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Tuesday, April 30, 2002
Improving on the sky 
Men in Makeup vs. Men in Facial Hair
| | I am loving every word of Donna Wentworth's Copyfight: The politics of IP, a new blog over at Corante. She not only makes huge sense, but delightfully unpacks ironies such as Hollywood's destructively delusional crush on the Net — which (she astutely observes) bears a bit too much resemblence to the love Annie Wilkes has for the captive Paul Sheldon in Stephen King's Misery (also in the movie by the same name, where the characters are played by Kathy Bates and James Caan). To show how much she loves him, Annie lovingly, but firmly, breaks Paul's legs with a sledgehammer. This, Donna says, is... |
| | The kind of love Hollywood has for the Internet. |
| | You can't blame Hollywood for falling so hard. The Internet seduces, seeming to promise through its end-to-end neutrality a certain nubile willingness to serve. Why shouldn't it act as the naive conduit through which Hollywood offers the world its creative progeny? The DMCA makes a lovely engagement ring. |
| | The problem is, of course, that Hollywood has a rival, and the rival, like a nerdy-but-nice boyfriend, has the Internet's best interests at heart. That rival is Geek Love, and it burns with a passion so intense, so high-minded and pure, that it's downright embarrassing. And now it's on its way to Washington, working draft in tow, for hand-to-hand combat with men who wear orange makeup. |
Mayday of Silence
| | I hope more over-the-air broadcsters that also broadcast on the Net will participate by silencing their terrestrial programming and pointing, as the webcasters will be doing, at the SaveInternetRadio.org site. |
MoDumb question
| | I wonder: Does Mozilla have anything like IE's auto-form-fill capability? I really love how Mozilla works, in general. It's fast, solid and packed with user-oriented features, some quite innovative (e.g. the Cookie Manager). But it seems to lack auto form fill. Or maybe I'm just missing it. Hope so, because it would have saved me a lot of the time I just wasted on the Amtrak site, filling out the same form over and over and over again, every time I hit the back button to correct some minor mistake. |
Democracy at work
| | As former MIT professor David P. Reed explained recently in his presentation to the FCC's Technical Advisory Group, "Interference is not what you think it is. Signals do not damage each other, they pass through each other." Information is only lost in receivers and is thus simply an architectural and technical problem. |
| | I urge people to listen to Reed's compelling presentation on these matters, given at the Friday April 26th and available in RealAudio. |
| | What Reed helps us understand is that our telecommunications future, as well as future economic growth, are being held hostage by a regulatory regime based upon the telecom world as it was in 1932, well before Shannon's work in information theory, the invention of radar, the invention of the micro chip, and the advent of pervasive computing. One result is that the FCC ends up favoring companies while damaging the proper functioning of the market and creating obstacles to the commercialization of new innovations. This is a very odd unintended distortion. |
| | At PC Forum I talked briefly with FCC Chairman Michael Powell about the ironies I brought up at the end of this post here. He seemed to understand. In fact, I thought at the time that his interest was piqued. |
| | I think we need to follow up on that. |
Truckin' Fi
| | Thanks to B!X for the link. |
Commons markets
| | So the issue is not market versus commons. The issue is how to set equitable and appropriate boundaries between the two realms - semi-permeable membranes --so that the market and the commons can each retain its integrity while invigorating the other. That equilibrium is now out of balance as businesses try to exploit all available resources, including those that everyone owns and uses in common. |
| | I suggest that the Net's commons in fact supports markets. The only boundaries worth considering are akin to those between foundations and rock. |
| | Coincidentally, my reading in geology has led me to the enclosure laws by which common lands were privatized in England early in the Industrial Age. Very interesing stuff. Here's Toynbee on the matter. |
Radio bulletin
| | But yesterday in Self Hosting of Weblogs she suggested that Radio Userland and Blogger are both about "Centralized weblogging": "...you hate the frustrations associated with a centralized weblogging system such as Radio or Blogger..." Which is not cool, at least in Radio's case. |
| | I don't know Blogger very well, and don't use it. But I'm fairly familiar with Radio (which I use), and it seems clear that it's as decentralized as you want to make it. You can run it on your desktop and FTP to your Web space, or run it on a host at your ISP. It installs and works fine in either mode. |
| | Personally I believe that blogs served from desktops is our best hope for restoring symetrical bandwidth to the Net. Both Movable Type and Radio deserve credit for pushing exactly that trend. |
| | Hmm.. Right now Blogger is returning "HTTP Error 500-13 - Server too busy." What is wrong with The Force these days? Anyway, maybe Evan can explain where Blogger fits in this decentralization trend. |
| | [Later...] I am told that Movable Type is not decentralized. I can't tell from their site (and I don't have the time to research it right now). Maybe one or more of ya'll can point me to URLs for each of the blogging services that say where each stands on this centralized/decentralized question. I'll be glad to post them. |
| | Meanwhile, let me declare my own goals here. |
| | First, I want to see the Web finish turning into the writing environment of first resort. Back in the mid-80s there was a book called The Mac is Not a Typewriter. I don't remember what the point was, but I do know that I want to see the Web turn into the next typewriter: a writing and publishing system for everybody — the final fulfillment of the press freedom sanctioned by the First Amendment. To me that's what weblogs do, big time. |
| | Second, I want to see the Web restored to its original design as a symetrical system. I'd like speeds both up and down to be equal. I'd like Port 80 to go unblocked. Cable and ADSL (which constitutes most DSL) systems are set up today with the expectation that most people would rather consume than produce. In fact they actively discourage production. Yet most of us would probably rather put our photo albums and home movies on our own home servers instead of some BigCo or ISP server, if the choice was available. Decentralized weblogs, by appealing to relatively resourceful and motivated early adopters, will do more to drive a symetrcial web than anything else on the horizon right now. |
| | It seems to me that Userland is pushing toward both those goals with Radio, and has been for a long time. In fact, as I understand it, Radio was designed originally as a completely decentralized system. But because very few potential customers were running on their own IP addresses out of their own homes and offices, the market was too small. So they desinged it to allow upstreaming for HTTP service out of an ISP — a solution that's as decentralized as it practicaly can be. |
| | Again, I don't know enough about the others to say how decentralized they are. |
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