MiniMediaGuy

After sharing my pollyanna assessment of the Grokster ruling the other day, I thought I’d do something useful by revisiting the topic of digital rights management — that is, securing content against unauthorized copying while creating easy ways to enable authorized uses.

Think of DRM as an envelope sealed by (teenage magician) Harry Potter. Once Harry puts a message into a DRM wrapper — be it text, multimedia or software — the enclosed material knows by whom and under what circumstances it may be opened: only by people who pay a specified amount in precise way, or only four times, or whatever. (Harry delivers by owl; I prefer broadband.)

If you want to get up to speed on DRM (or need a refresher) visit the Wikipedia entry. The American Library Association also has an excellent primer that contains links to interest groups that either want to preserve or change the status quo. If you’re looking for a group generally in opposition to things as they are, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I also found some interesting stuff from the Cato Institute that takes a libertarian view — while the status quo needs shaking up, market mechanisms (like Harry Potter envelopes), rather than government rules, are the way to go.

Those seeking a totally different approach to copyright have gravitated to the Creative Commons. This organization, started by attorney Lawrence Lessig, has created a set of graduated protections for content. Imagine a scale one to 10, where one allows unlimited copying and 10 means no copying without prior permission. There is a range of options in between, such as free copying so long as you include a link to the source.

The Creative Commons has become the nucleus of a worldwide effort to build new customs and laws that would be truly magical. Calibrated copyright protections, working in conjunction with micropayment systems, are among the missing links in what we have to build — a new media ecosystem that will coexist with the old order.

In this regard, the Creative Commons is pursuing an evolutionary strategy toward change. It is building an alternative order, without necessarily being hostile to the status quo. This approach makes intuitive sense, not just in this context but in every aspect of life. Pour your energy into building what you want — minimize the wasted effort of trying to tear down what you don’t like.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Today I’ve reached across The Pond — British slang for the Atlantic — to recapitulate the results of a survey suggesting that B2B websites are better advertising vehicles than print magazines. Among noteworthy findings, the survey found that business decision-makers spent “almost an hour per day online for work purposes,” and “more than half (54%) had bought a product … as a result of seeing advertising on a B2B website.”

The survey was sponsored by the UK Association of Online Publishers, which conducted telephone interviews of 300 “business decision makers” in January. Though not wishing to be rude, the small sample size and self-serving nature of the survey require that the results be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that a B2B website, linking specialized news and targeted advertising, would make for a superior response and if I were selling ads, I’d have no hesitation in showing these results to a potential sponsor.

Before I continue, let me thank Paid Content for pointing me to an article posted by the UK web publisher Netimperatives. Since the UK site did a fine job of summarizing the results, I’ll suggest you bounce back over the pond, after you finish reading this, to drill down into the survey. Meanwhile, let me point out something nifty that I noticed on this, my first visit, about how Netimperatives packaged the info.

The first link from Paid Content pointed me to a Netincentives synopsis. A link in the synopsis pointed me to a longer article on the same survey. This tactic of creating low, medium and high-value versions of the same information reminded me of tiered-pricing notions advanced by thinkers such as UC Berkeley info-economist Hal Varian.

Sure enough, some digging around the Netincentives site led me to offers for a free email newsletter (weekly or daily editions) and an annual paid subscription. I chose the free weekly to determine how useful future offerings may prove — before I clutter up my email with their daily spew, or spend 99 quid ( that’s pounds sterling in Yank-speak) for the premium offering.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Many opinions will be written today, arguing that the Supreme Court decision on Grokster is good or bad. I see no point in another such outburst. The justices have said copyright holders can sue technology firms that aid and abet illegal file sharing. It is the law. But the law is not the future. And the future belongs to those who not only allow but reply upon file sharing in their business models. And that’s not just me talking. In fact it’s a higher authority than The Nine. The entire fabric of the Internet is implicitly whispering “share.”

There has never been a medium like the one through which these words are reaching you. The Net enables us to form spontaneous connections with people of like mind, whether down the street or around the world. These can be casual exchanges or lasting collaborations. Forty years ago, the Canadian scholar, Marshall McLuhan, called the world a “global village.” The term described the ways in which print, radio and television, tied disparate peoples closer together than ever before.

The Web turns the global village into a global room, in which we keep bump into kindred spirits accidentally, perhaps through the use of a search engine. That’s how I found Joe Gratz, a law school graduate living in San Francisco. He provided links to the decisions and some of the news reports. Next time I’m curious about intellectual property rights, who would I turn but my new buddy Joe — who I’ve never met.

The other thing about this global room is that when we do find someone or something we like, we pass it on — as I did above. The ethos of the Web reminds me of a folk song entitled “Magic Penny.” Writing about love, songwriter Malvina Reynolds writes:
It’s just like a magic penny
Hold it tight and you won’t have any
Lend it, spend it, and you’ll have so many,
They’ll roll all over the floor.

Substitute information or entertainment for love and I think the same concept applies. Now I’ll be honest. I don’t yet know exactly how people — especially me — will turn this magic penny media distribution system into larger denominations. My current favorite dream is to get invited to do lucrative speaking and live performance events. I could tell jokes and stories, and sing. (Although the wisenheimer who sits in front of me at work insists that I’d better not quit the day job until I add plate-spinning to the routine.)

So please don’t hold it against me if I don’t see the precise shape of the future. But I think you can see for yourself that the present is not like the past. So as Bob Dylan has said:
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a changing

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

P.S. Please share this will all your friends. Well, maybe not with all your friends ’cause that would be spam, and there’s others laws against that!

Call it wishful thinking or rank speculation, but there’s a buzz that Google is gearing up to create some sort of (micro?) payment system for content. If true, this could help solidify the commercial basis for citizen media, a movement that seems to be populated mainly by PWDJs — that is people with day jobs.

Thanks again to the indefatigable Rafat Ali for pointing me to the posting in which John Battelle carefully fanned the tiny ember of fact that has dribbled out about Google’s electronic payment plans. Or as John called it in his own (slightly adapted) words: “the Google e-pay system in the wings (that has been) the subject of much speculation and a tiny bit of confirmation in the last 10 days.”

I’ve written at least once or twice before about micropayments — that is, collecting small amounts for content and/or services. And in those posts I’ve quoted prominent naysayers and proponents. My own feeling is that content must develop some value in cyberspace or else we are creating an environment that places absolutely no value on disciplined thought and creativity — except as fly paper for eyeballs.

So it heartened me to see ClickZ columnist and web entrepreneur Kevin Lee write: “Good content is increasingly hard to find … (and suggesting that browsers) would pay for access to their favorite song lyrics or $.01 to read today’s Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh blog post … Paying for music, video, and other content from a stored value payment system that processes low-value payments without huge transaction costs will happen. It’s no longer a question of if, but when and by whom.”

Which brings me back to Google and its growing clout. A recent MediaPost article, summarizing advertising market research by Outsell, Inc., noted that GOOG and rival Yahoo! “generated $6.5 billion in total revenue last year, compared to a total of $60 billion by the 10 largest companies (Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Gannett, Pearson, Tribune, Reuters, McGraw-Hill, VNU, Wolters Kluwer, and the Daily Mail and General Trust).” The same article went on to note that “when it comes to new revenue, Google and Yahoo! also have generated $4 billion–the same amount as the 10 largest companies combined.”

So if Google does create a payment system for content, it could be a boon for independent creators. At this stage however, this is only conjecture and so I remain a PWDJ (in the singular that’s person with a day job). Speaking of which, let me get to it!

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

My eyes popped as I read a scholarly essay, written by a British librarian, exploring what it means to have so many people, storing so much in the way of pictures, stories, data and memorabilia, in digital form. The essay focused on technical and legal issues. But this digital shoebox phenomenon has an implicit business dimension.

Thanks to Neal Beagrie of the UK Joint Information Systems Committee and the British Library for writing, “Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in which he lays out a premise that is both obvious and profound — as we sock away gigabytes of digitalia, we create the challenge of preserving, protecting, and sometimes simply finding that bit we know that we once stored somewhere.

Or, as Neal says: “Individuals have always used physical artifacts as external memory and reference aids. Over time these have ranged from personal journals and diaries, to photographs and photographic albums, to whole personal libraries of books, serials, clippings and off-prints … As personal collections shift from paper and analogue formats to hybrid and increasingly digital formats, personal digital collections are emerging.”

New collection technologies raise new issues. Will the data format become obsolete and irretrievable? Will your hard drive crash and wipe out a lifetime of memories? “It is telling,” writes Beagrie, “that research on digital data loss has suggested that a substantial amount of personal data is not backed up and that, on average, 6% of data held on all PCs is lost each year (more for laptops and mobile devices because of the higher incidence of theft).” That made me wonder, how big is the opportunity for a backup industry, and is it possibly something that could evolve on a cottage or neighborhood scale, or is this a market that the Googles and Yahoos of this world have already staked out. (In a note of regional pride, I would point out that Neal calls the Northern California startup, Ourmedia.org, “the first … service to explicitly offer long-term preservation as well as hosting services for personal and community content.”)

Okay, so you find storage and backup boring. How about what happens when a person dies without divulging the password to a database, as occurred when a Norwegian archivist went to that great data farm in the sky without letting anyone know how to get into a digital collection representing four years’ work. “The case achieved world-wide publicity after … (authorities) … made an international appeal for hackers to help identify the password,” Neal writes. “It only took hackers five hours to crack the code and unlock access to the database.” (Of course, given the international attention, you knew this already. Here in San Francisco, the episode briefly drove the Michael Jackson trial off the front pages.)

The essay also acquainted me with the concept of a “Generation C,’” that cohort of young people who take it as a God-given fact that people were created with portable communication devices that also snap pictures. (I remember one time, several years back, taking my second child, now 12, to a movie theatre, and having him tap me on the shoulder to ask if I could pause the screen and take him to the loo, aka potty.)

In any event, do read the original which is full of useful information, and sans the colonial snarkiness. I found the essay fasciating because I’ve been trying to convince myself that the “business” in new media is the manipulation and manufacturing of content — not merely its delivery via broadband, an opportunity beyond the reach of Mini Media types anyway. I have thought the prime opportunity in this regard will be the creation of media artifacts. Neal’s essay dwelled more on the software and network-level implications of this digital shoebox phenomenon. It may be that the physical expression and the electronic accessibility of digital memorabilia will represent business opportunities of equal magnitude. But lest this difference cause any further friction between the English-speaking peoples (there is that whole Blair memo), let me concede in advance that, of course Neal knows better. He’s British.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

I’m currently working with about two dozen high school and college students, in a program meant to give them a crash course in print and multimedia journalism — a gig that may be teaching me more than I’ve been able to pass on to my young charges. Last night, for instance, I sat in on a lecture in which San Francisco State University professor Andrew DeVigal offered these budding journalists a glimpse of where multimedia may be heading — toward game-like displays meant to provide not just information, but a dose of the experience, and toward a new style of non-narrative content buffet from which viewers can consume as much or as little knowledge as they wish.

That may sound vague, but as a former sailor I’ve stood watches at sea, and I know that objects on the horizon always appear fuzzy. DeVigal keeps a website where he points to examples of what he means by cutting edge multimedia, and last night he offered some object lessons to our young students — some of whom will one day bring those objects on the horizon into focus.

I know that what stuck in my mind was when DeVigal pointed us to a USA Today production called Dugout Dilemmas (requires Flash to view). As the title suggests, the site casts the viewer in the role of a major league baseball coach, posing situations such as runners on first and third, two outs, team down by two runs, power hitter up, do you tell him to swing for the fences or single to drive in the run?

So imagine a room full of hormone-activated teens, tired at the end of a long day, and they’re all “lecture, lecture, yawn, yawn” — until the game comes on and they’re suddenly engaged. –Nuff said?

Now baseball isn’t a topic that floats my boat, but what if this technique were applied to “Saving Social Security?” It would be a complex task — and by that I mean both the real-world problem and the act of modeling it in a game. But how better to involve people in a problem high on the national agenda. In the early 1990s, when the Clinton administration talked up a national health plan, the Markle Foundation created just this sort of “what-would-you-do” game around that issue. But in that pre-web era, the game had to be played on CD-ROM and that required what boiled down to a series of political Tupperware parties. I don’t think that effort went far. But the web would allow us to turn this game concept into a public policy version of eBay. And what if local media, using local programmers, started gaming local problems. Would that be journalism?

The other things that wowed me out of DeVigal’s 90-minute lecture was a glimpse of the Theban Mapping Project (requires Flash to view). I would describe it as an online encyclopedia from which you can browse as little or as much as you’d like to know about one of the most important Egyptian archaeological sites. There is some introductory material but the site is meant to be explored as a self-guided tour. It is therefore not an attempt to convey information in a narrative style, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Rather it is a new information construct. You can spend hours there if you have a deep and abiding interest, or get a 10-second dose if your Egyptology has been satisfied by any of the many mummy movies set in Thebes.

One last point. DeVigal pointed to the website of Noah Brier as a place where he goes to keep an eye on trends in this developing field, so I’ll just pass on that reference before I run.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

On Monday I mentioned the Supernova conference in San Francisco and this morning I dropped in (virtually-speaking) to read about computer game-play both as a market (per capita spending of $108 annually) and as a social phenomenon (no surprise to this parent of two teens).

The per capita spending figure was offered by Stanford communications professor Byron Reeves, as reported by the well-known blogger JD Lasica. He was reporting on a panel called Connected Play that featured Raph Koster (Sony Online), JC Herz (Joystick Nation), Philip Rosedale (Linden Lab), and Dennis Fong (Xfire). (My note: I’m pretty darn sure that the per capita spend was all video games and not just the connected, i.e. online, variety.)

I snipped this quote from JD’s account: “Society and media underestimate the importance of games to today’s generation,” said Koster. “Games to today’s kids are having as big as impact as rock ‘n’ roll, TV and radio to previous generations. That’s the world now, the game world. “You non-gamers, you’re the dinosaurs.”

That may be a bit of an overstatement, but possibly not by much, judging from the amount of time I see my own and other kids playing games. Literary and political types embrace the interactivity of the web as organizing tools. But it makes sense that play appeals to a larger demographic (ditto for sex and dating). JD reported another factoid (from Reeves’s talk) that struck home: “350,000 people are playing WarCraft at any one time.” (That estimate includes my 16-year-old son, whose dinosaur parents are forever trying to pry him away from keyboard and screen.)

JD’s account offered a few words and a photo of Linden Labs’ Philip Rosedale, but a far more revealing account of its game, Second Life, can be found in a recent edition of the East Bay Express, a free weekly newspaper. To summarize a lengthy and fascinating article, thousands of people are exchanging real money to buy the game currency that is used to purchase the virtual artifacts that players create and exchange in their Second Life.

So I can see that gaming is an important and growing segment of the new media marketplace. Nevertheless I have a somewhat saurian view of the genre. To me it’s like watching sports. Both are popular activities, but I get more satisfaction out of cleaning the garage. My disdain for virtual games is influenced by my reading of Snow Crash, the science fiction novel in which author Neal Stephenson paints a dystopian view of two sick worlds, one real and the other virtual.

Meanwhile, in the face of technological, social and demographic trends beyond my control, all I can do is be the Tyrannosaurus Dad, who sees the late-night flicker of the WarCraft screen and roars: “Turn off that computer, now!”

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media