Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Here is an interesting article:
NPR defining new Podcast strategy.
NPR has had an agreement with Audible.com, but didn’t renew their contract and will be announcing a new policy “for making NPR content downloadable and portable.”

A somewhat related story,
The Future Of Public Radio by
Doug Kaye, 8/10/05, has some interesting
ideas about high cost of production, low cost
of distribution, the “long-tail,” the “Innovator’s Dilemma,” and so forth. Sample:

If you haven’t read
that book [The Innovator's Dilemma] by Clay Christensen, you really should. As it applies in this
instance, the dilemma is that the established organizations can only
approach innovation on the basis of protecting their current way of
operating.

But the real problem is coming from the fact that listeners want
long-tail time-shifted content. They want to hear programs that are more
meaningful to them, and they want to listen at their convenience. The
entire broadcast-radio system, with its distribution, simply can’t
provide what the customers want.

Are libraries faced with an Innovator’s Dilemma? Libraries
don’t face the same market issues, but libraries do have to
have a service that, on average (read: “including long-tail contents
and services”) is worth funding. It is discouraging that
so much library-like innovation is happening outside libraries at places like
the Google library project and del.icio.us and the Internet Archive, but it is encouraging that libraries are
seeing the importance of digital preservation in a way they didn’t a few
years ago and that so much good digital preservation work is being done within the library community.

According to boingboing, some companies use wikipedia as a viral marketing tool. Boingboing describes a recent incident in which the BBC was caught doing this (although it was learned later that it wasn’t an official BBC ad). This insidious advertising is really dangerous as it calls into question the inherent validity of *all* information. This is not merely “garden-style vandalism” but the erosion of the public trust in information.

Some of the comments are truly horrendous, like this one:

I can’t say who I am, but I do work at a company that uses Wikipedia as a key part of online marketing strategies. That includes planting of viral information in entries, modification of entries to point to new promotional sites or “leaks” embedded in entries to test diffusion of information. Wikipedia is just a more transparent version of Myspace as far as some companies are concerned. We love it (evil laugh).

On the other side, I love it from an academia/sociological standpoint, and I don’t necessarily have a problem with it used as a viral marketing tool. After all, marketing is a form of information, with just a different end point in mind (consuming rather than learning).

Who said that, Goebels?

See Wikipedia’s page listing viral marketing history.

For more on corporate ethics and truth in advertising, see “Truth in advertising: breaking the spell of consumerism” (An Interview with Kalle Lasn by Derrick Jensen) and the Media Foundation.

Internet Archive: Details: Interview with JD Lasica about ‘Darknet’

Citizen journalist Eleanor Kruszewski interviews JD Lasica, author of the book “Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation,” at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco during the Supernova conference, June 22, 2005.

Hollywood Controlling Parts of Windows Vista Design
by Edward W. Felten, Freedom to Tinker,
August 9, 2005.

Felten examines a Microsoft white paper on the design of Vista (formerly Longhorn), the next Windows operating system. He says that, “The document reveals that movie studios will have explicit veto power over what is included in some parts of Vista.” He notes that changes to the operating system will affect the hardware requirements for running it; “…nearly all of us will have to discard our PCÕs monitors and buy new ones to take advantage of new features that Microsoft could provide Ñ more easily and at lower cost Ñ on our existing monitors, if Hollywood would only allow it.

In light of the FCC’s extremely passive take on
“network neutrality” (see
FCC deregulates DSL and How Martin’s FCC is different from Powell’s), it is worth taking a moment to examine
the importance of network neutrality to libraries. Some good background
can be found here:

Neutral Ground: As Web Providers’ Clout Grows, Fears Over Access Take Focus
by Amy Schatz and Anne Marie Squeo.
Wall Street Journal
Aug 8, 2005. pg. A.1 (Eastern edition). [subscription required]

The issue arises because broadband network service providers have the
technical ability to filter, slow, encumber, and block users’ access to
the web, web sites, individual web pages, particular kinds of services
or files….

Read the rest of this entry »

MuniWireless article series

Libraries are all about access to information right? Then librarians should be talking about and advocating for municipal wireless networks. Wireless should be seen as just one more public utility (water, sewer, …) that should be supported by city governments.

Currently, 34 U.S. cities and 50 foreign cities have deployed Wi-Fi, while an additional 19 U.S. cities and 15 foreign ones have deployed more narrowly targeted “hot zones” in their urban cores, according to muniwireless.com. Here in San Diego, we have the SoCal Freenet building a wireless network in Golden Hills, with coverage planned for other areas like Bario Logan and City Heights. Perhaps the most well-known municipal wireless story is unfolding in Philadelphia, where the city is building a WiFi network, but companies like Verizon are fighting it, saying the city shouldn’t be competing with the private sector. Lessig had something to say about that in Nov, 2004. And there was a story on Talk of the Nation in April, 2005 discussing municipal wireless services with, among others, Declan McCullagh from CNet.

Unfortunately, there are bills before Congress that could bar states from allowing municipal broadband in areas served by the private sector, as well as measures to restrict the provision of municipal broadband in the 14 states that already provide it.

As the nation’s telecommunications laws are being drastically re-written (see the other recent posts on the FCC and broadband), I believe we’re seeing a codification of the digital divide. And this, my friends, is bad for libraries and really bad for citizens. Keep track of WiFi here (WiFiNetNews), here (Community Wireless), and here (Wireless Libraries).

We’ve been posting a lot this week about the FCC and this may seem
off-topic to some of our librarian readers. Trust us, it is on topic. If you have
any doubts, read this item by David S. Isenberg, which compares the philosophies of network access of past FCC chairman Powell (who “began the slow, steady squeezing off of competition”) to the new chariman Martin (who is “there to finish the job”). The changes that the FCC is making to the way network access is regulated threaten the open exchange of information on the Internet. These regulations help set up an Internet for commerce and deprecate an open Internet of free information freely exchanged and un-encumbered by commercial interests. Martin is taking off the gloves.

How Martin’s FCC is different from Powell’s, Isen blog, Sunday, August 07, 2005.

Powell: Freedom to access content.

Martin: Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.

As Susan Crawford notes,
“Entitled? Access? Lawful? Content? Who decides what’s lawful? As I’ve said in the past, providers’ terms of service may set the bounds of what’s lawful.”

In one of this week’s most-mailed articles from the Chronicle,
G. David Pollick, president of Birmingham-Southern College, says:

“The style of writing is changing — it’s becoming conditioned by
models and forms,” he said. Grammar-checker features of word
processors, for instance, often mark flowery phrases as mistakes and
suggest bland alternatives, he said. “You start to lose a lot of
artistic and aesthetic quality.”

“It increasingly makes the language a dead language instead of a live
language,” he added. “If a computer model starts to become the form of
communication, then what you end up with is a language that is dying
instead of one that gets richer and richer through use.”

Professors Give Mixed Reviews of Internet’s
Educational Impact [subscription required] By Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of
Higher Education, (August 12, 2005) Volume 51, Issue 49, Page A32.
[temporarily available without subscription here:
http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=foniiaqn8iyb9s6tmhdrifo1fphav6nl ]

BENTON’S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for MONDAY AUGUST 8, 2005 Benton Foundation

Today’s Benton newsletter has extensive coverage of last week’s FCC decision to “de-regulate” telephone companies’ Digital Subscriber Line services. Excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

As more and more Americans turn to high-speed connections, or broadband, for their access to the Internet, the power of the phone and cable companies that provide this access has grown. Technology has evolved allowing the broadband companies to block Web sites from their customers. If they start using this power to promote their own commercial content offerings and weed out rivals, say critics, the innovative and free-wheeling Web could be crippled. So far, evidence of such tinkering is scarce, and broadband providers — and many regulators — scoff that the market would never let them censor the Web. But conflicts of interest have arisen in the past when owners of information pipelines have incentives to favor one company over another. Airlines, for instance, built the original computer-reservation services for travel agencies, and programmed them to push flights by the airline that owned the system to the top of agents’ screens — until the government intervened in 1984. On Friday, the FCC waded into the debate when it issued new rules for data services provided by telephone companies. The new rules release phone companies from an obligation to share their high-speed Internet lines, known as DSL, with rival providers of Internet service. The move, a victory for Bell companies, puts them on an equal footing with cable-television providers, which offer their own version of high-speed Internet through cable connections. But critics say the unanimous FCC decision strips away some of the rules designed to protect consumers’ rights — including the ability to freely access the Internet. In place of a strict policy on free access, the FCC instead on Friday issued a statement saying consumers have a right to freely use legal Internet applications and services.

Faith in Neutrality,
Susan Crawford blog

As noted
earlier, the FCC DSL ruling included some
principles on network neutrality which would
would bar DSL providers from degrading or blocking services offered by competitors, but the principles are unenforceable. Susan Crawford, in this short posting, examines FCC Chairman Martin’s committment (or lack of it) to network
neutrality. Crawford says that “We’ll need more than principles for the open internet to survive.”

Susan Crawford is Assistant Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School, teaching cyberlaw and intellectual property law.