infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

A week or so ago, Ethan Zuckerman posted an entry discussing aggregator blogs that use whole entries from Creative-Commons-licensed sources. He raises the issue of commercial blogs that take content that’s licensed under share-alike licenses. To use the content, these commercial blogs should also use a Creative Commons license, but, in the case he described, there was no license declaration. He wondered how enforceable these licenses are.

He was talking about a site called usmediaweb.net, which reblogs entries dealing with media issues. This site reposted an entry of mine on YouTube a few days ago, and, although I’d read Ethan’s post, I was too befuddled by the site to worry too much about it, and I was a little flattered to see someone actually reads this thing. I’m using a non-commercial-attribution-license, so if usmediaweb.net is a commercial site, unlike reblog or unmediated, I should have popped them an email and told them to take it down. It looks like they’re in the process of rebuilding the whole site, so it’s a moot issue at this point.

I’m running into a related, but more pragmatic issue. In the past few days, I’ve had a few mysterious sites republish posts whole-hog, then tracking back to my blog. Unlike usmediaweb.net, which republished a thoughtful post people might genuinely find interesting, these posts were lame linkdump entries. When I go to the linking site, I don’t see much other content, and, when I look, there doesn’t appear to be a Creative Commons license either. I haven’t bothered to ask them to take down the post because I suspect this is a form a trackback spam. While nothing on the sites reek of spam today, I’m wondering if they’re using trackbacks to get links to blank pages, and after getting enough inbound links, turning the pages into link farms. I haven’t seen anyone else discuss this phenomenon, but maybe I should be savvy enough to know trackback spam when I see it.

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Huh, I didn’t realize until I read today’s “Doonesbury” comic strip that I share the same hometown as Mike Doonesbury – Tulsa, Oklahoma. According to this FAQ, Garry Trudeau’s choice of the city had little conscious cultural significance, explaining, “The selection of Tulsa, mentioned in the strip’s debut, was the first of thousands of occasions on which the creator went with the first thing that popped into his head.” After I tracked down the first strip, I realized that I had almost certainly read the comic, but the fact that Mike was from Tulsa wouldn’t have registered, since at the time I would have been a teenager living in Tulsa. I doubt I would have put the computer humor in the context of 1970 America, either.

Tulsa’s a funny choice of hometowns for Mike because as long as I can remember (which, for newspaper comics, is the Reagan administration) the major daily in Tulsa, The Tulsa World has buried “Doonesbury” deep in the classifed section, while other, less political strips like “Mallard Fillmore” run on the comics page in section C. Readers presumably complained that the strip rotted the minds of Tulsa’s youth. I remember being quite an avid reader of newspaper comics as a youth, and, once I finished “Bloom County” on the comics page, digging through the classifieds to find “Doonesbury.” Berke Breathed’s tales of cats and penguins probably rotted my mind more than “Doonesbury,” but it’s still an interesting memory of resisting newspaper design.

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Over on Lost Remote, Cory Bergman explains why the blog is using YouTube to embed video in posts, rather than link to clips on the Comedy Central site. Although using YouTube implies a degree of copyright infringement, it is too difficult to find a linkable URI on the Comedy Central site, as well as a host of other sites. The only easy way to share the video content with readers (and promote Comedy Central programming) is to use the service. Bergman asks, “Why aren’t media sites copying YouTube search and share functionality?”

This is a good question, and I thought I would raise a tangential question. As John Battelle and others have pointed out, YouTube’s business model isn’t really sustainable. Although the site has become wildly popular in a short amount of time, the content that is driving people to the site is copyrighted material, like the Colbert Report clip on Lost Remote. Investors and larger businesses will balk at throwing more money at a company that is so vulnerable to litigation. And since YouTube uses a substantial amount of bandwidth, it will quickly burn through money.

So, I’ll ask, “Why doesn’t YouTube pursue the business-to-business market and license its technology to networks like Comedy Central?” Instead of competing with Google Video and sites like eBaumsworld, it should compete with the likes of Brightcove. YouTube has demonstrated that its Flash-based video service is easy to use and flexible enough for a variety of different Web formats, so why not approach content providers as an alternative to the current streaming technologies? Comedy Central (or any other TV network) has a great opportunity to promote its shows by allowing bloggers and MySpace users to embed clips in their blogs and, more generally, simplifying the architecture of their sites.

I guess YouTube has two or three hurdles it has to overcome. First, I don’t know the legal status of its technology. Is it sufficiently unique and sufficiently protected that YouTube could license it to networks? Or could Viacom (the parent of Comedy Central) develop a similar homegrown solution relatively quickly? Secondly, the quality of YouTube is fine for sharing video created with consumer-grade equipment, but it’s pretty poor compared to other technologies like QuickTime and RealPlayer that large TV organizations use. As Valleywag pointed out, “The resolution is 2002-quality.” I imagine YouTube is working on improving the quality and performance of their player. A final issue is that old-media TV networks are probably resistant to sharing their content. It may not be an accident that Comedy Central makes it difficult to blog clips from “The Colbert Report.” They want to drive viewers to their site. Of course, I and a thousand other bloggers think this is short-sighted, but it probably requires a shift in the culture of TV production. Moreover, while bloggers like me who adminster their own sites, have no problem with embedding outside content, the major providers of online presence might. While MySpace explained their upgrade to Flash 9 as a security measure, it may also be motivated by a desire to restrict what kinds of content are embedded on user pages. Despite these hurdles, YouTube’s solution for embedding video online could be a great solution for major content providers.

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After screening a few episodes of early Fox teen drama “21 Jump Street,” I was inspired the other night to watch another text that featured Johnny Depp as an undercover cop. Donnie Brasco was as good as I remembered it, and I wondered, “What else has this Mike Newell guy done?” A check of IMDB revealed how little I pay attention to film, but it also revealed a really interesting movie in pre-production. Newell is on board to direct “Sealand,” which is a biopic about Roy Bates, who squatted an anti-aircraft platform in the English Channel and declared himself the prince of the independent nation of Sealand. I would love to see a silver-screen treatment of this bizarre story.

Geeks may remember Sealand’s efforts in the early part of this century to create an off-shore data haven. The company HavenCo set up shop on the rusting hulk of Sealand to serve data that would not be regulated by governments other than Sealand, presumably offering an opportunity for gambling sites and purveyors of adult content. Wired magazine had a nice feature on the genesis of HavenCo. Eventually HavenCo shut down for a variety of business and logistical reasons, not to mention the fact it was kind of a goofy idea to begin with. Regardless, it’s worth mentioning that HavenCo wasn’t Sealand’s first foray into pushing the envelope of media content. It also operated a pirate radio station before Britain liberalized it’s broadcasting laws and legal stations played rock music. I don’t know what slices of Sealand’s history the movie will portray, but it should make for a fascinating story.

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Mark Cuban challenged readers a few days ago to come up with a strategy for attracting more people into theaters. In the original post, he pointed out that studios often spend more money on marketing on a per-viewer basis than they spend on the price of admission. Cuban owns his own theater chain as well as a distributor, so presumably his organization gets the full ticket price, unlike distributors who take a cut of the box office, but still this is a poor business strategy. (The major studio/distributors make the biggest chunk of domestic money from DVD sales, so the marketing blitz that surrounds theatrical releases largely serve to create buzz for the DVD.) For someone like Cuban, who produces movies for niche audiences, he can’t rely on a hit or two floating the rest of his movies.

Today, Cuban posted a follow-up. He is impressed by the response, but disappointed with the suggestions. Some he has already floated, like discounting multiple versions of the same film. When he spoke at the RTF department this spring, he discussed how his day-and-date release schedule might eat into box office sales, suggesting that more folks might see Bubble in the theater if the DVD was discounted with the ticket price. I’ll let readers read the rest of the suggestions, but one gave me a good chuckle, creating a tagging system for releases to harness Web 2.0 social networking mojo. Cuban says “The problem is that its a downstream idea. It works in response to something that is working well.” This sounds about right, but I also think that tagging is mostly successful for sharing content in the same context. If you’re online it’s good for sharing stuff online, but not for getting groups of friends to go to the theater.

It’s worth mentioning that this idea has already been implemented to a certain extent. Bside is an independent film distributor that uses social tagging to find what films audiences respond to. I was skeptical of the idea when I met Bside’s founder Chris Hyams at a party last year. I sort of chortled at the idea of tagging films, since it seemed like everyone was applying tagging to a variety of different problems. At that time, however, I was barely using del.icio.us – which is probably the paragon of tagging systems – and clearly I’m a heavy del.icio.us user. (Actually, my conversation with Chris convinced me to give del.icio.us a second look.) What Bside does is creates folksonomic social network systems for film festivals, where festival-goers can go online, share thoughts about the movies they see, and categorize them as they see fit. This helps Bside determine what markets might be interested in the films at the festival. Since Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures only puts out a few pictures each year, it probably doesn’t have the critical mass of films to support a similar system, but social tagging probably shouldn’t be discounted entirely as a new model for creating interest in movies.

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I’ve already pointed to a Reuters story that tracked the evolution of the Wikipedia entry for Ken Lay in the minutes after his death was known to the public. The story looks at individual edits, which included some misinformation, and describes how the story was in flux as the news came out. It concludes that Wikipedia is a poor source of information because the article was edited several times in a short period to correct errors.

Today Washington Post technology columnist Frank Ahrens takes this silliness to the next level by using this small data set to warn readers that articles may be edited by “insane crazy people with an agenda.” I wonder if he’s written about AM talk radio in the past. Describing one edit where a contributor incorrectly wrote that the guilt of ruining the lives of investors led Lay to suicide, Ahrens notes how the editor left out an “l” from “finally” and adds the parenthetical comment,

Is it the speed with which flamers type that inevitably leads to typos? Or is it a political statement, a willful rebellion against the bourgeoisie strictures of so-called conventional spelling? Or are they just idiots? Discuss.

OK, I’ll bite. Ahrens, I’m not sure you’re using the term “flamers” correctly — I typically think of flamers as Internet users who send hostile messages or posts to other internet users, not people who post biased or incorrect information online. I’m sure newspaper reporters never turn in copy with typos. I don’t mean to defend this user, but speculating about possible political motivations behind a missing letter is silly, and using this data point to attack the credibility of an open online project is a willful misrepresentation.

Ahrens does note that this error was corrected in a minute by another editor, but his tone suggests that Wikipedia encourages the dissemination of misinformation. (”Somehow, one minute later, actual news managed to elbow its way into Wikipedia.”) If Ahrens cared to do any actual reporting, he might have noted that WIkipedia has had, since its inception, a Neutral Point of View policy that instructs editors to remove this kind of editorializing, but the journalist seems more interested in making knee-jerk claims about the integrity of his profession. He says later that “At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.”

The Ken Lay entry provides an interesting case study on how the online encyclopedia operates, but both Reuters and Ahrens draw the wrong conclusions. I suspect that most of these edits were based on reporting from day-time cable news. If you’ve ever watched a cable news channel report a breaking news story, you’ll know that information trickles bit-by-bit, and the the on-air talent frequently speculate about the news. It would not surprise me if a newsreader learned that Ken Lay died, suggested he committed suicide, and presented this to the audience. If Ahrens is going to complain about Wikipedia changing a story over a short period of time, he should point his attention to his peer journalists on cable.

Update: There are some good comments on this post over on Slashdot.

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Last week, I watched FOX’s rerun of the FX comedy “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and I thought it was dumb. After Time TV critic James Poniewozik’s glowing recommendation, I decided to tune in to the second season’s premiere last night. Besides, I thought it was my duty as a former Philadelphian and student of media to see how the City of Brotherly Shove is represented on screen.

At first I was inclined to think that the only think Philly about “Sunny” was b-roll of the city and references to places — the opening titles feature postcard shots of obvious landmarks like the Ben Franklin bridge, Logan Circle, the art museum, and South Street — but I realized the show had a Philadelphian sensibility after all. The humor of the show isn’t really my style, but I found myself laughing. As I laughed I realized that I was laughing not so much because I thought it was funny, but because it was something my friend Jay would think is funny. Jay is a transplant from Tulsa to Philly and found it easy to fit into the culture of the city, something I wasn’t able to do. I was laughing because I knew Jay would be laughing. I realized that his humor is probably more in tune with the city’s than mine. Other Philadelphians probably enjoy the crude sensibility.

The second episode aired last night also included a plot point that might not be unique to Philadelphia, but certainly reflected the character of the city. A new neighbor buys the property next door to the bar owned by the ensemble of main characters. He informs them that the deed includes property 400 feet into the bar. Thanks to surveying errors or custom, this demarcation had been ignored, and the land had been a part of the bar’s building. The new owner wanted to evict the owners from his land. (This is something that would actually happen in Philly.) I won’t reveal how the issue is resolved, but it certainly reflected the character of one of America’s oldest cities.

There are plenty of things that seem out of place in a show about Philly. The bar is vastly larger than any bar I visited in the city, none of the characters have obvious Philadelphia accents, and there aren’t any black people in the show. The show doesn’t convey the sense of claustrophobia and tension I felt when I lived there, but, for a TV show, it does an admirable job of reflecting “the real” Philadelphia.

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A few blogs have pointed to Classic Movies it’s OK to Hate” at The Onion AV Club. As I had hoped, Star Wars made the top of the list. As a child, I positively loved the universe and collected the dolls action figures, but, when I watched it in class as an undergrad, I was bored out of my gourd. It just seemed to drag. I don’t think the prequels have done anything to improve the film’s status in my mind either, so I’m a little bewildered by commitment of its fan community. For example, Austin has a weekly radio show about the films. Why?

The article doesn’t reveal its criteria for a “classic movie,” and, as someone who’s spent the better part of his adult life in academic film-TV programs, there are some classics missing I expect to see. Casablanca or Citizen Kane aren’t mentioned. I frankly enjoy Citizen Kane, but I’d certainly entertain an argument over why it’s OK to hate it. And where’s The Sorrow and the Pity? Many of these movies like Caddyshack and The Big Lebowsky aren’t “classics” in the sense that you’d watch them in film school, but apparent favorites among certain twenty-something buff communities.

I’d like to add my own list of classic movies it’s OK to hate, but I’m frankly drawing a blank. One movie that comes to mind is Full Metal Jacket, which I found pretty offensive when I watched it last summer. Compared to other Vietnam American War in Vietnam movies, the film used a painful moment in history and the suffering of soldiers and families for a dry, formalist experiment. To me, it just seems pretentious and disengaged from the characters depicted on screen.

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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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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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