Sticks and Stones

Gary Vaynerchuk asked us all to make today Good People Day, which is a wonderful idea. It’s not naive to decide to think about what we appreciate in others, and it isn’t unfair to turn our eyes away from the mainstream media’s flow of death and destruction. Sometimes we should talk about good news, sometimes we should publicly celebrate the people we consider good.

My contribution is to share a story with you - specifically how I got to know the wonderful people at CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast. It was mid-2005, the show was pretty new and a few people were beginning to develop what would become a vibrant community. We were in the hundreds, and at the CNET forums learnt about each other, discussed all sorts of issues, and so on. It was a great community and the hosts dropped in often. The forum was one of the places I had to visit everyday; the conversations there were as important to me as my ‘real-life’ conversations.

Late 2006 turned out to be a tough time in my life and the people I had known, but never met, rallied around to provide moral support. These people strewn across the planet came to share kind words with me and show that I mattered to them. That forum has always meant a lot to me, because I have met some amazing people there, people I later met in real life, and others spread all over the world with whom I have started online projects!

What was equally remarkable about the listeners’ community was how much we interacted with the hosts. They didn’t live one step withdrawn, watching from afar at what we said about their opinions and analysis. They participated, which made the whole atmosphere far more conducive to lively conversations, not just responses. Tom, Molly, and Veronica were always in the forum talking to their listeners. It was never a ploy to suggest they cared about the audience, it was real interest in the listeners. Even as the show has grown to the tens, likely hundreds of thousands of listeners it has today, you’ll still see Tom, Molly, and Jason joining in.

There are several thousands of miles east and west from me, here in London, separating us in the Buzz Out Loud community but I know that through my many years of interactions with the Good People involved with the show, I have gained real friends and am better for having known them.

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HarperCollins, following in the footsteps of one of its authors: Paulo Coelho, will begin making some of its books available for free online. These books are not downloadable, will only be available for one month, and can’t be printed out. DRM is not dead in all forms of digital media yet.

The New York Times reports that this will begin today. Books available:

“The Witch of Portobello” by Mr. Coelho; “Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy” by Mr. Irvine; “I Dream in Blue: Life, Death and the New York Giants” by Roger Director; “The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from and How You Can Choose” by Mark Halperin; and “Warriors: Into the Wild” the first volume in a children’s series by Erin Hunter.

I thoroughly applaud HarperCollins for making these books available online not because books need to be free but because books need to be available. Here in North London we have a library. It is somewhere in this area, although none of the residents seem to know where it is. It is small, and the one and only time I went in there, was stocked with Friends DVDs and racks of self-help books.

Harper Collins can spread the joy of high quality fiction by putting its content on what is slowly being recognised by ‘old media’ as the distribution mehanism of the future: the internet. The popularity of Audible, Sony’s eBook and the Kindle all demonstrate that digital distribution of books is not the far-off-future, but the present. It is good to see HarperCollins joining in.

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Molly Wood from CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast has started a new blog called ‘Cult of Ownership’. While we’ve written on copyright in the past, in fact the very first Sticks and Stones post was about the Creative Commons licensing used on this website, Molly is uniquely qualified to offer a comprehensive view on the tech industry and how we understand our rights regarding what we create.

In an age of more freely available digital artwork, music, and video, we perceive these materials to be free to use, share, remix, and indulge in - but those who know copyright law, especially the dreaded DMCA and the beleaguered concept of ‘fair use’ will know that this perception is very far from reality. I highly recommend Cult of Ownership, and strongly suggest you head over to the blog and read it in its entirety.

To answer the question in the title of this post, yes you do have the right to edit my photo of the Jaguar E-type, as long as you state that the original work is mine, and that you don’t use your edition or my original for commercial purposes.

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Before getting this MacBook I was used to a 20 inch screen which allowed me a lot more screen real estate. Downsizing was painful because it allowed me much less space in which to do all that I do, which is why Rafe Needleman’s piece at Webware.com last week was so useful.

Even though you may not be able to decorate your desk with two 30 inch Apple Cinema displays as Al Gore does, it is likely that from a hodgepodge of assorted CRTs and LCDs you could create a truly impressive screen worthy of a nuclear power plant.

While impressive to look at and possibly quite pleasing to own, there are actual usability benefits to this indulgent proposal: you’ll get more done. It’s incredibly easy to add a second display: all modern operating systems and computers have support for this. It takes the click of a few buttons and the tightening of a few screws (possibly just the sliding in of a plug to a socket i.e. MacBook, Cinema display and the wonder of mini-DVI).

But what if you need your RSS reader, a word processor, a spreadsheet application, World of Warcraft, and Sticks and Stones open? You would need two, maybe three monitors at the very least. Products like DisplayLink and DisplayFusion would be best suited for this sort of rigourous usage. As soon as I dive behind my computer and unhook the necessary cables to link up the 13 year old Gateway 17 inch monitor, I’ll be hitting feeds twice as hard, and hammering out posts twice as quickly. Or, procrastinating twice as much.

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It has been an agonizing few years of waiting. A trickle, then a few industry officials reaching a consensus that people generally don’t like DRM, then a few more people chimed in. We waited through 2003 and iTunes, listened to Jobs wax lyrical about how he hated DRM and it was the studios forcing it upon Apple. We saw Napster, Rhapsody, Sony’s Connect all fail under the weight of PlaysForSure.

But the final blow for DRM took the form of Amazon’s MP3 store. Jeff Bezos’s company, famous for selling physical media (books, not Audible audiobooks, DVDs not video rentals until Unbox, and CDs instead of MP3s until recently) plunged into DRM-free MP3s and Apple fanboys all over the world sighed as the great Steve Jobs was beaten to the punch.

MP3s are challenging the seamless integration of iPod + iTunes, because although they require one more step (dragging the file into iTunes), Apple’s AAC format can only be used on a minority of devices, most notably the iPod and Sony Ericsson phones. This gives Amazon a far greater potential market.

Why did Amazon succeeded where iTunes Plus failed? Well, Amazon is far cheaper, and there isn’t the stigma of paying more for the freer file. Interestingly, Apple has dropped its price but without Universal Music Group’s catalogue (which Amazon has), iTunes was always going to flounder in comparison. Now the events of 2008 must unfurl. I’ll buy from Amazon, and so should you: it’s often cheaper, and those files play on any device. I believe most people will join us in abandoning the needless shackles of DRM’ed AAC.

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