From Wednesday’s NY Times: Apple Offers Hi-Fi Sys­tem to Use iPod in the Home.

Apple Com­puter fur­thered its push into home enter­tain­ment on Tues­day with the intro­duc­tion of a high-fidelity stereo sys­tem for the iPod music player, as well as a new ver­sion of the Mac Mini com­puter with fea­tures for man­ag­ing dig­i­tal music and video.

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Had a good time this after­noon speak­ing to a lunch gath­er­ing at the Cen­ter for Inter­net and Soci­ety at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity. I put together a half-hour slide pre­sen­ta­tion, which will be released on pod­cast, titled, “War of the World Views: The clash between big media and cit­i­zens media.”

I had plenty of mate­r­ial to draw upon, both from Dark­net and from Our­me­dia. Showed one exam­ple of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism: Trusted Com­put­ing, cre­ated by Ben­jamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel and oth­ers in Ger­many. (It’s terrific.)

Then I showed three mashups (could have drawn from scores of them) and dis­cussed fair use in the dig­i­tal age: the Bush-Cheney debate; an anime mashup; and a Char­lie Brown mashup that isn’t on Our­me­dia because United Fea­ture Syn­di­cate won’t let it.

Prof. Lawrence Lessig was in the audi­ence and asked a ques­tion I hadn’t heard raised before: As sites build out licens­ing capa­bil­i­ties that pro­vide com­pen­sa­tion for artists when part of their work is used in a mash-up, does that under­cut the claims of fair use by those who don’t seek per­mis­sion and use the works anyway?

Great ques­tion. The answer is still unset­tled. I sug­gested that users would wel­come a nar­row­ing of the large fuzzy grey area that cur­rently con­fronts those who want to incor­po­rate cul­tural works into their own. The trend line toward pay­ing com­pen­sa­tion to artists for use of their works online is unmis­tak­able. We hope and believe that a grass­roots mar­ket­place can be built in a way that doesn’t crimp fair use rights.

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Chris Messina passes along word that Bar Camp Austin could use some donors. Writes Chris:

William Hur­ley has self-funded Bar Camp Austin (which pre­cedes SXSW) and is look­ing for a lit­tle coin to off­set the pecu­niary penalty of pay­ing it personally. ;)

He’s cur­rently fronting shirt and poster expenses and is look­ing to get a shut­tle back and forth between SXSW and Bar Camp on the order of $1800. As with the orig­i­nal Bar Camp, we’d like to limit indi­vid­ual
spon­sor­ship at $250/per per­son or orga­ni­za­tion (unless you want to buy a meal or round of drinks) so if you or any­one you know might be inter­ested in help­ing out, let me know! … Spon­sors will get a thank you
men­tion at the event (of course), list­ing on the wiki and elsewhere.

If you’re inter­ested in help­nig out, drop me an email.

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It’s a sad state of affairs when you’re too busy to even blog your own pub­lic appear­ances. But, bet­ter late than never. Here are two events I’ll be speak­ing at this week:

Today (Mon­day, Feb. 27) I’ll be giv­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion at Stan­ford Law School’s Cen­ter for Inter­net and Soci­ety from 12:30 to 1:30 pm.

Topic: When cit­i­zens media and big media collide

In recent years we’ve seen the emer­gence of new grass­roots media forms: text blog­ging, pod­cast­ing, Web­cast­ing, video blog­ging, and dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy as social media. What hap­pens when the cul­tures and val­ues of these vibrant new media forms bump up the real­i­ties of copy­right law and out­dated busi­ness prac­tices? One of the most strik­ing exam­ples of this dis­con­nect occurs in the world of mash-ups, a new art­form that com­bines ele­ments of exist­ing video and audio to cre­ate star­tling new works. How should web­site oper­a­tors deal with such cutting-edge cre­ations that may or may not fall under the tra­di­tional bound­aries of fair use?

Free: It’s open to all, and lunch will be served.

Where: Stan­ford Law School, Room 280B

Event #2:

Soci­ety for New Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Research will hold its first con­fer­ence March 2–3 in Palo Alto, CA. Here are the con­fer­ence ses­sions.

On Thurs­day, March 2, I’ll be par­tic­i­pat­ing on a panel titled, “Bound­ary Bat­tles: What is a Jour­nal­ist and Why Does it Mat­ter?,” though I’ll be sure it bears lit­tle resem­blance to the title. Other pan­elists are Tom Forem­ski, edi­tor, founder, pub­lisher, Sil­i­con Val­ley Watcher; Dan Far­ber, editor-in-chief of ZDNet, and Tom Abate, MiniMediaGuy.

This event isn’t free, but if you really need to get in, email me and I’ll see what I can do.

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Monday’s NY Times: Cyberthieves Silently Copy as You Type.

Oh, oh. A new breed of scum­bags emerges.

In some coun­tries, like Brazil, [phish­ing] has been eclipsed by an even more vir­u­lent form of elec­tronic con — the use of key­log­ging pro­grams that silently copy the key­strokes of com­puter users and send that infor­ma­tion to the crooks. These pro­grams are often hid­den inside other soft­ware and then infect the machine, putting them in the cat­e­gory of mali­cious pro­grams known as Tro­jan horses, or just Trojans. …

These crim­i­nals aim to infect the inner work­ings of com­put­ers in much the same way that mischief-making virus writ­ers do. The twist here is that the key­log­ging pro­grams exploit secu­rity flaws and mon­i­tor the path that car­ries data from the key­board to other parts of the com­puter. This is a more inva­sive approach than phish­ing, which relies on decep­tion rather than infec­tion, trick­ing peo­ple into giv­ing their infor­ma­tion to a fake Web site.

The mon­i­tor­ing pro­grams are often hid­den inside ordi­nary soft­ware down­loads, e-mail attach­ments or files shared over peer-to-peer net­works. They can even be embed­ded in Web pages, tak­ing advan­tage of browser fea­tures that allow pro­grams to run automatically.

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Today’s San Jose Mer­cury News has a Q&A with Joe Kraus about his wiki startup JotSpot: Help­ing peo­ple col­lab­o­rate online. Co-founder of Excite in new ven­ture to increase work­place productivity.

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Sun­day NY Times Mag­a­zine: In Toronto’s collective-happy indie-music scene, it seems as if every­one is with the band. Excerpt:

To call BSS a “band” is to sim­plify mat­ters dras­ti­cally. It’s more like a net­work, or, as Emily Haines, a some­time BSS’er and lead singer of the Toronto band Met­ric, put it, “some­where between a tribe and a cult.” Most of the mem­bers of BSS are also mem­bers of other bands that are released by Arts & Crafts. The very name con­notes what all the artists on the label have in com­mon: they are lo-fi, heart­felt, ironic, makeshift and as tightly inter­linked as the kids in a summer-camp lanyard-making ses­sion. The musi­cians play on one another’s CD’s (BSS can have between 9 and 17 musi­cians on a given track depend­ing on who shows up or what’s needed for a par­tic­u­lar song), a level of coop­er­a­tion and orga­ni­za­tion unusual in any popular-music scene, even one that might be summed up by the slo­gan above the bar code on BSS’s most recent CD: “break all codes.”

Wow, music for the new age. Won­der if Bro­ken Social Scene will be at SXSW?

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From my friend Micki Krim­mel at World­Chang­ing: Early this year, pro­duc­tion wrapped on the first fea­ture film to be shot entirely with cell phone cam­eras. Directed by South African film­maker, Aryan Kaganof, “SMS Sugar Man” is the story of a pimp and two high class pros­ti­tutes dri­ving around Johan­nes­burg on Christ­mas Eve. It was shot for less than 1 mil­lion rand ($164,000) in just twelve days.

Also see some brief dis­cus­sion on Metafil­ter. Thanks to Adam Fields for the pointer.

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Sun­day NY Times: Your Call Should Be Impor­tant to Us, but It’s Not

PAUL M. ENGLISH never imag­ined that a pet peeve would become such a cause célèbre. For more than four years, Mr. Eng­lish, a vet­eran tech­nol­o­gist and ser­ial entre­pre­neur, has main­tained a blog on which he shares every­thing from his favorite choco­late cake recipe to the best man­age­ment advice he’s received.

But last sum­mer, fed up with too many aggra­vat­ing run-ins with awful cus­tomer ser­vice, Mr. Eng­lish posted a blog entry that rever­ber­ated around the world: a “cheat sheet” that explained how to break through auto­mated inter­ac­tive voice-response sys­tems at a hand­ful of com­pa­nies and speak to a human being. He named the com­pa­nies and pub­lished their codes for reach­ing an oper­a­tor — codes that they did not share with the public.

The reac­tion was over­whelm­ing. Vis­i­tors to the blog began con­tribut­ing their own code-breaking secrets and spread­ing the word. The con­sumer affairs spe­cial­ist for The Boston Globe wrote about Mr. Eng­lish, who is now the chief tech­ni­cal offi­cer of Kayak.com, a travel search engine he helped to found, and gave his online cheat sheet main­stream atten­tion. That led to appear­ances on MSNBC, NPR and the BBC, an arti­cle in Peo­ple mag­a­zine — and more than one mil­lion vis­i­tors to the blog in Jan­u­ary alone.

So, this month, Mr. Eng­lish trans­formed his right­eous indig­na­tion into a full-blown cru­sade. He started Get Human, which he calls a grass-roots move­ment to “change the face of cus­tomer ser­vice.” The accom­pa­ny­ing Web site, www.gethuman.com, sets out prin­ci­ples for the right ways for com­pa­nies to inter­act with cus­tomers, encour­ages vis­i­tors to rate their expe­ri­ences (the site is to issue a monthly best-and-worst list), and pub­lishes many more secret codes unearthed by mem­bers of the move­ment. As of last week, the ever-expanding cheat sheet offered cut-through-the-automation tips for nearly 400 companies. …

The Get Human cheat sheet makes for enter­tain­ing — and mys­ti­fy­ing — read­ing. Want to reach an oper­a­tor at a cer­tain major bank? Just press 0#0#0#0#0#0#. Want to reach an agent at a big den­tal insur­ance com­pany? Press 00000, wait through a mes­sage, select lan­guage, 4, 0. Want to reach a human at a lead­ing con­sumer elec­tron­ics retailer? Press 111## and wait through three prompts ask­ing for your home phone number.

It would be funny if it weren’t so depress­ing — and such bad busi­ness. Count­less chief exec­u­tives pledge to improve their company’s prod­ucts and ser­vices by lis­ten­ing to the “voice of the cus­tomer.” Memo to the cor­ner office: Answer the phone! …

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Over at the Participant.net See It Now group blog, I posted this:

I’ve been spend­ing a lot of time with young, Net-savvy users
lately. Will these young peo­ple
join tra­di­tional news orga­ni­za­tions, or will they take a dif­fer­ent
route to par­tic­i­pat­ing in the media?

Increas­ingly, the answer is the latter.

Fewer
young peo­ple are look­ing to join news­pa­per news­rooms, given the
eco­nomic upheavals ahead for the indus­try and the unwel­com­ing cul­ture
that infests news­rooms’ approach to youths.

More and more young
peo­ple are feel­ing alien­ated and put off by the main­stream media. This
week’s Sacra­mento Bee ran a story titled, No room for news.  Today’s tech-savvy youths lack an appetite for tra­di­tional media.  Excerpt:

“It’s more inter­est­ing for me to log on to (Inter­net)
forum boards and see what other peo­ple … are say­ing about cur­rent
events than lis­ten to a report on the news for two min­utes that isn’t
very infor­ma­tive at all,” says Tay­lor Wang, a 23-year-old senior at UC
Davis.

Avi Ehrlich, a senior jour­nal­ism major at CSUS, put it
more bluntly: “We get exactly what we want when we want it instead of
some­body decid­ing for us what we need.”

I sus­pect they’re dead on.

We’re liv­ing in a tran­si­tional
time in which we’re mov­ing away from a media cul­ture of top-down,
tightly con­trolled, for­mu­laic, father-knows-best news struc­tures to one
that is more open, demo­c­ra­tic, dis­trib­uted, inclu­sive, infor­mal and
collaborative.

Let’s call it cit­i­zens media. Big-J
Jour­nal­ists often look askance at such grass­roots efforts, but the same
forces that have spurred the cre­ation of 28 mil­lion weblogs are now
play­ing out in fas­ci­nat­ing ways across the landscape:

At Ourmedia.org,  80,000 peo­ple have pub­lished nearly 150,000 works of per­sonal media in just 11 months. At South Korea’s OhmyNews, 40,000 cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists take part in the news equa­tion. Cit­i­zens have crafted 750,000 arti­cles for Wikipedia and its com­pan­ion cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism site, WikiNews.

Hyper­local news sites such as Baris­tanet, Coast­sider, IBrat­tle­boro, Free­NewMex­i­can, GoSkokie, H2Otown, Muncie Free Press, Beni­cia News and many oth­ers con­tinue to flour­ish, based on the pas­sions and inter­ests of a small num­ber of cit­i­zen pub­lish­ers. Cur­rentTV is based on the arrest­ing idea that we the peo­ple can cre­ate our own media. Par­tic­i­pant Pro­duc­tions is chan­nel­ing the same energy into Hol­ly­wood films and a series of blogs to engage the citizenry.

I turn reg­u­larly to cit­i­zen media sites such as Flickr, Now­Pub­lic and Metafil­ter to immerse myself in com­mu­nity media, grass­roots cre­ativ­ity and com­pet­ing points of view. Jeff Jarvis recently exam­ined the role of Howard Stern’s Howard 100 as alter­na­tive news. Grass­roots media activists are play­ing an active role in fill­ing the gaps
left by the main­stream media’s cov­er­age of the after­math of Hur­ri­cane
Kat­rina for the peo­ple of Louisiana. Oth­ers have formed meet-up groups
to col­lab­o­rate in mak­ing media. Dan Gill­mor has cre­ated a Cen­ter for Cit­i­zen Media that holds promise as a hub for col­lab­o­ra­tion and new ideas.

The main­stream media need to learn how to embrace these emerg­ing
media forms rather than how to route around them. These inde­pen­dent
out­lets bring a pas­sion, fresh voice, inge­nu­ity and con­science to their
work, some­thing that a large por­tion of the pub­lic believe tra­di­tional
news orga­ni­za­tions have lost.

Mil­lions of
peo­ple believe that tra­di­tional media insti­tu­tions have failed them in
pro­tect­ing the pub­lic inter­est and cov­er­ing sto­ries that hold mean­ing
for them. Increas­ingly, they will turn to the Inter­net — and in many ways cre­ate
their own news-making apparatus.

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