Old Media, New Media and Where the Rubber Meets the Road

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 6

Analog (old) media is all about managing scarcity by controlling distribution, the net effect of which is to enable publishers to price access to their “toll roads” as they see fit.

Digital (new) media, by contrast, is premised on the assumption that the tools for content creation, selling, distributing and marketing enable meta-professionals and prosumers to create a surplus of “good enough” content.

This content, in tandem with un-tethered distribution and pretty good search/retrieval functions, operates in complete disregard for the old media-based pricing models that preceded it.

As such, when the forces of analog media collide with digital media, as they have in music, newspapers, yellow pages, books and magazines (and are beginning to collide in television and movies), a brutally efficient “creative destruction” process occurs.

Simply put, if the digital forces can assemble a “good enough” version of the un-tethered content, then in most cases, the analog media provider is in deep trouble (read: devastating business model disruption).

Understanding Media Disruption

My once-beloved San Francisco Chronicle has been “hollowed out,” reduced to a thin pamphlet, thereby accelerating their subscriber attrition.

Why PAY for content that is less deep, less differentiated than I can get online elsewhere for FREE? It's a vicious cycle.

My once-favorite local news station, KRON, no longer has sports on the weekends; it runs more syndicated content and requires that its reporters operate their own cameras to minimize cost. It's definitely struggling. KNBR, which is the sports radio station that I listen to, tells a similar story.

Do you even know anyone who actually uses the Yellow Pages anymore? That would have been unfathomable when I was growing up.

Now, Google is the Yellow Pages.

On some level, it really is as simple as saying that Craigslist killed the classified ads business, which in turn, killed the newspaper business.

The music business was once supremely cool. Records were cool. The whole chain between record producers, tour promoters and record stores was pretty cool.

Remember record stores? Whither Tower Records. Heck, even Blockbuster is standing on some wobbly legs.

Strangely, it's not that the music suddenly is less good. In fact, I probably listen to as much music as I ever have.

It's just that the "disruption" cow has left the barn (and is living in my iPod), and there is no turning back.

In this case, there are just too many incentives for the performers to maximize their online availability and shift their monetization to other sources, like touring and merchandising.

As a result, the music producer/promoter has been pushed to the backseat (for now).

(Un)Differentiated Media

It seems that the only safe havens are highly differentiated media creators that can’t readily be replicated elsewhere, such as the type of original programming one sees on HBO (e.g., check out: True Blood); the vertical/demographically targeted cable channels (where old media distribution rules still promulgate); and big budget movies, where production values (and production costs) are out of the reach of meta-professionals.

That is what makes the furor playing out with AP, all the more interesting.

AP is a syndicated content and news distribution service that makes its money offering infill content to (traditionally) analog media sources.

In the online world, however, the digital form of AP’s fee-based media is fodder for enabling digital publishers to link to, reference and excerpt from these same stories, typically without paying a nickel to AP.

Now, AP wants to turn back the hands of time by limiting/restricting access to and usage of that content.

Meanwhile, digital media advocates are citing fair use, and you just know that this can’t end well for AP, as their product is fundamentally undifferentiated.

That is not to suggest that they have no case, at least karmically speaking, but it's akin to arguing about oxygen. This is the atmosphere that they operate within.

The media industry would have to exercise a collective re-set to turn the tide on this one. Maybe they will, but I am skeptical.

Re-thinking The Audience and Your Product

Extending the conversation further, Fred Wilson’s post, ‘Monetize The Audience, Not The Content’ (read the comments section) presents a conundrum.

On the one hand, I totally agree with the objective of building your business around your audience.

But, I also think that a true solution needs to reconcile how the product or service evolves to achieve differentiation in such a universe; and that is a bigger challenge.

Here, my specific assertion is that while not all content is created equal, a whole heck of a lot of it is fundamentally undifferentiated.

In the case of The New York Times (a high profile pub that Fred regularly writes about), there are a few star writers, but none of which are such must-reads as to drive users to pay for access to them (hence, the failure of NYT's Times Select).

I love reading Frank Rich; Maureen Dowd is pretty entertaining; and Thomas Friedman is thought-provoking. Plus, there are 6-7 other times throughout the month that I find myself reading a Times article.

But, I've seriously never considered paying for access to them, and when the Select thing was in effect, and folks like Friedman were behind lock and key, I mostly forgot about them.

Case in point, whatever happened to Howard Stern after he left broadcast radio? Is the King of All Media even relevant anymore?

Don't tell me how much he is worth now. Tell me this. What happened to his audience?

It's a hard truth, but while there are 10+ good “enough” quality news/opinions sources for every news story of the day (and they are easy to find and well-indexed vis-a-via Techmeme and Google News), there is no "good enough" cheap/free alternative to the Ridley Scott directed, Christian Bale starring action movie.

As such, the NYT’s of the world face a real paradox. Their brand is their content, and without continuing to cultivate their content and innovate the way it's presented, which costs money, they have no durable audience.

Thus, I think a better path is to:

1. Come up with well-defined linkages between online and offline workflows. For example, print subscribers get access to deeper analysis, better tools for saving, excerpting, sharing and finding related content;
2. Create new types of media/engagement units that reward loyalty, communit-ize it, perhaps game-ify it;
3. Re-think segmentation (and pricing) across high-end, low-end, hyper-local, and vertical-specific distinctions, and re-work the product accordingly.

Apple, Record Labels serve up 'Cocktail'

So it seems fortuitous, that as I am updating this post, word filters into the blogosphere that Apple's long-rumored Tablet computing device is due in September (the Friday rumors said Q1, 2010), and that Apple is working with the record labels to re-invent the packaged music experience for the digital realm. Smart!

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Apple wants to make bigger purchases more compelling by creating a new type of interactive album material, including photos, lyric sheets and liner notes that allow users to click through to items that they find most interesting.

Consumers would be able to play songs directly from the interactive book without clicking back into Apple’s iTunes software, executives said. “It’s not just a bunch of PDFs,” said one executive. “There’s real engagement with the ancillary stuff.”

New York Story

Ending where we began, creative destruction has had a field day with the media business (and by virtue of its association, advertising as well).

To get to the other side intact, the NYT’s of the world have to figure out what they are that a focused, less expensive blogger, prosumer or meta-creator can’t emulate.

With brutal efficiency, this truth will separate those that can meaningfully, unquestionably differentiate from those that can’t.

Prognosis: more hurting ahead; then the industry finds its footing, begins a renaissance, and gets back on offense.

Related Posts:

1. Digital Media Rules: The Open Sourcing of Information
2. Apple, the ‘Boomer’ Tablet and the Matrix
3. How Social Media Works: It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations
4. The Programmable Fan Site: A New Media/Ad Unit Model
5. Flip Video News Network: Crowd-Sourcing meets CNN

Four short links: 29 July 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Bioweathermap -- crowdsourcing the gathering of environmental samples for DNA sequencing to study the changing distribution of microbial life. Another George Church project. (via timoreilly at Twitter)
2. We Are All African Now -- a great article about our genetic history and the computational genomics that makes it possible. (via Tim Bray)
3. Standing Out In The Crowd -- OSCON keynote by Kirrily Robert on women in open source. Excellent.
4. Energy Harvesting Powers Printed LED -- an interesting combination of two emerging technologies. Like an RFID, the circuit has a current induced by the presence of a changing RF field. The EL display and the RFID circuit are printed in organic compounds, whereas the power control is built with traditional circuit fabrication techniques. (via Freaklabs)

Four short links: 28 July 2009

UI Library, 3rd Party Wave Server, Mobile Phones + Parasites, Single API to Cloud Providers

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. CNMAT Resource Library -- The CNMAT Resource Library is our fast growing collection of materials, sensors, gestural controllers, interface devices, tools, demos, prototypes and products - all organized and annotated to support the design of physical interaction systems, "new lutherie" and art installations. (via egoodman on Delicious)
2. PyGoWave Server -- first third-party Google Wave server, based on Django.
3. Mobile Phones Identify Parasites and Bacteria -- UCB Researchers developed a cell phone microscope, or CellScope, that not only takes color images of malaria parasites, but of tuberculosis bacteria labeled with fluorescent markers.. The sensor network is built out, and the computers in our pockets surprise us with their uses. (via BoingBoing)
4. libcloud -- a unified interface to cloud providers, written in Python and open source. Covers EC2, EC2-EU, Slicehost, Rackspace, Linode, VPS.net, GoGrid, flexiscale, Eucalyptus. (via joshua on Delicious)

HadoopDB: An Open Source Parallel Database

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 0

The growing need to manage and make sense of Big Data, has led to a surge in demand for analytic databases, which many companies are attempting to fill (Teradata, Netezza, Vertica, DATAllegro, Greenplum^†, Aster Data, Infobright, Kognitio, Kick?re, Dataupia, ParAccel, Exasol, ...). As an alternative to current shared-nothing analytic databases, HadoopDB is a hybrid that combines parallel databases with scalable and fault-tolerant Hadoop/MapReduce systems.

HadoopDB is comprised of Postgres on each node (database layer), Hadoop/MapReduce as a communication layer that coordinates the multiple nodes each running Postgres, and Hive as the translation layer. The result is a shared-nothing parallel database, that business analysts can interact with using a SQL-like language. [Technical details can be found in the following paper.]

We recently spent an hour discussing Big Data and HadoopDB with Yale CS Professor (and HadoopDB co-creator) Daniel Abadi. One of the main motivations for building HadoopDB was the desire to make available an open source parallel database. While some analytic database vendors have built parallel systems using open source databases (e.g. Aster Data and Greenplum use Postgres), the resulting products aren't open source.

By taking advantage of Hadoop (particularly HDFS, scheduling, and job-tracking), HadoopDB distinguishes itself from many of the current parallel databases by dynamically monitoring and adjusting for slow nodes and node failures to optimize performance in heterogenous clusters. Especially in cloud computing environments, where there might be wild fluctuations in the performance and availability of individual nodes, fault-tolerance and the ability to perform in heterogeneous environments are critical. Given that the performance of current parallel databases scale (near linearly) as more nodes are added, vendors strive to develop systems that can be easily deployed on large clusters. Current parallel databases have been deployed mostly on systems with less than a hundred nodes. OTOH, the use of Hadoop technology allows HadoopDB to easily scale to hundreds (if not thousands) of nodes.

Generally speaking, Professor Abadi places HadoopDB somewhere between Hadoop and parallel databases when it comes to the trade-off between load (data loads are slower than Hadoop, but faster than parallel databases) and runtime (on structured data, HadoopDB is faster than Hadoop but slower than parallel databases). Below are some graphs from a series of tests conducted by the HadoopDB team:

Performance on Data Loads

Performance on Analytic Tasks

In our report on Big Data Management Technologies, we highlighted that (given the lack of upfront relational data modeling) Hadoop and other simple key-value databases encouraged experimentation that could lead to quick insights. But as query patterns emerge, " ... more refined data structures, data transformation, and data access processes can be built (including interfaces to relational RDBMSs) that make subsequent inquiries easy to repeat." In practice this means throwing data into Hadoop, observing how users interact with the data, then building relational data marts accordingly. The vision of the HadoopDB development team fits perfectly into this workflow. Over time, the HadoopDB team envisions their system to initially load all the data into HDFS, then take advantage of query patterns to dynamically load the right data slices into relational data structures.

Admittedly, the HadoopDB team needs to release tools to make their system easier to use/deploy. The HadoopDB development team is comprised entirely of Yale CS Department members, although Professor Abadi is hoping that open source developers will start contributing to the project. But if a paid gig is what you're after, the good news is that they're in search of a Chief Hacker.

[For more on Big Data, check out our report and follow @bigdata.]

(†) We were among the first users of Greenplum. In partnership with SimplyHired and Greenplum, we actively maintain a data warehouse that contains most U.S. online job postings dating back to mid-2005.

Ignite Seattle 7 on 8/3: Speakers Announced

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 1

Ignite Seattle 7 is being held a week from Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at the King Cat Theater. We have an all-star line up of some of the most ingenious, fascinating and inspiring geeks from across the world (or at least in or around Puget Sound).

Doors open at 7. Talks begin at 8:30. The opening contest will be a massive Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament. You join the team of the person you lose to until hundreds of people are on each team.

Here are the first 13 speakers listed in no particular order. We'll announce the final 5 next week.

Daniel Westreich (danielwestreich) - Causal inference is hard; or how I learned to stop worrying and love counterfactuals

The philosophical and practical problems of causal inference, and how to overcome these problems using randomized trials. With particular application to medical literature and epidemiology more generally.

Lee LeFever (leelefever) - Where Goldfish Come From
Everyone knows goldfish and koi, but very few have ever thought about where they come from - how they are bred, raised, transported, etc. I know these things like the back of my hand.

Dan Shapiro (danshapiro) - Making Benjamin Fly: Geeking out aero-style for about a hundred bucks
When I was a kid, RC flight meant spending thousands of dollars to put what was essentially a slightly-aerodynamicized lawnmower in the air. You spent thousands on engines and electronics and balsa, months building your plane, crashed it your first flight out, and then repeated. Over, and over, and over again. Enter lithium polymer batteries, rare earth magnets, miniaturized solid state inverters, 2.4 GHz spread spectrum frequency hopping transmitters and receivers. What do you get? I'll show you. And I'll show you how to get it up, for about one benjamin.

Mandy Sorensen (mandercrosby) - What To Do With 60 Minutes in Whale (and How I Learned to Use a Machete!)
Ever wondered what to do with a half-alive beached whale on a remote island in the Pacific?

Mehal Shah (mehals) - Fighting Dirty in Scrabble
Are you tired of your family thrashing you at Scrabble? Do you wince when someone brings out that red box at board game night? Are you ready to wipe the smug grin off the face of your significant other who pulls 7-letter words out of nowhere?

Elan Lee (elanlee) - I Wish I Was Taller
I filed a bug on my life with a major software company in Redmond.

Lauren Bricker (brickware) - Geek Generation
Don't call me a teacher, I'm more of a “Geek Generator.” I have kids (9 and 18), both who love computers and yes, they've already learned how to program. But apparently that wasn't enough for me. For the last two years I've been teaching computer science at a local private high school. It's incredibly interesting, rewarding, and yes, a lot of work. My goal with this talk is to generate more Geek Generators.

Willow Brugh (willowbl00) - Creating Communal Creative Space
The experience of building a maker space from scratch is certainly a project - I'll talk about my experience in doing so, what advice others have shared with me, and what spaces like this are already available in Seattle (and perhaps elsewhere on the West Coast).

M?nica Guzm?n (moniguzman) - Addiction! Staying afloat in the age of the stream
Glued to email, your RSS reader or Twitter? Has your hand grown by 133 grams and the approximate weight of an iPhone? The Web is a stream, and it's easy to drown. Tips, tricks and cautionary tales from a reporter who swims the stream to stay on top of local news, but has learned the hard how easy it is to get carried away.

Gregory Heller (gregoryheller) - What Makes The Greenest Cab?
Green transportation is all the rage these days, especially hybrid vehicles. Popular wisdom may lead some, including civic leaders and politicians to believe that the greenest vehicle is a hybrid. NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been fighting to Green the Yellow Cab fleet in that city by forcing all new cabs to be hybrids. The iconic NYC TaxiCab often sets the pace for the rest of the country's cabs. However would hybrids in NYC really make green cabs? And would the rest of the country's cab industries follow suit? The answer may surprise you.

Todd Sawicki (sawickipedia) - How I learned to Appreciate Dance Being Married to a Ballerina
Often times we see talks about how spouses deal with being married to geeks and startup jocks, now its time to turn the tables. This is a talk on what I've learned about ballet and how to appreciate it being married to a former professional ballerina. Hopefully you too will be able to tell the difference between a first and fifth position and a Pli? vs. a Pass?. Even a geek can learn to love classical dance.

Yoram Bauman - Principles of economics, translated
Translates for a lay audience the 10 principles of economics from Harvard professor Greg Mankiw's best-selling textbook.

Deepak Singh (mndoci) - Big Data and the networked future of science
New instruments, sensors, distributed scientific collaboration, informal publication channels = lots of data. How do we crunch it? How do we share it? How do we distribute it? This talk will dive into (a very very fast dive) into the challenges and solutions of the big science of today and tomorrow. Exascale anyone?

If you're not sure what Ignite is check out this promo video for Ignite Baltimore:

(Video courtesy of Think Again Media)

The Government Blocks Twitter No It Doesn't

by Mark Drapeau | @cheeky_geeky | comments: 9

In a recent CSPAN interview, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs noted that, “for some reason, Twitter is blocked on White House computers,” which created a minor frenzy among tech-savvy journalists ranging from UPI to The Hill. Later, news upstart Mediaite uncovered that the New Media team in the Old Executive Office Building could indeed access Twitter, but other people working on White House staff do not necessarily share the same privileges. This is all very interesting, but this story is far bigger than the White House, because it serves as a metaphor for rules governing social media tool use for the thousands of employees working throughout the Federal government.

Decisions about which social media sites are allowed in the Executive Branch are somewhat inconsistent, as I pointed out in a Department of Defense research paper earlier this year. Often without explanation or transparency, different agencies and even offices within agencies have different policies about use of social media platforms on the Web. Additionally, even when public affairs employees are allowed to use tools like Twitter and YouTube to communicate, they are sometimes blocked by different authorities at work from using them. So, in a gray area, they employ workarounds using personal laptops, iPhones, and the like.

Such internal contradiction cannot last long. Eventually there will have to be consistent, widely-known policy guidance about what sites can be used, and by whom, and why. And as the workforce age structure changes, and lines between professional and personal increasingly blur, employees will demand access to these sites more. Some sites may legitimately be blocked, but currently, there are a hodgepodge of rules that are often confusing, and possibly make the overall situation worse. Here, I propose two arguments for not blocking most social media sites on most government computers.

One, blocking social media sites does little for safety and security. The statement “Twitter is blocked” typically means that the domain Twitter.com is rendered inaccessible from a government Web browser. The downside to blocking sites this way is that there are simple mechanisms for alternatively accessing the underlying software (Twitter.com can be accessed from TweetGrid.com, YouTube.com from videos.Google.com, and so forth). Hence, official computers can access the same sites through different portals. Employees may also turn to nearly ubiquitous personal devices like BlackBerries to use social media during work hours. Finally, there are many "clones" of sites like Twitter and YouTube; are Identi.ca, Plurk, and similar microsharing sites also blocked? Thus, some employees effectively use the same social networks to send and receive the same information, with all of it being harder to monitor. This is not a recipe for good cyber-security of government systems or employee information.

Two, blocking social media platforms does little for government efficiency, transparency, and citizen engagement. True, when used poorly, sites like Twitter and YouTube are a distraction from official duties and a time-sink. But the same can be argued about phones, email, and even the cafeteria. When used responsibly, however, social media provides real-time information about critical news, helps employees working on similar topics within the government find and communicate with each other, allows the discovery of work-related conferences and other events, helps people better understand how technology is influencing overseas incidents like the Iranian election protests, conversing with citizens about microniche issues related to the office one works in, and countless other worthwhile applications. Blanket social media bans empower information to fall through the cracks rather than get to people who could use it.

Three reasonable steps should be taken. First, top-level government information assurance analysts need to determine what security risks various common social media websites pose to the government; they should be “binned” into categories like “Use only on non-military computers” or “Not for government system use.” Second, policies need to be transparent, consistent, and well-publicized across the government; employees will frown on radically different policies being applied in different buildings on Independence Avenue, or on different Army bases in Virginia. Third, employees and contractors working in government facilities need to be educated about the positive and negative aspects of using social media websites, just as they are about other aspects of cyber-security and other government procedures.

These three steps should counteract possibly less secure employee workarounds, and go a long way towards the more open, transparent, and participatory government that the President proposed in the first memo he disseminated after taking office. Interestingly, while the U.S. debates whether or not certain computers can and cannot access Twitter, across the pond the U.K. has released an official government template for how to use Twitter - it's a 20-page document offering practical advice, and uploaded online using Scribd for the entire world to see. Just as we look to other countries for ideas about how we can improve transportation, health care and the like, we might include social media on that list.

Four short links: 27 July 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Ignite OSCON -- 56m of video from Ignite OSCON. They're all great, but Dan Meyer remains the highlight for me.
2. gheat -- a maptile server in Python, delivering heatmaps to be superimposed on Google Maps. Handy for visualization fiends.
3. CaDNAno -- open source software for design of 3-dimensional DNA origami. One of George Church's projects. I love the combination of math, biology, and whimsy in open-source giftwrap. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. CommentPress -- an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. I'm taking a greater interest in tools that channel and focus participation rather than simply providing "edit this page". (via gov2.net.au's issues paper)

OSCON: Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth

by Robert Kaye | comments: 6

Two of my favorite presenters, Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick, did an OSCON session on "Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth." Brian and Ben talked about how programmers' insecurities cause all manner of troubles in programming projects, and then presented a number of tips for how to avoid these problems. They also asserted that there are very few genius "lone ranger"programmers in the real world -- most highly successful and productive programmers work smart and collaborate well.

(continue reading)

State of the Computer Book Market - Mid-Year 2009

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 12

If you have read previous State of the Computer Book Market posts, you know we typically publish between 3-5 posts that summarize the computer book market for a given year. SInce it's mid-year, I thought I'd do a shorter, one-post summary of where things stand in 2009 thus far. The picture looks like our US economy: lots of bad news peppered with small glimmers of hope. So let's look at the Market, Categories, Publishers, and Languages.

The market has been on a steady decline since mid-2008 and has continued downward right through the first half of 2009. And there are very few signs that the book-buying slump is going to turn around anytime soon. Overall, the market saw 595,821 fewer units sold in the first half of 2009 than were sold in the same period of 2008. Although we do not have data to show the trends between 2000 and 2003, the market performance this year is the worst we've seen since the fall of of 2001. You'll notice in the chart below that the seasonal patterns have remained consistent, but sales are at a much lower volume than any previous year.

(continue reading)

OSCON: The saga of MySQL

by Robert Kaye | comments: 14

At OSCON in 2006, I followed sessions that discussed how open source companies would fare when big corporations come in. Back then there were only a handful of examples of big companies purchasing small open source companies. Three years later, we've witnessed MySQL AB get swallowed by Sun, only to have Sun be swallowed by Oracle. Now there are more open questions than ever and at least three versions of MySQL that are jockeying to continue the MySQL blood-line. Yesterday I attended talks by two of these groups and I have to wonder how the MySQL game will play itself out over time.

(continue reading)

Amazon, Zappos and Buying What You Can’t Compete Against

by Joshua-Mich?le Ross | @jmichele | comments: 0

Amazon bought Zappos. At first I was a bit surprised. Like an aging celebrity going to the “big theater in the sky” it is unexpected when you first hear about it - but upon reflection not surprising at all. It smacks of inevitability.

Amazon has consistently displayed a genius for pushing the boundaries of their business - for syndicating their strengths and making them a commodity for others to purchase. Are they a bookseller, an ecommerce platform, a cloud service provider, a consumer electronics company etc.?

Along the way Zappos has shown the same genius - taking Amazon’s competence syndication strategy one step further. When they launched Powered by Zappos they allowed smaller merchants to overlay their brand on top of the entire Zappos supply chain and, more importantly, on top of Zappos’ legendary customer service. Zappos was syndicating the entire experience.

Much of the online conversation is taken up with worries that Amazon will not abide Zappos’ culture. I feel quite the opposite. I believe culture is exactly what Jeff Bezos and Amazon were buying (after all it likely wasn’t fulfillment centers, logistics, inventory or even customers). Culture is the one asset Amazon couldn’t compete against.

It was a smart move.

Four short links: 24 July 2009

Copytweet, MacMarket iShare, Open Source Under Fire, and OLPC War Stories

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Are Tweets Copyright-Protected (WIPO) -- According to an Internet posting on blogherald.com by Jonathan Bailey, every time a new communication technology emerges, it shifts the copyright landscape, and new copyright issues that do not fit existing intellectual property (IP) standards arise. With Twitter, for example, while its terms of service clearly state that tweeters own anything they post on the service, the 140-character limit to a Twitter post makes it almost impossible for the work to reach the level of creativity required for copyright protection. In the same vein, titles or short phrases usually cannot be protected since their length contributes to their lack of originality, as defined by copyright law. A roundup of the copyright issues raised by Twitter, which is a little like a roundup of the climate issues raised by ants.
2. Apple Has 90% Revenue Share Of >$1000 Computers (Ars Technica) -- wow. (via publicaddress on Twitter)
3. Open Source on the Battlefield -- Fortunately, SFC Stadtler knew how to use open source software. Using found hardware, like a laptop pulled from the trash, and wires pulled from collapsed buildings, he was able to establish a wireless network between the towers and the home base. He was able to install freely available voice-over-ip software on this recycled hardware, which turned the computer into a wireless telephone. The soldiers were now able to communicate with each other and the home base. At no cost. (via Jim Stogdill)
4. Sweet Nonsense Omelet (Ivan Krsti?) -- Horror stories from the inside about the shoddy suppliers of OLPC hardware. Thinking back, there’s a hardware incident I remember particularly fondly: one of our vendors sent us a kernel driver patch which enhanced support for their component in our machine. They chose to implement the enhancement by setting up a hole which allowed any unprivileged user to take over the kernel, prompting our kernel guy to send a private e-mail to the OLPC tech team demanding that, in the future, we avoid buying hardware from companies whose programmers are, direct quote, “crack-smoking hobos”.

Recent Posts

• OSCON: Standing Out in the Crowd | by Robert Kaye on July 23, 2009
• OSCON: Building Belonging (in communities) | by Robert Kaye on July 23, 2009
• Seeing Our Culture with Fresh Eyes | by Tim O'Reilly on July 23, 2009
• Four short links: 23 July 2009 | by Nat Torkington on July 23, 2009
• Four short links: 22 July 2009 | by Nat Torkington on July 22, 2009
• Can't Get Approval for your App? Sell the Source Code | by Andrew Savikas on July 21, 2009
• The Mobile Broadband Era: It's About Messages, Mobility and The Cloud | by Mark Sigal on July 21, 2009
• Four short links: 21 July 2009 | by Nat Torkington on July 21, 2009
• Tonight's Ignite OSCON Line-Up | by Nat Torkington on July 20, 2009
• Tuesday Night's Ignite LA Line-Up | by Brady Forrest on July 20, 2009
• What Will Open Gov Look Like in Five Years and in One Year? | by John Geraci on July 20, 2009
• Four short links: 20 July 2009 | by Nat Torkington on July 20, 2009