They skip over the most interesting and difficult part: How to get folks to use it! They casually mention that they built RSS right into the system, as if that was an immediate sell. I think it could be used to great effect in classes and in academic meetings, but it seems to have had a lukewarm reception in these venues.

In particular, the Association of Internet Researchers meeting encouraged tagging for the conference. First off: not sure that an academic conference encourages tagging. It seems to me to be something that has to happen over a long period of time. Second, they gave folks too many options: suggesting del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr tags, to an audience among whom (ironically, I think) tagging is not a common practice. In all, the effort fell flat. But it had the standard “let’s do it and see what happens” vibe. Nothing wrong with that vibe — it is very Web 2.0 — but as I said, the value of tagging something for a fairly broad conference seems limited to me, especially (and this is key!) if it isn’t integrated into the whole.

I’ve also had my classes tagging this semester. Since the class “home page” is an aggregator (like this one) it’s easy to pull the RSS from del.icio.us and integrate it with the standard stream. Yet only those who already knew about tagging are tagging.

I’m now thinking about the Cyberporn and Society course for next semester (yes, it is a little late), and how to better integrate tagging into the course. I think an important step is to provide more of an overview of what tagging is all about and how to do it so that students have a better idea of what it is.

It is always a trade-off in a course: how much time do you spend talking about blogging/wikis/bookmarking/etc. and how much time do you spend with the actual substance of the course. In other words, what is the ROI (return on instruction) for focusing on the “ways of doing” rather than the “ways of knowing.” I have generally shied away from “teaching the tools.” Set up some expectations for product — I always thought — and students would teach themselves the tools.

Recently, I’ve been reconsidering this a bit. It’s a truism that we are never teaching, but hoping our students learn to learn. It strikes me that certain kinds of tools (how to use a library, for instance) have a very high long-term ROI. While my “don’t teach the tools” made sense when we were dealing with Flash or GoLive (v.1, yikes!), when it comes to social computing, it may be something worth really focusing time and resources on.

Sure, some of you may say “duh”! But that’s a bit of a new direction for me.

I don’t know how many of the current MI students read my blog (I suspect very few), but if you do, this should trigger some ideas if you haven’t yet settled on a capstone. A lot of creative possibilities to combine GPS and Google Maps. I know a few of you are doing things with GPS and wireless (through Paul’s class or in other courses), and this would be a natural kind of extension. Also might allow for some interesting combinations when glued together: think Google Maps + Facebook or other services. Neat stuff.

Communication Theory students: roughly the same deal. I won’t consider changes to the notes wiki after Sunday night.

That is all.

Here are some of the things the students have had to say about the experience. And note, there may be a boatload of response bias here, given that we are still working in the class.

Admin for Best Blog:

I have come to the realization, from searching the blogosphere and from knowledge gained via this class, that blogs stand the chance of replacing screen names. In the years to come, more and more people will be launching their own blog, hosting their own topics, inviting fellow bloggers to have free reign on their blog, and thus creating their own neighborhood in the ever expanding global village. It is a concept that is exciting. And prior to this class I had no clue to what a blog was or what blogging entailed.

Jenn:

I like doing all the work through a blog system, merely for the fact that I have a ridiculously busy schedule this year, and I donâ€t mind doing the assignments late at night (rather than on Wednesday afternoons). I think that using blogs for a classroom setting is a great idea. Itâ€s fast, up to date, and interesting to read. There really isnâ€t anything difficult regarding blogging, itâ€s all too easy. After the semester ends, I will keep up with blogging. I will most likely check out the blogs that I have come to really enjoy, rather than start up my own… again, Iâ€m just a really busy girl.

jf44:

It definitely appears that Blogs can be used the way that we have been using them as well as many other ways, and furthermore has the potential to be a very effective networking tool. Although I do wish that we were meeting in person at least a few times throughout the semester, it also does appear that it is working for many people in the class to hold the class, strictly online. I just believe that it would be a little easier and keep people like my group members in line with the work that they have to do on a more regular basis. Other than that, the class and the material that we learn is interesting most of the time and occasionally borders on being fun.

The concept of blogging definitely has the potential to be much more than it is in the classroom as well. I would also recommend it to any teacher who is looking for a sort of networking tool for their class that looks to get more in depth than that of the widely used, but lame discussion boards via UBlearns.

I had originally thought that group blogs would make it easier for folks to come together on topics, etc. This is the first time I used that approach. Worked really well for some of the groups, and really poorly for others, as with all group work. I’ll have to figure out how to handle that better in the future, though it may not be worth the trouble.

Don:

It is sad how slow the education system is at catching up with technology. The fact that our fine institution is only at the UB Learns stage is discouraging. I donâ€t believe having a class that meets only virtually should be a radical concept. I dare say that you donâ€t need to have any face-to-face meetings. Thatâ€s what AIM and chatrooms are for. I admit that at times during the semester I have put this class at the back of my mind. This is partially due to my own laziness and irresponsibility. I also blame the way Iâ€ve been programmed as a student. If I am not regularly attending a class, I am likely to forget about it. This psychological obstacle is one that I believe can be overcome; especially if more instructors like Dr. Halavais attempt to break the monotony of our education system.

A lot of people mentioned AIM chats as a possible way getting together. I am really new to the idea of using instant messaging as part of my teaching, but I’ve been very happy with it so far. I’ll definitely plan on integrating this more directly in later classes. I had planned on doing so in this one, but that was predicated on using Orkut to get profiles of the students, and that kind of fell apart.

unfabulosa:

I really didnâ€t mind the experiment at all. Perhaps, meeting in person more frequently would have forced me to be more involved with the class in general. But at the same time Iâ€m fine with the distance factor, who wantâ€s to go to class anyway? Iâ€m online at least once a day so itâ€s no big deal. I will admit that if the subject matter of the weblog is of interest to me, then I most likely will enjoy the process of blogging. As far as the readings go, I thought they were very interesting and helpful to this class†use of technology. If I had to give a teacher some advice, I would say that weblogs are a great idea because they require a lot of writting, understanding and exposure to the ever expanding world wide web. I personally believe that the internet will become the future of some media industries. If anything, would encourage for the teacher to allow students to decide if they wish to work alone or in groups.

unfabulosa brings up the motivation issue, as did Don, reegs, and several others. I have graded several times through the semester, hoping that grades would be a good enough reminder. I don’t think it’s that students don’t want to, or can’t, post regularly. It’s just that the pattern of classes helps act as a reminder for what needs to be done and when. I need to figure out a way to encourage more frequent posting. It may be a simple metric: post three times a week and then you are good. As it turned out, only a handful of people posted on a regular basis, despite such a requirement in the syllabus.

Adrienne:

My feelings about the experiment have been so-so. I do not like the fact that we are meeting physically in a class setting, after not having done so for a few months now. If there was a teacher wanting to use a blog in their classroom, I would not recommend it. The hardest part about blogging, is writing about things that are of interest to me, and making sure no one else has covered it already. My content has been okay. Not like other students, but I am not totally dissatisfied with my blogs either. If I could change the structure of the class, it would not have been working with groups, but at least having the option to do the blogs on your own in the beginning. Also, looking at more blogs and structures to get a better understanding about them the first 2 weeks we met in the beginning of the semester

One of the issues — and this is something I need to work on in my teaching anyway, but is especially important when you are asking students to try something new — is being more organized and explicit in my expectations. Many students are used to fairly structured environments for classes, and since I always hated such structures, I make the mistake of assuming others do to. When I originally planned the class, I expected getting folks up and blogging would be a relatively painless process. As it turned out, it has become the main effort of the class, leaving out some important content. As I noted above, I don’t consider that a failure, but it is not what I had planned or expected.

And, to end on a high note, protesterbee:

I think that the idea of holding class via blogs is pretty cool. Itâ€s different, to be sure, but I think that it works. It requires a very high level of trust on the part of the Professor, and it also requires the class to police themselves more.

I think that so long as there are basic ground rules set, and that there is enough interesting material and that a blog is an adequate forum by which to give this information, then I donâ€t think thereâ€s anything wrong with holding class like this.

Personally I like this class because I can do the work when I have the time to do it (meaning weekends, late at night), and it doesnâ€t really matter. I can post whenever I want to, which is super sweet.

In conclusion, rock on!

Some of the experiments in blogging in classes have been glorious failures: I learned a lot out of the process, but I’m not sure how successful they were at encouraging student learning. Others have been unqualified successes. I won’t know about this class until I see what direction the student blogs take over the next month, but I would put it more toward success than failure, even though the success was not what I had initially intended.

Even nicer is to open it up and find some wonderful articles focusing on some serious descriptive work. I am particularly taken by Kumar et al’s (the Almaden folks, natch) article that looks at some of the structure of livejournal, and it’s not just because they cite the work Jia Lin and I have been doing. Along with the Nardi et al piece in here, I think I now have a couple of very good articles to hand to the increasing number of people who knock on my door and say “where’s a good entry point for the literature on weblogging”? And, at the same time, there is something oddly fetishistic about the trauma of going mainstream: at the same time the comfort of knowing that if studying blogs was a folly it is at least a folly that lots of people more respectable than I am have fallen into, and at the same time, the feeling that you may have been so into what was happening right around your own board, that you have failed to see the next incoming wave.

Time to start paddling.

My weblog is a public weblog. I entered into it in part because I thought that as a public employee and an educator I had a responsibility to speak publicly on matters in which I had some knowledge. Luckily, I didn’t stop there! But many weblogs are not really designed to attract a large or a public audience. Many people are happy to have a weblog for their friends and family, or a fairly close-knit group. These two types of blogging are interesting for different reasons.

Visiting random blogs through, for example, the random link at blo.gs feels very different from Blogexplosion in large part because those who have joined the latter are seeking out public audiences.

Firefox, at its basic level, has a great set of features. I don’t know how I ever lived without tabbed browsing! But the extensions make it even more powerful. In my setup, I have the spellbound tool, which lets me spell check my forms (very helpful for blogging), and an Autofill extension that mimics IE’s utility. To help my language impairment, I have Translate Page, and I am eagerly awaiting an update to Moji so it will work with the new Firefox. I have a small extension that saves me keystrokes in using the Wayback machine. But the killer extension has to be Web Developer, which lets me edit CSS on the fly, on any web page, among other very useful things.

I am also using the excellent Mozilla Calendar, both at home and at work. They are linked using regular old ftp (no fancy webdav for me) to my web page, and I have a copy of PHP iCalendar displaying it to the public here. Except for an annoying bug that makes sharing my “to do” list a bit problematical, I have been very pleased with this set up. I only wish I could get my colleagues to both keep and share their calendars, but I doubt this will happen any time soon.

*Traffic*

I can get a traffic report that lets me know how many people are visiting your site each month. You can do that too, by adding a small piece of code to your template. Go to Site Meter and sign up. They will give you a little piece of code that you will need to insert somewhere on your index page. (There are actually a number of places that will provide this service: e.g., bravenet has one, too.)

Once you have the code, log in to your blog and insert the code in your index page, which can be found under “templates.” Depending on your layout, you can probably just put the code before the two lines that read:

at the very end.

There are similar services that will host polls and similar toys for you. Usually, they give you a snippet of code that you can put either in a message or on the template for the page.

It may be too early for most of you, but once you have a fairly large traffic base, you can also get an audience estimate at Alexa. I’m a bit dubious about the reliability of that measure, though.

*Comments & Trackbacks*

This is pretty obvious. If folks are commenting on your posts, you know that you are having some effect. In many cases if they are blogging about your posting, you will also get a trackback message. Either one means that you are having an effect on your audience, and the trackback means that other people who might not otherwise find your blog now can.

*Searching in-links*

If you go to Google and type link:https://alex.halavais.net/ (er. but use your own url) you get a list of folks who are linking to you. Technorati can tell you which _blogs_ are linking to you.

A bunch of social softwarians discover the pleasures of sticky paper.
Some of the best social software breakthroughs are yet to come in
purely physical spaces. Ever feel as if you are being labeled?

Moblogging! What it really means is blogging with your camera. Because you asked (or at least one of you did) we’re going to go through the process of blogging through a service called flickr. There are lots of ways to do this, and we even have taked about one that doesn’t require flickr, but we are going to take the easiest way. It will be reasonably easy the first time, and super easy every time after that.

The first step is to sign up for flickr. Did I say easy? It is! Go to the flickr home page and click on the button that says . You’ll fill out a very simple form like this one:

When you hit “sign up,” it will think for a little bit, and then give you a big old form to fill out. Luckily, we’re doing this the easy way, so look for the link that says “You can skip this step for now,” and click it! You’ll be taken to your main page, which will look something like this (though maybe not exactly):

Click on “Your account” (circled above). On the next page, under blogging, click on the link that says “Your blogs.” On the page that comes up, click on the big link that says “Set up a new blog.” On the next page, no matter what it tells you, you need to choose the “BloggerAPI Enabled Blog” from the pulldown menu, as this is the best way for flickr to “talk” to your blog:

The next screen might feel a bit techy, but no worries:

API Endpoint: http://schoolof.info/bluelagoon/xmlrpc.php
Username: admin
Password: somthingorother

Of course, you should replace “bluelagoon” with your own url name, and username with the name you use to log into your blog, and password the password you use to log into your blog. When you click “next” it will make sure that your information is right. If it is, click “All Done.”

OK, now flickr knows how to post to your blog. The next step is creating a way to easily get your images up to the flickr system. Click on the “Home” link in the upper left corner. On the next page, click on “Your account” again, as you did above. On the next page, under “Blogging,” click on the link that says “Uploading your photos to your blog by email,” since that is what we want to do.

You will be presented with some options when you do this. I decided to post “small” photos, and to be able to blog the text of my email as well:

After clicking “save,” flickr will provide you with two *secret* email addresses. Take the time to write these down somewhere that you will be able to find them later. I’m most interested in the bottom one, which is something like “slimy99snail2blog@photos.flickr.com”. Note that the instructions on how to use this email approach are right there on the page:

When you upload photos by email, use the subject line to give your photo a title, and the body of the email to give it a description.

Now, I’m ready to photoblog via email. I go to my regular old email system, and send my photo as an attachment to “slimy99snail2blog@photos.flickr.com.” The subject of my email is “Social stickers,” and in the body I write “A bunch of social softwarians discover the pleasures of sticky paper. Some of the best social software breakthroughs are yet to come in purely physical spaces. Ever feel as if you are being labeled?” Then I attach a photo I took last month at a workshop, and hit SEND.

And…

Nothing happens. All that work, and there is no change to your blog. No worries, the post is there, it is just hiding. Log on to your blog, and at the top of the “edit” page, you will see a link to the posting you have just done. Click on the “edit” link next to it, give the posting a title, hit save, and bingo! That wasnâ€t so hard, was it? OK, yes it was. But from now on, whenever you want to post a picture, all you need to do is email it to your special secret address, then go on and publish it. If you are amazingly geeky, you can even do this directly from your camera phone. Pretty cool, huh?

The shoe taste, I’ll withhold comment for now, but with the blog marketing, the Manolo is genius.

1. Please remember to send me your AIM user name, at halavais@buff… (you know the rest), for our meeting on Wednesday night.

2. Note that I pretty much can track you if you move to a new blog. However, since we are in a transition phase, if you are changing blogs or user names or something could you either:

a) Blog in your real name or
b) Drop me an email telling me your new pseudonym.

As I noted, the next grading period ends on November 16. The following two grades will *not* be individual, but for the blog as a whole.

The most widely read piece of meta-blogging is Rebecca Blood’s Weblogs: a History and Perspective. Blood wisely titles hers a history, rather than the history, likely realizing that the latter claim inscribes resistance in its arrogance. Nonetheless, her short essay has become, de facto, the story we tell ourselves about where blogging came from and why. Sure, there are squabbles over who had the first true blog, and the like, but her narrative has been internalized and naturalized among the blogging community that it seems almost unassailable. It provides yet another example of the fact that the history goes to the namers. Nietzsche would be proud.

The argument is a bit circular. Everyone agrees that weblogs existed before they were called weblogs. If we find the first examples of the label being used, this should allow us to track these first identified weblogs back to a core of progenitors. And from these earliest amoeba of weblogs we can then work forward to chart out the natural evolution of the species. It seems, though, that this hits only some of the ways in which we might define weblogs (for example, it doesn’t refer to macro-level interactions, motivations, effects, and behaviors), and seems to favor the term over the function or impact. Indeed, her presentation focuses first on naming as a definition of weblogs, and then on technology — namely the blogging services that provided support for those interested in starting weblogs.

The naming approach is not wrong, but it also isn’t the only way to go. We can hope to understand weblogs and their development from a number of other perspectives. We can look to the technology: both software tools designed to facilitate blog publishing and the wider technological environment in which weblogs have evolved. We can look at effects at a number of levels: how has blogging affected our everyday lives (the lifeworld level), the social environment (the structural-functional level), and from a very high vantage, what it means to be an individual in society (perhaps, the structuration level). “Effects” may very well be the wrong word to use here, since we are really talking about a highly reciprocal relationship, but it will do for now.

Whether weblogs are those things that people call “weblogs,” has recently become especially difficult. There has been notable resistance among those who keep Livejournals to the term “blog” and “blogger,” and a similar resistance is easy to find in the discussion on Slashdot; whenever a blogging topic comes up there is often a back-and-forth discussion on whether or not Slashdot is a blog. At its most sophisticated, such approaches aim to define weblogs from the perspective of blog genre. In many ways it seems natural to try to, at least in some provisional form, define blogs in such a way that it represents the most common general usage.

Closely aligned with this approach is one that takes these common understandings of what are examples of weblogs and collecting a fuzzy set of formal characteristics that should help to determine what counts as a blog and what does not. It is common, then, in most attempts to define a weblog to find some of the most common characteristics: that it is a frequently updated web page, with dated entries, presented in reverse-chronological order. Sometimes, such definitions suggest that the web page is authored by an individual rather than a group. Others follow Blood’s suggestion of two types of bloggers “linkers” and “thinkers”; those who abstract other web pages and those who generate original content for their weblogs. I suspect that many people who now keep weblogs engage in both of these activities.

The narrow version of the technological perspective is a kind of second-order version of the naming approach, and another popularly accepted history of blogging. It suggests that web pages hosted by “blogging” services like Blogger, Xanga, Typepad, Diaryland, and (more controversially, perhaps) Livejournal, as well as web pages produced or supported by weblogging tools like , Radio UserLand, Word Press, and (again, far more contested) Drupal. A more provisional approach suggests that if a page “pings” a ping server like blo.gs. Of course, you then run into the problem of whether blogging software can be used to produce sites that are not weblogs. You also have to wonder whether blogging software is a subset of Content Management Systems generally, or if it is a different animal.

While combinations of these two approaches (along with two other approaches we will encounter below) make up the majority of blog histories and definitions, they confirm that history is told by the successful namers. If the criteria for blogging requires self-identification, or the use of self-identified blogging tools, I have only been blogging for about three years. If we use other criteria (and this often means escaping the blog label: “personal web publishing” has been used as an alternative, though I prefer “collaborative web publishing”) , I can claim to have been engaging in blogging since 1997 or 1998. During those years, I was updating my own website regularly — usually once a week. By 1999, I had written a tool in Perl that allowed students in my class to share a blogging space. My intent was to undo some of the problems I saw with existing threaded forum software, but those web pages, with click-out comments and reverse-chronological entries, is indistinguishable from today’s blogs. I suspect my experience in this is not unique. There were many people “blogging” before they ever encountered the word or others doing something similar. The naming histories tend to leave these folks out.

What might account for my own experience better is a broad technological explanation. Leaving aside the personal part of web publishing, the concept of what publishing on the web could offer was changing at just about the time blogging took hold. The ontogeny of web publishing in many ways recapitulated the phylogeny of communication media at large. The earliest commercial websites tended to view the web as another way of delivering documents and pamphlets. Initially, these were in plain text, but when image-capable browsers became widespread, these pages began looking more and more like brochures. In extreme cases, graphic designers would put a GIF image of existing literature on a web page, and be done with it.

Over much of the 1990s, there came an evolution of what was expected on the Web. The static website, a copy of pamphlets and brochures, was no longer enough. Part of what came was more interactive content, or broadly speaking, the “dynamic” web. If you were to take a look at contemporaneous book shelves, you would have found books on “Dynamic HTML” the use of CGI to access databases, and the rise of Flash. Corporations increasingly included “news” items published quarterly, then weekly, then daily. After a number of tentative experiments, newspapers began to publish on their regular news cycle, and eventually, the larger papers published first in their online version. The updates on some sites, like CNN began to be made “as it happened.” To consider weblogs outside of this progression of the edge of web publishing generally would be a mistake. The home page evolved just as other sites evolved.

One of the things that makes weblogs particularly interesting is that there is no off-line equivalent. Many point to centuries-old pamphleteering or the photocopied manifesto as forerunners, and they probably are, but this is the first time we have really seen the equivalent of the daily (or more often) newspaper at a personal level; the real Daily Me. So, by placing the evolution of weblogs in this larger technological frame, we in no way diminish their importance. As we move on to the present state of weblogs, we will note that the transparent and public nature of hitherto private discourse may be a difference that makes a difference.

Another way to tell the story of blogging, and a popular one, is to talk about the effect of blogging. L’affaire de Trent Lott, for example, or the impact of war bloggers. This is a hook that journalists particularly like. A year ago, when I told people I was interested in blogs, the very few who didn’t say “huh?” assumed I was interested in why people kept diaries. Now, the public perception of blogging is very closely tied to politics, since the role of weblogs in, for example, the Dean campaign and the democratic convention were very well covered. Both of these speak to function. Some of roles that Lasswell initially attributed to the news media have been taken on by the blogging world. A history based on this kind of public functional effect is likely to play itself out episodically. Events that drive blogging or are driven by it, like the 9/11 attacks and the events that followed, then become the posts upon which a history of blogging is built.

I suspect the real functional history of blogging is yet to come, just as a functional history of cellular telephones is yet to come. Because the real impact of blogging, if it continues to grow (which I suspect it will, at least over the next year or two), will be felt in a more fundamental way: in the way individuals interact with one another and with their information environment–assuming the two are actually separate. This history is already being written in work that looks at the possibility of weblog-based conversation, deliberation, and collaboration, and even more so in work that examines the role of collaborative web publishing in the process of personal knowledge management.

Even further on the horizon is a structurational history of blogging that builds on the functional questions. I think we already see this in some of the questions about power laws in the organization of weblogs. Weblogs may yet prove to be the perspective and framework best suited for investigating a range of sociological ideas about social structure that runs from Simmel to Castel; the informational node of the network society. Just as those two scholars, among others, have traced the changing nature of psyche and identity in rural, urban, and networked environments, weblogs are redefining what it means to be a social being. Do blogging and related approaches lead to the further fracturing of individuals into multiple personalities engaged in disparate groups? I suspect that some forms of public blogging actually lead to a retribalization of identity: my students read my weblog, as does my boss, my mother and extended family, my friends. Under such conditions, I have limited means for shaping and maintaining multiple identities.

In the meantime, at least one definition of the weblog is any website that is particularly heavily linked within the blogosphere. The blogosphere is most often defined, in turn, as the universal collection of interlinked weblogs. This definition is undoubtedly circular, but that does not make it any less useful or accurate. It is easy to think of tools that adhere to all of the other criteria for “bloginess” — they appear in terms of their formal organization to be weblogs, they have some effect that seems to contribute to the “blog revolution,” they even consider themselves to be a weblog. Yet the sin qua non may remain the degree to which a weblog is linked to the rest of the blogging world, the degree to which it exchanges information with the wider system.

None of this provides us with “the” history of blogging. I do think it is important, however, that we resist the compelling notion that Blood’s history is the only way to think about the source and trajectory of blogging. Not that it is a bad way, of course! But I think that we can benefit from the understanding that there are a number of histories of blogging that are going to be written, and should be written. To provide a more textured view of this, we next look at the blogging of today, and try to extract the salient features; the things that make weblogs worth all the meta-blogging and introspection they seem to engender.

* How to write a manifesto
* Another manifesto assignment with links to some more notorious ones
* A manifesto-writing tutorial (follow at own risk)
* The Scottish Parliament has some ideas on manifesto writing, too: pdf

Ready! Think! Write!

Update: And you might supplement your viewing with this NYT article on how Wal-Mart is mining their customer data. To what effect? Hurricanes drive Pop-Tart sales, for example.

Careers in Criminal Law Discussion Panel
Tuesday, November 16th, 7:30pm
Room 106 O’Brian, University at Buffalo (North Campus)

Featuring:

John Condon: Defense Attorney, Adjunct Professor
Hon. Kevin Dillon: New York Supreme Court Judge, Adjunct Professor, Former District Attorney, Former Defense Attorney
John Humann: Federal Public Defender, Former Defense Attorney
Mary Clare Kane: Asst. United States Attorney, Narcotics and Violent Crime Division, Former Assistant District Attorney
Mike McCabe: Assistant District Attorney
Paul McCarthy: Assistant Attorney General
Mike Siragusa: Assistant Attorney General

Brought to you by The Criminal Law Society & The Prosecutor’s Club. Please join us! Refreshments will be served.

Many people think of software pirates as fundamentally unethical. Stealing is stealing, they say. Yet, the history of software being something someone “owns” is not so very long. There was a time, not so long ago, when the very idea that you could “sell” software would be crazy. You could sell the material used to hold the software, whether that was a an early floppy disk or a listing in a magazine, but the software itself? That was the equivalent of saying that if I bought a book with a great recipe for ham, I couldn’t share that recipe with my brother. That’s crazy-talk.

And yet, now it is necessary to explain to people that free software exists, and necessary that we use law to make sure it remains free.

This concept — that certain ideas can be owned as property — is a strange and unnatural one. What is it to “own” an idea? An idea or a concept or a story only exists, in some sense, when it is communicated or commuted into substance. Do you own your telephone number? Your name? Both are forms of knowledge that are generally considered to be un-ownable, and yet other kinds of knowledge that seem equally strange can be owned.

Let us take, as an example, Amazon’s patent on “one-click purchases.” Here’s the concept: make it so that customers can purchase and send an item by clicking a single link. Neat idea. Original? I doubt it; it seems to me to be the natural extreme of trying to make the customer interaction as simple as possible. Yet, Amazon has patented the idea of clicking and ordering something in one step. As soon as they were awarded ownership of this concept, in the form of a patent, they asked the court to stop Barnes & Noble from allowing people to click once and order an item.

Amazon also has patented the idea of affiliate marketing. If you allow your customers to sell items over the web, and pay them a referral fee, you are stealing a concept that Amazon owns. If you create a hyperlink, without paying British Telecom for the rights to use a hyperlink (BT owns the idea of a hyperlink), you are stealing from them.

Naturally, these are extreme cases, but it makes one wonder? How and why can you own ideas?

A Temporary Monopoly

Intellectual property is a complex and often confusing topic. Here, I hope to provide no more than a thumbnail sketch. There is a reason we can own ideas. The US Constitution provides for the protection of original ideas in order to promote innovation. The US economy and culture is heavily anchored in the idea of invention and innovation. The framers were worried (as well they might be, given that some of them patented devices) that inventors who are exposed to the market have no way to profit effectively from their invention. So, the constitution provides a mechanism for enforcing a temporary monopoly on an invention that you have made. Then, as now, there was a question of balancing the public need to be able to produce goods efficiently with the incentives needed to encourage invention.

The trick is that inventions and creations are increasingly made up out of existing materials. Hip hop is an obvious example of this, using samples from already-popular musical work to remix and reform into something new. But inventions work this way, too. If you want to build a new airplane or operating system, you are going to need to base that on a lot of ideas that have already been around for a while. Take Mickey Mouse, for example. Disney has owned Mickey Mouse for a very long time. If Mickey were a character that anyone could use, it would likely increase the amount of creative potential of the society. That’s why the framers of the Constitution made the monopoly temporary. But each year, that temporary claim gets longer and longer.

The argument resurfaced when Napster became widely used. Even if you didn’t agree that downloading music was “stealing,” surely you saw the need to pay musicians for their creative efforts! Of course, the claim was complicated by the fact that most artists were not directly benefiting from album sales, as Courney Love has explained. But in the abstract, it’s not hard to see why Napster might have been an effort to kill the goose the laid the golden eggs. Music might be free, but without an economic incentive, would new music continue to be created.

I suspect that it would. I have a feeling that people will be creative with or without economic incentive, but that isn’t the real question. The real question is whether protecting intellectual property is a good way to make sure that innovation, creativity, and invention remain vital. The answer that many people have reached is that a temporary protection of some goods makes sense. But if that temporary protection is extended to too much or for too long, it ends up hurting instead.

Freeing Mickey

Some people have argued that the effort to free Mickey is a vital one. The laws meant to promote invention, creativity, and innovation are instead stifling it. Rolling back the length of time protection is extended, and the types of ideas, concepts, and communications that can be protected, is one approach.

The other is devising new ways for individuals to more flexibly choose a protection system. If I have invented something and don’t feel the need to have a monopoly on it (for example, if I record a song but don’t plan on making a CD, marketing it, etc.), I want to be able to say “OK, you can use this for your own projects, as long as you don’t profit from it, and I get credit.” Sometimes, I might just say “anyone can use this for anything they want.” The problem is that if I don’t say anything at all, by default I am suggesting that I have a monopoly over its use.

Consider, for example, the ugly doodle on this entry. I drew this during a faculty meeting. It is not great art. If (I can’t imagine this, but let’s just say) someone wanted to use this image on their own site, they would have to email me to ask permission, normally. Why? Because even without putting the little (c) on it, or doing anything else besides drawing it on paper, I have been given a copyright on the material and granted a monopoly on its use. However, in my case, I’ve attached a Creative Commons license on my site, which allows people to make use of things they find on my blog as long as they cite me, do not change it, and do not sell it. If they want to do any of these things, they can contact me, but otherwise they don’t need my explicit permission.

Muddy Waters and Fair Use

This doesn’t solve everything, of course. In practice, what constitutes “commercial use” isn’t exactly clear, for example. And when I say it can’t be altered, does that mean that people that run aggregators and are republishing only some articles in my feed are violating my license? I don’t think so, but it may be ambiguous. Where do things “chunk”?

And then there is the problem that not everything on my site is original. I regularly quote other people. Consider, for example, this posting. Here I am repeating a joke (that conceivably could be copyrighted) that was told to my brother and then passed on to me. Clearly, I don’t have the right to slap any old license on it that I choose. Moreover, the photograph is taken from an MSNBC article. And they, in turn, captured it from Taiwanese television. What a mess! In these cases I am asserting “Fair Use,” a limited get-out-of-copyright-free clauses that allows you to use stuff without permission in certain circumstances. But that doesn’t help someone reading my blog to decide whether they can then repurpose this image. And what about the comments? When people post comments, do they own these, or are they covered by my license. Lots of places for ambiguity here.

Very recently we have encountered a situation in which ownership of creative material was brought to the fore. The JibJab parody of Woody Guthrie’s song caused the copyright owners threaten to sue JibJab. There was the further question of whether television stations that aired parts of the parody (fair use) were actually promoting the theft of the song. In the end, JibJab won out. Both political speech and parodies have long histories of relatively strong protection, but it wasn’t obvious that this would be the outcome.

Free Culture

Lawrence Lessig, in a new book called Free Culture, which, naturally, he has released under a CC license. There seems to be an ongoing push to provide public cultural goods: music samples, software, and other goods. At the same time, companies continue to be interested in laying claim to new kinds of ideas: from people’s DNA, to the thoughts in their heads. How this plays out over the next few decades — and which countries and regions get the policies right — with have an enormous impact on what our future looks like, what we do and what we buy.

When we meet in class this coming Wednesday, we are going to be reinventing ourselves, and our blogs. You will have an opportunity to build a new blog, with a new team. You can even go it on your own for the remainder of the semester if that is what you want to do. Or you can redefine your own group blog to clearly focus on some aspect of information technology and new forms of communication.

To that end, I want everyone (individually) to propose a weblog that will focus on a particular, relatively narrow, topic area. This must be something that will be different enough to attract an audience, and you need to be able to gather the best material from the web, other media, and your own contacts to build this into something worth looking at over the remaining weeks we have together.

For inspiration, you might look at some of the successful blogs that are commercially backed. The three blogging empires right now are:

* the Gawker Group, which includes blogs like Gawker, Wonkett, Defamer, Fleshbot, Gizmodo, and Jalopnik;
* the Corante blogs, including industry-related blogs like Online Dating News, Many2many, In the Pipeline, Flackster, GoYaMi, Get Real, and Brain Waves;
* Weblogs, Inc., who host, among others, the P2P weblog, engadget, hack a day, the mortgage weblog, Judith Meskill’s weblog, the spam weblog, and gadling.

While these blogging dynasties are producing blogs they hope will make money (and therefore that must attract a lot of eyeballs), there are a lot of others out there that draw a public audience by focusing on particular topics, ranging from Coolhunting, to Daddy Types, to Curbed. Some of the most successful blogs of late have been political blogs; Newsday suggests that the DailyKOS pulls in $600,000 of advertising anually, while Atrios is blogging for about $7,000 a month. However, writing on political issues requires you to be quick, and to both get at information that otherwise would remain uncovered, and do so in an engaging way. That’s a pretty tight market.

Post with the name of your proposed blog, what you will cover, why you think there is an audience for the topic, what kinds of posts you will make, and how you will uncover interesting news for your blog. Indicate some of the blogs that are in the same space, and how yours will be different. Be as original as possible, and as narrow. What kind of news would you like to have a more frequent and focused update on?

Make a compelling case in your blog entry, and I will select the best of the bunch to pitch in class on Wednesday (just a 2 minute explanation of your idea). Even if you already know you want to be on someone else’s team, you need to come up with your own concept for the purposes of this assignment.

Questions? Ask them here in the comments!

What do you think of our experiment. Can blogs be used in this way? Would you rather we were meeting in person? Does this work as a distance form? Would it be better if it were used in conjunction with a more in-person classroom? Would you prefer a non-blogging class to a blogging one? What would you tell a teacher who was thinking of using blogs in their classroom? What has been the hardest part of using a blog with the class? The most surprising? Do you know how many people are reading your blog? Are you proud of the content? Do you think this is something you might do after the class? If you could change the structure of the class, how would you do it?

Obviously, these are more suggestive than exhaustive questions, but I am interested in your opinion. Oh, and normally I wouldn’t have to say this, but many of you don’t know me well: you won’t hurt my feelings if you hate the blogging. I want your honest feedback.

I’ll reserve a more in-depth assessment of how things have been going until after I hear your ideas. For now, I’ll just say that I don’t think we’ve gotten where I had hoped we would be. A large part of this is not having the physical classes. I think that these, more than anything else, force a kind of regularity on the process that may be a necessity for now. When I look at the syllabus for the class I realize that we haven’t covered nearly as much as we have in previous iterations of the class. I’m going to collapse some things together for the following week and talk about intellectual property, online payment models for content, and the rise (resurgence?) of Do-It-Yourself culture. Rather than assign particular readings, I will expect you to follow the links in the lecture posts. We will follow with the following topics: privacy/surveillance, Marketing and advertising, and Ubicomp/Wearcomp.