November 16th, 2009

Should search engines pay tribute to content?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 2:43 pm

Categories: Google, Internet, business models, content, mass market

Tags: Google Inc., Search Engine, Rupert Murdoch, Journal, Internet, Search, Construction, Dana Blankenhorn

Tom Foremski, one of the good guys here at ZDNet, is out with a piece suggesting that Google fork over whatever Rupert Murdoch wants in order to keep indexing Fox News.

His argument is that losing access to regularly-updated content would be a big hole in Google’s business model, which is based on making everything out there available.

I have two problems with that:

1. If one publisher can force Google to pay for a link, so can every other publisher. Blackmail never ends.
2. Publishers have tried this before and failed. Including Murdoch.

I think the first point is more important. Foremski argues that newspapers get little traffic from Google. This is true, mainly because, as he notes, most still haven’t got a Clue when it comes to the Internet.

Google has already taken their wire service traffic away, signing side deals with major wire services like AP, posting those stories on Google pages, paying back the ad revenue. The only newspaper content left is local or beat-specific. Most traffic to those stories comes from the local area.

So if the traffic flow is modest, why should Google be paying? Just to protect its reputation?

There is no need to argue the point. We can run an experiment.

Let Bing or Yahoo pay Murdoch, and let Murdoch put robots.txt files on all his properties, keeping them away from Google’s crawlers. See what happens. If there’s real market share to be gained here, Google’s competitors will be happy to buy it.

On to the second point. Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have tried the paid model. The Journal maintains it, but offers links to the full-text of its stories, through Google. The Times gave up its Times Select program as a money-loser.

Yes, The Journal began its program before Google bought it. But I also remember a time, about a decade ago, when Fox site managers were transferring every link deep into their site to the home page. It was maddening. They stopped.

There’s some basic math at work here. The smaller your circulation base, the more specialized it is, the better off you’ll do with either a paid model or a registration model.

Lots and lots of journals allow only access to abstracts if you’re not a registered user. The New England Journal of Medicine is an example. And there are many publications only available to paying customers, who are notified of updates via e-mail.

The problem is that if you want a mass audience on the Internet, you have to make yourself available to a mass audience. Newspapers are mass circulation publications. Throwing up registration windows or pay walls hasn’t worked for them.

But, again, Murdoch (and every other publisher) is perfectly free to try. Just write a simple robots.txt file forbidding indexing. Poof, you’re invisible to the search engines’ spiders.

There’s no real controversy here, IMHO. Publishers are free to conduct what experiments they want with Google, either seeking to tweak it to get more audience, or block it to access a smaller, elite audience.

History says Murdoch is barking at the Moon. But he likes to write his own history. Let him try.

November 2nd, 2009

Blackboard embraces and extends into open source movement

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:09 am

Categories: Applications, General, Google, Implementations, Infrastructure, Strategy, business models, content, education, marketing

Tags: Open Source Movement, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Anyone seeking a case study of how a proprietary software company can “embrace and extend” itself into the open source world should stop thinking Microsoft and start thinking Blackboard.

(Picture from the University of Alaska. Bonus points if you find a link to Russia from the site.)

Blackboard has a long-running feud with open source, ably chronicled by our own Christopher Dawson. Open source Learning Management Systems (LMSs) like Moodle, Sakai and OLAT have been seeking its market share for five years now.

Part of the solution was to open source tools for use with its proprietary suite. Blackboard may have been overly-aggressive in pushing this as a true open source solution but it wasn’t finished yet.

Phase Two involves signing alliances with educators and lining up scaled resources from within the open source ecosystem.

Today’s news brings an example.

It’s a deal with Northwestern University (Go Wildcats) to integrate its Blackboard Learn platform within Google Apps as a single sign-on. The Building Block itself is open source, Google Apps is based on open source, but here’s the imprimatur of a major University (and big customer) linking a proprietary LMS into it.

Earlier this year Blackboard signed a deal with Flat World Knowledge, the open source textbook publisher we’ve written of here, to integrate Flat World textbooks with Blackboard Learn.

Given Blackboard’s position as a market leader, and its open source Building Blocks for handling the integration, the move by Flat World is logical and justifiable.

The result, however, is that despite open source a proprietary LMS is more entrenched than ever within its marketplace.

November 2nd, 2009

Wordpress picks up college newspapers with CoPress

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:35 am

Categories: General, Internet, business models, content, education, publishing

Tags: College, Wordpress, Content Management System, CoPress, Content Management, Enterprise Software, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

Drupal may be grabbing headlines by becoming the CMS of the White House, but WordPress is bound to be the CMS of a future President thanks to a deal it signed with CoPress.

CoPress, the brainchild of former University of Oregon editor Daniel Bachhuber, aims to build a vertical of college papers within the CMS market, with managed hosting and training.

(The original Oregon Duck mascot image was trademarked by The Walt Disney Co. Can you kids guess who it is?)

Bachhuber told Poynter Online that 21 colleges have already signed up, including the papers of Central Michigan, Michigan State, and Cal State Fullerton.

Papers now have a choice between rolling their own solution, joining CoPress, or working with the College Media Network, whose College Publisher is given away free in exchange for banner ad space.

This means free is battling open source directly within the college paper market. In addition to comparing features, CoPress is also arguing against CMN’s latest upgrade, and pointing out that it is building a community around contemporaries rather than delivering a top-down solution.

My own career in college journalism seems a world away from all this. During my freshman year at Rice the paper was actually set with hot type from a Linotype. They later switched to a photo-typesetting solution in which formatted type was printed and then glued to a piece of cardboard with pink plastic cut-outs showing where photos would go.

Before that, I broke away from my high school newspaper to create an opinion-based start-up, which leads to the real challenge facing college journalists in today’s online world, namely competing in their markets with every entrepreneur on campus.

If your start-up costs are nearly nothing what is the benefit of being the “official” college paper Web site?

October 26th, 2009

News Corp. prepares to destroy more online value

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:17 am

Categories: General, Google, Internet, business models, content, mass market, video

Tags: News Corp., OpenOffice, Social Networking, Open Source, Office Suites, Software, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Dana Blankenhorn

One thing I like about News Corp. is their utter online cluelessness.

One word. Myspace. When News Corp. paid $580 million for MySpace’s parent in 2005 it was the undisputed leader in social networking.  Now it’s an also ran.

News Corp.’s Photobucket once ruled online photo sharing. Now Flickr is catching up. Its Scout.com and Foxsports are being pushed hard by Rivals.Com and ESPN.

The main reason? News Corp. is impatient, it tries to monetize everything quickly, and thinks its unique content is worth paying for. No one’s unique content is worth paying for when there are ample alternatives.

So now News Corp. is pushing to ruin another potential online gold mine, Hulu. News Corp. owns 45% of Hulu, and is now screaming that it will make users pay for access, just as it will make them pay for access to everything else it owns.

The problem is this idea of make them. You can’t make people wear underpants online. When you charge people for something — anything — you cut your potential traffic by 90% or more. You become invisible to search engines, except for your main page, so you have to flog your own stuff.

Most of News Corp. is very bad at the whole competition thing anyway. Its whole schtick is to push a specific sensibility, to have a monopoly on that sensibility, but its online efforts don’t have that sensibility. They could monetize that sensibility if they wanted to play the niche, but instead they try to monetize what everyone else gives away.

If people really love Glenn Beck, in other words, you can make them pay for Glenn Beck. But you can’t make them pay for something they can get free down the street. Like news. Or sports. Or TV clips.

You can’t force the market. If you’re selling something others are giving away they won’t buy from you. The price you charge must be related to what everyone else charges. And if you try to make everyone else charge it’s called collusion.

What News Corp. is trying to do is like buying OpenOffice and sticking a $495 price tag on the box. Won’t work.

Why is News Corp. obsessed with charging people? Probably because their cost structure is out of line. YouTube, thanks to Google, has its costs under control. Until News Corp. can deliver costs close to that Hulu can’t compete.

So they blame you instead. Yes, you, greedy online consumer who expects something for nothing and chicks for free. It’s all your fault they can’t make money. But they’ll take it from you, force it out of you, make you pay.

Like I said, clueless.

October 25th, 2009

Drupal challenged as White House goes blog

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:59 am

Categories: Database Management, Development, General, Government, Internet, content, mass market, politics

Tags: Drupal, White House, Blog, Whitehouse.gov, Blogging, Government, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

Whitehouse.gov has been relaunched as a Drupal site.

The switch was designed to be transparent, but even a casual observer will note the site now features five separate blogs, and that officials’ names are now listed on announcements that read more like stories, often with personal details.

So it’s one small step for Washington, one giant leap for open source. Sites like Whitehouse.gov are the ultimate honeypots for hackers and script kiddies around the world. This is true regardless of the party in power.

What that means is that government programmers, the Drupal team, and the folks at its commercial arm, Acquia, are going to be very busy with real and imagined bug reports. It’s going to test their systems as well as the software.

Officials indicated that if the Whitehouse site works well Drupal could be in line for other government work.

October 13th, 2009

Wikipedia productized

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 9:20 am

Categories: Applications, General, Hardware, business models, content, marketing, mass market, publishing

Tags: Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, Wiki, Online Communications, Dana Blankenhorn

Perhaps no business has been so transformed by open source as encyclopedias.

The appearance of Wikipedia, and its many cousins, rivals and inlaws, has wrecked the business. Even giant Microsoft’s Encarta has succumbed, as of the end of this month.

We all know the jokes about Wikipedia’s accuracy, but since it beat the Encyclopedia Brittanica in a blind taste test nearly four years ago attention has focused more on making it better, or creating rivals to it, than knocking the idea of open source, crowdsourced content.

And now it’s in a box. Meet the Wikireader.

It’s about the size of a portable alarm clock, with a one-color screen, a MicroSD card, and a touchscreen with three buttons, running on two AAA batteries. Update the card on the company’s Web site or they’ll send you four updates a year for $30. The retail price is $99.

The designer is Sean Moss-Pultz, last seen helming the failed OpenMoko mobile phone project. It’s cute, and it has enough marketing muscle behind it to have a chance.

Will we see it under your Christmas tree this year? Maybe you know a kid who can use it, or a know-it-all relative.

It’s also part of a general trend, specialized, mass market devices designed to access just one piece of the Web. Certainly a trend worth watching.

I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of owning a really fine set of encyclopedias (my office has one from 1883) and I don’t know if you’d call Wikipedia fine. But at $99 it’s cheap as chips.

October 5th, 2009

What Everyblock owes Knight after its open source success

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:36 am

Categories: Distributions, GPL, General, Internet, business models, content, venture capital

Tags: Journalist, Founder, MSNBC, Everyblock, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

The Knight Foundation, as part of its efforts to improve online journalism, gave a $1.1 million grant for the launch of Everyblock in 2006.

Everyblock used the money to build a GPL code base that aggregates local information for use by news sites. Here, for instance, is its recent report on my home zip code.

Last month, however, Everyblock was acquired by MSNBC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but should Knight get its money back, even a little of it?

A better question might be, is there any money to get? In making the announcement the Everyblock blog indicated it was really looking for a way to sustain itself after the Knight money ran out, and MSNBC’s investment will go mainly into making the site more valuable.

And the code is still available, all of it, under the GPL.

Founder Adrian Holovaty is mainly involved these days with another open source project, Django, and his own post on the deal drew a string of attaboys from around the world. There are no reports of him tooling around his home town of Chicago in a fancy car, buying fancy threads, building a fancy home or buying Oprah Winfrey dinner.

It wasn’t that kind of acquisition.

Despite this some journalists who commented at the Nieman Lab blog posting about the deal seemed to have a feeling of seller’s remorse. One asked whether all the code was released. Another asked whether revisions to the code would remain open source.

All this upset Holovaty, who responded within the thread that the charges are not true. All the code was released, he said, and he has given Knight kudos in every interview.

At the Online News Association show in San Francisco, Knight journalism program officer Gary Kebbel said future grant language will change. Again, he was not specific.

Andrew Hazlett noted that when “The Civil War” became a huge hit producer Ken Burns repaid much of his grant money. But Everyblock is not “The Civil War”.

There is an assumption among journalists that when a company is acquired its founders become rich. This often happens. More often, founders just breathe a sigh of relief knowing they have survived the experience and their baby has found a new home.

Some statement from MSNBC about the financial facts would probably end the speculation, my guess being that they only paid enough to sustain the project. And MSNBC’s future generosity to the Knight Foundation might be worth a press release as well, whenever that occurs.

But this jealousy by journalists is unseemly and based on ignorance.

In the world of open source projects move from non-profit to for-profit sponsorship all the time. It is normally considered a good thing. It is not a sign the original sponsors are bad. It means they have a solid structure in place to keep development going.

It’s an illustration of just how far journalists live from the real world that they could get jealous over good news.

September 4th, 2009

How an open source camera will change photography

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:16 am

Categories: Apple, Applications, Development, General, Hardware, content

Tags: Software, Open Source, Camera, Marc Levoy, Dana Blankenhorn

What Stanford calls the Frankencamera does not look like much.

It’s big and clumsy and you don’t get much better performance as a result of that.

(This is a close-up from our Crave blog. The hands are those of graduate student Andrew Adams. No word on whether he’s related to Ansel.)

But because the new camera is based on a Nokia N95 smartphone, whose software is licensed by the open source Symbian Foundation, it can become a lot more.

Professor Marc Levoy plans to release a complete implementation for the camera in a year, a platform on which apps can be built.

Already he has created software for the camera that does things no commercial camera can do, like extend its “dynamic range” so all distances are optimally lit, and enhance the resolution of videos with still images.

The applications are endless, going well beyond hobbies.

Cameras that take pictures of speeders could have programs that enhance and re-take those images on cars that try to gray-out their license tags to avoid detection. Any attempt to evade photo detection might be automatically countered with the right combination of hardware and software.

It seems amazing that no camera company has yet sought to build an ecosystem based on software, but this is an area where open source really can innovate, since every application will be a new one.

Open source smart phone groups like Android, LiMo and Moblin should all be anxious to replicate what Levoy is doing in their phones.

One point Levoy did not make is that the Frankencamera software could be integrated with existing open source imaging software, like The Gimp, so developers of those programs can jump-start the ecosystem.

Levoy’s idea is also so obvious it’s impossible to believe a proprietary company can’t adapt it quickly enough.

How soon before we see camera apps at the Apple app store?

August 31st, 2009

Should open source hate Apple?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:31 am

Categories: Apple, FOSS, General, Microsoft, content, mass market, politics

Tags: Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Digital Rights Management (DRM), Open Source, Digital Media, Security, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Dana Blankenhorn

No.

Apple is not the dominant computing platform.

It’s true that Apple is just as proprietary a company as Microsoft. Some might say more so. But there is a big difference between competing with proprietary products and holding a monopoly with them which you use to keep open source down.

There is a reason that history records a case called U.S. vs. Microsoft. Microsoft has both a monopoly and a proven record of using its power to keep open source from gaining a foothold.

Apple, meanwhile, has just a 10% share of the operating system market. Sure, if they had more they might be dangerous, just like if I looked like Antonio Banderas I might be a movie star.

Microsoft did not really change its tune after the court case wound down.

• Microsoft subsidizes the channel so every PC in the store runs Windows, even netbooks where that’s more trouble than it’s worth.
• Sharepoint is designed specifically to extend its monopoly.
• Remember the OOXML standards battle, where Microsoft corrupted the standards process itself to maintain control of the applications market?
• The Novell deal, in which Linux vendors admit that 2+2=5 so Microsoft won’t assert non-existent  patent claims against them, still gets me mad every time I think about it.

Now it’s true that Apple supports Digital Rights Management (DRM), and limits what users can do. The Free Software Foundation is dead set against DRM. But this was the industry’s price for even letting Apple offer  a product like the iPod.

The music industry’s reaction led to Apple offering to forego DRM and may be the biggest victory open source won in this decade.

Or take the iPhone. Sure it’s designed to enforce AT&T’s control of bits, and in so doing enforce Apple’s control of what you do with the device. But it’s the Apple-AT&T relationship that is objectionable. The handset market is increasingly competitive.

The whole idea that the Free Software Foundation should go against Apple rather than Microsoft, then, is a straw man. Apple may want the control over users and markets that Microsoft has enjoyed this decade, but it doesn’t have that control, nor is it likely to achieve it.

August 25th, 2009

What really happened to Wikipedia

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:21 am

Categories: General, Internet, content, management, publishing

Tags: Wikipedia, Processes, Wiki, Online Communications, Dana Blankenhorn

Money happened. Success happened.

Over the last few years the Wikimedia Foundation has built a board with some serious street cred, climaxing with the appointment of venture capitalist Roger McNamee to its advisory board  in January . Money has been rolling in.

Wikipedia long had to rely on the nickels and dimes of contributors to keep the servers on and the bandwidth bills paid, but now those nickels and dimes are turning into serious change, and it is becoming a darling of the philanthropic establishment.

On its own the Foundation raised $6.2 million worth in 2008. (Full disclosure. I threw in a few of them. About $50 if I recall correctly.) Such early money is indeed like yeast. It lets the dough rise. So here is $300,000 from the Ford Foundation. And $500,000 from the Hewletts.

The influx of money and talent has allowed Wikimedia to get its head up out of the day-to-day and focus on the longer term. Plus, with 3,000,000 articles and counting (just in English) the absolute growth rate is slowing.

It’s not, as The New York Times snarked, that “as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.” It’s more like a couple that owns its house and has come into some money. Out with the garage sale cabinets, let’s make a serious Ikea run.

No one is making big money here. But some digital plumbers and electricians and framers and painters are getting some work, turning the resource into something that will stand the test of time.

The first bit of renovation will come on one of the most controversial and bug-ridden parts of the house, living people. The aim is to put a process together that can end the back-and-forth between friends and enemies on your Wikipedia page.

Or mine.

I had a personal run-in with a Wikibully. Someone who didn’t care for me tore my reputation on Wikipedia to shreds. I finally rewrote the whole thing to my own liking. Recently the whole article was taken down.

But here’s the good part.

All the official actions related to the page are, for the first time, transparent and identified as to who did what. This person took the page down first, this one restored it, this one took it down again. Processes are being built by which such decisions can be managed and defended. What was arbitrary is becoming arbited.

That’s important because Wikipedia is becoming more than a source of articles on Japanese anime. As I found in rewriting my 2002 book on Moore’s Law recently, Wikipedia is our best hope of fighting link rot. It’s a source you know you can link to, an address that is unlikely to disappear, or go behind a paid firewall.

Like the Internet itself, like open source itself, Wikipedia is growing up. This is something to be celebrated. Regardless of what happens to your personal page.

August 21st, 2009

Google Books sued by a pig, cat and dog

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:07 am

Categories: General, Google, Legal, Microsoft, content, mass market

Tags: Google Inc., Internet Archive, Litigation, Internet, Business Operations, Dana Blankenhorn

When it comes to digitizing books and offering readers and writers a business model, Google has planted the wheat, harvested it, threshed it, ground it, and baked it.

Now Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo think they each deserve a big slice of bread. They are taking the hen to court in order to get it.

The effort, led by attorney Gary Reback, to challenge Google’s deals with writers and publishers for digitizing “orphaned works” that are copyrighted but no longer published is less lawsuit than business by another name.

The aim here is not to help writers make money. Once a work is online it’s as available as it’s ever going to get. The idea is to get Google’s rivals a cut of the deal.

The three say they’re standing behind the Internet Archive, which also wants Google’s deal without paying for it. (The Archive in this case is played by a duck.) And in theory there is no reason an easy settlement can’t be reached. With five companies involved each firm’s piece of the costs is a lot less than it was with just Google fronting things.

Something tells me, however, that’s not going to happen. The Archive’s claim is based on the fact that Google has the money to pay for digitizing (about $1 per book), it does not, but it should have the same rights to the result. That’s silly.

So is the Open Content Alliance’s claim that Google is trying to create a “monopoly” and “rewrite the copyright law.” We are talking here about solving a problem created by long-lived corporate copyright, the fact that books now become economically worthless long before they become legally available.

Google’s solution is pretty elegant. It’s free money to authors, or those to whom they have assigned copyright, and the greatest freedom possible for readers given the stupid requirements of that law.

Are authors going to get a better deal from the lawyers for Duck, Pig, Cat and Dog? Is such a deal being offered? If there is I’m all ears. But if not why should I, as an author, care except for the fact this stalls the deal and perhaps means there’s no deal at all?

August 20th, 2009

Some 40,000 college students studying on a Flat World

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:16 am

Categories: General, Internet, business models, content, education

Tags: Textbook, E-books, Personal Technology, Dana Blankenhorn

Remember Flat World Knowledge?

I interviewed CEO Eric Frank a year ago about his plan to deliver e-book textbooks free to college kids, and about the business model he claimed would still spin money for the textbooks’ authors.

In March Flat World got $8 million in funding, and the news is they now claim 40,000 kids are using their stuff.

This is the tip of the iceberg, David Weir of BNET writes. The number could grow five-fold in a year and the total market is 17 million students.

So far the company has focused solely on business and economics textbooks. But it now has 32 titles in development covering basic subjects like psychology, sociology and genetics.

Instead of paying $100 for the textbooks you need in a class, Flat World claims its customers pay an average of $18. In addition to the free download students can buy a PDF version, a printed version (black and white or color), even an audio version. (My eldest is dyslexic — this is big news.)

Flat World is being followed into the market by a host of competitors, like Chegg and BookRenter. This may be the best news of all.

While the material is subject to copyright, it’s called open source because it’s freely available for download on the Internet.

When I spoke to Frank last year he mentioned several other ways to monetize the content, from testing guides to online chats with book authors. So you might think of this as more of a Priceline model. Students can name their own price for textbooks, actually spending more than they do now if they want ancillary services, or spending nothing at all.

August 19th, 2009

Writers who call MPAA or RIAA awful need to look in the mirror

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:24 am

Categories: General, Google, Government, Internet, Legal, content, mass market, publishing

Tags: Google Inc., MPAA, Advertisement, RIAA, Christopher Buckley, Internet, E-books, Personal Technology, Dana Blankenhorn

Powerful interest groups representing musicians, movie moguls, and even TV have been fighting the copyright wars for years and losing.

(Who is reading the paper? Find out at the bottom of this post. Picture from Expedient Means.)

They win in court, and governments are aligned with them. Individuals who stand against them on grounds of principle are slapped down hard.

But that hasn’t stopped the Internet or Moore’s Law. These powerful interests have had to realign their business models to deal with the new reality.

There is a micro-payment model called advertising and if your stuff is not online and available it does not exist.

This has not stopped some writers, some agents, and some academics from tilting at Google’s windmill.

After years of negotiating with the Authors Guild and publishers, Google last year offered the authors of “orphan works,” copyrighted but no longer published or sold, free money.

For $125 million it won the right to digitize books, and while it will offer excerpts free, the whole books must be paid for, with 63% of the money (including ad money on the free looks) going to publishers and authors.

Google takes the risks, Google pays the costs, Google does all the marketing and distribution, while you get more than half the money for sitting on your rear end. Pretty sweet, huh?

Too rich, say some University of California professors. Not rich enough, say some authors, and you’re giving Google a monopoly, complain librarians. You should have negotiated with us instead, claims the William Morris Agency.

Trouble with all this is you can opt out. If you don’t like the deal for the old crap you can’t give away along I-75, say so and it will be taken down. Publishers of orphaned works, which aren’t making money, can’t opt-out en masse, because they relinquished a lot of publishing rights when they stopping publishing.

Christopher Buckley says he opted out because he’s ornery. He’s also still selling books.

This isn’t about your stuff anyway, Chris, but keeping alive such classics as pup’s God and Man at Yale.
How are tomorrow’s young conservatives going to discover what is eventually out of print? And when Google sells a copy or sells an ad next to the good parts, you get a cut. Free money.

Far from settled? Of course. A judge has to approve it. But if you expect Google to negotiate with you individually for your out of print crap you’re just being silly.

Any other e-book publisher — Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, etc. — can easily negotiate with Google to pay a share of its costs and get the same deal. If Google balks sue. This deal is non-exclusive.

I should add that my own out-of-print magnum opus The Blankenhorn Effect is presently available at Google Books, and when my update is done (later this month) I very much hope to do an Internet publishing deal for it and save a tree or two.

The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan said, and the message of the Internet is pretty clear. Make it available and maybe, if you’re lucky, someone will learn something from it. Don’t make it available, and it will cease to exist. (McLuhan still exists. That’s him behind the paper.)

August 18th, 2009

Can tr.im find the right open source model

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:40 am

Categories: Applications, Internet, content, mass market

Tags: Twitter, Tr.im, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Tr.im, a URL-shortening service that tried (and failed) to become the default on Twitter (which chose bit.ly) has, after flirting with a sale or closure, decided to go open source.

It’s all explained in a blogalicious post from co-founder Eric Woodward, who said that by September 15 Nambu will become an open source project offering its software under the GPL-compatible MIT license.

URL shorteners have been around for years, but the need for them became critical with the rise of Twitter, with its SMS-like 140-character message length. Twitter’s importance can be seen in a chart credited to Tweetmeme showing bit.ly with an 80% market share following its Twitter tie-up.

John Borthwick of Bit.ly told ReadWriteWeb that the Tr.im community will face an immediate problem of scaling. Scaling will take cash.

If a community can deliver cash, however, Tr.im could return some important value to the open source community and to the larger Web.

With the software open source any Web site will be able to offer its users URL shortening or incorporate that into its service. Tr.im also wants to work with Gnip.com to make aggregate anonymized user data available free.

While I applaud open source, I wonder whether the “community” model of open source is the one Tr.im really wants to pursue, since so much of its value seems pointed toward businesses. Communities are great for delivering volunteers and users, not so great for delivering the green.

Perhaps an alliance of businesses could support Tr.im on a model like that of Eclipse, or a scaled business could sponsor the project, delivering the relatively small amount of cash Tr.im needs to grow through open source.

July 22nd, 2009

Kaltura launches open source video platform

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 9:00 am

Categories: Applications, Distributions, GPL, General, Internet, content, publishing, video

Tags: Online Video, Video, Corporate Communications, Open Source, Marketing, Dana Blankenhorn

At OSCON in San Jose, Kaltura announced the public launch of its open source online video platform, called Kaltura Community Edition.

It is currently available for download at Kaltura.org under the GPL Affero license.

The software lets businesses and other organizations host their own video video collections, which can be integrated with open source community network programs like WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, MindTouch or Moodle.

The platform supports all the functions needed by an online video publisher, including easy import of videos, editing, streaming, and support for advertising. In addition its Kaltura Network includes re-mixable content under the Creative Commons BY-SA license, including 600,000 images from the New York Public Library.

Kaltura, an Israeli company, has its U.S. headquarters in New York City. The business model, as with other corporate open source projects, combines a hosted SaaS version of the software and commercial video services such support packages, streaming, hosting, and backup.

The launch follows an Open Video Conference Kaltura hosted in June in New York. The company is part of the Open Video Alliance.

July 20th, 2009

Wikipedia push for Ogg Theora

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:18 am

Categories: General, Internet, content, mass market, video

Tags: OGG, Video, H.264, Wikipedia, Ogg Theora, National Portrait Gallery, Wiki, Corporate Communications, Online Communications, Marketing

Wikipedia’s decision to support Ogg Theora for video uploads may be the last chance to break the proprietary video monopoly embodied in H.264.

Microsoft, Google and Apple have all built H.264 support into their products because it readily adapts to Digital Rights Management, without which studios and other video rights owners have been unwilling to make content available online.

Wikipedia’s support of Ogg Theora will place extra steps in front of those who wish to upload video to Wikipedia, but the support of Fireogg, a Firefox plug-in, may alleviate the problem.

Ogg Theora allows downloading, re-mixing and uploading without payment of license fees. It is embedded in the VLC player, which reached Version 1.0 earlier this month.

Our Josh Lowensohn says Google is sniffing that Ogg Theora does not deliver video that is as good as H.264, but now for the first time you can be the judge of that.

Wikipedia is a natural fit for this fight because it supports open source content aggressively, as witness its current battle with the UK’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), which threatened legal action after 3,300 images it digitized were uploaded to Wikipedia.

The response by Wikipedia deputy director Eric Moeller could be summarized as “Nuts“:

The NPG believes that the slavish reproduction of a public domain painting without any added originality conveys a new full copyright to the digital copy, creating the opportunity to monetize this digital copy for many decades. The NPG is therefore effectively asserting full control over these public domain paintings.

That may also be his response to the Hollywood-Silicon Valley embrace of H.264 and DRM. Does Wikipedia now have the heft to win this battle, and give open source video an opening in the market?

July 19th, 2009

Amazon uses 1984 to free e-books

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:52 am

Categories: General, Government, Legal, Strategy, content, mass market, publishing

Tags: Outrage, Amazon.com Inc., Rights, E-books, Sales Force Management, Productivity, Digital Rights Management (DRM), Government, Personal Technology, Sales

Amazon.com is not a stupid company, nor is it naive.

CEO Jeff Bezos knows that the biggest hurdle e-book readers face are DRM schemes and copyright regimes  that differ from country to country.

So in letting Americans download copies of 1984 that were outside the local regime to their Kindles, then having them erased remotely, Amazon created a highly-publicized cause celebre that may finally bring reform.

Sure, Amazon was within its rights. Rights are not the issue here.

Right and wrong is the issue.

We all know that, in the global world of the Internet, a national law is a local ordinance. These ordinances are often complex, contradictory, and exist solely to protect local monopolies.

In this case the monopoly is copyright, which extends practically to infinity in the U.S., thanks to the Walt Disney Co., but is held to a reasonable length in other countries.

It’s America’s penchant of giving corporations greater rights than individuals which is at issue here, and 1984, as a book, is a great place to make that point. Author George Orwell also wrote Animal Farm, whose best-known line, “some pigs are more equal than others,” applies superbly to the case.

If the intent of copyright is to create an incentive for people to create, why should that incentive last 75 years past the life of the creator? There is no reason, except for the fact that corporations now hold copyright in the U.S., and corporations are immortal because when they die they pass their assets on to other companies.

Amazon knows that uniform rules are in everyone’s interest, especially Amazon’s. By enabling this outrage, creating this outrage, then apologizing for this outrage, and promising not to repeat it, Amazon puts pressure on both publishers and governments worldwide to create a reasonable, global copyright regime, so ebooks and books operate under identical principles.

It was definitely the computer industry play of the week.

July 17th, 2009

What open source government data gets you

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:49 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Internet, content, management, politics

Tags: Attitude, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Early this week I was surprised to wake up and find my wife at the front door.

She likes to leave home early and beat the crowds on Atlanta’s transit system, MARTA.

But on Tuesday, her train was stopped near downtown. It sat on the tracks for an hour before she got out, walked to the other track, and decided to work from home.

I spent the rest of the morning trying to find out what happened. MARTA never released the information, and with local news staffs cut to the bone, no one pressed them on it.

Contrast this closed source attitude with what Portland’s TriMet system has done.  By simply releasing their schedules to the public as data files they have encouraged third-party developers to create a host of mobile apps for riders.

The apps, in turn, encourage riders, even regular riders, to keep a link to TriMet on their phones, on their person. Then, if there is trouble, TriMet has a channel through which it can quickly report what has happened, what is being done, and how riders can route around it.

What makes the difference is the transit system’s attitude toward its route data. When you take a proprietary attitude, as MARTA does, riders are left in the dark. An open source attitude, like TriMet’s empowers riders.

This attitude of convenience also leads to more satisfied customers and greater political support. MARTA would love to expand into other counties, and it needs to push through a fare increase. Imagine what an open source attitude toward its data might make in that effort.

And consider what it might do for your local governments as well.

NOTE: A hat tip here to my late friend, Russell Shaw. After leaving Atlanta for Portland in the late 1990s he liked nothing more than regaling me with tales of how much better life was there. I heard his voice in my head as I wrote today, and it made me smile.

June 18th, 2009

Where is the power in ebooks?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:38 am

Categories: Applications, General, Hardware, Internet, business models, content, mass market, publishing

Tags: Web, E-books, Personal Technology, Dana Blankenhorn

Amazon’s release of Kindle source code, coming alongside its complaints about Google Books’ legal agreement, brings up the interesting question of where the power lies in the ebook market.

Is it in the look-and-feel of the device? Is it in the content? Is it in the standard? (Picture by David Carnoy for CNET.)

While all these are important, I have another idea of where the power lies. I think it lies in connectivity.

As good as the Kindle is, as good as Google Books are, they are in the end books. They are mere digital representations of an analog product, complete with footnotes.

But an ebook can be more. It should be more, and before it becomes the standard reading interface it will be more.

I have a little demonstration of this future in my PC right now. It’s an updated version of my 2002 least-seller The Blankenhorn Effect. I have retitled it Moore’s Lore: How Better and Better gets Faster and Faster.

What gives this book its value? Hyperlinks.

Instead of footnotes, I’m checking references online, and changing those which disappeared since the first edition. Then I’m embedding the final links in the text as hyperlinks. The final product is an .odt file, but is easy to turn into a .html file, or a Kindle file, any other kind of file you want.

The key is I did not design this book for print. I designed it for electronic use. The ebook reader which is best for this book has an open interface to the Web, so readers can double-check anything with a click and start their own adventures with the content.

In editing the book, by the way, I found one of the biggest changes in the Web this decade has been Wikipedia, but not for the reason you think.

Wikipedia reduces the problem of disappearing links. The entries there have more stable paths than links to corporate Web sites, or even some news sites. This makes them handy as references.

Back to the reader. Amazon’s Kindle has limited Internet connectivity, designed for the downloading of books from the Kindle Store. I need more. I need to reach from the book outward toward the Web. And I need that capability to be as transparent as it is on this Web page.

The real power of an ebook lies in its connection to the Web. Hyperlinks give books that fourth dimension they have lacked for 600 years. 

If we’re going to lose the great interface of a summer read, it should be for something that offers more than the feel of a good book can give you. Connectivity is the killer ebook app.

June 16th, 2009

Data and software both want to be shared

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:04 am

Categories: General, Internet, Legal, business models, content, mass market, publishing

Tags: Creative Commons, Web, Data, Wikipedia, Wiki, Open Source, Web 2.0, Online Communications, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

Early in my career my wife and I were privileged to spend some time with Ted Nelson (right), whose Project Xanadu pre-dates Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web paper by nearly three decades.

We met soon after his publication of Literary Machines, and he was passionate that night on the issue that hypertext should protect intellectual property rights.

As we know the Web doesn’t. Nelson wanted ownership meta-data to follow text so the provenance of ideas could always be audited. Berners-Lee essentially offered a stripped-down version of SGML, a document mark-up language, sort of the way MS-DOS was a stripped-down Unix.

Critics of the open source idea have often called it an attack on IP rights, but as Tim O’Reilly wrote over a decade ago it’s really about building a structure under which those rights can be shared, not disregarded.

On his latest podcast, O’Reilly extends this idea to data, which he says is really more important. Wikipedia, for instance, or any good wiki, may be a more important phenomenon than Linux or Open Office, because it extends the open source ownership regime to data, and in the end data is what counts.

Wikipedia, in turn, is covered by a Creative Commons license, which tries to do for collections of data what the GPL did for collections of software. That there are several types of CC licenses reflects the fact that software licensing came first, and the CC founders wanted to support both BSD-like and GPL-like data licensing, even custom licenses.

My point today is that Nelson’s original concept — the strict control of IP rights through technology — was flawed. Few men are islands. Few really ginormous undertakings — like Linux or Wikipedia — can be the creation of one person. They’re a collective endeavor, requiring a legal framework that recognizes this.

The Internet, the Web, and Creative Commons all come from the same root, the idea that we share first, then figure out a framework under which that sharing can be formalized and everyone’s contribution respected.

And this may be the key to seeing who wins the Web 2.0 wars. MySpace is laying off people because it failed to get this balance right.

As with software, people want some control over their data, but they also want to share it so it can grow into something larger. The open source concept applied to data, embodied in the Creative Commons license, may well be the key to unlocking the value of Web 2.0.