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 They didn’t live one step withdrawn, watching from afar at what we said about their opinions and analysis.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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Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based international non-governmental organization which advocates freedom of the press, has today launched a one-day protest against Internet censorship in the nine worst offending nations. While they include obvious ones like China and Cuba, RSF also shines a light on the offenses of Turkmenistan and Eritrea, both nations which cripple Internet access as a means of controlling what the public knows, thinks, and understands of their government and global events.

The protests are very easy to join; you click on a country - perhaps the one that offends you most, or as I did, the one with the fewest protesters - and fill out 4 text fields; name, surname, city, and country. Then you pick the slogan you wish to hoist above your virtual head and join in with thousands of others who right now are protesting in virtual representations of famous plazas around the world, including the infamous Tienanmen Square in Beijing.

Join in (French)
Join in (English)

The graphic above, from the Wikimedia Foundation, is the Reporters Without Borders 2006 press freedom ranking map, showing from blue to red the severity of Internet restraints across the world.

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There are two very important reasons why the entire tech industry got HD-DVD completely wrong. One, as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow ought to be advocates of, is HD-DVD not having region coding or as much DRM as Blu-ray. The second, which the entire Wall Street Journal editorial board should support is the fact that variety is the spice of life. Oh, no, I meant that competition is the seed for all that is good and wonderful in our laissez-faire economic system.

The tech industry got HD-DVD so wrong because, unlike Blu-ray, HD-DVD had no region coding and had less restrictive DRM. This is important because consumers like you and me are sick of being dictated to about how we use our content. The VCR allowed us more freedom, as did the CD burner. Complicated codecs (Apple’s .m4p) and software restrictions (iPod usage limitations) severely hamper what we can do with the music we paid for.

Amazon’s MP3 store has gone a long way towards rectifying this situation but DRM on video remains as absurdly limiting as ever. iSquint, HandBrake, VLC, and so on exist just to help you untangle your content from their manacles. Why is it so hard?! HD-DVD did not have as complicated a DRM system as Blu-ray and for that reason we should have all been trumpeting it as the next generation product.

We should allow the market to operate on its own free from regulation and allow it to fight monopolistic tendencies. It is controversial to argue for more than one optical format, because the response will be that it complicates matters, forces a higher cost on the consumer by requiring her to buy two players, and complicate the lives of average citizens staring at stacks of competing players at CompUSA.

It may seem illogical to argue that competing formats is good for the consumer, but the opposite is true. When two similar goods square off the result is a bitter fight to the death with equally split market share. Using the example of colas, every time Pepsi lowers the price, Coca-Cola must follow suit. If Pepsi increased the quality of its product, Coca-Cola would have to scramble to match the new standard. In this way, Blu-ray and HD-DVD would have squared off and fought bitterly for our dollars. They would have increased quality, lowered prices, and packed in more features to beat the other for that precious penny.

All that is left is one player in a lucrative market. Yes, in ten years we will all download music and video from iTunes or Amazon or maybe even a resurgent Napster, but today Sony is grinning. It can riddle its product with copy protection, region coding, and restrictive DRM. Geeks/nerds/techies should be disappointed. Sony can also price its players and discs however it wishes, control production numbers to throttle output, and pay its employees whatever it likes. Economists should be disappointed. From whatever angle you approach the issue, I believe you too should be disappointed. Unless you work at Sony.

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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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I just updated the content management system running this blog from WordPress 2.3.2 to 2.3.3 because one of our authors was unable to log in. In the process I remembered to back up the theme and the CSS stylesheets that make this all possible.

While that worked nicely, my forgetting to save the wp-content/uploads folder means all our photos are gone. Of course I have them saved on my computer but with 60 posts it may take some time to put them back up. What that realistically means is that I’ll put them up tomorrow between 11PM and midnight after making dinner, cleaning up, doing some work, and going through the inundating excesses of Google Reader.

Update on 7th February: The images are back!

Technology, while beautiful, simple, and full of potential can be infuriating.

While I am writing a ‘Meta’ post, I should let you know that we now have social networking buttons with every post. This means if you use Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Technorati, Slashdot, or Newsvine you can submit any post from this blog to those sites.

We’re getting a pretty consistent 700 - 1000 pageviews per day, which is nice, but we deserve higher numbers considering the level of effort put into each post by all six of us. So, if you like what you see, spread the word (now easier, by clicking below: via Digg, del.icio.us etcetera).

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