Paul's Web Space 2.1

Viral Spiral: Digital Commons at New America

Last Friday I checked out a talk by author David Bollier at the New America Foundation. Bollier is editor of OntheCommons.org, senior fellow at the USC Annenberg School of Communication's Norman Lear Center, and co-founder of Public Knowledge, my favorite free culture organization. He is promoting his new book, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. in which he lays out how the emergent "sharing economy" of the Internet creates content that increasingly competes with traditional media organizations.

He discussed creative commons (CC) licenses and how those have been successfully employed by author Cory Doctorow and the band Nine Inch Nails. Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was the first book published under a CC license, and he attributes the success of his career to freely sharing his work in this way. Nine Inch Nails released their latest album "The Slip" for free on the Internet before it's physical release, and it remains free alongside web communities allowing fans to share remixes and videos . Later they proceeded to sell millions of dollars worth of CDs, DVDs and vinyl records, without the help of a traditional record label, thus keeping a much greater percentage of the proceeds in the process.

Bollier also discussed the concepts of Open Education Resources, such as MIT OpenCourseWare, and the Science Commons project - both of which endeavor to make formerly exclusive learning and knowledge resources more open and accessible. There was a little discussion of issues with conflicting forms of free/open/sharing licenses, but on the other hand, Science Commons takes advantage of a novel approach to trademark law to loosen the copyright of scientific articles and publications. His book is freely available online as well.

Next Sascha Meinrath of the New America Wireless Futures Program and Open Technology Initiative, presented his new paper, Rise of the Intranet Era , where he describes a developing trend in local/community based, decentralized ad-hoc networks, which enable community participation and journalism, accessible access to the larger Internet, and an array of other services.

Finally, moderator Michael Calabrese, Director of the Wireless Future Program, led a wide-ranging discussion, covering challenges involved in rationalizing various different open license structures, as well as threats and opportunities presented to traditional journalism by new community news initiatives. An interesting thread concerned how community participation influenced politics. Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America offered an interesting take, suggesting that the Obama campaign successfully utilized organized viral participation, in contrast with the barely-controlled anarchy of the Howard Dean campaign four years earlier — which had an impact but proved ultimately unsuccessful.

More details, video, audio, photos, and sharing options.

Labels: bollier, creativecommons, freeculture, internet, newamerica

   Link: http://www.newamerica.net/events/2009/viral_spiral

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ONA08 Day Two - Tina Brown, Semantic Web

The main sessions of the Online News Association 2008 Annual Conference were held September 12 (my birthday:) and September 13. First up was a keynote address by Tina Brown. Some may have wondered why Tina Brown – former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and author of a book on Princess Di – was speaking at an online news event, but she made it plain to see, offering an interesting take on what's missing in the online news space, and announcing her latest venture. This month she launched the Daily Beast, a news aggregation service that features content selected by 20 or so live editors, rather than utilizing automation to pick stories — offering content designed to appeal to "the news junkie who wants a speedy scan of the zeitgeist.” She was coy about details, but opened up a little more to Jeff Jarvis the night before. Not the most insightful talk, but it was interesting to hear the perspective of an old-school magazine type trying to navigate the waters of Web 2.0.

The first session I attended was a presentation by Marik Bide, project director of the Automated Content Access protocol (ACAP), a new European initiative that would provide the ability for news stories and other content to specify what uses are permitted. It's aimed particularly at search engines, but as Jeff Jarvis pointed out, seems to violate the basic tenets of the "link economy" that enable the Web to thrive. He was even harder on ACAP in his conference wrap-up, also directing criticism at ONA for emphasizing old-school news and its approach to the web rather than actively seeking our new types of news organizations and companies. Even though I work for an old-school newspaper, I've worked in the web and online space much longer, and I can see where he's coming from to a point. However, there were exceptions to his critique.

The next panel I attended, The Next New Metrics, tried to divine coming trends in audience measurement, beyond the page view. The most interesting presenter was Matt Cutler of Visible Measures, which specializes in measuring the consumption and distribution of Internet video; he stated emphatically that advertisers want more video – it consistently commands the highest CPMs and sells out inventory – so our charge is to create more video content, and presumably the money will follow.

Finally, I watched presentations of a couple interesting new developments in the Semantic Web space, first from Tom Tague of OpenCalais, a tool from Thompson/Reuters that enables automated tagging of content with rich semantic information — more semantic, but less of a "wow" application, at least yet, and available for free to all users. Then we heard from Tristan Harris of Apture, which gives publishers the ability to quickly link key concepts or details in their stories with a variety of multimedia and background information, all without leaving the page — less purely semantic, but with a more immediate payoff. This tool is available for free to bloggers and nonprofit publishers.

Labels: freeculture, journalism, metrics, ona08, semantic web, video

   Link: http://journalists.org/2008conference/

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Lessig Final Free Culture Lecture Thursday

This Thursday, January 31, Lawrence Lessig is delivering his final lecture on Free Culture, Copyright and the future of ideas at Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium. After ten years, numerous books, and the founding of Creative Commons (a practical, proactive attempt to free up some cultural content by enabling content creators to declare less restrictive licenses on their works than the default "All Rights Reserved"), Lessig is moving on to address the problem of government corruption. His talk will be filmed by Open Source Cinema, for inclusion in their upcoming feature film "Basement Tapes," an open source documentary. Those in attendance will also be treated to scenes from the film and re-mixed work from Open Source Cinema's web site.

The recently-released film "Good Copy Bad Copy" covers much of the same ground, and features Lessig, DC policymakers, and artists such as Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. The filmmakers seek further distribution and funding to support more similar efforts. I learned about Good Copy Bad Copy via the blog of Jake Shapiro, Executive Director of Public Radio Exchange and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. In a fascinating post describing a trip he took to Moscow last year, he turned me on to both that film and an organization based in London called the Freedom of Expression Project. This effort sounds remarkably like iCommons, which seems to involve everyone from Creative Commons to Wikipedia, to the Berkman Center; I wonder if they collaborate.

I have already mentioned "Before the Music Dies" in this space — another film that comes to mind. BFMD really focuses on numerous systemic problems with the music industry, but its attempts to control artists and creativity, and its inability to embrace new ways of dealing with and distributing content are related. Seth Godin recently wrote an insightful piece covering the same territory, reviewing lessons to learn from the challenges facing the music industry.

Labels: creativecommons, freeculture, freedomofspeeech, lessig

   Link: http://events.stanford.edu/events/125/12594/

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