ReadWriteWeb

I was going to leave a comment at Lucas Gonze's weblog, but I may as well use trackback and hope he sees this. Lucas posted a follow-up to his "whine that policing unauthorized music on Webjay is turning into a huge drag". He is considering a form of community moderation (suggested by Seb Paquet). I thought "Jim" left an interesting comment in response to this. The last thing he said was:

"Of course, with webjay, there is a more black-and-white issue. Is the material obviously illegal or not?"

This touches on what I wrote the other day about not being able to link to Lucid 3 and other New Zealand music using WebJay. Following on from Jim's query, I'm wondering how much of popular music is available free online? For example, if I wanted to create a playlist of my favorite songs in the Billboard Top 100 this week, how many of those songs would be available to me as free links? Anyone know an estimate?

How about more 'niche' music - like for example New Zealand music? It would be really interesting to find out what is the ratio of free linkable songs (which I hereby christen with the acronym FLS) to songs you have to pay to listen to, for each genre of music. Does bluegrass for example have a higher FLS ratio than blues? The higher the FLS (Free Linkable Songs) ratio, the better.

Lucas Gonze, creator of WebJay, said today: "Policing unauthorized music on Webjay is turning into a huge drag. The problem is that I have to impose my puritanism on others, which is absurd."

By "puritanism" I presume he means being morally pure and obeying the law of music copyright. Now, I like WebJay and admire its goals of making it easy for people to create and share music playlists. But as yet I've not been able to 'dig' it. Partly it's because I don't have broadband at home. But mostly it's because I can't legally link to the music that I like. That is, I can't create the playlists I want to because so much of the music I like isn't freely available on the Internet.

Play it Strange and Lucid3

I'll give you an example. Recently I discovered a fantastic New Zealand band called Lucid3. They're a "funk-groove" rock n' roll band, fronted by a very talented woman called Victoria Girling-Butcher (singer/guitarist/songwriter). I discovered this band on a recent television music promotion for Play it Strange, a new charitable trust formed to encourage young kiwis "to make, and experiment in, music which will reflect NZ's unique characteristics, thereby encouraging creativity and innovation in NZ music". Play it Strange is a great initiative and to launch it they had a weekend-long showcase of New Zealand music on one of New Zealand's 3 major TV networks. Yes you heard right, 48 hours straight of NZ music on national free-to-air television! One of the advantages of living in a small country... that sort of thing would never happen in the US or UK (or even Australia for that matter, I suspect).

Anyway I saw Lucid3 during the Play it Strange launch and was blown away by them, so I bought their debut album Running Down The Keys. It's been out for a couple of years, so I'm slow off the mark. In fact their second album All Moments Leading To This was just released today and I intend to go and buy it at my earliest opportunity.

But, here's the thing. I can't point you to a legal full-length MP3 of any of Lucid3's singles. The best I can do is point you here, which has 45-second samples of some of their songs. And you can't really get the feel of this band within 45 seconds. They're a groove band, so almost by definition their songs take time to get into - because they're so laid back. And their songs are the kind that you need to hear in full to truly appreciate them, which is testament to Girling-Butcher's songwriting ability I think.

So even if I wanted to (and I do), I can't include Lucid3 and a lot of other kiwi bands in any WebJay playlist. It's frustrating for me as a user and it's frustrating to Lucas no doubt because it places limits on his service. But the thing which really gets me is that the band itself, Lucid3, is missing out on a pretty good opportunity for promoting their music to overseas punters. OK WebJay is a small drop in the sea in terms of numbers of users, but it's growing fast and you never know who is tuning in. Maybe the playlist which includes Lucid3 gets passed around the link chain of the Web and eventually a record company honcho in the States clicks on the link...

Song of the Week

Some people have gotten around this moral dilemma. One example from my blogroll is Keith Robinson's Song of the Week feature. Every week Keith uploads a song he likes to his custom-built Flash-based application, so his readers can listen to it. It's a nifty little feature and he gets good feedback from his readers on it. But interestingly, he doesn't pay any licence fees for the songs and he's not overly concerned with the legalities of it. He says:

"I think as long as you stick to one song from an album and go no further than that my guess is you’ll be fine. I doubt the Performing Rights Society would go after you for something like this, but that is just a guess."

He also points out elsewhere that he's promoting the artist and essentially doing them a favour. I agree (see above), but I'm not so sure as Keith that using only one song from an album is a legal defense. I probably wouldn't get it away with it using NZ music. One of the disadvantages of living in a small country is that it'd be relatively easy for NZ music copyright authorities to track me down and punish me for my 'crime'.

Moral of the Story

By not having the opportunity to legally link to music for playlists or 'song of the week' purposes, the users of the websites lose, the owners of the websites lose, and most importantly the artists loses (it's essentially an opportunity cost). Who wins? The bloody lawyers of course.

Unless... unless Lucid3 give me permission to link to a couple of their full-length songs for a playlist. That would make me happy. Hope for a free culture springs eternal.

I'm currently reading Lawrence Lessig's new book, Free Culture, which is available as a free download under a Creative Commons license. I'm only up to pg 64, but already I've discovered some great new ideas. One of them is "media literacy". This is the best definition I've found so far of media literacy:

"The ability to read, analyze, evaluate and produce communication in a variety of media forms (television, print, radio, computers, etc.)."

Lessig refers to it as "an expanded literacy - one that goes beyond text to include audio and visual elements" (pg 50). He follows this with a paragraph that really made me sit up and take note:

"Read-only." Passive recipients of culture produced elsewhere. Couch potatoes. Consumers. This is the world of media from the twentieth century. The twenty-first century could be different. This is the crucial point: It could be both read and write. Or at least reading and better understanding the craft of writing. Or best, reading and understanding the tools that enable the writing to lead or mislead. The aim of any literacy, and this literacy in particular, is to "empower people to choose the appropriate language for what they need to create or express." It is to enable students "to communicate in the language of the twenty-first century."

In a nutshell:

20th Century = Read-Only

21st Century = Read/Write

Now obviously this is exactly what I've been trying to promote on my own weblog over the past year, but it's only been recently (after my interview with Marc Canter in fact) that I've begun to appreciate that "personal publishing" goes far beyond writing. It's whatever form of multimedia is most suited to you, the Reader/Writer. 

Writing in Multimedia

Lessig goes on to tell a story about a group of kids from "a very poor inner-city Los Angeles school". They created multimedia projects to express themselves on a subject that was very relevant to them - gun violence. They used a combination of images, sound and text:

The project "gave them a tool and empowered them to be able to both understand it and talk about it," Barish explained. That tool succeeded in creating expression—far more successfully and powerfully than could have been created using only text. "If you had said to these students, ‘you have to do it in text,’ they would’ve just thrown their hands up and gone and done something else," Barish described, in part, no doubt, because expressing themselves in text is not something these students can do well. Yet neither is text a form in which these ideas can be expressed well. The power of this message depended upon its connection to this form of expression.

That last point is worth repeating: the power of a message is intimately linked to the medium it's expressed in. Sounds pretty similar to the famous McLuhan maxim, doesn't it: The Medium is the Message. This is how McLuhan described his famous soundbite in a 1969 interview (which I've written about before):

"...because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage -- that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio."

The bit I want to focus on here is where McLuhan says the message isn't the content itself, but the medium. In other words, how the content is expressed. It's the same thing Lessig is talking about when he refers to "the language of the twenty-first century" and it's composed of images, sound, text. In my words: Web technology is increasingly enabling people in the 21st Century to write using multimedia. Nowadays you can express yourself in whatever medium best suits you (nb: the plural of 'medium' in this sense is 'media').

And, as Lessig goes on to say, it's all about constructing meaning for yourself: "Text is one part - and increasingly, not the most powerful part - of constructing meaning." One of his interview subjects explains further:

"[But i]nstead, if you say, "Well, with all these things that you can do, let’s talk about this issue. Play for me music that you think reflects that, or show me images that you think reflect that, or draw for me something that reflects that." Not by giving a kid a video camera and . . . saying, "Let’s go have fun with the video camera and make a little movie." But instead, really help you take these elements that you understand, that are your language, and construct meaning about the topic. . . ."

The Future of Blogging

I've been following the recent activity over at Lucas Gonze's new music-logging website, WebJay. Seb Paquet and Jon Udell have been talking about it and Lucas and Alf Eaton have been developing musiclogging apps. I've played around with Webjay a bit, downloaded a couple of playlists, but I can't say I've fully groked it yet. But then sound isn't my main "language", even though I'm a big music fan in my own way (mention The Velvet Underground to me and you won't shut me up!). WebJay is an example of one new form of media expression that is popping up in the 21st Century. A lot of people potentially will grok it, because sound is their medium, and they'll go on to create playlists and so forth with WebJay.

Writing text will continue to be my main personal publishing medium. Words are my thing and I'm reasonably good at creating them. I can't draw or paint, and I can't make music. I don't know anything about film-making or taking photos. So I'll mainly stick with words...and weblogging the 'text way'. But other people are different. And that's where I think blogs may struggle to accomodate peoples innate creativity. Unless weblogs can morph into sound-visual-text multimedia publishing tools. Which perhaps they will, if Lucas' experimentation with the sound form is any indication of the future of blogging. I'll certainly welcome it, as I want everyone to participate in the Read/Write Web. Not just plain text people like me :-)

Hands up who wants to get rid of the word "blog"? I'm beginning to wonder whether the word "weblog" has outlived its purpose. But before you call the white coats, let me try and explain.

You see, blogging to me has always meant writing and linking. Seb Paquet has a much more comprehensive definition, but in a nutshell blogging is all about publishing your writing and links. Nowadays we're entering a stage in the Read/Write Web (aka the Two-Way Web) where publishing to the Web is much more than writing and linking. It's about music, photos, videos, audio, situated software applications, editing your Orkut profile, etc.

Not everyone is, or wants to be, a writer. Boy have I found that out, the hard way, in my career so far as a Web Producer/Online Manager. Content Management has always been a big challenge in managing an Intranet or Internet website. The trendy strategy in recent years has been "distributed content management" - whereby you deploy a big 'ol Enterprise CMS, whack up some templates, and hand it over to the business to maintain the content. Well, that's the way it's supposed to work. But in reality, the majority of business people have little motivation to spend their time fiddling around with a website. Even the best Enterprise CMS's have a learning curve and all of them have some technical glitches and gotchas. So content maintenance often falls back on the IT dept or a Web-savvy team that specialises in content maintenance.

Motivation really is the key word - most business people have no desire to write and publish content and it's usually not in their job descriptions. Jeffrey Veen wrote an excellent article recently on why Content Management Systems have failed - websites need Editors, he says. Websites are a publication and so they need specialist publishers to maintain them.

To get back to blogging, there is a correlation with Content Management in the business world. Weblogging tools have undoubtedly made it easier for normal everyday people to publish their content to the Web. Just like Enterprise CMS's make it relatively easy for business folk to create and maintain content on their company's websites. But here's the crux: even though people have the tools nowadays, a large majority of them still don't have motivation to use them.

So far, the blogging world has been mostly all about writing and links. Therefore people who like writing and linking are attracted to blogging. But that's a small percentage of people who use the Web. A lot of the general public, particularly the young and affluent, are already producing things on the Web. Music, photos, code, and so on. All they need is a vehicle to "publish" those things. For example, I know a few programmers who have some fantastic ideas about web development. But writing words isn't their forte - writing code is. So they tinker with code, make some notes, try out a few ideas - but all of this never gets published. Weblogs aren't quite the tool for that.

And here's where I come back to the word "blog" and why I want to kill it off. Because it's so ingrained now as meaning writing and linking, it doesn't express the full variety of things that are beginning to be produced and created on the Web by 'amateurs'. The phrase "personal publishing" does a better job of describing this new range of multimedia production.

In order for the personal publishing revolution to take off, I reckon we've got to break free of "the blogosphere" and propel ourselves into a new Universe of Personal Publishing. Sure, writing is my forte and I use my weblog primarily as a publishing tool. But there's a whole other world out there, ready to explore!

I might Go Quiet for a week or two following this post. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by blog reading and writing and maintenance. Time to set my focus back on family, work, contemplative writing (read: not seat-of-the-pants writing as blogging can get for me when Info Overload hits). Besides, I need to get stuck into my potential Digital Web article this coming week.

This is a late-Saturday night post and I'm feeling tired and run-down as I write this. So forgive me if it sounds jumbled. But actually it'd be in keeping with the theme of this post: Remixing. I've been following with interest the controversy about The Grey Album, which is a mix of 'The Black Album' by rapper Jay-Z and the classic 'The White Album' by The Beatles. The mix was done by DJ Danger Mouse and the controversy is that he did it without the permission of the copyright holders of the White Album, EMI.

The Grey Album is doing the rounds of the Web as a free download. I gave it a listen and thought it was a pretty good album in parts, but really it's much more interesting as a concept. It was a brilliant idea to mix two such diverse albums, one made by a black rapper in the 21st century (I presume) and the other made 30-odd years ago by a bunch of english pasties. And it's a marketing coup to call it The Grey Album, as a pun on the Black/White mix. Pop music has an interesting history of remixes. One of the best examples is the Run-DMC/Aerosmith song 'Walk this Way', which blended rap and rock and resurrected two careers at the same time.

I wonder if we could apply Remixing more to the weblog world. For example, I'd subscribe to a remixed Winer-Pilgrim weblog (RSS-Atom), perhaps DJ'ed by someone who crosses both worlds - e.g. Joi Ito. Or maybe a Scoble-Scrivens remix (developer world vs designer world), with Anil Dash pushing the buttons.

But seriously, what I'm leading up to is a plug for Greg Gershman's new Blogdigger Groups. It's a service that lets you create a new group RSS feed out of a selection of individual feeds. For example take a look at this feed - it combines a bunch of weblogs about comics into one single RSS feed to subscribe to. I haven't yet worked out the best way to use Blogdigger Groups, but there are a couple of paths I see it taking.

One is to utilise Dave Winer's idea about categorising. If you have an RSS feed for a certain category - say posts about John Kerry - and other people have RSS feeds about John Kerry, then a Blogdigger Group could be created which combines all those John Kerry feeds into a single RSS feed. You could also add search feeds - eg Bloglines has a feature that allows users to subscribe to search queries. So you could do a Bloglines search for "John Kerry" and add that to your Bloglines group.

Another idea is one that Lilia Efimova wrote about a few weeks ago - combining feeds of your collegues or a real-world group you belong to. Lilia's examples:

"15 latest posts from KnowledgeBoard bloggers" or "10 latest posts by my colleagues"...

In summary, Blogdigger Groups enables a kind of Remix Culture in the blogging world. We can mix and match RSS feeds as we (the "consumers") see fit. Perhaps future generations of tools like Blogdigger Groups will allow us to mix and match microcontent, much like a DJ scratching a rap song on top of a Beatles melody. So we not only mix feeds, we remix individual posts. My mythical Winer-Pilgrim remix may not be that silly an idea in a few years.

About a month ago Rogers Cadenhead called me an "information-remix junkie", which I quite liked. We are a generation of Web and blog addicts and information is indeed our 'fix'. As the great Velvet Underground song goes, I'm waiting for The Man!

Thanks to Peter Lindberg, for pointing me and others to a couple of Marshall McLuhan articles. But before I talk about those, here's an overview of Marshall McLuhan from the Wikipedia:

"Famous for coining the phrases "The medium is the message" and "the global village," McLuhan was one of the early purveyors of the sound bite. He asserted that each different medium affects the individual and society in distinct and pervasive ways, further classifying some media as "hot" - media which engaged one's senses in a high intensity, exclusive way, such as typography, radio, and film - and "cool" - media which were of lower resolution or intensity, and therefore required more interaction from the viewer, such as the telephone and the television. While many of his pronouncements and theories have been considered impenetrable, and by some absurd, McLuhan's central message that to understand today's world, one must actively study the effects of media, remains ever more true in the electronic age."

In the first article Peter linked to, Melanie Goux discovers why Marshall McLuhan's book was entitled The Medium is the Massage (rather than Message):

"Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter, it had on the cover "Massage" as it still does. The title should have read "The Medium is the Message" but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, "Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!"

The second article was a McLuhan interview from 1969 by Playboy Magazine, which sheds some light onto why McLuhan was so receptive to the above typo. McLuhan mentions the message/massage thing here:

"...because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage -- that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio."

If it's true that the title was a mistake, then Marshall McLuhan proved he was adept at running with the mistake and massaging it into a new idea. He could pick up words, load them into his 'ideas gun' and blow peoples minds. Further, the memes ricocheted into the lexicon of society.

McLuhan himself describes his thought processes like this:

"I'm making explorations. I don't know where they're going to take me. My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. But my books constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks."

This 'mapping of new terrain' is exactly what we're doing in the 21st Century with the Web. Whatever your interests, you can find and explore them on the Web. It literally is a Web of Ideas, which we're creating as we go. This reminds me of David Weinberger's book Small Pieces Loosely Joined, which I've just finished reading. Here is one nice quote from that book (pg 55):

"The Web place is defined by interest the way the real world is defined by the accidents of geography. Interest on the Web is, like the Web space itself, explosive, out-bound, digressive. The Web space is the opposite of a container."

It's a shame McLuhan wasn't around to see the World Wide Web - I wonder what such an original and probing mind would have made of it?

Not all of McLuhan's ideas have proven prescient and he is very hard to read sometimes. I remember trying to read The Medium is the Massage when I was at Varsity in the early 90's. I don't think I finished it then, so I must pick it up again. Not so much for the specifics of his ideas, for they are hit and miss. For example, McLuhan gave great wraps to television as an interactive "cool" medium:

"We could program five hours less of TV in Italy to promote the reading of newspapers during an election, or lay on an additional 25 hours of TV in Venezuela to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio the preceding month. By such orchestrated interplay of all media, whole cultures could now be programed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate, just as we are beginning to learn how to maintain equilibrium among the world's competing economies."

Of course history had other ideas - television turned out to be a passive one-way entertainment form. Or maybe it did control our emotions like McLuhan predicted, only not in a good way. But either way, it's not McLuhan's specific predictions that will endure. It's his observations about technology being an extension of our bodies that will continue to inspire us. McLuhan died a decade before the birth of the Web in the early 90's, and more than 20 years before the two-way Web emerged in the early 21st century. But his spirit guides us as we, his technological children, explore this exciting new world...

Blogging is a 21st century art form and right now it is the most vibrant creative outlet in society. Ideas flow like water in the blogosphere and Weblogs.com ticks over with updated posts every few seconds. Anyone can publish a weblog and that's partly what makes it so vibrant. But also, there is a pioneering energy about blogging - we're not sure what we're doing but we know it is significant. These thoughts occured to me as I was reading an essay by the Indian writer V.S.Naipaul, called 'Reading And Writing: A Personal Account'. In it Naipaul wrote that the novel as an art form was at its peak in the 19th century, when it was invented:

"For sixty or seventy years in the nineteenth century the novel in Europe, developing very fast in the hands of a relay of masters, became an extraordinary tool. It did what no other literary form - essay, poem, drama, history - could do. It gave industrial or industrializing or modern society a very clear idea of itself. It showed with immediacy what hadn't been shown before; and it altered vision. Certain things in the form could be modified or played with later, but the pattern of the modern novel had been set, and its program laid out.

All of us who have come after have been derivative. We can never be the first again[....]They are the first; they didn't know it when they began, but then they do know, and they are full of excitement at the discovery. That excitement comes over to us, and there is an unrepeatable energy in the writing."

Naipaul went on to say that there is "an air of discovery" about 19th century novel writing, that disappeared when the "originators" burned themselves out. In the 20th century, cinema was the new "universal art" according to Naipaul. I'd like to go a step further and state here that blogging is the 21st century's universal art. From my PC in New Zealand, I feel as if I discover a new idea every day reading weblogs. And, to paraphrase The Carpenters, weblogging has only just begun!

Blogging is on the cusp of becoming mainstream, like the novel did during the 19th century. Witness what is happening within US politics. One of the leading Presidential candidates, Howard Dean, has tapped into blogging as a way to garner votes. Dave Winer and Lawrence Lessig amongst others are exploring this significant new path for blogging.

Yes my fellow bloggers, it's an exciting era to live in. Aren't you glad you're an Originator? ;-)