academic publishers get snippety with Google

Last Friday, the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) sent Google a long letter expressing concern over what might amount to “systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale” in its library project. BusinessWeek reports. The AAUP letter can be read here. Much of it asks Google to clarify its position on a number of points – to provide, as it were, the fine print on Google Print. Here’s a great item:

Snippet is used so consistently in describing Google Print for Libraries that it’s taking on the status of a technical term, and thus requires a specific definition. How long is a “snippet?”

Google defends its mass digitization project on the grounds of “fair use” (Section 107 of the US Copyright Act). In other words, it asserts the right to copy copyrighted materials and make them browseable on the web for research purposes as long as they restrict the amount that can be seen for free. Any commercial use of the text will take place only in the context of a publisher agreement. Publishers have the right to opt out, and apparently a couple already have, though most are holding their breath and waiting to see if they might be able to profit from Google’s project. The tricky question is, can a book that has been withheld from the publisher program be included in the library program?
You could say that the web is one enormous copying machine. And so fair use questions are more important than ever before. Will Google be the juggernaut that breaks down the door into a more permissive fair use era for all? Or will they use their power to establish an exclusive, Google-only, fair use zone, and set up a cartel with publishers? Or will a few well aimed law suits sink the project before it gets off the ground?

got a minute?

Submit 1-minute low bandwidth narrative films to the 60 Second Story Competition, adminstered and judged by an interesting gathering of electronic writers, bloggers and publishers (including some of the folks at Grand Text Auto and Spineless Books). Stories must be submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 License. It’s also worth mentioning that the contest is itself an entrant in another contest: the Contagious Media Showdown. The most contagious site (i.e. the one with the most hits in a three week period) wins. As of this writing, 60 Second Stories ranks 18th.
“Many digital cameras and webcams allow you to take one minute of video and audio at resolutions suitable for the web. With all the mindless fluff, commercial hoohah, and charlatanism on the web, we deserve a few minutes of story, do we not? Why haven’t you done this already? Tell us a story.”
Could prove to be a pretty contagious little concept – stories small enough to sneeze. I hereby infect you with it..
Also, read how Mozilla is getting its fans to spread the word about Firefox through viral video.

a big bang theory for media

Future generations, living comfortably as digital natives, may look back on the twentieth century as the big bang moment in the history of media. The big bang theory, by now a household concept in the annals of cosmology, speculates that the universe began some 13 or 14 billion years ago in a massive explosion of matter from an original, super-dense, super-heated singularity. 240px-Universe_expansion.png What does this have to do with twentieth century media? More than you might think. Industrialization and the development of telecommunications resulted in the centralization of communication forms into a kind of super-dense, super-heated singularity of their own: the mass media. Its power to drive a consumer economy through advertising, and blanket entire populations with messages and imagery has been so impressive, so all-consuming, that in a very short time it has come to seem all but inevitable.
But much to mass media’s surprise (and horror), the singularity has exploded. With the web barely a decade old, it looks like the reign of mass media is turning out to have been only a brief interlude between a pre-electrified world, and a vastly uncertain digital horizon. Generations for whom radio and television were wondrous novelties assumed a passive posture, letting the transmission waves wash over them. But subsequent ages, reared in the super-heated forge of the mass media, have grown increasingly impatient with the paleolithic norms of the TV network, the daily newspaper, the cineplex, and the publishing conglomerate. They want more diversity, more choice, more mobility, and more opportunity to contribute in the very forms the media taught them. Totally decentralized, the internet is a different kind of animal, and since it can absorb and copy basically any kind of media, it is perceived by Big Media as fundamentally hostile to its interests. Consequently, they are doing everything in their power to preserve the models that worked so well for them when the universe was still young and galaxies (chains, affiliates, imprints) were still within their grasp: suing file-sharing services, going after DVD pirates, and slapping all sorts of nasty DRM (digital rights management) on the little downloadable content they are tentatively trying to sell. But in the end, it’s a losing battle. Trying to hold still in a swiftly expanding cosmos will prove at first uncomfortable (as it is now) and eventually impossible. The universe is moving outward. Later, we’ll tell our grandchildren what it was like to watch the big bang and the brief, brilliant age of the mass media.
The Wall Street Journal ran a free web feature today – “How Old Media Can Survive In a New World” – examining the crisis facing mass media, asking influential observers in each industry what might be done to adapt to the decentralized laws of the web and how to profit from media that has no physical dimension. It serves as a nice snapshot of the explosion in its current phase.

web marginalia

NYTwikalong.jpg About a week ago, I attended a fascinating workshop at USC on Social Software in the Academy – a gathering of some of the most interesting thinkers, teachers and innovators at the intersection of technology and education. I learned a great deal, much of which I’m still processing and will be posting about this week. I also found out about some exciting new tools. One of them is Wikalong, a plugin for the Firefox browser. Wikalong makes it possible to write notes in the margin of a web page (something we take for granted in paper books). Reviews, rebuttals, conversations, subversive commentary, a “roving weblog,” or just plain old notes – all of these are possible in the little sidebar wiki notebook that Wikalong places to the left of any web page you go to. Online reading enhanced.
A great part of history is written in the marginalia, and I suspect that networked marginalia is territory worth exploring. Wikalong might be just a literal-minded stepping stone to more interesting forms, but the profundity of the margin (which lies in its spacial relationship to the primary text) shouldn’t be underestimated. 180px-Talmud.png Sparks fly between juxtaposed texts. While hyperlinks enable the reader to leap between textual worlds, they suck you down a wormhole to a distant place. Sometimes it’s better to be in both spaces at the same time (like keeping two browser windows open at once). Think of the Talmud, the great Jewish compendium of law and exegesis. On each page, commentaries are arrayed around a core text. Wikalong may seem insignificant next to this ancient hypertext system, but it points to a related sort of spatial intertextuality that should theoretically be possible in the new medium. If a flat page can be so multi-dimensional, think of how far we might be able to go in a virtual space.
Another handy tool is PurpleSlurple, which provides granular addressability for any existing web page. In other words, it inserts links for paragraphs and headers, allowing you to reference specific sections of text on a given page. Each “slurped” page gets its own URL, as does each individual element that has been anchored with a reference number. It’s primitive, but could come in extremely handy. For bloggers, this provides another way to reference a particular passage in a long web document. Just slurp the page, then link to the specific section.

Nils Peterson, of Washington State University, presented these tools, along with del.icio.us and a visualization application from Tufts called VUE, as a “juxtaposition of technologies” – a toolkit enabling a web reader or writer to more effectively annotate, reference and quote within the web.

“ubiquitous social encyclopedia”

Cellphedia, a thesis project at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, is a user-generated encyclopedia composed of text message Q&A from cell phones – a kind of mobile, hyper-abbreviated Wikipedia. But unlike Wikipedia, Cellphedia entries are not open to editing by the community, at least not yet. Inspired by Dodgeball, a popular friend-tracking service, Cellphedia suggests something more along the lines of a massive, multi-user trivia game than a serious knowledge resource. It’s the kind of street research that is becoming more common. Answers on impulse. The web overlayed on the physical world.

mobile web initiative

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main standards-setting body for the networked world we live and breathe, recently launched the Mobile Web Initiative. From the press release:
“Many of today’s mobile devices already feature Web browsers and the demand for mobile devices continues to grow. Despite these trends, browsing the Web from a mobile device — for example, to find product information, consult timetables, check email, transfer money — has not become as convenient as expected. Users often find that their favorite Web sites are not accessible or not as easy to use on their mobile phone as on their desktop computer. Content providers have difficulties building Web sites that work well on all types and configurations of mobile phones offering Web access.”
The web is moving further and further from being exclusively a desktop system. What began essentially as a set of interlinked brochures, to be read sitting down, has evolved into a dynamic, social multimedia space, increasingly connected to the world around us. I often think of the history of industrialization as a story of estrangement from the physical world. Cities swell, smog billows and the haze of electric light washes out the stars. Mass media forms naturally emerge from the concentration of industry – economies of scale that favor homogeneity, the sweeping gesture. At first, the new media seem to take this estrangement further, confining us to “virtual” spaces. But quite to the contrary, the web is taking us back into the world, not out of it. Even something as simple as Google Maps suggests this return. But to become fully unmoored from our desks, standards have to be set in place to ensure that the web is readable in smaller formats, and that we have faster, more reliable access when we’re on the move. Plus, the devices need to emerge that offer the convenience of a cell phone with the power of a notebook computer. The future of personal computing lies more with cell phones (see the new Sidekick II), iPods and Play Station Portable than with the latest desktop from Dell or Apple.

brush up your shakespeare


In Wired yesterday, Cory Doctorow sums up recent brave efforts by the BBC to adapt to a changing world: BBC Backstage, the Creative Archive, and reader-contributed photos.
“America’s entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe’s biggest broadcasters — the BBC — is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it. Unlike Hollywood, the BBC is eager and willing to work with a burgeoning group of content providers whose interests are aligned with its own: its audience.”
Above is a clip from a 1913 silent film version of Hamlet, downloadable for free from the British Film Institute under the aegis of the Creative Archive – one of the few bits of free content made available so far. It feels good to make a video quotation with total impunity. Perhaps others will be inspired to take a page from BBC’s book.
Here also is Rick Prelinger‘s speech to the Creative Archive Seminar in April. Prelinger is one of America’s great activist archivists.

the page as a spandrel (or not)

One of the spandrels in San Marco
One of the great conceptual jumps of the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (with the equally brilliant, if lesser known, Richard Lewontin) was the idea of the spandrel. In “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm”, they wondered about how the spandrels – in architecture, the roughly triangular area between two perpendicular arches – in the cathedral of San Marco in Venice came to be. Looking at how the spandrels are decorated now, they reasoned, you might imagine that they had been designed to feature prominently in the architecture. But this is not necessarily so from an architectural standpoint: if you want to have perpendicular arches, you have to have spandrels between them. Nobody ever wants spandrels by themselves; they’re a side product. Once you have them, of course, you can decorate them as much as you like.

Analogously, Gould and Lewontin reasoned, you could explain many biological features in the same way: a feature may continue to exist in an organism simply because there’s no reason to take it away. One shouldn’t expect features to have functions: they can simply do things (or not) because they’re there. Male nipples are the canonical example of this: there’s no reason for males to have them, but there’s no compelling reason not to have them. So they’re there.

I’ve been thinking for a while about the problem of pages on the screen. We have pages in a book because they make sense there: pages are the easiest way to divide up a long text into hand-sized chunks. Pages on the screen (as they exist in a PDF, say) seem to me to be something of a spandrel: there’s no physical reason that we need to divide text up into hand-sized chunks on a screen. We don’t always: look at the way a webpage scrolls. But what’s worried me is the paucity of the metaphors being used – note the verb “scroll” – against the tabula rasa that computers present.

Looking at a Flash demonstration (8Mb, but very much worth clicking or downloading) of the late Jef Raskin‘s Archy system suggests a way out of the problem. Here we have a two-dimensional space filling the frame of the browser. But this isn’t a two-dimensional space like that of a sheet of paper. The possibility of zooming in to create an infinite plane takes advantage of the virtual environment in a way that a piece of paper cannot. What if you had a novel in a space like this?

This is exciting to me because it’s active design – trying to change the metaphor – instead of being a side effect of trying to re-implement old ideas in a new context.