I’ve Moved To My Own Website: AndrewAPeterson.com

Please continue corresponding with me through my new site.  

HERE

It’s seriously so hard to move.  So many little things that I can’t move.   For instance I can’t make it so my comments take you to my new blog.  Ughh!  So frustrating.

Can Anyone Explain The Open Rights Group to me?

The Open Rights Group is out there. I have no idea what they aim to do.  There are a bunch of new projects that have sprouted up online for various goals having to do with Intellectual Property in the digital realm, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and more recently, the Featured Artist’s Coalition…  

My question is, is the O.R.G. a friend or a foe?  

I’m a child of digital media, and I’m also an artist.  I’m also a creator of other forms of content like this blog. 

The Open Rights Group’s site is so confusing and not-clear in its mission at first glance.  For all I can tell it’s a front for a major publisher effort.  

Really, the site is terribly unclear.  Maybe I was supposed to spend a bunch of time digging for the agenda there.  

Please, you guys, make it clear!

I can help if you want, but damn.  I can’t even tell what you stand for.

It needs to be completely clear to anyone visiting the site, as soon as they get there, me thinks.

Green-Washing, Water-Hoarding, Guilt-Mongering, Pickens & ZapRoot

Comment I left on zaproot’s episode 048 called Truth About The Pickens Plan …As of posting this, it hasn’t appeared on their site…

Here’s the Video I’m responding to:

I love me a good conspiracy theory.

I’m interested to see the evidence of this water-grabbing thing spelled out as more than just a reference and passing the buck to one article in Tucson Weekly (which has no sources or links).

Are there other sources?

I’m not a Pickens supporter per se, but I am a Web2 fanatic who thinks the grassroots/marketing efforts of the Pickens Plan are amazing, both in design and success so far.

I’d like to see the evidence of this theory about the mid-western aquifer properly added to the Wikipedia article on the page for the pickens plan… Currently, it only mentions one source, which seems to be the same source as for this episode.

Here: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Opinion/Content?oid=oid:113228

Maybe I’m wrong, and I definitely have no reason to side with a rich-ass oil guy…

I just want my skepticism to be smart.

Dates, Bill Numbers, and other data would really help.

The Wikipedia article, which anyone can edit, has none of this. It simply mentions the existence of this theory, which to me really makes it seem like a stretch since something so important seems like it would have some wikipedia back-n-forth going on.

Where is the discussion? If the people of the US are blind to this alleged water-grab, can you really claim the position of moral high-ground while attempting to make [ad-supported] content out of the issue without lifting a finger to actually get the word out via the wikipedia [or any other medium with any kind of reach]?

You guys aren’t even popular enough to have a wikipedia article for yourselves, yet you claim to be delivering an important message. I know it probably took a few hours at least to edit all that green-screen stuff with the pretty host bouncing around.

Who’s “Green-Washing” who? Are you helping humanity? Are you participating in the cloud? Or are you just trying to sell a cute actress to us while capitalizing on our guilt by using the whole “green” thing?

This is social media, people. If it’s true, add it to the wikipedia with sources!

If it’s “true” let’s expose it properly! I can’t wait to hear back from you. BTW, I love Channel Frederator!!! —Andrew

T. Boone Pickens’ Grassroots Campaign for U.S. Energy Plan

I just heard about this from the Inside Silicon Valley Podcast from The San Jose Mercury News (the site of which, sadly, has no RSS feed metadata in its html head.  Get it together, people!)

MP3 of interview HERE

Anyway, this guy apparently made a fortune as a Texas oil man.  Now he’s decided to spearhead a movement toward “energy-independence.”  In a nutshell, he wants to shift our use of Natural gas over to transportation and replace its 20% share of electricity production with wind power by building out the “Wind Belt” with turbines.  The result, he claims, would mean consuming about 38% less foreign oil. It would also mean cleaner transportation and electricity production.

Pickens has launched a totally kick-ass, Web2-savvy campaign to recruit online “foot-soldiers,” for his movement.  He has already met with the “president” and says he also plans to meet with both mainstream presidential candidates “at the same time.”  

He claims that the site moved into the top-1000 most-viewed sites in under three weeks, with 2.5 million hits and about a one-tenth conversion rate (people signing up to get involved, subscribing to get updates etc)!!! (three exclamation points!!!) In addition, he’s touring around giving “town-hall” meetings all over, and spending his money on TV advertisements.   

Techno-Activism? Go to PickensPlan.com and look around.  What do you think?  I like seeing rich-ass people putting their dollars into making positive changes in policy and public perception (if that’s what this is (I’m the first one to admit that I’m no expert on what the best route to sustainable energy is)).

Whatever you think about the plan, you have to admit that the campaign is being smartly executed. He must have a great team working for him.

This video is an overview of his “plan” (the second is one of the TV advertisements he did, which sufficiently pulls on left-wing heart strings since it has plenty of imagery of smoke pouring into the air)

Sebastopol Trash Pick-Up 08-09 Plan To Clean Sebastopol Country Roads

Starting August or September, depending on the comments I get on this blog entry, I will begin ridding the street I live on of trash, Watertrough Road, Sebastopol, CA 95472.  I imagine it will take me about a week of going out every day, for 2-4 hours on foot, and even occasionally picking some pieces of junk up with my minivan and hauling it to the dump or finding a way to recycle it.  I want to clean Watertrough Rd completely of every last candy-wrapper and cigarette butt.  

I would like to make a “movement” out of this.  Let’s start here in West County, and the rest of the world can copy us.

I want to set up an infrastructure for helping other people do similar cleanup work along our country roads. Now that we have the internet, let’s put it to some good!

Please be interested in this.  If you’re interested in helping in any way, please send an email to

sebastopolroads@gmail.com

Love,

Andrew A. Peterson, your neighbor.

Please Comment below to show your support!

Comcast Bought Plaxo. I deleted My Plaxo Account.

A “Letter to Comcast,” but also, and more importantly, a letter to people who read my blog.

Source: TechCrunch

Plaxo has some really compelling address book synchronization offerings.  Really, for me, Plaxo was sort of a mini dream come true as far as my personal data is concerned.

But I thought about it and I just don’t trust Comcast.  They are limiting my access to competing media distribution channels, and they have a reputation for fighting against consumer interests, and perhaps even human interests, if you’re willing to step back and see the implications of the non-neutrality they are in favor of with regard to the Internet.

Comcast, you have an uphill PR battle in front of you.  People like me will continue to think of your brand as representing pure evil until you start to prove us wrong.  I don’t know how you’re going to do this, but making acquisitions that appear to consumers to be privacy concerns, given your already soiled trust with the public, isn’t the best thing to do right now.  I’m all for socially curated media, and I’m glad if Comcast is working in that direction, but frankly, you’re in a position where you could really start to seem like the orwellian “Big Brother” Nightmare everyone is terrified of.  Perhaps you should point all your guns at bringing IPTV into reality, or better yet, let’s see the real convergence between TV and Web that we all know is coming one way or another.  Do that first.  And why don’t you also try getting all the dark spots in the Net lit up! The South, you know? Let’s get those people online and you can sell them programming later.  I know there’s not really a bandwidth problem, not when there’s 100 channels of “HD” programming streaming into all your cable customers homes 24/7. C’mon. Quit lying and cheating and stealing and start making some progress toward our common good.  Or on the other hand, why don’t you announce the acquisition of an arms manufacturer.  That’d help your company’s image.

I’ve deleted Plaxo’s software from my machine, and I closed my Plaxo account.  Goodbye Plaxo.  Really, an open-source version of the same type of thing would be better anyhow.

Lawrence Lissig Testifies at FCC’s Net Neutrality Hearing at Stanford April 17 2007

Link to Video

Should I join ASCAP? pros and cons (beta)

I’m worried that new innovations in music discovery might not be able to play ASCAP music because of the cost. I heard that this might be the case for small internet radio stations… I’m still trying to get to the bottom of this.

Then, I did come across these ASCAP contracts for new media channels… it’s about $1000/year minimum. This sounds high to me at first for a totally underground, out-of-my-bedroom type of channel, but then I got to thinking… A fast, enterprise-speed server, which is what I think you’d want if you were going to do something like an internet radio station, will probably cost you $100/month… So basically, if you were doing that and you wanted to play ASCAP music (and not get your pants sued off) you’d be doubling that amount… say $200-$300/month…

Then

I found a cool internet radio station called erika.net (that does play ASCAP and BMI music) and it turns out I wasn’t too far off. They say on their site that it costs about $400/month to keep their service going.

to be continued…

Easter & Wikipedia’s ‘On This Day’

What isn’t on this calendar?  Well, according to The Wikipedia, on this day, Jesus didn’t become the first human being ever to come back to life after being completely dead (for more than a few minutes).

Lots of interesting things did happen on this day, however.  For instance in 1903, The Wright Brothers applied for a patent on their invention of one of the first successful airplanes.

I don’t like to blog about religion (or mainstream politics), because I feel like doing so will cloud up the few messages I do really want to trumpet through this site.  But thinking about the tradition of celebrating Easter feels weird on me today.

Why do people need to celebrate something that certainly did not happen?  And going further, why is it that the story of Jesus, for most Christians, is more about the folklore of his alleged magic tricks than about the philosophical teachings associated with him?  Virgin births, resurrections, turning one form of matter into another with the waive of a hand–these are all great tricks, but what about the guy that made the Statue of Liberty disappear?  And that was so much more recent!  Magic is fun.  It’s neato.  But to me, disregard and even avoidance of what is evident, the laws of the universe for instance, is just disgraceful.

So while I know I might offend or alienate a few people with this post, I felt like I needed to say that it offends and alienate me when people celebrate bullshit and insist that things are true when they are not.  It offends me when religious people want to teach the younger generations of our species untruths.  It offends me when religious people want government policy to be influenced by untruths.

Happy Easter! 

Onion: Delicious Snacks Distract Congressmen From Horrors Of War

Voluntary Payment for Music vs. Music-Like-Water Approach Part 1

Part One – Some Background. Long Tail, Net Neutrality & Free Culture

First, let me apologize for how long this damn thing is. Unfortunately, I need to make sure I get everyone on the same page more or less as far as what I see as the important ideas/themes to consider when looking at the current condition of Music (and all other Media). If the set-up is old news to you, bare with me while I school everyone else for a second.

Second, if you’re interested in what is going on with all this stuff, you really ought to check out the book: The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution by Dave Kusek. The first six chapters are available as a podcast in the iTunes Store HERE (iTunes URL Link). And a variety of links to where you can purchase the entire Audiobook can be found HERE.

This is where I got the idea of “Music Like Water.” In the first chapter of the book, Kusek talks about how in the future, music will flow like water without the constant interruptions we experience now when we have to buy or download it or move it from one drive to another. Music will just be there waiting. Like water through a faucet, it will pour. It will be as abundant and as varied as we like. I believe, as long as the Net remains neutral, this is inevitable.

Right now of course, that’s not at all how it works. But if you’ve got your ear to the tracks you can hear it coming. Digital Media, The Web, Search, Recommendation Systems, Social Software, RSS/Atom feeds, P2P technology, increasing connection speeds, accelerating processing power, the cheapening of storage – We are clearly on the threshold of a paradigm change. This is a particular moment in time when some very exciting things are happening with regard to how media is curated, discovered and distributed, not to mention how it’s created.

This stuff is much bigger than just music too. Of course all of these concepts carry over into Film, News, Literature, instructional products, the list goes on, but even beyond all that, this is a profound moment in history because the very process by which Human Culture grows, changes and spreads is changing because of the Internet and the invention of digital product. Anyone with access to blue-collar amounts of money can create media. Since increasingly anyone can participate in the cultural dialog, people are. This phenomenon is causing the few companies and institutions that have had most of the control over Culture in its many forms for all of living memory to lose market share as they increasingly find themselves in competition with Everyone and Everything else.

The “Everything Else” is also called the Long Tail and is examined by Chris Anderson in his book, “The Long Tail: Why The Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” This is a good book to read or listen to because it brings to light an important fact: There is more value in the sum of all the less-popular and niche products than there is in just the “Top Hits” we’ve grown up with.

The “Everyone Else” is me and you. What we are participating in here is what Lawrence Lessig calls the Read/Write Web. Rather than a one-way, or Read-Only form of media, digital media and the Web are very conducive to dialog. One example of this dialog is sampling in music. Another is the blogosphere. And there are many, many more. The Hands-On, Read/Write, Two-Way “remix-culture” that we are finding ourselves in suddenly makes you and me part of the “Everything Else” I mentioned a moment ago.

In this way, we are taking market share from corporate media and so corporate media is losing influence over our Culture and losing Money as the value they can offer advertisers is falling. And guess what. They want to stop it. That’s exactly what the Net Neutrality debate is about. If the Net becomes un-neutral, it will be like handing the freedom to participate that we now enjoy over to companies that stand to gain from preventing our participation in Media, and our access to a variety of media products.

If you want to learn more about Two-Way Media and how Corporate Media is trying to control it, go read or listen to Lawrence Lessig’s book: “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture.” It’s free!

Almost everyone I know uses illegal means to access media products at leas some of the time. Often it’s just too inconvenient to get media the legal way. Actually it’s often not even an option.

The traditional purveyers of Culture are losing money because of this. Media have been selling eyes and ears to the advertisers that fund them since before your parents were born. It’s not paranoid conspiracy-theory-speak when I say that the corporate media want to maintain control over the Culture Markets.

MORE ON THIS TO COME.  In the meantime, check these out:

Trent Reznor Talks to CNET About Saul Williams Release

NIN Releases Ghosts Volume I for FREE 

Recent Post of Mine Comparing Press About the Radiohead “In Rainbows” Release to the Release of The Saul Williams’ Record

DIGG THIS: Video About Net Neutrality

I was pleased to wake up the other day after sleeping over at a friend’s house and find that this was playing on the TV Set via the podcast “The Digg Reel…”
Apparently it’s gotten some love out there. My friend Arin put this video together and he used an early incarnation of the song Starting Over in it.

read more | digg story

A letter To Lawrence Lessig: Government Websites

This post is aimed at one of my personal heroes, Professor Lawrence Lessig.

Mr Lessig,

First, I want to thank you for all the work you’ve done already to spread awareness about ‘Net Neutrality,’ the need for Intellectual Property reform, ‘Free Culture’ and so on. Your name comes up often as I do my part to help to change the way people think about the ownership of ideas and/or culture, no doubt because many of my thoughts on these matters are derivatives of yours. And finally, as an artist, thank you for helping me to see past my own possessive instincts, and to understand that my creative efforts are best honored if I aim for my work to become part of the Public Domain, because it is there that I can really contribute to the shape of our culture in the future. So thank you. Please keep up the good work.

It occurred to me that you may be the perfect person to spearhead the solving of a problem our government has -a small problem with major consequences. Before I go on though, I just want to urge you not to take this letter the wrong way. I don’t mean to imply that you need people like me to help you to choose your battles. But I know of no one else in the public eye that is such an advocate for the people, and who also seems to understand the implications of digital communication via the Web. You are the only public figure I can think of that generally seems to take the people’s side in all the domains where this issue manifests itself: The need for transparency in government; The need for people to be able to navigate the law to some degree without the aid of lawyers; The importance and potential of the [Read/Write] Web, especially with regard to how it can and does make our Democracy more democratic; etc… You actually seem to understand what the Web is and why it is important, and I fear that many or most of our legislators, judges and executives do not. This is why I’m writing to you.

The problem is that government websites generally lack consistency, search-ability, interactivity and general user-friendliness. On the surface, this may seem to many people like a minor problem. But from my point of view, it is one of the most important manifestations of how our government doesn’t work for the average person. This is a huge opportunity to improve how our democracy works for us.

Here are some of my thoughts on this.

1. Government websites generally have no interoperability between them. It seems to me that government websites should share a common information infrastructure as well as a common basic user interface and query system. If I am looking for information on something like a law on one government site, like say a county, I should be able to expand my search to include less local results, like say the state I am in, or narrow my search to only include more local results, like the City I am in. I think that government sites should be hierachically connected wherever possible to say the very least.

In general, I think it is time for all official government agency websites to become integrated.

2. Government websites do not routinely take advantage of technologies that make it easy for us to get new information from them. With technologies like RSS and iCal, it seems that citizens should be able to access regular updates from all the government agencies that concern them. We should be able to anonymously subscribe to feeds of governmental news, events, changes in policy, Etc. Example: “Effective today: All automobiles must have headlights turned on when it is raining regardless of the time of day. See Vehicle Code XYZ Section abc.”

3. By allowing existing laws to be un-findable, our government excludes us from even being able to understand what we have supposedly agreed upon through a democratic process.

For instance, on many occasions, I have tried to find out the specifics of one law or another. I have gone to my City, County and State government websites hoping for my question to be answered by a quick search, but instead, I’ve found myself hours later with a ton of windows open still trying to figure out the answer to a specific question like “Is [somehting] against the law?”

Again, to some people this may seem like a trivial complaint, but how in the world are we supposed to be law-abiding citizens if we cannot even be sure what the laws are? I believe that most people, in most communities in the USA have a very vague understanding of what is and isn’t legal. To many of us, The Law acts like some sort of urban mythology. We have no idea what the law actually says, and we cannot find the law if we want to learn what it actually says.

I have even had conversations with law enforcement officers in which the officers assured me that I “Can’t do” something, but were unable to tell me what the law says, where it says it, whether it is a local, state or federal law that is in question, or where I could even begin to look to find out for myself. This is scary to me.

I understand that Laws themselves are often confusing to lay persons. But I don’t understand why it is so hard to even find Laws in the first place. We have the technology to vastly improve this situation. It must be improved.

4 . Government websites generally have no place for public discussion or comment. There is also generally no universal protocol for asking the government(s) questions through the Web. Really, there is practically no way to reliably get facts about policy from government agencies in general. Since we clearly have the technology to make it possible for citizens to interact with and get information from government agencies, while keeping the expense to taxpayers very low, shouldn’t this be imperative?

So those are some of my main ideas about the digital government interface. Perhaps it is time for it to become written into law that certain standards and improvements are implemented on all government websites. Indeed, if there are already legally binding standards in place for government websites, they need to be vastly improved.

If technologies like RSS along with Semantic Web technologies were taken advantage of by government agencies, they could lead to vast improvements in our ability to understand and take part in our democracy.

Mr. Lessig, I wanted to write this to you because I don’t know where else to turn with these ideas. I hope you get this, and if you do, I hope you understand why I wrote this to you, rather than, say, The President or Santa Clause.

Of course, I am more than willing to help with this cause in any way that I can.

Sincerely,

Andrew A. Peterson

Lawrence Lessig Running for Congress. Please Consider This.

Here’s the video Lessig made about this.
“10 minutes to announce two ideas”

Police.

This is sad.  And I’ve seen behavior like this on the part of law enforcement officers far too many times.  I like to think that all this interconnectivity between us with our gadgets and the web is going to make it harder for our public servants to get away with treating us like this.

I Scraped My MySpace Friends. Scrape Yours!

Is there a way to download MySpace Friends? Not officially.I used “O-Community” to scrape my friends out of myspace and I used TextWrangler to turn the file into a series of <a> tags within <li> tags that include the XFN rel=”friend” attribute. I will be looking into how I might publish this information in a more relevant structure/format, probably as SIOC or FOAF data, if I can figure out how to do that.

I wish FaceBook & MySpace allowed you to download a spreadsheet (excel or whatever) of all your contacts and their demographic information like Age, Gender, Location Etc. Some other formats I would like to be able to download my contacts in are RDF/XML, vCard, CSV Etc…

Actually, it is explicitly against MySpace’s and FaceBook’s Terms Of Service to do what I have done here. Scripts and Bots are prohibited. Perhaps this will change some bright beautiful day in the future.

We need to be able to mine the ‘Data of Our Lives,’ including of course the contacts we make through Social Software services. We also need to be able to Back-Up all our Data.

If you would like help scraping your MySpace friends, drop me a line and maybe I can help out.

1. retard a ..
2. no profile
3. Matthew
4. Leandra
5. Matt
6. Giraffe
7. Arin Crumley
8. Susan Buice
9. Elijah
10. Big Love
11. John
12. OG Readmore
13. Kim
14. Four Eyed..
15. aletia
16. JB
17. Tom
18. hachurui
19. Ehly
20. Bianca Ba..
21. philipb
22. johnny
23. Vodka Tan..
24. Stephanie
25. Stefi
26. alien
27. tamiko
28. kefentse
29. sonja
30. Sonoma Co..
31. Miss White
32. Jamal
33. Chicago U..
34. Alexandra
35. Molly
36. monkey gl..
37. RUN
38. Mandy
39. GODFATHER
40. connie
41. The Datas..
42. P.P.A.M
43. mikehedge..
44. megadethk..
45. Cat
46. molecules
47. Simply Pa..
48. First Tim..
49. Jessica E..
50. Sarah Miller
51. rigel. th..
52. Erik
53. EVERYBODY..
54. bad kissers
55. Aaron
56. Velvet Ha..
57. Malik
58. brian
59. wei
60. selena
61. RADFORD
62. marissa

I Scraped My MySpace Friends. Scrape Yours!

Is there a way to download MySpace Friends? Not officially.I used “O-Community” to scrape my friends out of myspace and I used TextWrangler to turn the file into a series of <a> tags within <li> tags that include the XFN rel=”friend” attribute. I will be looking into how I might publish this information in a more relevant structure/format, probably as SIOC or FOAF data, if I can figure out how to do that.

I wish FaceBook & MySpace allowed you to download a spreadsheet (excel or whatever) of all your contacts and their demographic information like Age, Gender, Location Etc. Some other formats I would like to be able to download my contacts in are RDF/XML, vCard, CSV Etc…

Actually, it is explicitly against MySpace’s and FaceBook’s Terms Of Service to do what I have done here. Scripts and Bots are prohibited. Perhaps this will change some bright beautiful day in the future.

We need to be able to mine the ‘Data of Our Lives,’ including of course the contacts we make through Social Software services. We also need to be able to Back-Up all our Data.

If you would like help scraping your MySpace friends, drop me a line and maybe I can help out.

1. retard a ..
2. no profile
3. Matthew
4. Leandra
5. Matt
6. Giraffe
7. Arin Crumley
8. Susan Buice
9. Elijah
10. Big Love
11. John
12. OG Readmore
13. Kim
14. Four Eyed..
15. aletia
16. JB
17. Tom
18. hachurui
19. Ehly
20. Bianca Ba..
21. philipb
22. johnny
23. Vodka Tan..
24. Stephanie
25. Stefi
26. alien
27. tamiko
28. kefentse
29. sonja
30. Sonoma Co..
31. Miss White
32. Jamal
33. Chicago U..
34. Alexandra
35. Molly
36. monkey gl..
37. RUN
38. Mandy
39. GODFATHER
40. connie
41. The Datas..
42. P.P.A.M
43. mikehedge..
44. megadethk..
45. Cat
46. molecules
47. Simply Pa..
48. First Tim..
49. Jessica E..
50. Sarah Miller
51. rigel. th..
52. Erik
53. EVERYBODY..
54. bad kissers
55. Aaron
56. Velvet Ha..
57. Malik
58. brian
59. wei
60. selena
61. RADFORD
62. marissa

House of Representitaves Says Colleges Responsible for Piracy

I hate how our Congress slips irrelevant terms into legislation all the time. “College Affordability? What do Piracy, P2P and File-Sharing have to do with the affordability of ‘Higher Education?’

From CNET (I really like CNET lately):

“The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a higher-education funding bill that includes controversial new antipiracy obligations for universities.

The 354-58 vote to approve the College Opportunity and Affordability Act leaves intact an entertainment industry-backed provision, which makes up just a tiny part of a bill that has ballooned to more than 800 pages.

It says higher-education institutions participating in federal financial aid programs “shall” devise plans for “alternative” offerings to unlawful downloading–such as subscription-based services–or “technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.”

Bollocks.

If you look at the Yeas and Nays, you’ll see that the majority Yea votes were Democrats.  Actually, the only Nays were Republicans!  This is a good example of the Democratic party falling inline with Anti-Freedom, Pro-Corporate interests. I’m saying this only because many of my friends are self-proclaimed Left-Wingers and it is often assumed that the Left is more Pro-Freedom. Not so fast.

RIAA’s Cary Sherman Talks About Network Filtering

From the Public Knowledge Blog

Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA speaking at the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee’s State of the Net Conference

I want to find the full length version of this. UPDATE: The entire video is available HERE. (Unfortunately it’s a RealPlayer File, and it doesn’t play back properly through my MOTU 828… The fix for this is to switch to built-in speakers. Lame. Through my 828 the sound is all garbled and slowed down and only comes out through one channel.)

There’s also a complete Mp3 download HERE.

I heard part of the panel thru an audio stream that stopped about ten minutes in. For this reason I can say at least that the jump-cuts in this youtube video aren’t edits to bend the meaning of what Cary Sherman is saying. They’re just speeding it up. I’m looking around for the full video. I can tell from what I heard that this is an enlightening panel with a nice selection of speakers on it.

Panel:

• Mia Garlick, YouTube
• Greg Jackson, University of Chicago
• Gregory Marchwinski, Red Lambda, Inc.
• Cary Sherman, Recording Industry Association of America
• David Sohn, Center for Democracy & Technology (moderator)
• Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge

Lawrence Lessig Made a Video For You

It’s about Clinton/Obama.

It’s HERE.

He’s a hero so it’s good to tune-in when he makes videos for us.

Vote For Obama in the Primary!

I don’t like to blog about generic politics here, but I really don’t want Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic candidate.

Also, I really don’t like to support the Democratic Party or the Republican Party but since one of the two of them will almost definitely win the presidential election, I re-registered as a Democrat just so I could vote against Hillary Clinton (generally, I register undeclared).

As far as Democrats and Republicans go, I really think Obama is the best choice.

Here’s a good video of Obama speaking and then being interviewed at Google’s headquarters.

Please, DON’T VOTE FOR CLINTON!

A Vision of Students Today – New Video from Mike Wesch

Scott Westerfeld, DJ Spooky & More on TTBOOK This Week

In case you missed it and you probably did if you’re the type of folk that will read this, I wanted to steer you toward the last episode of the PRI show, To The Best Of Our Knowledge.

Their Podcast is broken down by segment and can be found here (itunes store url).

Part one, is about apocalyptic settings in fiction… I really thought the last part was interesting. An author named Jonathan Lethem Scott Westerfeld wrote a novel, apparently for teens, about a scenario in the future where Social Currency via the Web is everything (or something to that effect) – a sort of Social Software Hell. The interview touches on some ideas about privacy and technology and also why Teens may relate so well to dystopian settings. All very interesting to me.

The other segment is about plagiarism and there is various anecdotal fuel for discussion there too.

It’s amusing to me that I would find it strange that both of these topics, Intellectual Property and Privacy, be touched on by a radio program in the context of being completely unrelated. I’m so used to thinking about these two topics as parts of the big can of worms that is the Digital Age we’re just starting to come to grips with.

Swedish Cops Charging The Pirate Bay: “Conspiracy to Breach Copyrights”

The Pirate Bay is an infamous (or just fairly reliable) BitTorrent Tracker that has previously been completely out of range from legal action by the RIAA and others because they are in Sweden where the law apparently doesn’t consider BitTorrent illegal.

The site actually even throws a giant bird at all the lawyers that send them cease and desist letters and other threats, often responding with childish obscenities.  And they post it all on their site HERE.  Pretty audacious (and funny).

According to TechCrunch, according the The Wall Street Jounal,

Based on evidence collected in a 2006 raid on the offices of The Pirate Bay, Swedish prosecutors say that by the end of January they expect to charge the individuals who operate the file-sharing service with conspiracy to breach copyrights.

The Pirate Bay’s operators say they are expecting the charges and will prepare their defense with the aid of government-funded lawyers for a trial later this year. “We’re not worried,” says Fredrik Neij, a Pirate Bay co-founder. “We think the law is on our side.”

The Pirate Bay’s operators say they have been followed in recent weeks by camera-toting private detectives in foreign-registered cars. In September, they filed a police complaint claiming that MediaDefender, a U.S. counterpiracy company, had been hired by several Hollywood studios and music companies to hack into their site and shut it down.

MediaDefender, which itself was hacked by a shadowy group last year, denies the accusation. “We’re a reputable public company,” says Chief Executive Randy Saaf. “We’re not going to be doing hacking. That’s silly.”

Thoughts: FaceBook TOS, Robots, Control/Access to Contact information Etc

Still a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about the recent Scandal, famous tech blogger Robert Scoble’s FaceBook account getting suspended after he was using a script Plaxo is working on that can extract email addresses from your friends profiles, using text-recognition (user’s emails on FaceBook, if they decide to share them, are displayed embedded in images on their profiles to prevent text-scraping)

This is a comment I left on the SixApart News Blog’s post:
“Looking Through the Hype of Scoble and Plaxo’s Facebook Conundrum“ 

EDIT: Later, I decided to reuse this rant over on Publishing 2.0’s post here: “The Coming War Over Data On The Web” I’m linking to these things because I think you may want to go read them and the comments they are sparking.  Pretty interesting.

From my point of view, as a pretty avid user of social web apps, I think there are a couple of things missing from the way this discussion is playing out in most cases.
1. By “friending” someone on MySpace, Facebook or wherever, you’re agreeing to give them more access to you. Generally there are two levels of access – the non-’friend’ level and the ‘friend’-level. A user has control over what is published on each tier of access so it seems pretty obvious to me: if you don’t want someone to have access to your email address or phone number, don’t give it to them. Don’t give them that access.
Whether or not someone uses a script to manage the information you give them is beside the point. We don’t hand people our business cards saying “You may only use this email by manually typing it. You can’t put me in your bulk emailing lists.”
2. When you give someone your email address (or whatever), whether it’s embedded in an image or not, you are trusting them to not abuse it.
3. there are a few advantages to using Social Networking Services’ messaging systems in lieu of regular email. One is the ability to communicate with people despite the fact that you haven’t given them your email address, phone number, messaging handle or other private information. The other is the ability to ‘block,’ (and sometimes even flag) a user so that they actually lose privileges.

As users of a networking service, I think making a distinction between running scripts or not, with regard to how I can use the information you gave me, is terribly naive. I mean maybe I shouldn’t be able to use keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste either. It’s a slippery slope. If we draw the line for how I can and cannot use data that you give me at using software, then how about this scenario: I just so happen to be fairly wealthy and I hire a whole room full of overseas workers to manually manage my contacts, send messages etc… See?

Can I be trusted more because I’m not using a bot? No. Making the privilege of access to your contact information hinge on whether or not I will use software to help me organize it is a bit like saying I may only have your information if I promise to only use it in relatively more difficult ways.

When I tell people about some of the work that’s being done to create more universal data formats in the Semantic Web space, they often freak out about privacy, big brother and all that. It’s like people believe that if everything is disorganized and harder to use, there is more safety, privacy etc. This is troubling to me. Thank goodness people don’t manage their households and personal wealth with this approach to security!

If we rely on disorganization as a layer of security It means that only those with greater access to more powerful tools (whether they’re software tools or human resources) can extract and mine the data – data that’s already intended to be public in the first place!

Similarly, contact information should be managed via it’s point of access, not how it’s used. How it’s used is a matter of trust and those of us with integrity have reasons to honor the privacy and comfort of our contacts.