Blind leading the blind: Publishing industry follows lead of MPAA, RIAA

The New York Times is reporting that influential members of the publishing industry, including the AP and other news organizations, are pushing for extensions to the Robots Exclusion Standard which will give publishers more control over how search engines index their sites.

The extensions, known as the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), will reportedly allow content providers to “limit how long search engines may retain copies in their indexes, or tell the crawler not to follow any of the links that appear within a Web page.”

On the surface, this seems rather mundane. However, the publishers are pushing for the standards for copyright reasons, claiming that by indexing and redisplaying content from their sites, search engines are violating their rights as content producers.

I can’t see how this is anything but a boneheaded move by the publishers, akin to the brilliant tactics used by the music and film industries to alienate users while attempting to shore up their failing business models. The description of ACAP above sounds like it will merely prevent potential readers from finding content—if key areas don’t get indexed, users won’t find them in searches, and if crawlers can’t follow links, then that will further limit the effectiveness of searches by hobbling search algorithms like Google’s PageRank. I can’t imagine how content providers can think this is a good thing, unless, of course, they hope to turn the internet into a segregated collection of walled gardens where users must pay for content at every site they visit.

It seems that the trend for online content providers is in the opposite direction, as previously walled sites are opening up access. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, two of the largest, and most successful subscriber-based content systems, recently unlocked their sites. It is likely that they did so because the numbers suggest that the increased traffic brought by open access will more than replace subscriber fees with ad revenue.

I think the locking down of content that the ACAP represents is a move in the wrong direction. In the Times piece, the executive director of the European Publishers Council Angela Mills Wade is quoted as saying that “ACAP could . . . make Web sites more comfortable about putting more material online, including scholarly journals and other items requiring subscriptions.”

So, scholarly journals are afraid of putting their content online because search engines might index it, display summaries of it, and allow more people to read it? This makes absolutely no sense to me; the trend for content providers should be to monetize the long tail of users who would never find their content without it being freely searchable on the web. How is the content making any money—or acquiring any value at all, for that matter—by mouldering, unaccessed, offline? Publishing companies need to wake up and follow the lead of the Times and WSJ, not that of the RIAA and MPAA.

More by Berners-Lee on social networking

This time, its a video:

Video: Web pioneer discusses science of the Internet

Related: Tim Berners-Lee on “the Graph”

Tim Berners-Lee on “the Graph”

Web-god Tim Berners-Lee posted a theoretical blog on the social graph early last week.

He argued that networked computing has gone through three stages. First there was the net, the network infrastructure of the internet. Once users were free from having to physically connect individual machines that they wanted to network, they were able to ignore the network, or the cables, and focus on the computers themselves. According to Berners-Lee, when users could focus on the more important half of this binary, they were able to get more use from the net, and their ability was even more enhanced by enabling the reuse of underused or forgotten resources.

The next level of networking was the web. Because it combined the resources of different machines and connected them together seamlessly, the world wide web allowed users to focus not on the computers, but on the documents. The document of choice, of course, was the web page, which, like the computers of the net, became the focal point of web browsing.

At the third level, Berners-Lee points out that users began to realize that it is what the documents are about, not the documents themselves, that was important. This level is similar to the semantic web, and Berners-Lee calls it “the graph.” (Actually, he calls it the “Giant Global Graph,” riffing on the WWW.) As users are able to capitalize on the graph, he argues, they will be able to exercise more power from their computing tasks, just as the innovations of the net and the web made computing more powerful at those levels. However, to make optimal use of the graph, designers will have to allow for the information stored in their documents to be able to freely interact with the information on other pages.

Letting your data connect to other people's data is a bit about letting go in that sense. It is still not about giving to people data which they don't have a right to. It is about letting it be connected to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from other applications.

It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.

Berners-Lee suggests that this can happen if designers make use of available semantic web tools. He sums up his vision in this penultimate paragraph:

In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary.

via Read/Write Web

Course website design: Literature and Mathematics

I’ve been working on my spring 2008 course, “Literature and Mathematics” lately, and one of the things I’m trying to do is update the course website so it is a little more aesthetically pleasing. I started with a splash image:


The inspiration for the image is the quote from Lakoff and Núñez’s Where Mathematics Comes From:

The inferior parietal cortex is a highly associative area, located anatomically where neural connections from vision, audition, and touch come together—a location appropriate for numerical abilities, since they are common to all sensory modalities. Lesions in this area have been shown to affect not only arithmetic but also writing.

I felt the connection between arithmetic and writing emphasized in the quote would be a good hook for the course, a way of building on Lakoff and Núñez’s argument that mathematics is about ideas, then connecting this claim to literary ideas and the way the two interact.

My inspiration for the aesthetic of the image is another course text, Tomasula and Farrell’s Vas: An Opera in Flatland. Here’s a sample page from that text:


Although I’m going to make some minor tweaks to the image—I don’t like the look of the line to the bullseye, for example—I’m pretty pleased with the results.

There is one thing I’m not sure how to handle, though. The image of the brain comes from Joseph Vimont’s Traité de phrénologie humaine et comparée the NIH’s “Historical Anatomies on the Web.” The bullseye is supposed to be centered on the angular gyrus in the inferior parietal cortex. While I think the positioning seems about right, I don’t think that the brain folds in Vimont’s image match up with the folds of other brain images I have seen. Based on the folds, I think the angular gyrus would be located just to the right of the middle of the image. I’m not sure if this is because Vimont’s image is incorrect, or if it is not a view from the left side, but from the left rear of the brain. I suppose it’s not a big deal, because this isn’t a neurology course.

DIY ‘Minority Report’ multi-touch interface

A grad student from Carnegie Mellon named Johnny Lee has posted a video demonstrating how the Wiimote can be used to create a multi-touch, gestural interface similar to the ones seen in Minority Report.

His website has some other interesting videos showing his work with motion tracking and interfaces.

via Make blog

Facebook user statistics

Using Facebook’s new ad system, Paul Francis has collected and published demographic data on Facebook’s users.



As Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch originally reported, Francis’s data indicated that Facebook users were almost two-thirds women. Francis has since updated his results, pointing out that when he originally collected the data, he was unaware that Facebook users could choose to not select a gender, a fact which skewed the number of female users higher than they actually are.

via Tech Crunch

Facebook’s Beacon ad platform: Criticism and censorship

Facebook has launched a new ad platform called “Project Beacon”:

the new program is threefold: advertisers can create branded pages, run targeted advertisements, and have access to intelligence and analytics pertaining to the site’s more than 50 million users. Partners can participate in all three components of Facebook Ads, or a combination of them. “When you put this all together, you get some pretty amazing things,” Zuckerberg said of the program, which he said took “four months or so” to develop.

Through the branded pages program, advertisers can design custom pages with information, content, and custom applications—“any application that was written for users on the Facebook Platform,” Zuckerberg explained. Facebook users can sign up as “fans” of that brand, install branded applications, and other activities that will all show up in their profiles’ “mini feeds” and on the “news feeds” that are broadcast to their friends lists.

“When people engage your page on Facebook, that’s going to spread information about your brand virally through the social graph,” Zuckerberg said. “It becomes a trusted referral.”

For MoveOn.org, this new program is going over about as well as news feeds did when they were launched. MoveOn’s Adam Green argues that the platform is “a ‘glaring violation of (Facebook’s) users’ privacy,’ and has launched a paid ad campaign on Facebook, a ‘protest group’ on the social-networking site, and an online petition to encourage the company to allow users to opt into the program at their own volition.” What bothers MoveOn is that Beacon captures online activity outside of Facebook, and then publishes that activity in the users News Feed. While it is possible to opt out of Beacon, the organization complains that the process is complicated, and has to be repeated at each Facebook partner site.

Facebook has responded to these charges, claiming that users’ privacy will not be invaded because News Feeds can only be seen by friends, and that MoveOn’s campaign has misrepresented the difficulties in opting out of the program. The sticking point here is what counts as privacy: Facebook claims that only publishing information to friends is private, while Green claims, somewhat hyperbolically, “If Facebook’s argument is that sharing private information with hundreds or thousands of someone’s closest ‘friends’ is not the same as making that information ‘public,’ that shows how weak Facebook's argument is.” On the one hand, I think Facebook is correct: it is easy to set the privacy features of the site so that the News Feed can only be seen by those you want. However, even though Green may be overstating the case with the numbers he quotes,—which seems somewhat typical of MoveOn’s emotional rhetoric, considering that their other major argument is that Facebook is ruining Christmas—I believe he is correct that users are going to be somewhat blindsided by this feature and will want to have the ability to opt out completely, at least until they get used to it.

I think this new program clearly illustrates the growing importance of Facebook as a networking tool. If people didn’t find Facebook necessary, they would abandon it, rather than try to reform it. Also, I think it suggests that Facebook needs to do some serious thinking about how it introduces new products. Between this issue and the news feed reaction, it seems obvious that the company needs to pay much more attention to how its users react to its new offerings.

Finally, there is another disturbing question related to this issue. In his post responding to MoveOn’s arguments, Josh Catone at Read/Write Web suggests that Facebook users aren’t nearly as outraged as MoveOn is making them out to be, citing as evidence the fact that he couldn’t find any Facebook groups protesting Beacon. However, Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch is suggesting that Facebook may be censoring anti-Beacon groups:

Naturally all the press on the issue led people to go to Facebook to find the group MoveOn set up to organize their opposition to Facebook’s current privacy policy on this issue.

The group, which now has over 12,000 members, could not be located via search. Yesterday a search in Facebook Groups for “Privacy” began to return an error message saying “search is currently unavailable.” But at the same time, searches for any other term yielded normal results.

If this is true, and Facebook did try to limit the spread of the group, then that should make users concerned about the role the company seems to be making for itself in the search and social networking fields.

Second Life not “real”; users sad, lonely deviants

Morgan Clendaniel has a new article in Good Magazine on Second Life, arguing that, as the highly-lauded next wave of the internet, the virtual world is a disappointment, going virtually (ha!) unused; except, of course, for the naughty areas. Also, Second Life aficionados are depressed (and depressing) losers.

I believe the first point is the most valid and interesting. Clendaniel points out the site’s relatively few users.

Since it launched, Second Life has been hailed as a glimpse of how we will someday interact, shop, and even live. With email and online shopping now commonplace, virtual worlds are the new cutting edge of online business and buzz. “In many ways, Second Life is the next step of the internet,” says Jeska Dzwigalski, a community manager with Linden. “[In the future], having a virtual presence will be as ubiquitous as mobile phones or email addresses or a web page is today. It’s the evolution of the internet.” Right now there are almost 9 million accounts, but at even at peak times (4 p.m. Eastern—presumably, the most avid users don’t have jobs) there are only 40,000 users logged on. That means the future of the internet is only grabbing enough people to fill a baseball stadium. While that number has been slowly growing, think about this: If just a little under 1 million users have logged in during the last 30 days, that means there are 8 million others who tried Second Life and haven’t felt any need to come back.

While Clendaniel makes some good points about the site’s usage—40,000 visitors isn’t quite up to Facebook’s or Wikipedia’s numbers—the overall tone of the article seems reactionary. For instance, consider this paragraph on the ways that Second Life inhibits social relationships:

The paradox of a virtual world is that it adds human interaction to the online experience, while at the same time making sure you never have to actually interact with anyone. Now, instead of merely buying a book on a website, you can browse a virtual bookstore along side other virtual patrons, without ever leaving your home. This logic—that you’d want to give up both the speed of online shopping and the social experience of actually shopping, that you’d want to spend time in a bookstore but not actually go to one—is depressing, to say the least. From there, it’s a small step to buying only virtual clothes for your virtual self while you sit at home in your underwear (which some people no doubt already do). The only thing you can’t get here is real-life sustenance, but with enough restaurants that deliver, you could conceivably never log out. What a future it could be.

I’m not quite sure how browsing a virtual bookstore at home in your underwear is any more depressing that browsing Amazon.com at home in your underwear. Additionally, Clendaniel doesn’t seem to understand the appeal of the site to its users. After asking one user why she doesn’t meet people in the real world, he snarks off her response (“Have you ever been to Oklahoma?”) as in-group snobbery.

The article’s biggest weakness, however, is that it is entirely based on Clendaniel’s own experience as a (new) user of Second Life. It’s hardly a scientific sample, and it makes his criticisms come off as uninformed.

Teens use IM to avoid emotional communication

According to a new poll from AOL and the AP, nearly half of teenagers use instant messaging services, compared to only about 20 percent usage by adults. Interestingly, a large chunk of those teens prefer IM for communications with heavy emotional content:

An estimated 43 percent of teens who instant message use the tool for emotionally charged conversations, according to a poll from AOL and the Associated Press that was released Thursday. Those conversations might include making and breaking dates.

The poll—which questioned 410 teens and more than 800 parents—found that 22 percent of teens use IM to ask people out on a date or accept one, and 13 percent of teens use instant chat to break up. Girls are also more likely to use IM to avoid uncomfortable talks. According to the poll, about half of girls and more than a third of boys said they’ve used instant chat to say what they wouldn’t say in person.

via: CNET News Blog

Related: “Email is dead. Long live email!”

Email is dead. Long live email!

So, it turns out that the youth of today no longer use email, preferring the IM and chat. Oh, wait; maybe that was the youth of five years ago. At any rate:

e-mail is looking obsolete. According to a 2005 Pew study, almost half of Web-using teenagers prefer to chat with friends via instant messaging rather than e-mail. Last year, comScore reported that teen e-mail use was down 8 percent, compared with a 6 percent increase in e-mailing for users of all ages. As mobile phones and sites like Twitter and Facebook have become more popular, those old Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts increasingly lie dormant.

However, there is some hope for email yet. Apparently Yahoo and Google are attempting to reanimate email’s rotting corpse as the backbone of their respective social networking strategies. Clearly, people still get worked up about email, but it is possible that, over time, email will morph into a primarily business communication tool, as the most formal—or, perhaps, the oldest and therefore least scary—of online communication methods.

Finally: Targeted ads for your alarm clock

This is just what I’ve always wanted:

The simplest way to describe the Chumby is as an Internet-enabled alarm clock. It actually is a Linux-powered, WiFi-connected computer with a touchscreen in a palm-sized bean bag that is intended to replace your alarm clock.

You connect the Chumby to your home’s wireless network and then configure it from the company’s website by selecting various software widgets and organizing them into channels which then cycle endlessly on your Chumby’s 3.5-inch color LCD display.
...
the terms-of-use on the Chumby Website reserves the right for the company to insert its own widgets (a.k.a. advertisements) into my widget stream. Like everybody else in the Web 2.0 era, Chumby is hoping to subsidize its business and the Chumby network by selling ads.

Rowling gets greedy

J. K. Rowling is suing to prevent a Harry Potter reference work, The Harry Potter Lexicon from being published.

In a statement, Rowling added: “It is not reasonable, or legal, for anybody, fan or otherwise, to take an author's hard work, re-organize their characters and plots, and sell them for their own commercial gain. However much an individual claims to love somebody else's work, it does not become theirs to sell.”

I’m confused; who is it that’s not being “reasonable” here?

At any rate, this case is interesting, because it shows how malleable copyright has become in the digital age. Apparently, the HP lexicon was a website before its print incarnation, and Rowling had praised it in the past. However, she is apparently threatened by the idea of someone else publishing a Potter book.

via Boing Boing

Doonesbury on classroom communication

I found today’s Doonesbury to be particularly funny.


For me, the strip works on two levels. First, I think Doonesbury is poking fun at the way young people interact with technology, rather than suggesting that technology in the classroom is a wonderful thing. As evidence for this perspective I would suggest the joke in the throwaway panels—Zipper appears to be busily engaged in some sort of heavy thinking which overwhelms him, but this activity is revealed in the last panel to be checking his email—and the fact that Zipper is not the brightest character in the strip. I found the comic funny at this intended level: Zipper is clearly not participating in the class, and his scheme for avoiding being called out on this point makes for an ironically-exciting narrative.

(Personal note: this situation reminded me of my own college experience. When I was a freshman, I would regularly sit in the back of a large, required survey course and read the newspaper. On one occasion, I didn’t hear the professor when he called on me to recite something or other. When a friend a few rows over got my attention and let me know what had happened, I jump up to do the reading, but the professor had moved on to something else, so I stood sheepishly for five minutes until he finally acknowledged me.)

The comic also works for me at another level, one where Zip is able to use his considerable techno-savvy to deal with the age-old problem of being called on to answer a question about material you haven’t studied. Zipper is merely using his laptop—IM and Google—to provide a novel means for achieving an old solution: getting the answer from someone else. And, in this case, because he found the answer himself, it is more likely that he will remember it.

I’m generally amused by professors who don’t allow laptops in their classes because they “distract” the students too much. Do professors think that all the students without laptops are paying attention? Did they never pass notes, or sleep, or read newspapers in class? At least in Zipper’s case, he is able to use his distraction as part of the classroom environment, even though he isn’t completely engaged with that environment.

SCMLA presentation: Wikipedia and revision

I just got back from the SCMLA conference in Memphis; the weather was great, and I got to hear some interesting presentations from my panel-mates.

Here is a copy of the slides from my presentation via Google Docs. The presentation reports the findings of a study I conducted on revision practices on the site.

Enjoy.

Facebook as courseware update

CourseFeed has added a new Facebook app that, in addition to regular Facebook course-app features like discussion walls and notes, allows students to connect to their school’s Blackboard installation. I haven’t been able to fully test out the app because it isn’t compatible with The University of Texas’s Blackboard installation yet. It does seem pretty promising, though.

One of the drawbacks to using Blackboard is that you have to go to a new website, log in, and then navigate the site’s hierarchy, which can be unnecessarily complex. For example, to send an email to my class via Blackboard, I have to log into the system and go through four steps to access the email page. CourseFeed would simplify class communication for users who use Facebook and save them the extra step of having to log into a new system for class information.

In short, for schools that use Blackboard, CourseFeed seems like a decent method for managing the site’s clunky interface.

Related: Using Facebook for course management pt. 1 and pt. 2