infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

TechDirt points to an interesting news item about Microsoft opening it’s XBox development tools to consumer-level users. They suggest this could open up the platform (and console gaming more generally) to more interesting “user-generated content.” Although I’m not a gamer, I was a little suspicious, since the console gaming business model hinges on the scarcity of production tools. Microsoft and other console manufacturers sell consoles at a loss, then recoup the investment through the a licensing fee for each title. While this ensures Microsoft makes money, it also restricts game production to studios with enough capital to pay for expensive development tools and distribution to large organizations that can work with retail channels and pay the licensing fees. Microsoft’s announcement warps the established model for console game production.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer article clears up some questions I had about the program. The initial, free tool XNA Game Studio Express allows non-programmers to produce games for Windows, and a later, full-featured tool will enable users to create games for the XBox 360 at a $99 per year cost. These aren’t the same tools used by game studios, and it is not really geared for Microsoft’s console platforms. Instead, it seems more like a response to the far-from-new phenomenon of modding and allows Microsoft – and users – to make money at the very low end of game production.

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I’d never heard of Blackboard until I came to UT, but if you’ve been involved in higher education in the past few years, you probably have the kind of familiarity with Blackboard that breeds contempt. For the uninitiated, Blackboard is a server application for managing course documents and on-line student discussions. What you need to know about Blackboard is that it sucks, and its sales strategy relies on selling campus-wide licenses to university adminstrators, making it difficult for individual instructors to opt out and take a different approach to online class management.

Some of the problems with Blackboard are probably inherent to working with higher education. It requires what seem to me to be too many authentication steps, but this is probably due to worries about sharing intellectual property to the Internet and keeping student information confidential. I often find that I have to drill through too many menus to find the class or document I need, and this is probably a function of working at one of the largest universities in the country; the interface doesn’t scale when you’ve got 50,000 students.

Other problems, however, seem to arise from bad software. The discussion boards thread conversations in a way that requires you to click through to each individual comment. You can’t change the display like Slashdot to nest comments or simply display them in a single flat page. Diffferent discussions are kept in different folders, requiring too many clicks to change conversation. Finally, students cannot create their own discussion threads. While in an intro-level class this might be a nice features to keep inappropriate content off of the boards, but grad students should be allowed to start new threads without needing adminstrator access. I attribute this poor software design to the lack of competition in the “Learning Management” space.

And it looks like that space might get smaller. According to a post by Tim O’Reilly, Blackboard is starting to enforce software patents, presumably to keep competitors down. It’s already suing a smaller competitor Desire2Learn, and open-source projects working on an alternative to Blackboard like Moodle are also fearful of the well-funded litigious wrath of Blackboard.

According to O”Reilly’s post, the open-source projects are using this Wikipedia article to compile information about the history of course management for future prior-art challenges to Blackboard. Like Tim, I’m a little curious about their choice of Wikipedia as a tool for collecting data about online learning. First, it seems like a separate wiki would be more effective as a collaboration tool. (Moodle has set one up.) Secondly, I wonder what credibility Wikipedia has in an issue like this. Tim says the use of Wikipedia to store information about prior art “says something important about the role that Wikipedia is beginning to play as a canonical source for information about important topics.” While Wikipedia was cited in an Appellate court decision, the judges were roundly criticized for using the online encyclopedia as a source of information, and in a case that would revolve around online collaboration, I think Wikipedia’s mode of production would be debated.

Regardless, Blackboard’s patent trolling only makes my distaste for the software even stronger, and I hope that UT and other universities can move to better designed and, hopefully, open-source solutions, rather than support bad software and bad business with student money.

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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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Sage is a nice Firefox extension for reading RSS and Atom feeds. I primarily use Bloglines as my newsreader, but I find Sage is more useful for high-volume feeds like Waxy links or Google News feeds, since I can quickly glance over the headlines and look for something interesting, rather than scroll through each post as Bloglines seems to require. When activated, Sage sits as a sidebar and initially loads a page in the main browser window listing each of the items.

Sage also allows you to customize the stylesheet it uses to render the posts. I like the two-column layout in the default feed, but I decided to create my own Sage stylesheet, which I’ve uploaded here. You’ll notice that its pallette is very similar to the one I use on this blog; it has lots of earth tones. I’ve used Futura as the primary font, which isn’t particularly Web-safe, but I’ve made this for myself, so I thought I would go crazy with the type.

To use the stylesheet, download it to your machine and put it in a folder that makes sense to you. I put it in my Firefox user profile folder. Then open the preferences for Sage, check “use custom stylesheet,” and browse for the appropriate file. From now on, Sage pages should render granola-style. You can also find more stylesheets on the Sage wiki.

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One of the widely reported issues surrounding Wikipedia is its utility as a research tool for children (and, sadly, undergrads). I finished high school before Netscape Navigator was released, so the idea of using the Web as a tool for grade school research isn’t really on my radar. Thinking back, I remember being pretty reliant on encyclopedias for school projects, but it’s a little hard for me to see teachers and parents encouraging students to use anything on the Web as a reference. As I’ve mentioned before, Wikipedia has a page that provides suggestions for students and teachers on how Wikipedia should be used in research. It seems like this page is either too hard to find for teachers and reporters, or news reports just ignore these suggestions.

Anyway, I ran across yet another newspaper article about the problems Wikipedia presents for school research. I get a little frustrated with these stories, since it’s clear to me that Wikipedia should only be cited as a source if you’re writing about Wikipedia. The article raises a good point about kids and Wikipedia that hadn’t occurred to me.

Ray Baker wrote that his son was doing a school report on salmon and used Yahoo! to search for information. “I was shocked by how many porn sites use normal everyday words as keywords, so a search will pick them up,” Baker said. After that, his son used Google to search, and one of the articles listed was in Wikipedia.

The article was well-written, Baker said, and the included outside links made it a valuable resource. He continued, “In my opinion, Wikipedia should be used in every school. Yes, some articles are not the best, but for the most part, it provides a wealth of information
and is constantly being updated — proof that ‘open source’ projects work and work very well.”

I’m a little concerned about the prospect of salmon fetish sites, but, on the whole this was enlightening. Now that Wikipedia has been agressive about requiring references, students can use it as a repository of links to other information and steer clear of porn for the most part.

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Weblogsky points to yet another post suggesting that MySpace’s ugly design is, in fact, responsible for its success. This time, Joshua Porter of Bokardo.com argues that the ease-of-use of MySpace is responsible for attracting hordes of users. I find this a little hard to swallow. Lately, I’ve been really frustrated with MySpace’s habit of hiding functionality. For example, the page that aggregates blog subscriptions is more or less hidden, unless someone has posted a new entry since the last time I checked the site. When a blog is updated, I get a “new blog subscription posts” message on my “home” page, which links to the blog aggregator, but I am otherwise unable to drill through and find this page. (MySpace has URIs that are difficult to decipher, so remembering the URI is out of the question.) A different, but equally annoying problem lies in posting bulletins. If I want to post a bulletin, the link to the posting page is not by “My Bulletin Space,” where I would expect it, but in a table for “My Mail.” If bulletins and mail are in different tables, then the bulletin link should be with the bulletins. Beyond these frustrating design choices, there is a vast amount of useless clutter on the MySpace home page. I really don’t care about uncool “Cool New People,” alerts on Helio, or importing my address book after I’ve done it. There are a variety of useful Greasemonkey scripts for fixing the design flaws on MySpace, but the nice folks at News Corp. should be addressing these as well.

I still contend that MySpace’s liberal policy toward overriding stylesheets and embedding media is the factor most responsible for its success.

MySpace media hysteria seems to be hitting its peak. I saw a hideous segment on CNN the other night that built on fears about child predators on the social networking site. I can understand why parents might be afraid about their children’s safety online, but how is this any different than the dangers of children using AOL and is this really the most interesting story to tell about the wildly popular site? The piece shared a few anecdotes about runaways and abuse victims using the site, then pulled in a clip of Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet and American Life project speaking about MySpace at a conference. In the clip she says:

These sites are incredibly important to teenagers. I heard a teenage boy who was otherwise relatively standoffish talk with a fervor about how the best part of his day was logging into his MySpace page and seeing if someone had commented him or had friended him.

In text, this seems like a relatively harmless description of how teens use MySpace, but the “predator” story angle combined with Lenhart’s histrionic performance make it seem that teens are helplessly drawn into the project. Although I hardly want to side with News Corp., the news media is being irresponsible about their reporting on MySpace and online activity in general, boiling everything down to child abuse and business reporting.

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Gabbly is a interesting project that uses Javascript to create chat windows on any given page. For example, you can browse to http://gabbly.com/http://infobong.com and chat on this blog. Of course, it’s unlikely that anyone would be chatting here, since I have so few readers. Since bOINGbOING is the most widely read English-language blog according to Technorati, I decided to check and see if there was a Gabbly chat going on there, but at that time, there was no one chatting. One nice thing about the service is that the chats seem to be persistent — you can see old chats even if everyone has left. It also allows you to embed chats into other sites. I tried to embed a chat window in LiveJournal and MySpace, but apparently those sites block iframes. It’s nice to discover MySpace blocks something other than HTML entities.

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TechCrunch says the new Google Spreadsheet isn’t public yet, but Google has a public preview available. Like GMail, it’s a Web-based productivity application, and it will allow you to import spreadsheets as Excel files or CSV (comma-separated values). At first, I thought a Web-based spreadsheet was a silly idea - they have to Web-ify everything? Then I thought back to TAing this past semester. The professor and I traded the same spreadsheet of student grades back-and-forth via email, so many times, it became difficult to keep track of changes. If the new Google Spreadsheet allows sharing between multiple users and version control, this could be an ideal solution for lightweight spreadsheet users (like me) who spend a lot of time sharing spreadsheets.

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I was reading this account of Tulsa’s used record stores in the 1970s and came across a passage that I thought would be interesting to non-Tulsans:

It was run by a nice older couple who looked like the last thing they should have been doing was bootlegging music next to an elementary school. While they sold new and used 8-tracks, cassettes, and reel-to-reel tapes, their bread and butter were these jukeboxes that had 8-track recording heads built in (these were not hot-wired garage collages; though I never saw these machines anywhere else, they were beautifully manufactured.) The trick was simple; you go in, find a bunch of hit songs you wanted, then put in your coins and buy a tape that was just the right length and you had your own customized 8-track tape version of a K-Tel album. I had a girlfriend who was hooked on these stupid tapes.

I like the turn of phrase “garage collages,” although I do think “garage bricolage” would roll off the tongue better. More interesting, however, is the memory of commercially produced jukeboxes with embedded tape recorders. Granted, these devices were made before the DMCA or even the Sony Betamax case, but I wonder how what non-infringing uses they could possibly have. The account doesn’t say whether or not this business was in operation before or after the 1976 copyright act - I wonder if there were provisions in the act that addressed these jukeboxes, or, since the 1976 codified Fair Use, these jukeboxes were an effort to take advantage of a perceived loophole in copyright law. (Maybe since the jukebox plays the music aloud in a public place, the user is arguably making a fair-use copy of a personal experience.) It’s not clear, either, if these jukeboxes were manufactured in the United States — maybe they were graymarket Canadian jukeboxes brought to my hometown.

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I’m stuck in an AppleCare phone support queue. (The power adapter for my iBook is running very hot.) The automated system told me the wait would be twelve minutes or less. The wait doesn’t bother me as much as the hold music. Perhaps Apple thinks Dave Matthews and Counting Crows is inoffensive as possible, but, personal tastes aside, it just sounds like high-pitched muck on a crackly cell-phone. I understand why they need music on the line - it lets the customer know the line is still live. What I don’t understand, however, is why they need to play really bad music. Moreover, these artists don’t really seem to tie in with Apple’s public image as a hip, arty company. I wonder if they could just use a series of inoffensive electronic pulses to remind customers they’re still connected without offending their sensibilities. Or if they didn’t want to hire a sound designer, they could use the music of a project like Loscil, which might not even be recognized as music by many listeners.

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