2008 Archives

Subscription Music: Which Is It?

The question is: given Yahoo!'s decision that DRM subscription music doesn't work, why does Apple think they can make it work? The lifetime payment idea sounds a reasonable one: the iPod has a slightly higher cost but it comes with infinite downloads. Most important about that model is that it hides the payment to music companies; remember, by misinterpreting p2p ("the market wants convenient digital music" was interpreted as "some dorks are stealing our stuff!") and then by acting like bullyboys as they futilely chase the people they wish were customers, the labels have created a generation that expects music to be free.

Then again, it may well be that mobile devices operate under different economic rules than desktop ones: in New Zealand, Vodafone sells more music singles than any other outlet, including the iTunes Music Store (that fact's in the comments of the article, not the body). I run a very dumb phone because I enjoy being away from email, and I'd buy a bridge before I bought a music single on my phone, so I'm probably not the best person to assess the viability of the phone. I realize this is probably like asking, "why do kids these days dress so funny?" but I have a question for readers: can you help me understand why people pay money for music on a phone when they already have a laptop full of music?

Simplicity

I got a chuckle out of this comic on app simplicity and usability. So true, so painfully painfully true.

Penguin's Missed Ebook Opportunity

I've seen several softball pieces (such as this one) praising Penguin's decision to release, on Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader, some classics of English literature, starting with Jane Austen, with certain extras, in multiple ebook formats. Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for example, "will come with recipes from the era, copies of the book's first reviews, and a primer on social etiquette circa 1813." Another source adds "rules of period dancing, and illustrations of fashion, home decor, and architecture."

I'm guessing that the etiquette primer will not be what makes ebooks mainstream. Although ebooks should have extras, those extras should take advantage of the interactive medium, not merely deliver more -- and inferior -- text. This reminds me of the early days of CDs, when all sorts of trivial extras (outtakes, alternate takes) were added to discs as selling points. More recently, it's like the "deleted scenes" stuffed into DVDs. People, do you think those scenes were deleted because they were good?

What's most galling, of course, is that Penguin isn't attempting to increase interest in ebooks as a medium by making these classics, long past copyright, available in free, un-DRM-encumbered formats. In an old-meets-new mashup, publishers could use free distribution of still-in-demand classics to generate interest in a form, ebooks, that is still only in the earliest days of its potential public acceptance. Wouldn't you be more likely to try something new if it was free?

Radar Roundup: Brains

Today's topic is: our brains, understanding how they work, and living with the consequences of that knowledge.

• Brain Enhancement: Right or Wrong? (NYT): amazing gray areas we're getting into. Is it okay for a scientist to take brain-enhancing drugs? Compare with Wired News's write-up of Quinn Norton's ETech talk on the subject of how new bio technology will make us confront difficult questions around what it means to be human.
• How To Think (Ed Boyden's blog): Ten rules that were originally to be the basis for a class that taught MIT students how to think. Sample: "1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you're reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative."
• Notes on “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely (Toby Segaran's blog): fascinating list of ways in which we are irrational. The book looks interesting for its exposure of just these various ways in which we don't do the "right thing".
• Brain Rules: web site for the book by John Medina. Interesting book that tries to help people understand their brains and use them better. Ultimately it's frustrating: too much anecdote, not enough science for me. I came away feeling it would be a good 50 pager. I see a lot of people doing the "use your brain better" thing, possibly inspired by the $110M brain training software market (Nintendo is $80M of it). See gbrainy for an open source version. Vaughn Bell over at the Mind Hacks blog points to research that says the software doesn't work, and along the way coins the killer phrase "the four dopamen of the neurocalypse".
• Why we're powerless to resist grazing on endless web data (WSJ): "coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom." Push the lever, rat, and get your next damn blog post to read.
• Pricing and the brain (Economist): high-priced goods are perceived as better than low-priced, even to the point where high-priced placebos are more effective than lower-priced. Nobody's yet answered the question of what this means for open source/free software, other than to point out that it's a good reason for "free" to mean "freedom" and not simply "price".

Jill Bolte Taylor's amazing TED talk

At least three of this year's TED talks were flat-out amazing: Tod Machover's, Benjamin Zander's, and Jill Bolte Taylor's. The first of them has just been posted:

Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist, eavesdropped on her own stroke. As I wrote the day of her talk, she walked us through what she felt and thought while her brain was going wild, from the borderline-metaphysical ("I can't define where I begin and where I end") to the borderline-hilarious ("I'm a busy woman. I don't have time for a stoke"). Her description of her time in that strange state, caught between two worlds, the rare researcher who has been able to chronicle a brain-changing event from the inside, was astonishing.

And now you can see and hear it, too:

The brain she's holding there is a real one, by the way.

We'll alert you to the other two classics when they're published.

I Make... (Maker Faire Bay Area May 3-4)

If you wonder what Maker Faire is all about, check out this video, created by eric michael berg, a video intern working with us out of New York. He came to Maker Faire Austin and put together this simple but snappy video called "I Make...". It's all about the makers.

Maker Faire Bay Area is less than two months away -- May 3rd and 4th. If you'd like to participate as a maker, the deadline for entries is this Wednesday, March 19 at midnight. It's going to be another exciting event.

Given Enough Eyeballs - Art Meets Open Source in Philly

If you are in or near Philadelphia tonight, stop by the Esther M. Klein Gallery to check out the opening of Given Enough Eyeballs.

Like ETech's Emerging Arts Fest, the show curated by Annette Monnier explores the nexus of art, hacking, and collective authorship.

From the exhibition description:

"The artists in the exhibition, Given Enough Eyeballs, explore, in varying degrees, concepts of open-access and sharing, individual versus community, and ownership and appropriation, as it relates to the idea of open source software, software that is free to use and free to be adopted any way the user sees fit."

For more, see this review from the New Museum at Rhizome.

Details:
Esther M. Klein Art Gallery
3600 Market Street
opening 5-8 March 14
Exhibit up March 14 - April 26

Shelly Farnham on What Makes Facebook Apps Work

As many of you know, last fall, we released a report entitled The Facebook Application Platform, with analysis that demonstrated that far from being a "long tail" marketplace, Facebook has very much of a "short head" when it comes to applications.

As a social scientist, Shelly Farnham didn't think that was the end of the story. She asked if she could have access to our data set so she could do some additional analysis. We liked her analysis so much that we decided to publish it as a second report, The Facebook Application Ecosystem: Why Some Thrive--and Most Don't.

Shelly just did a great blog post about the report, explaining some of what she found. Here are a few tidbits:

In reviewing the dominant types of applications, it is clear that most of the applications are helping users achieve social goals such as improved communication, learning about the self relative to others, finding similar others, improving self-presentation, engaging in social play, and engaging in social exchanges via gifts and media...

In examining each application, we spent some time with the reviews and the discussion topics, expecting that applications that were more active would have more posts by users. We found however that reviews were not reviews. Rather, the review section seemed to be largely used for users to communicate with application developers, giving their feedback and reporting bugs, and to each other about the application.

The discussion topics section was used more for users to connect to one another. What was striking, however, was that both of these sections tended to be used to a greater degree when social applications (e.g., social games) did not provide a venue for verbal interaction within the game itself. The reviews then became overloaded with demands for the user-to-user communication required to use the application. These overloaded review sections, much like the overloaded horoscope or game discussion areas, reinforce the message that people come to social sites to be social, and will twist any application into an opportunity to communicate.

Good stuff, reminding us that social network applications are used socially, and that developers providing functionality that enhances social behavior are winning. These comments emphasize a basic web 2.0 (and open source) principle as well: users are co-developers. If you don't give them what they want, they will hack your system, overloading its features so they get what you didn't give them outright.

Perl mailing lists added to Markmail archive

Jason Hunter writes in email:

Perl is the duct tape of the internet. Created by Larry Wall in 1987 and made famous with his Programming Perl "camel book" published by O'Reilly, it's the tool sysadmins use to keep things running.

We're proud to announce we've finished loading the Perl.org mailing list history into MarkMail. A total of 530,000 emails across 75 lists. The lists don't go back to 1987 (boy that'd be cool if they did). But that's all right; who really needs tech support against Perl 1.000?

What we have here is traffic starting with the migration to the Perl.org setup in 1999:

Enjoy! And if anyone has earlier archives, let us know.

This is awesome. Markmail also has mailing list history for php, ruby, mysql, postgresql, and all of the Apache projects. (Coverage of Python and Linux is very limited.) And as I wrote previously on Radar, the markmail search and trend graphing interface is really slick. Google ought to buy these guys and offer this product as an upgrade to Google Trends! Not to mention applying some of their interface insights into other Google search products.

Laptop penetration in Brazil, rising developer count in China

Interesting email from Paul Kedrosky:

You'll find this interesting: The only place I have been where I see as many open laptops in the audience as at O'Reilly conferences is here in Brazil. Really fascinating.

In a related note, I talked the other day with Stephanie Martin, the head of IBM DeveloperWorks. She noted that the number of Chinese developers active on the site is approaching the number from the US, and that she expects it to pass the US numbers before long. This is as much a reflection of the decline in the developer population in the US as it is the rise of the developer population in China. (More details in this article.)

I wonder, though, how many of the developers in the O'Reilly emerging tech ecosystem are being counted. IBM's focus on enterprise software development may cause them to miss all the ferment coming from cross-over, self-taught developers who started in some other field (say design, or engineering, or finance) and just had an itch to scratch. I certainly see a lot of vibrancy in the US tech community, and I just don't buy the doom and gloom that people seem to be spreading about the declining number of CS degrees. Most of the tech entrepreneurs I know didn't start in CS anyway. They are self-taught.

From ETech to Where 2.0: Disaster Tech and Activist Mapping

At ETech last week, Ethan Zuckerman spoke about the use of web technologies in repressive regimes. It was great -- one person even told that it was the best session he'd ever seen. I recommend reading Ethan's write-up of his talk.

He began with the hypothesis:

Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists. If there's no porn, the tool doesn't work. If there are no activists, it doesn't work well.

The title of the talk was "The Cute Cat Theory of Activism". The more people use a service to post about cats the harder it is to shutdown entirely. So instead the authorities end up playing whack-a-mole. Ethan's slide shows how some of the more popular services can be used:

Ethan told us real stories of Google Maps being used to track secret prisons and jets and of Twitter being used to organize protests.

At Where 2.0, we will be joined by Erik Hersman (AKA Hash). Erik founded the activist mapping site Ushahidi (trying to keep Kenya's election safe). During his closing keynote, Enemies Around Every Corner: Mapping in an Activist World, he's going to talk about the use of maps to report incidents and keep elections free. He's going to explain the importance of clean data when people's live are at stake and he's going to share some success and failure stories with us.

(continue reading)

Radar Roundup: UI

• Microsoft's Lucid Touch (DanceWithShadows): a semi-transparent device that you interact with by touching the back of the screen. A clever prototype from Microsoft Research, demoed at the recent TechFest.
• Multitouch Rubiks Cube (The Future is Awesome): cube that displays the colours and you gesture to rotate. Cute.
• NextWindow (ZDNet): nifty demo from a New Zealand vender of multitouch sensitive screens up to 100 inches in size. Also see the company site. They also make an overlay for existing screens that just plugs in and goes. Sweet!
• Weather Map Interface Lets You Feel The Wind (New Scientist): using haptic table with mounds to represent high pressure or high wind speed, valleys for low pressure or low speed. They report a region's atmospheric situation being easier to understand when experienced through the table.
• Cyber Goggles: High Tech Memory Aid (Pink Tentacle, which is the perfect name for a manga brothel): Tokyo researchers have built goggles that record everything you see and can annotate and caption objects in your field of view. I'm not sure I buy the idea that it'll help you remember things (anyone fancy captioning the real world to help your goggles? Me neither) but it has some sweet HUD possibilities--train it on Facebook so it'll pop up names of people when I meet them at conferences, etc.
• Multitouch Barcelona: blog of a group building a low-cost multitouch table and software to run on it. See also NUI Group, a group of researchers and hackers building and open sourcing new UI hardware. Check out the wiki to see how they built a multitouch table.
• Every Time I Think About You I Touch My Cell (Will Henderson's blog): hack to add multitouch gestures to new MacBook Pros and Airs. Sweet.