linkdump for 2006.06.24
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Wiki “devoted to the architecture and urban design of Austin, Texas.”
who needs chilton
I was leaving Austin coffeeshop The Green Muse last night when I saw this guy pecking at this PowerBook on top of his Jeep. It was pretty clear that he was downloading information about working on the vehicle. After I asked if I could snap a picture, I asked, “Who needs Chilton, when you’ve got the Interweb?” I’m not sure if he got my reference to the line of auto service manuals, but he said that, yes, he had downloaded the Jeep service manual. “It’s got like 1,400 pages here!” he told me. I keep the Chilton manual for my pickup behind the bench seat, but I imagine tracking down the manufacturer’s documentation online would work in a pinch.
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linkdump for 2006.06.22
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Awesome pictures of a Dell laptop in flames.
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motivation and context
Jon Udell has a post today that criticizes the industry term “user-generated content,” which is used to described the content on sites like Flickr, MySpace, and just about anything else Web 2.0 related. On these sites, users upload photos, blog entries, and otherwise produce content that draws an audience. I’ve long resented the term as well, and I’ve been meaning to blog this similar item that relates Derek Powazek’s objections.
Both Jon and Derek despise the use of “user” to describe both active participants and more passive audience members. Jon says it’s dehumanizing, while Derek doesn’t like the drug-culture connotations the word evokes. Frankly, I don’t really have a problem with “user” I like it better than the alternatives in the same way that some media studies folks prefer “work” to “text” to describe a movie, TV show, or other cultural artifact. “User” implies a greater degree of activity and investment than “viewer,” “reader,” or “audience member,” just as “work” acknowledges labor, while “text” does not. Shoot, I’d call members of TV or film audiences “users” if I thought I could get away with it.
Jon doesn’t voice any objections to the use of “generated,” but Derek criticizes it for its mechanistic implications, that the content comes from an engine or robot. This is probably my greatest objection to the term. “Generated” lacks an acknowledgment that the people contributing to a site are doing work, and this work is hopefully meaningful to them in some way. I can just imagine some MBA leaning back in his Aeron chair saying, “All we have to do is turn on the Wiki, get us some of that user-generated content, and we’ll never have to pay a writer again! Bwahahaha!”
“Content” reminds Jon “more of sausage than of storytelling,” suggesting that the textual matter is more than just stuffing for a business model. Similarly, Derek thinks of “content” as “something that fills a box” like packing peanuts. I don’t disagree, but I’ll add that content seems to be pretty agnostic about what the content actually is. Are the contents stories or videos or photos? Are the contents any good? These things matter to your audience and they should matter to you.
My greatest objection to “user-generated content,” however, is its framing. What it describes is not a thing, but an activity, a mode of production. (Sorry to use a somewhat awkward Marxian turn of phrase.) As Derek points out, the people engaged on these sites aren’t “generating content,” but making something meaningful to them. By saying “user-generated content,” observers neglect the emerging systems of production that surround these projects, whether or not the purpose of the site is to take people’s contributions and commoditize them. To fix the problem with “user-generated content,” we have to shift perspective and think of it as a mode of production. Yochai Benkler’s formulation “commons-based peer production” is an attractive, if awkward, way to describe the phenomenon, except it’s used to describe projects like the Linux kernel or Wikipedia, where a group of contributors work on the same product in a coordinated way. Perhaps we can pare it down to “peer production” to describe what goes on on Flickr or blogs or Indymedia. And if you really need to talk about what’s on Flickr, you could say “peer-produced content.”
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linkdump for 2006.06.18
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Via Jordan, a discussion of the differences between licenses and contracts. I wish there was a story like this that explained FCC Licenses.
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Via Jordan, explains the legal difference between licenses and contracts in terms of the GPL. This distinction is not made frequently enough in popular reporting about intellectual property.
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freewheeling collective creativity
I’m not sure this is a situation where a copyeditor wrote an overly simplistic headline or the reporter herself is sensationalizing a story, but I lean toward the latter. The New York Times has a story titled “Growing Wikipedia Revises Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy” that discusses a refinement to its policies on page protection. The news of the story is that the project has created a for particular article. “Semi-protected” articles are locked to users whose accounts registered for fewer than four days. Wikipedia has had full protection of articles since before the presidential election, when adminstrators were locking articles about presidential candidates. However, the story doesn’t make the distinction the old page protection and the new semi-protection policy.
If anything, the new semi-protected status is more open than the old approach. A protected page could only be edited by a few administrators, while the rest of the Wikipedia community was locked out. With the new semi-protected status, anonymous users and users who have only created accounts to vandalize a page or disrupt the editing process are locked out. A few new users may be legitimately locked out of making good-faith edits, but, compared to the number of new, hostile users that could be drawn to an article through a critical blog post or astroturf campaign, it seems like a small slice of potential users. I can see how someone like Nick Carr could say that this undermines the “Anyone Can Edit” spirit, but Wikipedia doesn’t say that anyone can edit any page. Compared to many sites, Wikipedia is pretty reluctant to implement hard-and-fast rules and this rule seems to nurture article quality at the expense of users who have shown little commitment to the project.
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links for 2006-06-17
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A service that allows users to download online videos to the hard drive.
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I’ve been meaning to post something about the actions in Oaxaca, and this will have to do.
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self-proclaimed cultural mongrel
When I was an undergrad at the University of Oklahoma, the campus art museum installed a seven-foot fiberglass sculpture of a horse in front of the art museum. The sculpture, Mesteño by Luis Jimenez, was particularly striking at night when its red eyes glowed. Of course, more than a few people thought an airbrushed fiberglass horse with lightbulbs for eyes was a little tacky, especially when it sat on a particularly prominent corner of campus. My friend Aaron even performed a prank mocking the sculpture. I thought the sculpture was great, though, I loved that OU had installed some challenging art and the negative response it received. It provoked discussions of taste and white privilege on campus. While people may not have articulated their reactions in the most sensitive ways, Jimenez certainly succeeded in provoking a discussion about art on campus
I learned today that Jimenez died Tuesday while working on a piece. A chunk of the sculpture he was building fell and cut an artery in leg, leaving him to bleed to death. He was working on another giant horse, this one for the Denver airport. I’m saddened to hear this news, since I found his work moving and added much to my undergrad experience. It’s a pity there won’t be more of his work for the world to enjoy.
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linkdump for 2006.06.16
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This site searches tags across several folksonomy-enabled sites.
