The San Francisco Chronicle published a rather bone-headed analysis, User revolt at Digg.com shows risks of Web 2.0 (bylined Verne Kopytoff, Thursday, May 3, 2007) of the recent 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0 dust-up on Digg.com.

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0 is allegedly an encryption key that unlocks high definition media content encrypted using the AACS standard. It was cracked and posted to a web news group, Digg’d by others, and Digg was then hit with a DMCA ‘take-down’ diktat by the MPAA (The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is an unfortunate piece of legislation passed by the U.S. Congress that is the equivalent of outlawing kitchen knives because they could be used to commit crimes. Worse, the DMCA is being used by the MPAA and the RIAA to deny citizens fair-use copyright of media those citizens have legitimately purchased. Want to back up that DVD collection? Can’t do it in the not-quite-so-free United States of America).

Digg obliged the MPAA by censoring posts containing the AACS key, but users persisted, and Digg relented.

The Chronicle’s take on the controversy? Such shenanigans are the inevitable outcome of naive Web 2.0 companies’ loose reigns on the unwashed masses of the internet. It’s such a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the internet, the web, ‘Web 2.0,’ and this whole technological arena as to be an embarrassment.

According to the Chronicle,

The dust-up underscores both the power and the danger of what has come to be known as the Web 2.0 movement, a loosely defined group of Internet sites that foster online social networks and rely heavily on purely democratic principles to promote everything from news stories to music to photographs.

In truth, ‘Web 2.0′ technologies, which revolve around delivering a desktop PC-like, rich application experience to users via web browsers and the internet, have nothing at all to do with the democratising reach of the internet and the web. If anything, the development of centrally managed locations for posting material under the control of proprietary companies such as Flickr and Digg represent a step back from ‘democracy.’

What the SF Chronicle’s author fails to grasp is that the source of the internet’s democratising power is the nature of its underlying protocols, which make all hosts present in a single space (that is, a ‘cyber’ space) with zero distance between them. This is quite unlike traditional broadcast or print media, where delivery is expensive and slow, is overwhelmingly centralised, and ‘consumers’ of media contribute very little content in return.

Kopykoff continues:

Examples of Web 2.0 sites include the video-sharing site YouTube, the user-written online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the photo-sharing site Flickr. The movement also includes wildly popular social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, on which users can interact with each other in a virtual setting.

Digg’s problems this week are just the latest example of Web 2.0 growing pains. Wikipedia is routinely buffeted by inaccurate or self-serving information, while YouTube is flooded with pirated videos.

Kopykoff has conflated so many different technologies it is difficult to know where to begin to parse the misapprehensions apart.

MySpace could hardly be called a Web 2.0 utilising site, nor would Wikipedia be put into this category. Web 2.0 makes applications such as Google Earth possible — applications that draw data from net repositories, but behave like an application residing on a local computer’s hard drive, such as Microsoft’s suite of office applications, which grew up on stand alone PCs, before there was a net.

Wikipedia’s woes — and its tremendous, novel breadth — stem directly from the ability of each host machine to talk directly to every other host machine on the internet, but again, its web presentation has probably zero of what one would call Web 2.0. Its failings are those of any mob scene, and that’s something that we learned how to cope with long before internet technology came onto the scene. Parliamentary rules of order, editors in news rooms such as Kopykoff’s, meritocratic universities, rules of civil service, and representative democracy all serve to improve the output of the ordinary human lot. Wikipedia chose to run itself as a mob would, and this has precious little to do with the medium that conveys it.

Identifying which communications are valid and sound and which are merely rumours, or the rantings of a hothead, or a mob of them, is a task little changed from the print and broadcast era.

I could continue to parse the article, but you probably get the idea. Kopykoff badly misunderstands the beast he (or she) has been sent to report on.

Sadly, the kernel of a story was there, but somehow Kopykoff missed it. It is this: why are so many people unhappy with the DMCA, the MPAA and the RIAA? Is outlawing all copying, or banning all technologies such as peer to peer communication — or strings of characters and computer programs — a legitimate means for dealing with crimes committed with those tools?

Two posts I made in a discussion on traditional newspapers’ employees’ and investors’ confusion around linking vs. copying, the nature of the web and the internet, and copyright law (discussed by Doc Searls here and by Calcanis.com here. The Washington Post story that set off the discussion is entitled Zell Wants End to Web’s Free Ride, and is bylined: “By Frank Ahrens and Karl Vick, Washington Post Staff Writers, Saturday, April 7, 2007; Page D01″. My replies are here and here.):

This comment from an earlier poster is truly an example of tilting at windmills:

“Google ignores copyright. But it’s not just Google. The entire Web is still set up this way because Congress hasn’t understood the implications yet. Eventually, they will. And this will change with the laws.”

The web is not print, nor is the internet a broadcast medium. The juridical, political and social arenas will have to adjust to this reality. Posting on the web inherently means that one has given away content. There is nothing comparable to the immediacy of the hyperlink in the print world. The primary usefulness, indeed the very definition of the web, stems from linking. Tim Berners Lee, author of http and html, clearly articulated this in _Weaving the Web_, and Zell, the reporters at the Washington Post, and David Lazarus would do well to read Berners Lee’s book.

Linking, of course, is not the only novel aspect of the internet. Tcp/ip also make it so that zero distance exists between hosts, thereby breaking the broadcast model — or, more correctly, making it so that broadcast is but one protocol that fits nicely into the tcp/ip suite.

Again, journalists and investors from the print world do well to dwell extensively on these facts. To take another approach, anthropologist Benedict Anderson’s book, _Imagined Communities_, examines the similarly disruptive character of an earlier innovation: the printing press. I highly recommend it as an excellent primer on what we’re seeing unfolding now.

***

I wanted to clarify two things that I said in a post above.

First, I said: “Linking, of course, is not the only novel aspect of the internet.” I think it’s more accurate (thought a bit awkward) to say: “Linking is not the only novel aspect that occurs ON the internet.” Links, after all, are only one way to represent information, and protocols other than http use other metaphors: bulletin boards, mail correspondence, etc. Just as there is a significant difference between colloquims, symposiums, forums, dialogues, monologues, drama, etc., so too does presentation’s form affect information’s character.

Second, I should make it clear that I believe that there is a distinction between linking and copying. I suspect that linking will eventually (hasn’t this already happened in legal precedent?) fall into the area of copyright that permits either limited quoting or creative re-use. Google News almost certainly falls within the bounds of acceptable limited quoting (but the old legal framework still doesn’t quite fit the new reality, does it?).

Newspapers are going out of business not because of Google News, but because of Craigslist. Craigslist doesn’t reproduce any newspaper content; to the contrary, it competes with newspapers fairly. Zell looks rather like a sore loser.

It is a little surprising that Sam Zell and the Washington Post reporters seem to be unfamiliar with this legal and technological terrain.

In the run-up to Mavericks (the penultimate big-wave surfing contest that happens at Pillar Point each winter between January 1 and March 31st on 24 hours notice), the San Francisco Chronicle has run a story entitled “Desperate Race for Survival, Riding for Their Lives.”

An excerpt from the story:

The pair idled their craft by the “green can” buoy about a quarter-mile to sea and hundreds of yards south of the spot where world-class waves wall up to provide expert surfers with some of the world’s most thrilling rides. Since dawn, Alladio had pulled from the water a half-dozen hapless spectators who had been rinsed off jetties by the rising swell. By late morning, Cahill had joined her, retrieving boards for surfers who had snapped their leashes amid the tumult.

At about 2:30 p.m., with the ocean bare of surfers, the water seethed with bubbles after the last set of waves — with 60- to 80-foot-high faces — had thundered through. Alladio and Cahill were fatigued and considering heading in.

Looking north toward Devil’s Slide, they saw a smooth, gray line resembling a fog bank hurtling toward them at an incredible rate of speed.

“What is that?” they asked each other.

Alladio saw a faint feathering of white along the top of the ridge. It could only be storm winds ripping spray off a gigantic mountain of moving water. Cahill saw it, too.

“It’s a wave!” they shouted.

Insane. Outrageous. Excellent story.

Congratulations, by the way, to the SF Chronicle for being one of the few dead tree organizations that get that cost-walling fish-wrap is a great way to destroy any possible value it might have had. No doubt the fish mongers of the world are wailing. I’m actually afraid to link to most traditional news organizations because their links are so ephemeral.

The SF Chronicle might also be beginning to grasp that writing more, in greater detail, and in depth in a way that was never feasible in the comparatively expensive print world is another great way to add value to their offerings. It does shock me to see that newspapers, whose very strength was the quality of not merely their writing — but their journalism — seem to do precisely the opposite on the web: they erect feeble, gaudy web sites that presumably are to act as enticements to buy the print product. Um, guys? You’ve got this precisely backwards. It truly points to the oft repeated tale of the birth of new technologies: so often those whom it threatens most grasp it least. Cultural adaptation lags technological innovation.

Thanks again to SF Chronicle staff writer Paul McHugh for a great piece of reporting.

I was just subject to a rather thorough — breathtakingly so — round of bureaucratic incompetence by Laney College (Oakland, California). Me to Admissions and Records clerk: “Will I be able to get this today?” “Will it come back up?” “Can you take my payment, then, [and enter the data at a later time, and mail me a copy]?” No, No, No, Sorry.

Wow. What can you do?

But wait, there’s more. Earlier, I had visited the Laney College / Peralta Colleges web site to see if I could get a transcript, online hopefully — after all, I only wanted an unofficial transcript. This Peralta Coleges “Transcript Information” page filled me with hope. Especially the tantalizing “Click here to view your Unofficial Transcript.” Ok, so I click here, which takes me to a page entitled “Grades.” Warmer. But no transcript request form. Hmm. Wait…there is a link Click here for transcript information — so I Click Here once more. I am back where I started. WTF?

And these people have a Computer Science Department. Frightening. Oh, did you think that you might find a curriculum at that link? Let’s just say the Laney College CS web page is … spare. Guess they’re too busy working on their COBOL programs. Think I’m joking? Download the Laney College Catalog — true to form, it’s a very web unfriendly pdf: 2.79 MB.

Alrighty then. Back to our little conundrum. Oh! Stupid me! On that very hope inspiring Transcript Information page there is a link (”Transcript Request Form”) to page entitled “Peralta Colleges Transcript Request“. It’s a data entry form! Oh my, the wonder of the web! But wait: Complete this Transcript Request, print (using your browser), sign, date and mail (US mail) to the address below“.

That’s right: we bought all this fancy computer equipment and hired those $500 an hour web consultants so that we could have you print out the fucking form and snail mail it to us.

To add insult to injury, Laney / Peralta Colleges charges $10 per transcript request — even for unofficial transcripts. Guess they’re still paying off the web consultants.

Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites

The conclusion arrived at is that, in some circumstances at least, PHP’s tendency to create more problems than it solves makes it an inappropriate choice. However, we also recognise that there are some situations in which PHP is to be used. For those who find themselves in such situations, we use the experience gained from using PHP in a range of sites (including the geographic search engine Somewherenear.com and a multi-million-dollar e-commerce site in the canning industry) to offer some guidance on how best to deal with PHP’s deficiencies.

Personal computer monitor resolution trends and bandwidth trends. I should note that the site presents a view biased exclusively towards Microsoft products.

Another nicely done XML tutorial.

The W3C has a brief page that summarizes XML: XML in 10 Points.

Constructing a Document Type Definition (DTD) for XML looks like it might be a pretty good intro. to building XML DTDs (document type definitions).

AM weblogging:

Doc’s mention of an OPML editor

Wikipedia entry on OPML

XML Unlocks Information: How XML Accommodates Human-Authored Content

Hmmm, I need to find a deadly simple XML/XSL example; say, an address book or something. How about a search in Google using site:.edu xml xsl addressbook example. Ah, better, a few examples to work with.

AJFORM is an intriguing introductory toolkit for getting up and running with AJAX. Thanks to Ajax Info for the info.

Marc Cantor has written a good summary of current open standards projects (maybe calling them ‘movements’ might be a little more accurate) in an article titled Breaking the Web Wide Open!

His description echoes my experience, which has been that although “incumbents” (Cantor’s term) may be using new technology, they often mimic what they know. Cantor says:

For decades, “walled gardens” of proprietary standards and content have been the strategy of dominant players in mainframe computer software, wireless telecommunications services, and the World Wide Web—it was their successful lock-in strategy of keeping their customers theirs.

And:

While the incumbents use cheap open source software to run their back-ends systems, their business models largely depend on proprietary software and algorithms.

Cantor gives an excellent and concise summary of open web services technologies, and lists areas being developed:

Today’s Open APIs are complemented by standardized Schemas—the structure of the data itself and its associated meta-data. Take for example a podcasting feed. It consists of: a) the radio show itself, b) information on who is on the show, what the show is about and how long the show is (the meta-data) and also c) API calls to retrieve a show (a single feed item) and play it from a specified server.

The combination of Open APIs, standardized schemas for handling meta-data, and an industry which agrees on these standards are breaking the web wide open right now. So what new open standards should the web incumbents—and you—be watching? Keep an eye on the following developments:

Identity
Attention
Open Media
Microcontent Publishing
Open Social Networks
Tags
Pinging
Routing
Open Communications
Device Management and Control

Cantor then discusses each of these in depth. Quite interesting.

I’ve been tweaking this page’s css / design a little more. My goal, and the goal of this site, is to learn how to use publishing tools, such as css, php, mysql, apache, linux, w3c standards, etc.

lynda.com seems like a pretty well put together tutorial site.

Whenever I’m trying to explain the difference between the web, the internet, and earlier media forms, I begin with this analogy: the first TV news shows looked like radio sounds. Announcers stood stiffly in front of a camera and sonorously read the news. Of course, it didn’t work, because TV abhors stillness. Even if it’s just Ken Burns moving the camera across a tintype from the U.S. civil war, you’ll notice that everything on TV moves now. It’s such a basic insight, but people didn’t automatically grasp it. I also believe that this process, as with the adoption of any technology, is fundamentally collective in nature: we learn, and adapt, as a group.

Similarly, the best ways to use the internet and the web are forming as we watch. An excellent example? The incomprehension with which traditional print news organizations greet the web. Dan Gillmor discusses the phenomenon of the “costwall” at traditional print news outlets’ web sites. Gillmor points to how traditional news organizations can adapt and even benefit from the ‘net, by turning fishwrap, as Cory Doctorow so aptly terms it, into an asset that is both communally and commercially valuable.

I think examining the unfolding of earlier adoptions of technology can be revealing, and here I usually refer to Benedict Anderson’s excellent book, Imagined Communities. His principal subject is nationalism, but along the way he examines the influence of the printing press on the spread of capitalism, vernacular languages, and nationalist ideologies. We can expect similar upheaval, given that the foundations of capital and property are threatened by the internet and the web.

The means of reciprocity usually get rearranged in such times, as was the case after the advent of radio. Eben Moglen’s 23 February 2004 Harvard address, as posted on Groklaw, is a lucid introduction to the unfolding of this story this time around.