Mike Linksvayer

If working for a new project of a startup-like nonprofit in San Francisco involving [open] education, [copyright] law, and [semantic web] technology, perhaps you should look into applying for Executive Director of CC Learn. I could imagine an education, legal, or technology person with some expertise and much passion for the other two working out.

Student programmers, Creative Commons is participating in Google Summer of Code as a mentoring organization.

It is too late to apply for a summer technology or “free culture” internship, but keep CC in mind for next summer and (possibly) this fall.

Update 20070409: There are three open positions in addition to CC Learn ED above:

• General Counsel
• Web Engineer
• Administrative Assistant

I missed Tuesday morning’s Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present and Future Battlefields for sleep and the Creative Commons moderated Open Knowledge vs. Controlled Knowledge, but noticed two very interesting items from Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich’s blog post:

I am pushing to make add-on installation not require a restart in Firefox 3, and I intend to help improve and promote GreaseMonkey security in the Firefox 3 timeframe too.

Please do! Drop all other Firefox 3 features if necessary.

And from Eich’s sixth slide:

Working with Opera via WHATWG on <video>

• Unencumbered Ogg Theora decoder in all browsers
• Ogg Vorbis for <audio>
• Other formats possible
• DHTML player controls

I’ve barely thought about <audio> and <video> but if their presence could encourage non-obfuscated media URLs I’m predisposed in their favor, but universal deployment of unencumbered audio and video decoders via browsers would be excellent.

I attended Perspectives on Designing for Global Audiences because the topic is important for Creative Commons — parts of the CC site are translated into many languages, there are many jurisdicton affiliates, some of which run their own sites. I want to do much more and better.

The panel’s focus seemed to be on big budget projects — their advice could be summed up as “hire locally and do lots of research.” This mindset caused them to take an audience question about asking users to help with localization as merely being about how to conduct user research.

One panelist claimed that communication is the first use of the net, then ecommerce, and finally entertainment, where the net is well developed. This sounds to me like a simple extrapolation from development in wealthy regions — I wouldn’t be suprised if entertainment arrives before ecommerce in some places.

Practical tips were interspersed. I’ll assume there’s some truth to these, which included:

• Chinese don’t like whitespace, pack a page with information.
• In Latin America “rich media” is hated more than spam. Yay, another argument against Flash.
• Many audiences don’t like scrolling. Too bad, I don’t like clicking and prefer long pages.

Web 2.0 and Semantic Web: The Impact on Scientific Publishing, probably the densest panel I attended today (and again expertly moderated by Science Commons’ John Wilbanks), covered open access, new business models for scientific publishers, and how web technologies can help with these and data problems, but kept coming back to how officious Semantic Web technologies and controlled ontologies (which are not the same at all, but are often lumped together) and microformats and tagging (also distinct) complement each other (all four of ‘em!), even within a single application. I agree.

Nearly on point, this comment elsewhere by Denny Vrandecic of the Semantic MediaWiki project:

You are supposed to change the vocabulary in a wiki-way, just as well as the data itself. Need a new relation? Invent it. Figured out it’s wrong? Rename. Want a new category of things? Make it.

Via Danny Ayers, oringal posted to O’Reilly Radar, which doesn’t offer permalinks for comments. This just needs a catchy name. Web 2.0 ontology engineering? Fonktology?

Evan Prodromou gave an excellent presentation on Commercialization of Wikis: Open Community That Pays the Bills. Check out his slides.

A few points:

• Other stuff will be recognized as having wiki nature, e.g., LibriVox.
• Four categories of wiki businesses: service provider (Wikispaces, Wetpaint, PBWiki), content hosting (wikiHow, Wikitravel, Wikia), consulting (SocialText), content development (WikiBiz). My comment: at first blush Wikia would seem to be a service provider, but they are also deeply involved in content creation and community management.
• Down with crowdsourcing and the notion that wiki contributors are suckers or sharecroppers. Better to think of wikis (and wiki businesses) as platforms for knowledge. Contributors use your wiki to help each other, not to give you free content. My comment: I’m not so down on crowdsourcing. Yes, it is MBA language, but the typical examples usually involve compensating contributors. Crowdsourcing shouldn’t be conflated with sharecropping, nor confused with community purpose.
• For wikis purpose more important than friends or ego for blogs (cf. blogs and social networking).

Seven rules for commercial wikis:

1. Have a noble purpose — e.g., shared knowledge (use a free license), help a community.
2. Demonstrate value — most interesting example is “carry the torch”; wiki communities can be transient, an entity that keeps focus helps.
3. Be Transparent.
4. Extract value where you provide value — most obviously, advertising for hosting.
5. Be personally involved.
6. Run with the right crowd — e.g., open source and open content, or you will be suspect of being a crowdsourcer.

It appears that Prodromou’s Wikitravel lives by these rules and has succeeded.

Update 20070317: Prodromou has a roundup of blog responses to his presentation. It was great indeed catching up with him.

Harvey Danger, a moderately successful band with one top 40 hit in 1997, has released their latest (2005) album as an unencumbered MP3 download with an essay explaining “why we’re releasing our latest album for free on the Internet,” covered by Cory Doctorow, Tim O’Reilly and many others.

Big deal. In 2007 re-releasing an old album as a DRM-free gratis download with no explicit rights granted to share or remix, should not be news, unless a major label is involved.

Jamendo is my current favorite example of 2,500 reasons (albums) why this is not news, but there are thousands of others.

If you need an essay to go with your music, teleport back to 1998 or earlier (I recall reading a version of Ram Samudrala’s essay in 1995).

Update 20070227: The Harvey Danger album has been available for download since September 2005 (when Doctorow wrote about it in Boing Boing, link above). It shouldn’t have been newsworthy then either, but I’m a fool for not noticing that now it is old non-news. A commenter at Techdirt pointed this out.

I’ve seen lots of confusion about microformats, but Jon Udell takes the cake in describing XMP:

It’s a bit of a mish-mash, to say the least. There’s RDF (Resource Description Framework) syntax, Adobe-style metadata syntax, and Microsoft-style metadata syntax. But it works. And when I look at this it strikes me that here, finally, is a microformat that has a shot at reaching critical mass.

How someone as massively clued-in as Jon Udell could be so misled as to describe XMP as a microformat is beyond me.

XMP, which is basically a constrained RDF/XML serialization following super-ugly conventions that may be embedded in a number of file formats (most prominently PDF and JPEG, but potentially almost anything), is about as far from a microformat as one could possibly get. Off the top:

• XMP is RDF/XML and as such is arbitrarily extensible; each microformat covers a specific use case and goes through great lengths to favor interoperability among publishers of each microformat (sometime I will write about how microformat and RDF people mean completely different things by “interoperability”) at the expense of extensibility.
• XMP is embedded in a binary file, completely opaque to nearly all users; microformats put a premium on (practically require) colocation of metadata with human-visible HTML.
• XMP would be extremely painful to write by hand and there are very few tools that support publishing it; microformats, to a fault, put a premium on publisher ease–anyone with a passing familiarity with HTML could be writing microformats.

I don’t agree with everything the microformats folk have done, but they do have a pretty self-consistent approach, if one bothers to try to understand it. XMP ain’t it.

XMP is by far the most promising embedded metadata format for “media” files — which is mostly a testament to how terribly useless to non-existent the alternatives are (by some definitions there are none).

Addendum: I’m really only picking on one word from Udell’s post, the remainder of which is recommended. It is useful to me to learn that “There’s also good support in .NET Framework 3.0 for reading and writing XMP metadata.”

Update 20070215: Udell explains:

Now there is, as Mike points out, a big philosophical difference between XMP, which aims for arbitrary extensibility, and fixed-function microformats that target specific things like calendar events. But in practice, from the programmer’s perspective, here’s what I observe.

Hand me an HTML document containing a microformat instance and I will cast about in search of tools to parse it, find a variety of ones that sort of work, and then wrestle with the details.

Hand me an image file containing an XMP fragment and, lo and behold, it’s the same story!

Yes, for 99% of the .01% of the world that cares at all, microformats and XMP are the same: metadata, embedded data, or even just data. That’s what I was hinting at in the title of this post — in the minds of 99% of the .01%, microformats are becoming synonymous with metadata, i.e., genericized. This is either a marketing and naming coup or disaster, depending on one’s perspective (I don’t particularly care).

I considered this headline: If XMP is a microformat, RDFa sure the heck is a microformat.

Seth Godin and those who worry about republishing of (freely licensed) bloggy material, please watch this video by Lucas Gonze.

Republishers, if they add only noise or worse (in the case of sploggers) are primarily a problem for aggregators (Amazon can be thought of one, as can search engines), not creators.

That said, if Godin really hates the idea of a republisher using the license granted by Godin, that license does allow the licensor to request the removal of attribution from derivative or collective works. If this was requested eventually one couldn’t find the commercial outrage version of Godin’s book by searching for Godin’s name on Amazon. (But I have no idea if that provision could apply in this case, am not a lawyer, generally don’t know what I’m talking about, etc.).

Copyright (DRM in particular) turns us into technology idots and makes us disingenuous too. Consider Leonardo Chiariglione’s reply (”A simple way to skin the DRM cat”) to Steve Jobs’ DRM bashing.

Chiariglione goes out of his way to muddy the waters by

• Including rights expression or rights description (including Creative Commons) under the rubric of DRM. This is not what anyone, including Jobs, is talking about when they dismiss DRM.
• Conflating standards generally and standards with security components in particular, with DRM.
• Pretending there is a non-zero chance of any “interoperable DRM” (where we’re talking about Digital Restrictions Management, not mere description or expression) scheme gaining any traction.

Clue: a skinned cat is dead.

Via Slashdot.

Addendum: Some never learn, see Chiariglione’s Secure Digital Music Initiative, spawned late 1998, dead since early 2001.

Jamendo is one of the most interesting music sites on the net (in terms business, community, and technology — there’s no competition yet for the vastness and bizarreness to be found on archive.org, yet). They’re trying every Web 2.0 trick and have somehow managed to avoid becoming overwhelmed with crap. I’ve listened to dozens of the 2,100 albums on Jamendo. While only a small fraction of these have strongly agreed with my taste, just about everything (weighted toward electronica and French rock) sounds professional.

Now Jamendo has introduced an advertising revenue sharing program with participating artists.

Several video sites are attempting variations on this theme (among them Revver, Lulu.tv, and Metacafe), but as far as I know Jamendo’s is the first attempt in the audio space. One might think an audio site would have a harder time making web advertising work than a video site (videos are usually watched within a web page and can have clickable ad areas or bumpers even if not), but I gather that listening via (usually Flash-based) audio players embedded in web pages is increasingly common (and Jamendo upgraded theirs recently), as will be media players that “play” a web page in a browser interface.

One data point: although Jamendo heavily promotes download of high quality copies, primarily via BitTorrent, their statistics indicate that low quality http “streaming” has accounted for more bandwidth. There are many obvious caveats here, but I think all points above indicate that advertising-supported web audio should not be ruled out, even if it is granted that web video has more potential.

Digg Jamendo’s revenue share page.

Many good comments regarding supporting advertising on Wikipedia (or not) here and also on Slashdot and other blogs. I may further characterize and respond to these in aggregate (see the update to my first post for some of this). For now I want to call out or respond to a few particularly worthy comments and criticisms.

Evan Prodromou’s comment:

One thing I wanted to respond to was that a couple of people seemed to think it incorrect on my part to refer to Wikipedia’s Web traffic as a “resource”. I’m not sure what else to call a potential source of tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars annually in income. But if people know a better word for it, please substitute that in.

Let me also point out that wikipedia.org’s current huge Web traffic is not a long-term sure thing. As Open Content, the encyclopedia can be copied onto any other Web site on the Internet, and sites like answers.com show that this can be lucrative. Anyone familiar with the Open Directory (http://dmoz.org/) knows that it’s copied to Google Categories, Yahoo Directory, and dozens of other high-profile sites. In 5 years, will there be thousands of mirrors of Wikipedia on the Web? Will wikipedia.org become more like editors.dmoz.org — an editorial interface for a data set served from many other servers?

If that’s the case, will we look back on the high-traffic days of 2005-2008 as the time when we wasted somewhere around half a billion dollars in potential revenue? Will the WMF really be glad at that point that it did so?

I hadn’t thought of this scenario and don’t consider it likely, but do think it is an important consideration. I think the canonical dmoz.org was seriously disadvantaged in two ways Wikipedia is not — a fairly closed editorial process (e.g., I’ve applied a few times over the years and don’t recall getting any feedback, not even rejection) and probably a horrible editor interface (e.g., I was accepted as an editor at Chef Moz, a sister site of dmoz.org — and ran away screaming).

How could Wikimedia sites lose traffic to copies? Presumably much of Wikipedia traffic comes from Google. If Google published a branded copy (with ads of course) and promoted it in (or above) search results, Wikipedia would presumably lose lots of traffic (and many people would call Google evil for it, at least for awhile). I’m sure there are more creative scenarios in which Wikimedia sites lose traffic.

Peter McCluskey:

Mike Linksvayer has a fairly good argument that raising X dollars by running ads on Wikipedia won’t create more conflict of interest than raising X dollars some other way.

Almost. The second X is Y and an order of magnitude or so smaller than X. McCluskey:

But the amount of money an organization handles has important effects on its behavior that are somewhat independent of the source of the money, and the purpose of ads seems to be to drastically increase the money that they raise.

I can’t provide a single example that provides compelling evidence in isolation, but I think that looking at a broad range of organizations with $100 million revenues versus a broad range of organizations that are run by volunteers who only raise enough money to pay for hardware costs, I see signs of big differences in the attitudes of the people in charge.

Wealthy organizations tend to attract people who want (or corrupt people into wanting) job security or revenue maximization, whereas low-budget volunteer organizations tend to be run by people motivated by reputation. If reputational motivations have worked rather well for an organization (as I suspect the have for Wikipedia), we should be cautious about replacing those with financial incentives.

It’s possible that the Wikimedia Foundation could spend hundreds of millions of dollars wisely on charity, but the track record of large foundations does not suggest that should be the default expectation.

Yes, this could be a major problem. As I said last year, “[advertising] could fund a staggering Wikimedia Foundation bureaucracy, or it could fund additional free knowledge projects.” The possibility that new funds will not be used effectively lowers the expected benefit of running ads. Two items give me some confidence that the Wikimedia Foundation would be less susceptible to waste than the average foundation:

• Wikimedia Foundation’s history of transparency sets the tone for what would become a much larger organization
• An incomparable set of watchdogs (Wikipedians)

Regarding subversion of current volunteer motivations and ethics (which is really the point of McCluskey’s post), I would not advocate financial incentives for functions currently carried out by volunteers, certainly not any content-related function. Of course given large amounts of money there would be pressure to convert an ever larger group of volunteers into employees, regardless of what advocates of advertising on Wikipedia might have wanted. The possibility that this would occur and go badly should also weigh against advertising.

Addressing this possibility, I concur with Per Abrahamsen’s recommendation segregating Wikimedia projects and foundation funding of compatible projects:

Wikipedia is clearly able to earn its own money, begging for donations on the front (and every other) page is an insult to both visitors, and to the many worthy cases that are not in that lucky position.

So I support advertising on Wikipedia.

The adds should be non-intrusive, textual, clearly separated from content, and selected algorithmically, similar to the adds known from Google.

However, if the money are really that big (more than the current need), additional precautions would have to be taken. The most important would be to split the foundation into two, with watertight boundaries between. One that ran the current Wikimedia projects, and another solely responsible for distribution the ad-money between causes that promote the goals of the foundation, but had no say in the running of any of the projects. Money do corrupt, hence the separation.

Slashdot commenter FooAtWFU (and others) suggested that the real problem with advertising is that large numbers of contributors would leave in protest, seriously damaging Wikipedia. I doubt it. A very vocal minority would raise hell and some of them would leave, at least temporarily. I suspect most contributors would not even notice the presence of ads. I conjecture that Wikipedia contributors, however superior some may feel, are not that different from MySpace “contributors” (who seem not to be deterred by gratutous advertising). In a relatively short time (a year is my wild guess) a majority of contributors would have become contributors after advertising had begun. Such is the nature of a rapidly growing site.

A 2002 fork of Spanish Wikipedia (Enciclopedia Libre) could be interpreted as evidence in either direction. The fork apparently occurred in part due to “our rejection of censorship, of an editorial line, and of including advertising.” Whatever the merits of these claims, article counts show the fork growing more quickly for about a year and a half. From 2004 on Spanish Wikipedia grew much more quickly and currently is over five times the size of Enciclopedia Libre. So the loss of those ideologically motivated against advertising and perhaps with other complaints could be seen as a terrible blow to Spanish Wikipedia (a year or more delayed progress) or no big deal, considering current relative sizes. Is there any reason to think the proportion of Spanish Wikipedians disgusted by advertising is significantly different than that of any other language?

Of course it is possible if Wikipedia had taken ads in 2002, many more may have left, and perhaps the fork would now be five times the size of the parent instead of vice versa. This would not necessarily be a horrible thing. After all, the two sites (and any potential Wikipedia fork) use the same license, so work done on one is not entirely lost to the other.

This does suggest an experiment however — run ads on Spanish Wikipedia and see how many contributors move to Enciclopedia Libre. The existence of the latter would make it both easier for ad objectors to move and easier to determine who had moved, indicating a probable maximum negative impact on contributions to other Wikipedias, should they run ads, as no other language has an alternative as viable as Enciclopedia Libre — at least not viable for those who hate ads! The largest encyclopedic wikis outside Wikimedia run Google AdSense, e.g., WikiZnanie (Russian) and Susning.nu (Swedish).

Wikimedia Foundation is over halfway through a fundraiser. I hope that when you give you leave the following public comment:

I support advertising on Wikipedia.

Evan Prodromou summarizes a completely unwarranted controversy regarding a matching fund (bottom of page):

All fine so far, right? But a small logo in the donations notice — seen by non-logged-in users on every page of every WMF site — was considered by many Wikipedians and other WMF editors as dangerously close to the line on advertising — or over it. There have been several prominent users who have left the project because of it.

I’m not sympathetic with these folks; in fact, I’m in solid opposition. I think that Wikipedia’s huge amount of Web traffic is a resource that the Foundation is squandering. Traffic like Wikipedia’s is worth tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue per year. That’s money that could go to disseminate free (libre and gratis) paperback pocket encyclopedias to millions of schools and millions of children, in their own language, around the world.

It’s irresponsible to abuse that opportunity.

I strongly agree and will repeat exactly what I said during last year’s Wikimedia fund drive:

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.

In somewhat related news, Mozilla just reported 2005 financial information, showing 800% revenue growth:

In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M. $29.8M of this was associated with the Foundation (both before and after the creation of the Corporation). The bulk of this revenue was related to our search engine relationships, with the remainder coming from a combination of contributions, sales from the Mozilla store, interest income, and other sources. These figures compare with 2003 and 2004 revenues of $2.4M and $5.8M respectively, and reflect the tremendous growth in the popularity of Firefox after its launch in November 2004.

The combined expenses of the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation were approximately $8.2M in 2005, of which approximately $3M was associated with the Foundation. By far the biggest portion of these expenses went to support the large and growing group of people dedicated to creating and promoting Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla open source products and technologies. The rate of expenses increased over the year as new employees came on board. The unspent revenue provides a reserve fund that allows the Mozilla Foundation flexibility and long term stability.

An advertising-fueled Wikimedia Foundation could fund dozens of much needed Mozilla Firefox sized projects. And many Creative Commons (which just successfully completed its much more modest annual funding campaign) initiatives. :)

Update: Welcome Slashdot readers. The major objection to ads on Wikipedia takes two forms:

• Advertising is profane.
• Advertising would compromose Wikipedia’s neutrality.

A common response to the first is that those who don’t like ads can run an ad blocker. Easier still, those who don’t like ads can log in — there’s little reason to display ads to logged in users, who probably generate a tiny fraction of pageviews. But I don’t think either of these responses will satisfy this form of the objection, as it is basically emotional. Some people object to the knowledge that ads exist, even if not experienced personally. I suppose these people don’t use search engines. It’s a wonder they can stand to use the net at all. I discount them completely.

The second is completely unrealistic. How would third party text ads, e.g., via AdSense, compromise neutrality? There’s simply no vector for an advertiser to demand changes and zero reason for Wikipedians to comply. Wikipedia is not a small town newspaper beholden to the local department store, not even close. It isn’t even Slashdot, which as far as I can tell has not been compromised by years of running ads. To people with this objection: show me a community site that has gone astray due to advertiser influence.

Sponsors, “being managed by Wikipedia staff (like in newspaper ads, i.e. no uncontrolled 3rd party feeds)”, as suggested by Kuba Ober, are far more dangerous than third party ads, because then there is a vector between advertiser and someone with power at Wikipedia.

There may be an opportunity for Wikipedia to completely rethink and remake advertising, or merely compete in some fashion with what some are calling Google’s near monopoly, but now it would make tremendous sense to use AdSense or Yahoo! or both — and I suspect Wikipedia could manage to keep a greater share of revenue than a normal web publisher. Rick Yorgason mocked up what AdSense would look like in the place of the current fundraiser’s donation banner.

Slashdot commenter jklooserman summarizes objections from Wikiproject no ads:

1. Wikipedia’s philosophy is non-commercial
2. Ads put at risk Wikipedia’s principle of Neutral Point of View (NPOV)
3. The information that constitutes Wikipedia is wealth for the community

I don’t see “non-commercial” in any form on the Wikimedia Foundation home page. I do see this, in large text:

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.

The next line, all bold, asks for help in the form of donations.

Much more money, hundreds of millions, would speed the arrival of that world and fulfillment of that commitment.

As above, there is no realistic scenario for ads undermining neutrality on Wikipedia.

The third objection strikes me as a non-sequitur. In any case, the point of obtaining more resources would be to increase the wealth of the community — of all human beings.

jklooserman also pointed out that there’s a category of Wikipedians who think that the Wikimedia Foundation should use advertising. Add it to your user page if you agree.

Last October I attended BoCon, an “open source arts” conference held in Boise. I enjoyed BoCon, probably as much as any conference since CodeCon. Good mix of talks and performance, great space, and the first-time organizers (Joseph Coffland & co.) pulled it off without a hitch as far as I could tell.

I gave the first talk, covering as much open source, arts, and business related to Creative Commons as possible, slides here.

Boise musician and jack of all trades James Stevens gave a talk on “open source for musicians” based on research done for the talk. I was pleased to see that he discovered most of the major sites and tools I know of and presented them accurately.

Alex Feldman gave a talk on the history of open source, including much pre-history I was not aware of, e.g., a source clearinghouse within NASA called COSMIC, about which I could find nothing on the web. Feldman’s talk made me hope someone is documenting this pre-history.

Caleb Chung and John Sosoka of Ugobe gave talks on Furby, Pleo, and making stuff with electronics that moves generally. Animal pets only have a few generations before they are replaced by artificial pets that perform utilitarian functions in addition to providing companionship and don’t eat or produce feces.

Chung is hyper, and the world is probably a better place for it. “Art is the experimental end of design” is perhaps the most memorable quote from his talk. On the other hand, his slogan for pitching some sort of multimedia institute to Boise State is “I[daho] is for innovation.”

On that note, I have never before encountered the level of boosterism from locals that I did in Boise. They are very convinced that Boise is a place with great promise, reflected in everything from several ethnic restaurants doing well in downtown this decade to white supremicists being sued out of northern Idaho to Californians moving in. Boise does feel like a nice place. Reno sans tawdriness was my initial impression.

Friday and Saturday evenings concluded with music, including nerdcore performances from Beefy, MC Router, and MC Plus+ with DJ Lord Illingworth. They seemed to really enjoy the camaraderie of physical proximity. Whoever did the programming had a very good idea.

The thing I will remember from the past summer’s Creative Commons-related ‘iSummit‘ in Rio de Janiero is the view of São Paulo from above (I flew San Francisco->Houston->São Paulo->Rio and back). Tall buildings stretching into the horizon in all directions, even moreso than Tokyo (New York doesn’t hold a candle to either, although its tallest buildings are taller). I felt I had finally seen the maximum city and could hardly believe the expanse, as if I dreamt it. Now I have to go see it on the ground, eventually.

Paul Keller (who was at the iSummit but the following is from an earlier trip) provides this description and photos:

the view from the bar an the gallery is absolutely breathtaking. the São Paulo metropolitan extends to the horizon (and probably beyond) in all four direction. the city seen from above is a collection of high rises of all shades of gray all states of decay and pretty much any architectural style imaginable. extremely beautiful if you ask me.

São Paulo panorama by Paul Keller, licensed under CC Attribution.

Image found on Wikipedia, credit to fotosedm.hpg.ig.com.br.

The title of this post references Dreams of Rio, a cheesy radio drama I listened to in college.

Eben Moglen’s talk Software and Community in the Early 21st Century expresses an aspiration and belief that as nonrivalrous components of the economy become more important peer production can produce radical equality where previous movements with the same ostensible aims have used violence, killed many people, and failed. An excerpt (transcript), emphasis added:

Ownership of software as a way of producing software for general consumption is going out, for economic reasons. But as I said, the economic insight that we can get from watching the transition from steel to software is far less important than the moral analysis of the situation. The moral analysis of the situation presents where we are now as, if I may borrow a phrase, a singularity in human affairs.

One of the grave problems of human inequality for everyone who has attempted to ameliorate the problem of human inequality – which is most thinkers about the morality of social life – the greatest problem of human inequality is the extraordinary difficulty in prising wealth away from the rich to give it to the poor, without employing levels of coercion or violence which are themselves utterly corrosive to social progress. And repeatedly in the course of the history of our human societies, well-intentioned, enormously determined and courageous people willing to sacrifice their lives for an improvement in the equality of human life have had to face that problem. We cannot make meaningful redistribution fast enough to maintain momentum politically without applying levels of coercion or violence which will destroy what we are attempting. And again and again, as Isaiah Berlin and other late 20th century political theorists pointed out, through hubris, through arrogance, through romanticism, through self-deception, parties seeking permanent human benefit and an increase in the equality of human beings have failed that test and watched as their movements of liberation spiraled downward from the poison of excess coercion.

We do not have to do that anymore.

The gate that has held the movements for equalization of human beings strictly in a dilemma between ineffectiveness and violence has now been opened. The reason is that we have shifted to a zero marginal cost world. As steel is replaced by software, more and more of the value in society becomes non-rivalrous: it can be held by many without costing anybody more than if it is held by a few.

This reminds of a 1992 Richard Stallman quote:

If we don’t want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes. We must start sending the message that a good citizen is one who cooperates when appropriate, not one who is successful at taking from others.

There’s much to debate concerning the speed, scope, and desirability of political and social change led by peer production. However, I find observations like the above rather satisfying and I believe deeply underappreciated. Peer production will not lead to absolute equality, but it does increase the scope for equality, freedom, autonomy, and decrease the need for violence or threats thereof. In other words, liberal ends achieved through liberal means, for a very broad range of meanings of “liberal.”

This I find more compelling than discussion of liberal/libertarian fusionism embedded deeply in the context of current U.S. jurisdiction politics. But perhaps my thought is too embedded in the free software context, and too cynical about power politics.

Moglen talk via Slashdot, also blogged at Creative Commons. Stallman quote via Dan Connolly.

Peter Saint-André published his promised essay Who’s Afraid of the Public Domain?. It’s fairly short and covers a fair amount of ground. I highly recommend it. Two of my favorite paragraphs:

Yet the public domain is nothing to fear. The works of Homer, Sophocles, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, Galileo, Newton, Bach, Beethoven, and other creative giants are all in the public domain. Their works are revered, not reviled. Sure, the fact that the Fifth Symphony is in the public domain enabled Chuck Berry to write “Roll Over Beethoven”; but far from defiling Beethoven’s good name, Berry’s song indicates the level of respect that we still have for Beethoven’s works. I bet you’d love it for your works to be similarly known and respected two hundred years from now (what creative individual wouldn’t?).

…

Because of that corporate influence over the copyright laws (at least in America), you face a choice: accept that your works will never pass into the public domain, or willingly place them there. You can place your works into the public domain immediately (as I have done) or specify in your will that your works shall pass into the public domain upon your death. I find it simpler to place my works in the public domain as soon as I publish them, but only you can decide the best course of action for your own works.

I would add that if you don’t make an effort to free your works, they will disappear, and your creative legacy with them.

One item of fear, uncertainty and doubt spread about the public domain (that would have been out of scope for Saint-André’s essay to address) is that it may not be possible legally to affirmatively place a work into the public domain (see Wikipedia:Granting work into the public domain for some discussion), especially outside the U.S. jurisdiction.

I believe wikipedians attempt to work around this with statements like the one currently in Template:Userpd (emphasis added):

I, the author, hereby agree to waive all claim of copyright (economic and moral) in all content contributed by me, the user, and immediately place any and all contributions by me into the public domain; I grant anyone the right to use my work for any purpose, without any conditions, to be changed or destroyed in any manner whatsoever without any attribution or notice to the creator.

Or one of many specialized “public domain or release all rights legally possible” templates like this one:

This image really is in the Public domain as its author has released it into the public domain. If this is not possible, the author grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

I have no idea what a court would make of these, but presumably someone has or will inform the Wikipedia community if they are bogus.

If you aren’t ready to fully embrace the public domain, Creative Commons offers several gradations of partial measures (as well as a form to help you dedicate work to the public domain).

Check out all of Saint-André’s posts about the public domain and digg his essay.

Creative Commons has begun its annual fall fundraiser. Donate if you can or buy a t-shirt in support of your favorite licensethe public domain.

If you’re completely clueless about restrictive copyright and the net, you’re probably in the wrong place. Before you scurry off, watch Get Creative, which introduced Creative Commons nearly four years ago and provides some of the background story.

Otherwise, check out the brand new Wanna Work Together?, which explains Creative Commons more succinctly and features music by J Lesser, who has the awesomest home page ever.

Revver is forgoing its usual fifty percent take on ad clickthroughs for these videos through the end of the year (there’s a static ad at the end of each video).

Please contribute and spread these videos to help ensure a future with plenty of freedom lunches for all.

I currently work for Creative Commons, but heed this blog’s current tagline: My opinions only. I do not represent any organization in this publication.

I almost entirely agree with Mark Birbeck’s comparison of RDFa and microformats. The only thing to be said in defense of microformats is that a few of the problems Birbeck calls out are also features, from the microformats perspective.

But worse is better.

I will reveal what this means later.

Another quip: My problem with microformats is the s.

Evan Prodromou provided a still-good RDFa vs Microformats roundup (better title: “RDFa and Microformats, please work together”) in May. I somehow missed it until now.

Ah, metadata.

Update 20061204: I didn’t miss Prodromou’s roundup in May, I blogged about it. And forgot.

At best, as (arbitrarily) measured by years of adult education or years (10) to becoming an expert in something.

Inspired by the oft-heard ‘JD/MBA is the new BA’, Arnold Kling’s slightly more verbose statement

The point is that what used to be a college-degree premium is turning into a graduate-degree premium.

and MC Plus+’s The Empty Set (mp3):

this chip hop shit is a celebration of hustling for whatever degree, whether it’s a PhD or a GED or even if you’re just trying to make ends meet

Not a particulary great track, but ugh, I am too amused by nerdcore and looking forward to seeing MCPP at BoCon next weekend in Boise, where I’ll be speaking.

Throwaway thoughts above, I am against credentialism. Many current forms anyway.

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 /.