Mike Linksvayer

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia says to dream a little:

Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?

…

I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what we dream of, that we can’t accomplish on our own, or that we would expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.

One shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth and this could do a great deal of good, particularly if the conditions “can’t accomplish on our own…” are stringently adhered to.

However, this is a blog and I’m going to complain.

Don’t fork over money to the copyright industry! This is defeatist and exhibits static world thinking.

$100 million could fund a huge amount of new free content, free software, free infrastructure and supporting institutions, begetting more of the same.

But if I were a donor with $100 million to give I’d try really hard to quantify my goals and predict the most impactful spending toward those goals. I’ll just repeat a paragraph from last December 30, Outsourcing charity … to Wikipedia:

Wikipedia chief considers taking ads (via Boing Boing) says that at current traffic levels, Wikipedia could generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year by running ads. There are strong objections to running ads from the community, but that is a staggering number for a tiny nonprofit, an annual amount that would be surpassed only by the wealthiest foundations. It could fund a staggering Wikimedia Foundation bureaucracy, or it could fund additional free knowledge projects. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has asked what will be free. Would an annual hundred million dollar budget increase the odds of those predictions? One way to find out before actually trying.

Via Boing Boing via /.

Chris F. Masse points out Smartcrowd, a blog that gathers prices from several markets as the primary component of its commentary. I’d really like to see a service that only gathers prices for related contracts from several markets in an automated fashion, but Smartcrowd’s apparently manual index on GOP control of the U.S. House is a useful start.

Masse’s summary and comment on U.S. House control contracts are contradictory:

[real-money political prediction markets predict a GOP-controlled House while play-money political prediction markets predict a Dem-controlled House.]

So the crowds at Casual Observer and Newsfutures currently favour Democrats to win the House of Representatives, while the crowds at Tradesports and WSX suggest the Republicans will retain control of the House of Reps.

But WSX is a play-money market.

Aggregation should highlight a problem with play-money markets — play money is not fungible, so one can’t arbitrage between play-money markets, effectively reducing their size. I say should because there’s a pretty big discrepancy between Betfair and Tradesports real-money prices for US. House control. I’m guessing that with more active markets price difference among real money markets would shrink. There should be mountains of evidence one way or the other for sports bets. Anyone know?

By the way, Masse’s collective blog on prediction markets isn’t really launched yet but you may as well subscribe preemptively. Same for his insider blog which has a clever tagline (”the sidebar blog of prediction markets”).

Update 20060926: Masse points out Oddschecker, which does what I want for sports bets (hopefully they’ll expand) and a paper that has some evidence for lack of arbitrage opportunities between real money exchanges. See the comments for details.

Tim Lee has a wonderful take on Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. The punchline, in my estimation:

When supply exceeds demand, as it seems to for both music and punditry, the equilibrium price is zero.

I think to be technically correct “at p=0″ needs to be inserted before the first comma, but nevermind, read the whole thing.

Doc Searls unfortunately decided the other day that offering his blog under a relatively restrictive Creative Commons NonCommercial license instead of placing its contents in the public domain is chemo for splogs (spam blogs). I doubt that, strongly. Spam bloggers don’t care about copyright. They’ll take “all rights reserved” material, that which only limits commercial use, and stuff in the public domain equally. Often they combine tiny snippets from many sources, probably triggering copyright for none of them.

A couple examples found while looking at people who had mentioned Searls’ post: all rights reserved material splogged, commenter here says “My blog has been licensed with the CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 for a while now, and sploggers repost my content all the time.” A couple anecdotes prove nothing, but I’d be surprised to find that sploggers are, for example, using CC-enabled search to find content they can legally re-splog. I hope someone tries to figure out what characteristics make blog content more likely to be used in splogs and whether licensing is one of them. I’d get some satisfaction from either answer.

Though Searls’ license change was motived by a desire “to come up with new forms of treatment. Ones that don’t just come from Google and Yahoo. Ones that come from us” I do think blog spam is primarily the search engines’ problem to solve. Search results that don’t contain splogs are more valuable to searchers than spam-ridden results. Sites that cannot be found through search effectively don’t exist. That’s almost all there is to it.

Google in particular may have mixed incentives (they want people to click on their syndicated ads wherever the ads appear), but others don’t (Technorati, Microsoft, Ask, etc. — Yahoo! wishes it had Google’s mixed incentives). At least once where spam content seriously impacted the quality of search results Google seems to have solved the problem — at some point in the last year or so I stopped seeing Wikipedia content reposted with ads (an entirely legal practice) in Google search results.

What can people outside the search engines do to fight blog and other spam? Don’t click on it. It seems crazy, but clickfraud aside, real live idiots clicking on and even buying stuff via spam is what keeps spammers in business. Your uncle is probably buying pills from a spammer right now. Educate him.

On a broader scale, why isn’t the Ad Council, or the blogger equivalent, running an educational campaign teaching people to avoid spam and malware? Some public figure should throw in “dag gammit, don’t click on spam” along with “don’t do drugs.” Ministers too.

Finally, if spam is so easy for (aware) humans to detect (I certainly have a second sense about it), why isn’t human-augmented computation being leveraged? Opportunities abound…

If Intelligent Design is pseudoscience what does that make Christianity and other faith-based religions? Just pseudo.

I’ve been wanting to use that throwaway comment for awhile, but not having any desire to discuss ID (I’m glad there are people out there dedicated to debunking obvious crackpot pseudoscientific claims, though for some reason the targets don’t particularly provoke in me amusement, interest, or outrage, unlike purveyors of economic-political-religious-social crackpot ideas — odd peronality quirk I suppose), I haven’t until now, occasioned by the Technology Liberation Front group blog’s (I’ve cited several times) incredibly stupid decision to add a Discovery Institute employee to their roster.

My ignorant comment on ID: Overall, a positive development. Theists feel compelled to justify their faith on scientific-sounding grounds and are eager to debate real scientists. Even if the theists’ reasons for wanting to debate are completely disingenuous clearly they are on a slippery slope away from faith, which requires no evidence.

Update 20060901: Tim Lee’s TLF post addressing the Discovery Instituteis an utmost example of decency.

Tim Lee¹ (emphasis added):

The relentless march of open standards online continues, as AOL effectively abandons its paid, premium offerings in favor of a free, advertising-supported model.

I’m happy to see open standards win and happy to acknowledge good news — I am, for the most part, an optimist, so good news feels validating.

Time Lee, closing his post (my emphasis again):

Fundamentally, centrally planned content and services couldn’t keep up with the dynamism of the decentralized Internet, where anyone could publish new content or launch a new service for very low cost.

But just how hard is it to imagine a world in which closed services like AOL remain competitive, or even dominant, leaving the open web to hobbyists and researchers?

One or two copyright-related alternative outcomes could have put open networks at a serious disadvantage.

First, it could have been decided that indexing the web (which requires making and storing copies of content) requires explicit permission. This may have stunted web search, which is critical for using the open web. Many sites would not have granted permission to index if explicit permission were required. Their lawyers would have advised them to not give away valuable intellectual property. A search engine may have had to negotiate deals with hundreds, then thousands (I doubt in this scenario there would ever be millions) of websites, constituting a huge barrier to entry. Google? Never happened. You’re stuck with Lycos.

Second, linking policies could have been held to legally constrain linking, or worse, linking could have been held to require explicit permission. Metcalfe’s law? Never mentioned in the context of the (stunted) web.

In the case of either or both of these alternative outcomes the advantage tilts toward closed systems that offer large collections “exclusive” content and services, which was exactly the strategy pursued by AOL and similar for years. Finding stuff amongst AOL’s exclusive library of millions of items may have been considered the best search experience available (in this reality Google and near peers index billions of web pages).

Some of the phenomena we observe on the web would have occurred anyway in stunted form, e.g., blogging and social networking — even now services like LiveJournal and MySpace feel like worlds unto themselves although they are not technically closed and services like FaceBook are closed. Journaling and networking on AOL would have been hot (but pale in comparison to the real blogosphere or even real closed systems, which face serious competition). It is hard to see how something like Wikipedia could have developed in AOLternative reality.

Fortunately aggressive copyright was not allowed to kill the web.² As a result the march of open standards appears relentless. I’d prefer an even more relentless march, even if it means diminishing copyright (and patents).

1. I’m just using Tim Lee’s post as a jumping off point for an editorial I’ve been meaning to write, no criticism intended.

2. What is aggressive intellectual protectionism being allowed to kill or stunt? Online music is obvious.

In lieu of attending maybe the hottest conference ever I did a bit of wiki twiddling this weekend. I submitted a tiny patch (well that was almost two weeks ago — time flies), upgraded a private MediaWiki installation from 1.2.4 to 1.6.8 and a public installation from 1.5.6 to 1.6.8 and worked on a small private extension, adding to some documentation before running into a problem.

1.2.4->1.6.8 was tedious (basically four successive major version upgrades) but trouble-free, as that installation has almost no customization. The 1.5.6->1.6.8 upgrade, although only a single upgrade, took a little fiddling make a custom skin and permissions account for small changes in MediaWiki code (example). I’m not complaining — clean upgrades are hard and the MediaWiki developers have done a great job of making them relatively painless.

Saturday I attended part of WordCamp, a one day unconference for WordPress users. Up until the day before the tentative schedule looked pretty interesting but it seems lots of lusers signed up so the final schedule didn’t have much meat for developers. Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” and Q&A hit on clean upgrade of highly customized sites from several angles. Some ideas include better and better documented plugin and skin APIs with more metadata and less coupling (e.g., widgets should help many common cases that previously required throwing junk in templates).

Beyond the purely practical, ease of customization and upgrade is important for openness.

Now listening to the Wikimania Wikipedia and the Semantic Web panel…

The story of The Pig and the Box touches on many near and dear themes:

• The children’s fable is about DRM and digital copying, without mentioning either.
• The author is raising money through Fundable, pledging to release the work under a more liberal license if $2000 is raised.
• The author was dissuaded from using the sampling licnese (a very narrow peeve of mine, please ignore).
• I don’t know if the author intended, but anyone inclined to science fiction or nanotech will see a cartoon assembler.
• The last page of the story is Hansonian.

Read it.

This was dugg and Boing Boing’d though I’m slow and only noticed on Crosbie Fitch’s low-volume blog. None of the many commentators noted the sf/nano/upload angle as far as I can tell.

Google’s post introducing nofollow was unfortunately titled “preventing comment spam” leading some to call nofollow a complete failure as comment spam is “thicker than ever.”

If nofollow works it does not prevent comment spam but works against sites linked to in comment spam from appearing in search results. For what it’s worth spammy search results seemed to me a growing problem perhaps a year ago. I haven’t reached a spammy site from a Google search result in a long time. If my experience of less spammy search results lately is not anomalous, has nofollow helped achieve this? Only Google and near peers are in a position to know for themselves, but I certainly wouldn’t write nofollow off as a failure, complete or otherwise.

Google should publish its findings regarding whether nofollow has improved search results. If the answer is yes, web software creators and web publishers wouldn’t make the mistake of turning it off for untrusted links. If the answer is no it should be deprecated.

Addendum 20060601: The next time Google or similar ask publishers to do something the results of which can only be evaluated by the asker a committment to publish an evaluation should accompany the ask.

I should have said Google web search above. As Chris Masse points out in a comment below, blog search still stinks and so far Google and Yahoo! blog search do not improve the state of the art, contrary to my expectations.

Bo Cowgill notes that more people search for ‘blog’ and variants than “new york times” and variants. I suspect a more relevant comparison is between ‘blog’ and ‘newspaper’. The former’s slow rise looks faster than the latter’s very slow decline.

TV and radio still rule.

It looks like Google Trends ranks overrepresentation of cities, regions, and languages for specific queries. Arabic browsers are most likely to search for sex, Chinese most likely to search for Tiananmen. Past posts on Islamic sex and Tiananmen.

A term needs pretty heavy search volume to be trended, which is probably good — massive ego searchers will not be revealed, much to their disappointment.

Prediction market doesn’t make the cut, though I predict it will soon.

Creative Commons confirms the success of CC-Spain (of which I’ve seen other indicators), particularly in the Catalan-speaking region.

Google Trends doesn’t seem to do stemming nor does it suggest spelling alternatives.

Tyler Cowen asks “What is your most absurd view?” and gets an absurd number of comments.

Yes your comment should be crazy but serious too. It should refer to a view which you actually hold, but many other smart people consider untenable and bizarre.

Four of mine:

Sex and its pursuit is the cause of most personal troubles and most people would be happier with zero sex drive. Watch nearly any movie. If the characters weren’t horny they wouldn’t be in any trouble!

Through most of human history the most rational act for most individuals at any point in time was immediate suicide, given the suffering they should have expected to endure.

With respect to movement, residence and employment all humans should be as free to disregard international jurisdiction borders as they are to disregard intranational (e.g., U.S. state) borders and anything less is morally the same as South African Apartheid.

Nearly every user interface and product from Apple has been aesthetically and functionally ugly, from the orginal MacOS to iTunes. I don’t think I can blame Steve Jobs, as NextStep was wonderful. (Yes, I know OS X is derived from NextStep. They ruined it.)

Note that to the extent readiness to host certain beliefs is under evolutionary pressure my first two beliefs and perhaps the third would be strongly selected against.

Mostly I am an absurd hypocrite: I have a sex drive (but I gather it is less out of control than the average person’s), I have no intention of committing suicide, immediately or otherwise (but I think it is not absurd to expect relatively little suffering in wealthy parts of the 21st century), I live in the national jurisdiction I was born in (do I get any credit for 2000 miles away?), but I have never owned an Apple product.

Next Wednesday evening in San Francisco come to the Creative Commons Salon sadly not featuring avant-drone-noise electric violin music played on a stage behind white sheets (apropos of nothing apart from listening to that now and not wanting anything else), but should be pretty excellent anyway.

I’ve wanted to do a one-time event like this for a long time, but Eric Steuer and Jon Phillips, who are curating the event and series to be are doing a far better job than I ever could have.

Also next week I’ll be presenting at the 2006 Semantic Technology Conference, then on to SXSW for a panel on digital preservation and blogs and silly parties, but leaving too soon to see the great Savage Republic perform on Friday (in two weeks). Perhaps I should change my flight and find somewhere to crash for two days?

My partner and I are also looking for a new apartment. Know of a great place in San Francisco around $2,000/month and not in the far west or south?

Update 20060303:

Note Shine’s 1337 address.

Update 20060311: Success.

I’ve briefly mentioned digital identity before, but the launch of ClaimID (more below) prompts me to write down my over the top theory concerning digital/online identity as a great absolute productivity equalizer. The theory in pseudocode:

function work_on_digital_identity(num_workers, avg_worker_skill) { return 0; }

This comes from the observation that hangers-on who can barely string buzzwords together to form a semi-coherent sentence and very smart people and single person projects and huge organizations composed of either all produce the same level of useful results when applied to the “problem” of digital identity: nil.

No, I’m not naming names and yes, this is an extreme caricature. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

So ClaimID is a new site that encourages you to catalog links about yourself and link to your resulting ClaimID page from your blog or home page. Someone ClaimID says does a good job of explaining ClaimID says:

Say you’re a college student with a weblog and you post your foolish thoughts under your real name. Or you’re active in some newgroups or mailing lists.

Time passes, you graduate and decide to look for a job. Of course, the prospective employer will want to do a search on your name, but what will they find? Oops! Too bad you didn’t think of that before!

Enter ClaimID.com. ClaimID will give you a place that you can point people to, to say “Here’s the ‘me’ I’m proud of!”

Salvation! Before ClaimID it was not possible to create a web page with links you are proud of and without links you are not proud of. If you think giving your clean ClaimID page is going to prevent a prospective employer from finding embarrassing links, I have a bridge to sell you.

On the plus side ClaimID is a well designed web application, even if it does nothing useful yet, and useful features are easy to imagine, e.g., a social networking platform that is not a walled garden (imagine!), ego metasearch/tracking, trust metrics, copyright or other registry, perhaps even the Feedburner of identity protocols.

Many of these could be built into popular blogging software (for example) but using future ClaimID or similar would be far easier and more robust for most people.

For what it’s worth I think the killer app for decentralized authentication (yes I’m sloppily mixing overlapping concepts, oh well — but on that note this and this look pretty interesting) is private blogging, or more generally selective information sharing. Currently the only way to do this on the web apart from running your own walled garden is to use someone else’s, e.g., LiveJournal. I never understood the popularity of LJ until a year or so ago someone told me people use it to write entries that only friends may access.

Now that Google has a product (Google Page Creator) named^* for cofounder and current President of Products Larry Page it clearly needs a technology named for cofounder and current President of Technology Sergey Brin.

“Brin” doesn’t have an obvious meaning so perhaps the technology could be something more compelling than GeoCities 2.0. How about a Basic Reality Interface Neuroplant?

I’ll take two Google Brins for staters — one to replace each eye — better portals to see the portal, including its (soon to be) millions of crappy Google Pages.

^{* Not really.}

Brad Tempelton explains why a censor should want an imperfect filter — it should be good enough to keep verboten information from most users, but easy enough to circumvent to tempt dissidents, so they can be tracked and when desired, put away.

In the second half of the post, Tempelton suggests some anti-censor techniques: ubiquitous SSL and steganography. Fortunately he says these are “far off” and “does not scale”, respectively. To say the least, I’d add.

Cyber-activists have long dreamed that strong encryption would thwart censorship. Freenet is an example of a project that uses this as its raison d’être. While I’m a huge fan of ubiquitous encryption and decentralization (please install OTR, now!), these seem like terribly roundabout, demand-side means of fighting censorship — the price of obtaining information, which includes the chance of being caught, is lowered. But someone has to seek out or have the information pushed to them in the first place. If information is only available via hidden channels, how many people will encounter it regardless of lower risk?

An alternative, perhaps less sexy because it involves no technology adoption, is supply-side anti-censorship: make verboten information ubiquitous. Anyone upset about google.cn should publish information the Communist Party wants censored (my example is pathetic, need to work on that). This is of course not mutually exclusive with continuing to carp and dream of techno-liberation.

I guess I’m calling for Spread Free Speech projects. Or one of those chain letters (e.g, “four things”) that plagues the blogosphere.

I probably only noticed Alex Tabarrok’s post in my feed reader this morning because of the title similarity to Nathan’s the law of averages blog. The former has some amusing stories in comments of student cheaters foiled by their own stupidity. The gist of the post and comments is that it it isn’t worthwhile for a professor to try hard to catch and punish cheaters as cheaters tend to do poorly anyway and being perceived as a hardass obtains lower student evaluations.

I wonder how this applies to the world outside school, where compulsive excuse makers don’t receive grades every several months, aren’t working toward graduation, and negatively impact others — a student cheater at worst has a marginal impact on the grading curve, if a curve is being used — students are striving for individual reward — while a bad worker can damage an entire organization.

What means do people use to allow bad workers to “fail out” in environments where being a hardass is counterproductive or firing is nearly impossible? This applies particularly to government jobs (my only experience is second-hand), but also to a surprising extent in for-profit organizations. For a long time I thought managers were simply afraid or ashamed to wield the axe. Now, I think it is a little more complicated than that — managers have many different fears that prevent them from firing counterproductive workers.

Addendum: Last year I saw in a university bookstore a large banner hung behind the cashiers featuring a screed on the evils of cheating, a pledge to never cheat, and supposedly the signatures of the entire freshman class. Struck me as Orwellian. My guess is the message did not have its intended effect on certain students — those who had some sense that high school was prison-like and harbored some hope that college might be substantially different.

That’s the Net Prophet, a new four-character, blasphemous emoticon invented by Sandy Sandfort:

Please note the turban and matted beard. Net Prophet is suitable for e-mail, websites and graffiti. And I think it’s a lot btter symbol for free speech than some stupid ribbon.

Not to mention better than flying the flag of a jurisdiction. The beauty of the Net Prophet is that it is not merely a symbol for free speech, it is free speech (where “free speech” is communication that someone wants to forcefully suppress).

Why “support” free speech when you can engage in it? There may be no other issue where direct action is so easy, so do it!

The first thing to note about the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons is their timidity.

The timidity of the selection turns out to have been pure genius (mine would have aimed for maximum depravity) as it highlights just how bizarre the reaction has been.

Many have expressed disappointment in the tepid support for free speech from many western governments. I am completely unsurprised. The U.S. government and its allies have taken on around 25 million Muslims as constituents. The government of Denmark has more freedom to do the Wright thing.

As I am on a very minor photo remix kick, here is my contribution to the universe of images of Mohammed:

Muhammad licking a camel’s asshole under orders from Allah.
Original photo by Saffanna licensed under cc-by-2.0.

I believe this image complies with putative prohibitions of the depiction of Muhammad, though some may claim they see him in the camel’s face. (Yes, this is a remix with zero diff.)

How do I know Muhammad and not Jesus is with the lucky camel? Because a camel couldn’t feel an imaginary person’s licks.

This cries out for a photo mashup, so here it is:

That’s the first photo mashup I’ve ever done, so it’s very simple. I opened the protester facing a column of tanks photo in the GIMP, opened the pretty Tiananmen Building photo in a second layer, then searched for filters that would allow me to combine them — Layer|Transparency|Color to Alpha accomplished exactly what I wanted.

I thought this JPEG export at zero quality looks kind of neat.

NB I don’t think Google has done anything wrong google.cn. The appropriate response is not anger with Google, but action to spread the information the Communist Party of China wants to suppress.