A Harvard case study on the political significance of Blogging

The Kennedy Center at Harvard has published a fascinating case study on how the Blogging community rather than the mainstream media exposed Senator Trent Lott’s speech honouring Strom Thurmond that cost him his place in the political sun. What’s interesting — and useful — about the case is that it’s exhaustively researched. Also interesting is that the PDF comes with pretty restrictive DRM measures. No cutting and pasting — even of short excerpts. Harvard is clearly not joining the Open Courseware bandwagon. Reminds me of Jay Rosen’s list of the ten differences between weblogging and traditional journalism.

GMO and IP: same story

“The question is as simple as this”, writes George Monbiot, in a terrific Guardian Op-Ed piece. “Do you want a few corporations to monopolise the global food supply? If the answer is yes, you should welcome the announcement that the government is expected to make today that the commercial planting of a genetically modified (GM) crop in Britain can go ahead. If the answer is no, you should regret it. The principal promotional effort of the genetic engineering industry is to distract us from this question.

GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by them. They can patent the seeds and the processes that give rise to them. They can make sure that crops can’t be grown without their patented chemicals. They can prevent seeds from reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seed companies and closing them down, they can capture the food market, the biggest and most diverse market of all.”

The interesting thing about this piece is that it highlights what’s going also in Intellectual Property. We’re moving into an era when large companies want to own everything — including the human genome. And we don’t seem to have governments or electorates perceptive enough to realise what’s going on. Instead we have a lot of rhetoric about ‘consumer choice’, ‘property rights’, ‘theft’ and ‘free’ trade.

Some Like It Hot

“OK”, says Larry Lessig, “P2P is ‘piracy’. But so was the birth of Hollywood, radio, cable TV, and (yes) the music industry”. Nice excerpt from his forthcoming book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.

What is Mac OS X?

Remarkable, detailed, informative answer to that question by an IBM programmer, Amit Singh. Thanks to Gerard de Vries for the link.

The Waste Land

This is just one of an astonishing (and sobering) set of pictures taken by a Russian biker and photographer who likes travelling round the Chernobyl area. Her English is delightfully wacky (though less so than my Russian), but the pictures speak for themselves.

The computer and the motor car: another intriguing similarity

My Observer colleague Simon Caulkin has a fascinating column today on the parallels between the US-dominated automobile industry in the 1960s and the US-dominated software industry in the 2000s. What’s the parallel? Well, in the 1960s, the automobile manufacturers were ‘relaxed’ about quality whereas the upstart Japanese were not. We all know what happened. In the 2000s, the software companies are, er, relaxed about quality (not to mention security) and — guess what? — the Indians are not. This is the really interesting aspect of the ‘offshoring’ debate. And the funniest thing of all is that Bill Gates drives a Lexus.

That SCO memo is authentic

When I posted that piece about how Microsoft was bankrolling, er investing in, SCO, the authenticity of the leaked memo hadn’t been established. Now, it has.

What everyone should know about Free Software

“The goal of the Free Software Movement is to enable people to understand, to learn from, to improve, to adapt, and to share the technology that increasingly runs every human life.” From Eben Moglen’s terrific lecture at Harvard.

Meet the opposite of the couch potato — the Internet user

From the latest survey of the Pew Internet and American Life project — the most comprehensive ongoing study of how Americans use the Net:

“44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files

In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online. Some 44% of the nation[base ‘]s adult Internet users (those 18 and over) have done at least one of the following:

21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites. 17% have posted written material on Web sites. 13% maintain their own Web sites. 10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files. 8% have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses. 7% have contributed material to Web sites run by organizations to which they belong such as church or professional groups. 7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings. 6% have posted artwork on Web sites. 5% have contributed audio files to Web sites. 4% have contributed material to Web sites created for their families. 3% have contributed video files to Web sites. 2% maintain Web diaries or Web blogs, according to respondents to this phone survey. In other phone surveys prior to this one, and one more recently fielded in early 2004, we have heard that between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users have created diaries or blogs. In this survey we found that 11% of Internet users have read the blogs or diaries of other Internet users. About a third of these blog visitors have posted material to the blog.”

This is hard evidence supporting what most of us have known for a long time — but which has not yet dawned on the traditional media industries — namely that the era of the passive consumer of media content is coming to an end. There will always be couch potatoes, no doubt, but they will look increasingly eccentric in a networked future. Humans are social, communicative animals. Given the right media, they will seek to express themselves. The Net is providing the medium — and they are expressing themselves. QED.

Yahoo starts to charge for inclusion in its search rankings

Surprise, surprise… NYT story reads in part:

“March 2, 2004: Yahoo said yesterday that it would start charging companies that want to ensure that their Web sites are included in its Web index from which research results are selected.

The practice, called “paid inclusion,” has long been a part of many search engines including Microsoft’s MSN search function and Ask Jeeves. But Google, which last year surged ahead of Yahoo to become the No. 1 site for searching on the Internet, disdains the practice as misleading.

Last month, Yahoo replaced Google, which had operated Yahoo’s search engine, with its own technology to index billions of Web pages. Yahoo says it hopes to include every site on the Internet it can find in that index at no charge. But sites that pay for Yahoo’s new program can guarantee that they are included in the index.

Yahoo will update its index of paying clients every two days, while it may update its listing of other sites once a month. And Yahoo will give paying clients detailed reports on when its users click on their sites and will help those sites improve their listings.”

Hmmm… The day will come when Internet users will pay a fee to use a ‘clean’ search engine.