Mike Linksvayer

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.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts has been called a seminal album for many genres, but it was for me personally too. I discovered it while browsing the library’s LP collection for strange music, probably in 1985 or 1986. Having been exposed to the Talking Heads (which I grew to love despite hearing Take Me To The River first) and Brian Eno in prior year, I borrowed the record and immediately decided I liked it enough to tape it (a big investment at the time). It is one of the few listenings from that time period that I still indulge. Most of the tracks hold up very well.

This success led me shortly after to pick up Talking Heads ‘77 by Peach of Immortality at a used record store. It was unclear whether it had anything to do with the Talking Heads (it doesn’t) but the store owner said it was very strange. It was the first noise album in my possession and is probably the only recording I own manufactured copies of in two formats (LP and CD). I still love it.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was recently reissued on its 25th anniversary. This would be unremarkable but for the release of sources for two of the album tracks today under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, which is great and very satisfying.

Of course I wish they had used a more liberal license and that the remix site wasn’t Flash-based or at least did not require Flash 8, which renders it inaccessible to Linux clients. Small complaints and a reminder to throw some money at Gnash, which seems to have made its first alpha release a few days ago.

Update: bush-of-ghosts.com claims to require Flash 8, bush-of-ghosts.com/remix does not and does work on Linux. Can’t say I’m sorry to miss whatever “interface” is on the home page.

The first Creative Commons Salon San Francisco was good, tomorrow’s should be great. Bob Ostertag and Lucas Gonze (who I’ve cited many times) are presenting. I could hardly ask for a better lineup.

Event details.

Update 20060417: Followup post on the CC blog.

It was a pleasure talking to Ostertag before the presentations got underway. Among other things I learned that Pantychrist vocalist Justin Bond has become extremely sucessful. During the presentation he said he had wanted to put his recordings in the public domain but Creative Commons seemed like a good thing to support, so he chose a license rather arbitrarily. Argh! (CC does offer a public domain dedication.) Ostertag pushed the idea that thinking in terms of “copies” is completely obsolete and more or less encouraged “piracy” — in response to a naive questioner asking if streaming and DRM together could stop copying (smiles all around). It was evident during Q&A that he had much more to say coming from a number of different angles. I look forward to reading more of his thoughts.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lucas Gonze’s presentation, though it may have been too much too fast for some people. I found the things he left out of a talk about how the net is changing music notable — nothing about DRM, streaming, P2P, music stores, or podcasting. Hear, hear!

Today avant garde musician Bob Ostertag released digital downloads of all of his recordings that he holds the rights to under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. There will doubtless be a post on the CC weblog about this, but I write here as a fan of Ostertag’s music. To my taste this is the best music to be made available under a CC license so far. It’s too bad he didn’t choose Attribution-ShareAlike instead of Attribution-NonCommercial, but I can’t have everything I want. (Via Steev Hise.)

On a slightly related (see below) note, I’m really looking forward to the Kronos Quartet performance with Matmos April 21 at Yerba Beuna. My review of a Kronos/Asha Bhosle concert last fall, also at YB.

(Ostertag performed with Kronos on All the Rage, unfortunately not one of the recordings he holds the rights to and Matmos was a contributor to the CC/WIRED CD.)

Addenda 20060326: The CC blog post.

On second read I noticed this in Ostertag’s mini-essay (emphasis added):

Saying goodbye to record royalties is in any event no great sacrifice for a musician such as myself, whose music has always been too adventurous to be valued by the mass market anyway. Strangely, many musicians I know whose work lies outside the mainstream remain much more invested in the idea of selling their recordings than their actual experience in the market would seem to justify.

This rings true to me. I’ve often been surprised at just how proprietary some artists are — many being generally suspicious of capitalism and in no position to make more than a pittance selling their art under any regime. Double or triple irony.

Ostertag’s release (but not the above quote) reminds me of a concert he gave February 25, 1998 at Venue 9 in San Francisco. I found myself sitting next to Don Joyce of Negativland and tried to convince him to be more radical about IP, in addition to expressing appreciation for his work.

Congratulations to MusicBrainz for taking care of a longstanding substandard feature — a proprietary and not very scalable acoustic fingerprinting technology (Relatable TRM). Today MusicBrainz announced integration with MusicIP’s MusicDNS fingerprinting service, full details in the announcement.

Funny thing, I just cleared all the (old, mostly gathered in 2001) TRM tags from Bitzi a couple weeks ago.

Creative Commons license tracking is also now enabled at both MusicBrainz and MusicIP, no doubt more on that at the CC weblog in the near future.

Belated congratulations to MusicBrainz for signing their first commercial deal in January.

I wrote some about MusicBrainz about 15 months ago. I predict the next 15 months will be very good for what I’ll call “open music infrastructure.”

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.

Congratulations to Lucas Gonze on the Webjay/Yahoo! merger. (Via Kevin Burton.)

Yahoo! made a very wise decision to be acquired by the light side rather than the dark side.

My favorite Gonze post: Totally fucking bored with Napster (more at CC).

Also have a listen to the best track on ccMixter (if you share my taste, probably not), also a Gonze creation.

I could gonze on, but enough of this!

I hate to write about software that could be vaporware, but AllPeers (via Asa Dotzler) looks like a seriously interesting darknet/media sharing/BitTorrent/and more Firefox extension.

It’s sad, but simply sending a file between computers with no shared authority nor intermediary (e.g, web or ftp server) is still a hassle. IM transfers often fail in my experience, traditional filesharing programs are too heavyweight and are configured to connect to and share with any available host, and previous attempts at friendnet clients (e.g., W.A.S.T.E.) were not production quality. Merely solving this problem would make AllPeers very cool.

Assuming AllPeers proves a useful mechanism for sharing media, perhaps it could also become a lightnet bridge–ccPublisher as a Firefox extension.

Do check out AllPeers CTO Matthew Gertner’s musings on the AllPeers blog. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but his is a very well informed and well written take on open source, open content, browser development and business models.

…

Songbird Media Player looks to be another compelling application built on the Mozilla platform (though run as a separate program rather than as a Firefox extension), to be released real soon now. 2006 should be another banner year for Firefox and Mozilla technology generally.

…

Lucas Gonze’s original lightnet post is now near the top of results for ‘lightnet’ on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, and related followups fill up much of the next few dozen results, having displaced most of the new age and lighting sites that use the same term.

Last night for my partner’s birthday we saw Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo. It struck me as a costumed gymastics exhibition, not a circus. That’s a good thing in my book, as my stereotype of circuses is not good–pure cheese. I was impressed by the performances, even moreso that they were done without injury. For some reason I found the jugglers’ take on playing catch particularly entertaining–with many objects in the air between performers at once. Maybe because it was about the only performance I could personally attempt, fail miserably at, and not become a quadriplegic in the process.

The musical accompaniment was tolerable, but I couldn’t help imagining from the start what the people who did Crash Worship or similar might do given such a troupe–add fire, cacophony, remove stage and seating. It would be great fun, but probably injurious.

The wily Lucas Gonze is at it again, defining ‘lightnet’ and ‘darknet’ by example, without explanation. The explanation is so simple that it probably only subtracts from Gonze’s [re]definition, but I’ll play the fool anyhow.

Usually darknet refers to (largely unstoppable) friend-to-friend information sharing. As the name implies, a darknet is underground, or at least under the radar of those who want to prohibit certain kinds of information sharing. (A BlackNet doesn’t require friends and the radar doesn’t work, to horribly abuse that analogy.)

Lightnet, as far as I know, is undefined in this context.^*

Anyway, Lucas’ definition-by-example lumps prohibited sharing (friend to friend as well as over filesharing networks) and DRM together as Darknet. Such content is dark to the web. It can’t be linked to, or if it can be, the link will be to a name,^** not a location, thus you may not be able to obtain the content (filesharing), or you won’t be able to view the content (DRM).

Lightnet contnet is light to the web. It can be linked to, retrieved, and viewed in the ways you expect (and by extension, searched for in the way you expect), no law breaking or bad law making required.

^* Ross Mayfield called iTunes a lightnet back in 2003. Lucas includes iTunes on the dark side. I agree with Lucas’ categorization, though Ross had a good point, and in a slightly different way was contrasting iTunes with both darknets and hidebound content owners.

^** Among other things, I like to think of magnet links and Bitzi as attempting to bridge the gap between the web and otherwise shared content. Obviously that work is unfinished. As is making multimedia work on the web. I think that’s the last time I linked to Lucas Gonze, but he’s had plently of crafty posts between then and now that I highly recommend following.

I usually run away screaming when I hear a description including the word “fusion”, e.g., of food or music. I’ve never heard that word applied to the Kronos Quartet’s eclectic works, though their ability to fuse the string quartet with other forms is nearly foolproof. Yesterday’s performance with Bollywood singer Asha Bhosle and pipa (Chinese lute) player Wu Man was a case in point.

Terry Riley’s The Cusp of Magic filled the first half of the concert. Judging by that performance only, one would have to believe that a pipa/violin/violin/viola/cello quintet was a standard arrangement. Wu Man played beautifully and in unity with Kronos, never triggering an annoying thought of “oh, now we hear the ‘eastern’ bit.”

The second half, featuring songs by Rahul Dev Burman performed by Asha Boshle, Kronos, Wu Man, and Debopriyo Sarkar on tabla, was equally successful, with the musicians ably replacing an entire orchestra. A few seconds after Boshle started singing Nihcole whispered to me that “she’s the one we hear in all those films.” I haven’t really seen all that much Bollywood, but it’s true, her voice is immediately familiar. Supposedly she has recorded 20,000 songs in her sixty year career. That’s almost one song every single day for six decades. Hard to believe. She looks and sounds nothing like 72.

Each time I hear Kronos perform I am happy, both because I love their music and they make me feel a bit sentimental. The first musical event I ever attended of my own accord was their early 1989 performance at the Krannert Center, where I believe they played Riley’s In C, John Zorn’s Cat O’ Nine Tails and Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze. When I finally bought a CD player, also in 1989, Kronos’ Winter Was Hard was one of my first discs (I bought the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa/Come On Pilgrim and Bongwater’s Double Bummer+ at the same time).

Other reviews at SFist and memestream.

So, why does fusion denote abomination and electicism beauty?

David Byrne writes about the denial of visas to foreign performers. His journal does not have permalinks, so look for the April 16 entry. Boing Boing posted a relevant excerpt, but to get a feel for how hard it is to plan a U.S. tour with non-U.S. citizens, read Byrne’s full post.

Byrne chalks it up to “cultural censorship” and writes that “this has less to do with Homeland security and more to do with keeping the American public ignorant and free of foreign influence and inspiration.”

There may be something to that, but the reason musicians and other performers require special hard to obtain visas (P visas and O visas) has more to do with protecting American musicians from competition. In the early 1900s the American Federation of Musicians successfully lobbied to restrict admission of musicians into the US.

Statutory protection of a set of workers determined largely by birth, a familiar story.

Of course the system is ripe for abuse. Cultural censorship is bad result, but there is much worse (I understand that sadly this movie is accurate; eventually I will write a post about it).

End restrictions on the ability to travel, live and work where one pleases. Apartheid is unacceptable within national borders and should be equally unacceptable across national borders.

This music had every cell and fiber in my body on heavy sizzle mode.

Thurston Moore on mixtapes, could be describing me listening to early Sonic Youth or one of my many ecstasy-inducing 120 minute cassettes that I’m mostly afraid to touch, really need to digitize. Yes, Moore relates it all to MP3, P2P, etc., sounding like he’s from the EFF:

Once again, we’re being told that home taping (in the form of ripping and burning) is killing music. But it’s not: It simply exists as a nod to the true love and ego involved in sharing music with friends and lovers. Trying to control music sharing - by shutting down P2P sites or MP3 blogs or BitTorrent or whatever other technology comes along - is like trying to control an affair of the heart. Nothing will stop it.

[Via Lucas Gonze.]

I’d like little more right now than to have Sonic Youth or one of Moore’s many avant projects to release some crack under a Creative Commons license. Had they already you could maybe find it via the just released Yahoo! Search for Creative Commons. (How’s that for a lame segue?)

I’m in Austin now through Monday for SXSW and in San Diego Tuesday through Thursday for Etech. I’m sad that I won’t be around for any music showcases this year and that I have to leave Austin for one of my less favorite places, but Etech is the better conference.

I’m helping Matt Haughey with a SXSW panel, The Semantic Web: Promising Future or Utter Failure (I’ll be the SemWeb technologies advocate) and an Etech session, Remixing Culture with RDF: Running a Semantic Web Search in the Wild.

Creative Commons will have other events and a party at SXSW.

I say CodeCon was 3/4 (one abstention) on Sunday.

Wheat. An environment (including a language) for developing web applications. Objects are arranged in a tree with some filesystem-like semantics. Every object has a URL (not necessarily in a public portion of the tree). Wheat’s web object publishing model and templating seem clearly reminiscent of Zope. In response to the first of several mostly redundant questions regarding Wheat and Zope, Mark Lentczner said that he used Zope a few years ago and was discouraged by the need to use external scripts and the lack of model-view separation in templates (I suspect Mark used DTML — Wheat’s TinyTemplates reminded me of DTML’s replacement, Zope Page Templates, currently my favorite and implemented in several languages). I’m not sure Wheat is an environment I’d like to develop in, but I suspect the world might learn something from pure implementations of URL-object identity (not just mapping) and a web domain specific language/environment (I understand that Wheat has no non-web interface). Much of the talk used these slides.

Incoherence. I find it hard to believe that nobody has done exactly this audio visualization method before (x = left/right, y = frequency, point intensity and size = volume), but as an audio-ignoramous I’ll take the Incoherence team’s word. I second Wes Felter’s take: “I learned more about stereo during that talk than in the rest of my life.”

i-Brokers. This is where XNS landed and where it might go. However, the presentation barely mentioned technology and left far more questions than answers. There was talk of Zooko’s Triangle (”Names: Decentralized, Secure, Human-Memorizable: Choose Two”). 2idi and idcommons seem to have chosen the last two, temporarily. It isn’t clear to me why they brought it up, as i-names will be semi-decentralized (like DNS). In theory i-names provide privacy (you provide only your i-name to an i-name enabled site, always logging in via your i-broker, and access to your data is provided through your i-broker — never enter your password or credit card anywhere else — you set the policies for who can access your data) and persistence (keep an i-name for life, and i-names may be transparently aliased or gatewayed should you obtain others). These benefits, if they exist in the future, are subtler than the claims. Having sites access your data via a broker rather than via you typing it in does little to protect your privacy by itself. You make a decision in both cases whether you want a site to have your credit card number. Once the site has your credit card… Possibly over the long term if lots of people and sites adopt i-names sites will collect or keep less personal information. Users, via their i-brokers, may be on more equal terms with sites, as i-broker access will presumably be governed by some you-have-no-rights-at-all terms of service. Some sites may decide (for new applications) they don’t want to have to worry about the security of customer information and access the same via customers’ i-names. However, once a user has provided their i-broker with lots of personal information, it becomes easy for sites to ask for it all. Persistence is also behavioral. Domain names and URLs can last a long time; good ones don’t change. Similarly an i-name will go away if the owner stops paying for it. Can the i-name ecology be structured so that i-names tend to be longer lived than domain names or URLs? Probably, but that’s a different story. In the short term 2idi is attempting to get adoption in the convention registration market. Good luck, but I wish Fen and Victor had spent their time talking about XRI resolution or other code behind the 2idi broker.

SciTools. A collection of free to use web applications for genetic design and analysis. Integrated DNA Technologies, the company that offers SciTools, makes its money selling (physical) synthesized nucleic acids. I was a cold, tired, bio-ignoramous, so have little clue whether this is novel. (Ted Leung seems to think so and also has interesting things to say about the other presentations.)

OzymanDNS. DNS can route and move data, is deployed and not filtered everywhere, so with a little cleverness we can tunnel arbitrary streams over DNS. Dan Kaminsky is clearly the crowd pleaser, not only for his showmanship and the audacity of his hacks (streaming anime over DNS this time). More than a few in the crowd wanted to put DNS hacks to work, e.g., on aspects of supposed syndication problems. PPT slides of an older version of the talk.

Yesterday.

Last week (September 22) the Wall Street Journal printed “Market Gains As Bush Rises and Kerry Falls” (unauthorized copy found here).

I’m extremely skeptical that the market should be read as approving or disapproving of Bush or Kerry, or particularly responding to individual polls. There’s so much noise in the market that I’d only expect an unthinking partisan to read candidate preference from market index behavior, particularly when the two candidates who can win are so similar policy-wise (though a partisan wouldn’t agree).

However, it should be possible to design securities which explicitly tease out the effect of a candidate’s election on the market (or something else). One approach is I believe known as “conditional futures”. Three securities would do it: a) has a value determined by whether Bush wins, b) has the value determined by a market index on a date in the future, and c) has the value determined by a market index on the same date in the future if Bush wins, or zero otherwise. If c/a > b then the futures market thinks a Bush win is good for the market index in question. Alternatively b) could be determined by the value of the market on the same date in the future if Bush loses, in which case if c/a > b/(1-a) then the market thinks a Bush win is good.

You can see some claims along these lines in a play money (unfortunately) market:

(In calculations below I use last trade if available, otherwise average of bid and ask.)

bid ask last
/  /   /
61 62 61 http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=Bush04

Bush is likely to win.

47 48 NA http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=Stocks
25 30 25 http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=GBStok

25/.61 = 41 < 47.5

Bush win means lower stock returns?

51 53 52 http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=GBNuke
33 39 34 http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=JKNuke