you have to know what you’re looking for. And if you find that someone under your employ is a fan of scat porn, so much a fan of shitting on their lovers that they (gasp) blog about it, what does it matter to your business if they don’t shit on your customers (either literally or figuratively)? Are people really so dumb that they can’t differentiate work from play on the Web? I think not. And I think there’s a generation of kids coming into the work force with a basic understanding of this.

We don’t change the way we act around our friends because our grandmother may be listening, unless we’re sure she may, in fact, be listening. Leaving the front door unlocked is not an invitation to my home. Speaking loudly at the bar does not make eavesdropping on my conversations ethical.

How is a conversation between two friends in a pub different than the same conversation on the Web? Who is the voyeur, really, if the message wasn’t meant for you (or worse yet, you pry the data out)?

The greatest flaw in thinking about the Internet, is thinking that bloggers (including me), Facebook users or people who post photos to flickr want mass attention and fame. We don’t (or at the very least, we don’t expect it). We target our message, whether it be photos of a night out with friends or posts about the Internet, to those few people who might perchance stumble across a slice of our digital selves (key word: slice). We are outliers. We are all Chris Anderson’s Tail.

15 minutes of fame has given way to being famous to 15 people. Mass media is dying, if it isn’t already dead. Get over yourselves.

Isn’t privacy a two-way street?

More thoughts on this to come soon.