It’s available for free download from Technology Evaluation Centers. You can also do a little bit of research on how MODX Revolution’s web content management system would satisfy your requirements, using the TEC Advisor analysis and comparison tool (this link allows you to use it for two hours free).

But I don’t see why Google only allows a few invites at a time. This is the same error Google made with Wave. The service is only useful if everyone is using it. Gmail was different, you didn’t need to depend on people having Gmail accounts for it to be immediately useful.

Why doesn’t the sharing functionality from Reader/Buzz integrate with the Plus stream? I’d rather have just one stream that is circle-enabled. Picasa likewise has some integration but still the images in Plus end up being managed separately from my Picasa account. And it’d really be useful if Google Docs sharing worked through Plus circles.

I was surprised that setting up my Plus account, didn’t take advantage of my Gmail contacts. I already have some circle notion set up in my Gmail contacts and while it asked if I wanted to import contacts from other services it only seemed to scan for address in my Gmail account without respect to the stored contacts. Strange.

And finally, I think a multi-state sort of profile element system would be useful. That is, it’d be nice if I could set each part of my profile to display different content for a given circle (or lack of circles). For example, I might have one set of interests set as Public, another set for my friends circle, and a completely different set for my work circle. I think this type of thing is necessary to really fulfill on the circles concept. Right now, I still like having a separate profile for work versus personal life.

There’s a lot of promise in Plus. I find it easier than Facebook and I trust Google a lot more. Google’s attitude toward easily getting data out of its system and opening itself up to third parties makes me feel less trapped in a single company’s walled garden (and I believe walled gardens will always ultimately fail).

The more important value of using Plus, will come not just from Google’s innovative concepts on social media but the way it integrates those with other services. I hope Google hurries and completes everything.

“We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”

Remember that Google Wave is essentially Google’s interface for its Wave concept, which centers around the wave protocol, largely an extension of XMPP. Much was developed because of the Google Wave project being open source, wave federation servers, the protocol, extensions, etc. In addition, it was not only a consumer project, various enterprise applications built upon it (SAP Streamwork and Novell Pulse). In other words there is a rather large amount of support outside of just Google for the various aspects of Wave. Google might discontinue development on its Wave product but as Google says, it will extend the technology for other projects.

What’s that mean? The first thing people are theorizing seems to be based on the growing rumours of Google’s upcoming social application, Google Me. TechCrunch points in that direction. People are theorizing that in public waves as well (which now I won’t bother to link to here). And that makes sense, if Google is preparing a Facebook killer, then why wouldn’t it take advantage of all it has in its storehouse of disruptive supplies?

In my previous post about Google Wave’s disruptive nature, I said that Wave wrests control from social networks by giving anyone the opportunity to form them, ad hoc,without a central overseer; like e-mail. This is a very powerful idea. Facebook is known for being something of an alternative to e-mail. The problem with Facebook is that it’s owned by a single central source and so Facebook cannot scale out the way e-mail has. If Google can develop a better Facebook than Facebook, but also let it scale freely through third parties (like on through wave federation servers), then it’s got something that’ll be much more likely to peel off Facebook’s traffic. Google has always been better at harnessing the power of things that move freely, beyond its own sphere of control. Just look at its Android success. Google uses Free and open source software as a strategy, successfully.

Which brings me back to what Google is really ending here. I’m guessing that Google is putting an end to its current user interface. That’s what most people think of as the Google Wave product. While it was quite an interesting interface, it’s true that it confused a lot of people. I loved what it allowed me to do and essentially wanted it to replace my use of e-mail completely (not to mention the many other things I used it for) however, there were some things that frustrated me with it. So Google will kill off its interface but extend the underlying technology to another product. This might be a very smart move.

Google built an incredibly cool group of technologies for wave but the interface was new, foreign, and disconnected with what people are doing on a mass scale. Facebook has a proven system that masses flock to for communicating online. Facebook’s system of course has many problems (I’ll save those for another post). If Google launches Google Me to take what Facebook does well; while improving that with its own insights (things like social sphere separation or clearer interface components); amalgamating the social bits and pieces it launched everywhere else (Buzz, Gmail, Orkut, Reader, etc.); and making that all work on top of the amazing FOSS wave technology it developed, it will have something that is both sticky to users and can grow far beyond what Facebook is capable of. It might finally even be the e-mail replacement I’d hoped for in 2006 (and which Wave essentially was), plus a whole lot more.

Such a move would also enable Google to extend deeper into the reaches of collaborative enterprise applications, which is important for Google’s other app strategies and brings the personal social world with the business world all within Google’s interconnected web of data. Smart move, Google. Still, I don’t understand why it didn’t wait to kill its Wave interface until it launched Google Me.

–Update: Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said in reference to the tech developed behind Wave:

“. . .we are taking those technologies and applying them to new technologies that are not announced. We’ll get the benefit of Google Wave but it won’t be as a separate product. . .”

And that just bolsters my point.

• Wired Webmonkey - Google Bails on Wave
• Official announcement – Update on Google Wave
• ZDNet – Google Kills Wave and chance to reinvent online communications
• ReadWriteWeb – Why We Shouldn’t Get too Excited about Early Adopters - makes a good point on adoption, supports my argument above about how it’d be a good idea for Google to use the underlying Wave tech in a its more likely accessible Google Me.
• CNet – Eric Schmidt on the Demise of Google Wave
• ZDNet – How will Google Wave be Reincarnated – good point about Google Labs, and the various ways the Wave tech will get used.
  

OpenFile set up a system in which individuals in the local area (it currently appears to be just Toronto) pitch topics. Then the OpenFile editors review the pitches and submit strong ones to a public peer review process. The pitches that pass that public peer review (I presume these would be the topics that interest the most people) get assigned to a professional reporter by the OpenFile team. The reporter researches and writes the news story, which eventually gets published on the site. The public then has the opportunity to add to the story with photos, commentary, etc. (they detail the process here). Quite a good way to make use of the professional skills of a journalist while harnessing the best elements of community participation.

I’m going to return to OpenFile in a moment, but first I’d like to point out a few other new news site experiments that I’ve been reading. I’m not suggesting that these are better or worse, but the new ways they explore using the Internet for journalism above and beyond what traditional newspapers have accomplished is significant. I think it will be clear how OpenFile continues to push these new models.

Indymedia is probably one of the older experiments in citizen journalism and has proven itself capable of delivering a lot of new content from around the world. Indymedia has various local “outlets” around the world and allows people to publish news stories from what’s going on in their region. Indymedia managed to develop a network of independent reporting, which is open to anyone. The organization was formed initially for the purpose of protesting WTO talks and to this day has specific topics that it asks for when submitting new stories. Indymedia, thus doesn’t seem to aim to be an all-purpose news organization.

AgoraVox has been growing its citizen media experiment for some time. AgoraVox feels like something between a newspaper and magazine. It publishes in French, English, and Italian. The AgoraVox system relies entirely on its citizen contributors which may or may not be professional journalists (a couple articles I wrote on my conmem.ca blog were published there). By accepting RSS feeds from volunteer authors, it then has its editorial staff review and select, through a layered voting process, the articles it wishes to publish. Eventually writers can join the editorial processes too–building its own community. AgoraVox produces interesting results from around the world with relatively consistent quality (I suspect due to its visible review process). It manages to inform while also providing opinion and public fora to discuss the content. It works very much like OpenFile except that it does not assign reporters to stories, instead it publishes the stories that have already been written by contributors.

The Mark launched fairly recently. It’s slightly different in that its focus is to publish analyses by individuals recruited for the purpose. So The Mark seeks out people that it believes are both credible and linked to Canada, to publish articles, presumably about current issues but not exactly in the form of a breaking news article. To date, The Mark’s process has produced some very insightful pieces.

NewsTilt, another newcomer, gives the impression that it hopes to develop into a large news emporium. It stresses the journalist as a brand. Stressing the journalist’s brand means NewsTilt wants its journalists (and it seems to call for professionals) to report however they think they can best acquire a good audience. The site’s goal is to aggregate a wide variety of content to attract high traffic, which it can monetize in ads, syndication, etc. This is interesting in that the site clearly doesn’t care whether the journalism presents balanced view points (though journalists can do that if that’s their style). I think the assumption is that if it has enough content it will be up to the readers to decide to read the counter-perspectives. NewsTilt also wants its journalists to maintain the articles they write through responding to commentary from readers, similar to OpenFile. Unlike OpenFile, NewsTilt doesn’t appear to rely as heavily on community participation. The community participation appears to be more of a feature augmenting the material than the impetus pushing the reporting. Indeed NewsTilt stresses that it doesn’t assign stories the way traditional companies do, it’s all up to the reporter.

Clearly, people are trying to innovate news reporting and delivery. But two things struck me about OpenFile that help differentiate it from the other citizen news sites. First, OpenFile is wedding the experience, learning, and professional component of traditional journalism with the independence, democracy, and directness new media provides everyone. Second, OpenFile makes its goals of transparency and archival explicit.

To the first point, traditional newspapers should pay attention. Stories continue to circulate about the problems traditional newspapers have had adapting themselves to the digital world, their revenues plummet but they don’t innovate. While some forge ahead, rapidly integrating modern online elements like reader commenting, social media links, searchable archives, etc. I rarely see traditional newspapers innovating in such a way that they really harness the advantages of digital media.

To the second point, I’ve written about the problems with online news stories lacking history. It’s not just that articles sometimes disappear but that the newspapers reporting them forget, years (sometimes months) later about their previous reporting. In the digital medium, we link! Linking is one of the most basic activities, it’s been a huge part of what has defined the Internet. We don’t have to copy much or repeat much or rewrite much because we can link to everything. Every piece of content gets to be part of our digital memory, requiring little more than a link to bring it into the context and relevance of current news stories.

Online news ought to be one of the most link-happy types of content there is. Recording history as it happens is valuable and that value persists when records link to the continuing present recording. This is a major failing in just about all online traditional newspapers today. They lack the history, timelines, and links to prior and perfectly related stories.

I believe, or at least hope based on what I’ve read on OpenFile’s site that it will help resolve this problem. OpenFile seems to want to keep each article alive, allowing it to grow with its community’s interaction and spawn new articles. This ongoing maintenance reminds me of what we see on Wikipedia. Checking on a Wikipedia page, you can always click the discussion or history tab to find out all of the changes to the page and the reasons for those changes. Sometimes those are even more informative than the article itself.

OpenFile has a good idea. I look forward to seeing it grow, and hopefully spread to more cities.

I think it makes an important statement, in terms of offering a level, common understanding that could be used widely across society, government, and business. Early in the manifesto, it says the public domain

“. . . is the basis of our self-understanding as expressed by our shared knowledge and culture. It is the raw material from which new knowledge is derived and new cultural works are created. The Public Domain acts as a protective mechanism that ensures that this raw material is available at its cost of reproduction – close to zero – and that all members of society can build upon it. Having a healthy and thriving Public Domain is essential to the social and economic well-being of our societies.”

I think this is a particularly well-put point. I’d hoped to express a similar idea in my response to the recent Canadian copyright consultation (and other writings). The manifesto proposes principles and guidelines to foster the well-being of our public domain for the 21st century.

Many of its recommendations make sense to establish as a common global basis. Having such a basis would foster an understandable and common societal/cultural norm in the face of special interests that don’t always operate from a larger, more long-term perspective.

It recommends (I’ll paraphrase, but these are spelled out with more precision and detail in the manifesto itself)

• Reducing the term of copyright protection
• Changes to the scope of copyright protection take into account the effects on the Public Domain
• Material in the Public Domain in its country of origin, is in the Public Domain in all other countries
• Punishing false or misleading attempts to misappropriate Public Domain material
• Prohibiting other rights from reconstituting exclusivity over Public Domain material. Ensure a practical and effective path to make orphan and non-comercially available works available for re-use by society
• Make it the role of cultural heritage institutions to label and preserve Public Domain works
• Get rid of legal obstacles preventing the voluntary sharing of works
• Enabling personal non-commercial uses of protected works and looking into alternate forms of remuneration for authors/artists.

I see these as a welcome prescription for the cancers spreading through various governments’ approaches to copyright, particularly in the age of digital reproduceability,  Internet distribution, and an imbalance of corporate influence.

Setting these recommendations as a baseline would provide a common understanding from which to open up new, modern business models. We desperately need to affirm something like this manifesto to keep our culture vibrant, and our creative arts and sciences bubbling with inspiration and discovery.

Google Wave, or maybe more accurately, the open source Wave protocol could be the most important innovation to our interaction with the Internet since the development of the Web.

I say all of that in spite of being a little frustrated with Wave’s current early beta state and lack of wide-spread availability. Now that the preview version has been available for a while, I’ve read articles saying that Google Wave underwhelms or even fails. There are still some problems to work out (it’s only a preview version after all) but I think it’s off-base to trash it so I’m going to do the opposite with this post.

Don’t know what it is? Here’s a simplistic overview: with Wave you can start a conversation (instantly or sequentially) with friends, colleagues, whoever, incorporating essentially any other electronic form of media you desire. The whole history is maintained in the Wave and can be played back as it occured or glimpsed as a fait accompli.

I think of a Wave as a discrete encapsulation of both content and the live processes of the people engaging with each other, engaging with that content. It can easily be distributed, shared, or otherwise punctured.

Google Wave makes it easy to embed games, business applications (SAP’s Gravity prototype is an impressive example; I don’t understand why they’re bothering with 12sprints Streamwork–they’d be better off building functionality on Wave *), text documents, video meetings, the possibilities go on and on; all of these things operate under real time collaboration. Even a plain wave let’s you see other people’s typing as it occurs. This is neat, it’s valuable, sweet utility that will draw people to Google Wave but it’s not what makes Wave so important or really differentiates it.

I think Wave has two crucial things going for it. First, it gives you control over whether waves are public or not and second, perhaps more importantly, it’s based on a free and open-source protocol.

My first point: the publicness.

Waves can be embedded in Web sites. Imagine browsing your favourite site and seeing a link for a public wave. You join it. Instantly you’re part of a community around a specific topic. This is nothing like embedding Twitter feeds or structure-heavy LinkedIn and Facebook stuff.

Let’s say you’re an enthusiast of Czech tramcars (that almost happened to me). You take photos of vintage cars rusting in far out rural locations. You participate in message boards reminiscing over the merits of the Tatra T6B5, somehow you secured a video of trams rumbling through a bygone communist city.

Then one day you find a Web site of like-minded enthusiasts and you see that they’ve put a link to their public wave. So you join it and find that a number of people have been debating the specs of the T6B5. You notice that scans of old documentation appear in the wave and someone has drawn diagrams around certain areas linking them to the related conversation. You remember that old video you had of one in action, so you insert it to the wave too. Oh, but wait you’re the only one looking at that moment–if the others were there you’d be chatting with them live. No problem. Even if someone isn’t typing directly back to you, they’ll see the update next time they open their Wave application and they’ll be able to reply.

Although my example above is not so serious, the point I’m making is that yes Google Wave lets you collaborate privately with those you invite but it also lets you open things up to the public in a way that didn’t exist previously. And you can make this happen just by clicking the “New Wave” button. Where else can you do that sort of thing? Traditional Web sites? Yes. Discussion forums? Yes. Video sharing sites? Yes. But you can’t do them all at once, seamlessly. I could keep listing things but you get the point, don’t you? Those will be challenged with this new disruption, and they’re not the only things.

I don’t even have to collaborate with people. I use Waves as my personal note-keeping medium. To-do lists, boring things like that. I could even publish my own personal Waves, like statuses on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, or blog posts (indeed I think I’ll try it on this site, stay tuned). Perhaps it has my likes and contact information as well. Public versions. Shared versions. Private versions.

Here’s another example. Wave has tremendous potential for “content producers.” Take a media/analyst company like the one I work for (TEC), where we send our subscribers e-mail newsletters, publish reports online, help companies through their software selections, host podcasts, etc. all based around enterprise software topics. We could be hosting waves around selected subjects with our analysts, writers, consultants, all participating whenever new issues arise. It would effectively subjugate (or augment if you prefer to see it that way) our other media initiatives. People that would normally subscribe to an e-mail newsletter, could join a wave instead and begin interacting at their leisure with whatever has occurred and become aware when something new occurs, and contribute their own input.

Waves may offer new promise for newspapers, musicians, all sorts of “content producers” if they harness the concept well.

My second point: the free and open-sourceness (wave protocol).

Social media mechanisms tend to decentralize Web content sources. They make it easy to spread articles, music, video, conversation, games, etc. beyond the boundaries of the originating Web sites. Facebook, for example, has taken over as one of the dominant destinations on the Web. I can go to facebook and communicate much as I would through e-mail, but I get potentially more out of Facebook because of the ways it sucks in the activities and interests of my selected peer group. That makes Facebook appealing and oh so sticky. But it is a single site, I do have to play within its boundaries, and not everyone that I can reach through e-mail is available, or even appropriate to reach through Facebook. Nor will they ever be because of two things: the rigidity inherent to its closed (single controlling company) structure and the domineering way it mediates my person-to-person communication.

So Facebook has some problems. In spite of all the various forms of access third parties can successfully take advantage of on top of the Facebook API, Facebook is a single company, with closed control. It’s essentially the same with Twitter, LinkedIn, and of most other social media sites (there are some possible exceptions like status.net/identi.ca).

Communication/collaboration mediums like e-mail on the other hand, owe much of their success to the fact that the platform isn’t controlled by a single company. Anyone can develop and proliferate e-mail servers and applications (desktop, web-based, smartphone apps, etc.). They work together by adhering to an open standard. It’s worked so well that e-mail has been one of the longest standing, most pervasive, and still highly relevant Internet applications. Unlike say, the social network MySpace: the fad that’s fading fast.

Social media innovated or reintroduced popular mechanisms for communicating-with other people via the Internet. Whereas most traditional Web sites had got themselves into the habit of communicating-to other people (which is fine, it serves a certain purpose–presenting or disseminating that which is authored, as it is authored). The Web site proper became the focal point. With social media mechanisms the web site is itself not so much the focal point as it is an aggregator and conveyor from other sites and between people (not the company operating it).

Social media sites generally lack user-facing content to communicate-to (except stuff developed by users themselves) but at the same time social media sites haven’t developed the full extent of communicating-with. The more the Web site itself fades from the focus and simply conveys person-to-person, the better it enables communicating-with as opposed to communicating-to. Facebook type companies are still too central to the communication they enable. On the other hand, Wave concocts a balance between the two, which is a disruptive innovation made possible because of the open source protocol. Wave wrests control from social networks by giving anyone the opportunity to form them, ad hoc,without a central overseer; like e-mail.

If Facebook or LinkedIn undergo a downward trend in popularity (Internet users’ have notoriously fickle tastes) or outright collapse, it will trigger a collapse in communication, data, the interactions within their communities. They thrive on critical mass and uptime. How about the proliferation of online office productivity applications? Those may allow users to collaborate in real time but they suffer the same problem as Facebook and LinkedIn, they’re a single entity conveying the communication.

The effort users have put into building their profiles, collecting the histories and online memories of their peers, attaching themselves to special interest groups, etc. will eventually be lost when sites like Facebook decline. Unlike e-mail, you can’t easily take Facebook with you. Some people have recognized this and have been working toward ways to get info out of online services. It doesn’t change the fact that we’ll never see a proliferation of Facebook servers offered by other companies.

This is fundamental: Google Wave is an implementation of an application that uses the open source Wave protocol but it’s not the only one, there will be others many of which might be quite different from Google Wave itself.

Wave, inherently made for live communication and collaboration, doesn’t risk hobbling its users through the fault of a single company or sag of popularity. Wave has every possibility of becoming popular the way e-mail did, since anyone can develop wave servers, clients, bots and extensions for the platform, etc. Other social media and work collaboration platforms cannot make a claim like that.

One more thing to consider. Building the Web on the Internet was an order of magnitude different from the rise of Web 2.0 apps. Web 2.0 sites are still, at heart, Web sites, they just do more. Wave on the other hand, is an order of magnitude different from the Web, since it’s emerging from it. Google Wave can do a better, more flexible, and more useful job subjugating portions of the “Web site proper” than any existing social media Web site.

If you’ve played with Google Wave and don’t get it yet, I strongly recommend reading the unofficial Complete Guide to Google Wave written by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. I found it very helpful. Read the section on making waves public to find public waves or also see this directory of public waves. There’s also Google’s discussion site. For a quick though far less informative overview try Lifehacker’s Google Wave 101 or The Shiny Wave’s cheatsheet. Also, some interesting extensions and prototypes.

* Update 20 May 2010: SAP’s Streamwork now supports Google’s Wave protocol. I’m glad they realized the wisdom in adopting wave rather than trying to make an isolated version of their own.

The questions were

1. How do Canada’s copyright laws affect you? How should existing laws be modernized?
2. Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time
3. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster innovation and creativity in Canada?
4. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?
5. What kinds of changes would best position Canada as a leader in the global, digital economy?

1. Copyright and You
How do Canada’s copyright laws affect you? How should existing laws be modernized?

Canada’s copyright laws affect me by imposing a controlling framework over my participation in our society. In responding to all of these copyright discussion questions, I propose that the basis for understanding how we should treat copyright needs to be founded in day-to-day living human society. I’d say this holds by and large for our treatment and interaction with all manifestations of various intellectual creations.

I’m not going to talk about specifics. Not specific stipulations, rules, or terms on how I think the copyright laws should be written or applied. I’m sure that there are a number of suggestions for that but I would like to see some background principles in place from which the specific rules are set. If questions arise as to the specifics or proper application, then a verification against the background principles would help determine the best approach. So I’ll answer these questions, as briefly as I can, with what I think the background principles ought to be.

Canada is because Canadians are. In our everyday activities we create our own culture while apprehending it. In order to participate at even the most minute levels of creating our culture we’re constantly experiencing everything around us to inform and inspire what it is we put into our culture. Really it’s just how we live in a society with other people—I’m trying to describe a self-nourishing loop. For example, when I write a novel, I’m drawing on my lifetime of ideas which has been influenced by every experience I’ve had. My experiences include everything in the world around me that I come in contact with, physical or otherwise. Whether initially created by humans or not, the fact of the Canadian environment is as much a part of our social experience as are the ideas we convey in our culture.

I believe that when I expose any of my ideas publicly (that is, when I do not keep them to myself), whether in a manifestation like a book, music, painting, etc. or even verbally, those ideas become irrevocably a part of our society. The moment we manifest a product of our intellect in the public sphere (our commons) at least one other person has now somehow apprehended them in his or her experience. The lives of those people are influenced by their apprehension of the ideas. In turn, those people will somehow contribute them, in their own ways, into society. Maybe someone will read a book I’ve written and then recommend it to someone else; a simple example. Maybe someone will see a painting that an artist made and be inspired with an idea to compose some music, which then eventually gets performed and heard by other people. A bit more involved, but just as much a part of the loop that is a living society.

That loop is the vibrancy of a living society. Without this constant interchange of ideas and creativity to even the simplest, most banal degrees, we cease to be a society. That is, without it, everyone keeps everything to oneself, which could only be possible if one were to live entirely by oneself, isolated from all other human interaction. In other words, in the absense of human society.

Current trends in copyright discussions tend to focus too much on the economic aspects of creator’s rights or else simply the notion of “ownership”. This is a mistake because it neglects the priority of the entire background principles taking place that enable people to manifest their intellectual creations within our society in the first place. It is however mostly possible and reasonable to identify creators with proper attribution to their works. From this attribution there are plenty of ways encourage our economy without assuming restrictive ownership-style rights. But this is more for a later question. I mention it here only to say that the economic concerns (which tend to wield an overbearing influence in copyright legislation) have profoundly impact our lives in the way we apprehend and participate in our society. These economic concerns should not be mixed into the purpose of copyright law, which in my opinion is to better our society by fostering creativity in the living space for manifesting our intellectual works.

Canada’s copyright laws affect me because I want to participate in a living Canadian society. I want to experience our society and I want to continue contributing to it. I do not want our society to die, I want it to neither be excluded nor exclude the rest of human society. Finally, I do not want to live isolated from all other humans. In order for this to be my reality, the controlling framework that is copyright must, by all means, neither restrict my liberty to apprehend all the creative intellectual elements of our society and environment nor restrict my liberty to contribute in kind.

Modernizing Canadian copyright law requires a focus equally on fostering creative expession and on ensuring the possibility for everyone’s apprehension of those forms of expression. Modern Canadian copyright law should emphasize a lack of restriction on the exposure, apprehension, distribution, and redistribution of all public intellectual manifestations. Canadian copyright law should focus on strengthening the freedom of our commons and affirming that this is our cultural lifeblood. At the same time, Canadian copyright law should clarify and enforce proper attribution for all who contribute their ideas in whatever form manifested. The framework of modern Canadian copyright law should be minimal in its control of social participation.

2. Test of Time:
Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time?

I think this question is asking about the copyright rules themselves standing the test of time. Unless I’ve misunderstood, that is not the best question to ask with respect to copyright and time. A more important issue is how does copyright affect Canadian values and interest over time? To which, I think copyright has to ensure the apprehension and contribution of intellectual manifestations to Canadian society now and continuously.

Rules that prevent the apprehension or distribution of any intellectual manifestation exposed within our social milieu are hostile to the test of time. For example, rules that confer rights for the reproduction of books to individuals or companies beyond the author’s lifetime serve more to destroy that piece of our shared culture than to keep it living. Such rules severely narrow the possibility that people will be able to apprehend the book because its distribution is maintained by a single source of control that frequently does not have our common social well-being as its driving focus, but rather the increase in profit is the driving focus.

Generating wealth by means of controlling access to a book works because the book can be made scarce (when it might otherwise be freely copied). This is problematic for a number of reasons but one main reason is that preventing apprehension of the book implies the removal of a part of the living loop that is our society. It’s ultimately a hostile attack against the well-being of our society. In other words it goes contrary to our longetivity, it’s a practice that fails the test-of-time. If we want to ensure that our intellectual manifestations do stand the test of time, we must ensure the well-being of our society’s living loop.

To answer the test-of-time question as originally stated, based on Canadian values and interests, which certainly seek self-continuation (since I don’t believe all Canadian’s share a suicide wish), copyright changes should be made so that they do not result in causing our society to have many instances of individuals or companies holding rights over those of our social commons. If we someday end up with so much of our culture bottled by a few companies for apprehension by those that can pay, then we self-destruct, at which point we will be forced through extremes to re-evaluate the madness of an over-restrictive copyright policy, and thus the policy itself would be poorly adapted for the test of time.

3. Innovation and Creativity:
What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster innovation and creativity in Canada?

I think most people recognize that innovation and creativity do not take place in a vacuum. They go hand-in-hand with the living loop of our society. In order to foster more innovation and creativity, it’s essential to liberate exposure, apprehension, distribution, and redistribution of all public intellectual manifestations.

The best way to encourage innovation, which by definition builds on what exists already, is to encourage the free-flow of ideas in all their forms. Creativity likewise often flourishes as people are inspired by their apprehension of other’s creative works. Modern Canadian copyright should boldly recognize the infinite, free reproducibility of ideas as a common good, necessary for innovation and creativity. This would help ensure their apprehension.

To foster innovation and creativity modern Canadian copyright should also ensure recognition of creators. This is important for at least three reasons. First, because it identifies those participating and thus calls attention to the life that is Canadian society. Second, knowing the creator of some sort of intellectual manifestation helps enables social interaction between people. If I know who wrote a song, I can find more of her work, which might further inspire me to create something or otherwise participate in our society, or I can collaborate with her. Finally, something just feels right about being able to identify a creative work with its author. Authors feel entitled to recognition of their labours contributing to the living loop that is our society. Recognition of the elements composing our commons by our commons, encourages us to participate.

4. Competition and Investment:
What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?

Historical precedent repeatedly shows that when there are fewer restrictions on the exposure, apprehension, distribution, and redistribution of public intellectual manifestations, competition and investment bloom. There are multifold examples of this in Lawrence Lessig’s book “Free Culture” (http://www.free-culture.cc/).

When intellectual manifestations are understood in the context of our living society, the notion of ownership becomes entirely awkward and anti-social. To really allow the notion of ownership contained within the phrase “intellectual property” to function, we apply it as though speaking of discrete physical items. Consider that the moment an intellectual creation is manifested in our society it irrevocably enters the living loop I described. So, followed to its ultimate ends, in order for ownership of “intellectual property” to be practically implemented, we eventually would require that creators be isolated from society. The only way that what is intellectual can really be owned is to isolate its creation entirely from influence contributed by our living society and from likewise influencing our society. Once it’s loose, it propagates in idea if not physical forms. But such an implementation as isolation makes the notion of ownership useless and the concept of “intellectual property” both nonsensical and untenable.

None of that however, means that we cannot recognize, attribute, and celebrate those people who originate or otherwise manifest their ideas and creations in our society. Nor does it mean we cannot harness those manifestations and the energy behind creating them in interesting and lucrative ways. I think it’s essential to distinguish between ownership and creation, which current copyright laws do not seem to do effectively.

Competition and investment with respect to our intellectual manifestations ought to be considered as a separate issue from most of the other questions in this consultation. We have to recognize that competition and investment are wholly dependant on a living society. They require new inputs to society from creators as well as desire from those in society that would apprehend the intellectual manifestations. In order to foster competition and investment, the focus of modern copyright should ensure the well-being of the living loop of society I described previously.

5. Digital Economy:
What kinds of changes would best position Canada as a leader in the global, digital economy?

First and foremost, modern Canadian copyright needs to emphatically affirm the characteristics inherent to the digital medium. That is, it must tend strongly toward the liberty to freely reproduce that which is digital.

Creations manifested in a digital medium, similar to ideas themselves, are infinitely reproducible without degradation, and with virtually little effort or expenditure of physical resources. It is a huge disservice that copyright-oriented conversations often address creations manifested in a digital medium as though they’re apprehended the same as physical items. A shovel can be stolen (I take it from a store and it’s gone), a digital file (like an MP3 or FLAC music file) cannot. The digital file can on the other hand, be duplicated without loss of or degradation to the original. This is hugely significant in all of our attitudes toward addressing the digital economy.

Modern copyright needs to swim with both the lack of limitation and the absence of scarcity that characterize transmission of intellectual works manifested in digital media. A proper Canadian copyright policy should not include anything that enables the implementation of technologies, applications, agreements, or other methods of enforcement limiting or otherwise restricting the nature of the digital medium.

The best economic policy involving the digital medium must embrace limitless reproducibility in ways that are totally alien to physical objects. The sooner Canadian copyright law recognizes this, the sooner Canadians and Canadian businesses will be able to develop and launch modern digital-native business models that lead the global economy.

Actually, reader, I’m a little tired of all these search posts. But new things keep happening and this one is compelling enough to note. I really miss Google’s notebook feature (actually a lot of people do). It was like BasKet for the Web. It sounds like Yahoo! is about to launch a new app called Search Pad that will be like Google’s notebook but with a teensy bit of intelligence.

This sounds like a right combination. If the search engine can be intelligent enough to figure out that you’re doing some sort of research and then help you with an easy-to-use note-taking, organizing system, fantastic. But if it becomes even more intelligent and can offer even more useful things than just archiving notes, that would be a powerful assistant.

There is some nice potential here. I wonder if Yahoo! will take advantage or underwhelm. Either way Google please take note, your competitors’ efforts to improve how people use the search results they get are becoming more sophisticated and intelligent. Will Wave make up for the loss of notebook?

Its preview side categories, recent searches, etc. have been done before by other search engines including Yahoo, Ask, Google, etc. A lot of Bing’s approach seems to be various ways of presenting search refinements, again not new (alltheweb.com the past days of teoma, and others). Its powerset stuff inside I suppose is important–helps Bing against some of the others (hakia.com) out there, but in the end I don’t seem to get better results than Google gives me and I still find Google’s interface preferable.

In practice Bing doesn’t appear to live up to its release claims of helping me make decisions. I don’t see much to justify Microsoft calling Bing a decision engine, so that must have been more marketing hubris than anything.

If the game is going change perhaps that will come from more interesting experiments like Wolfram|Alpha or an alternate company. Then again, Google continues to innovate and change the search game better than its challengers do.

“…search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find… Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”

This goes hand-in-hand with the idea I was calling for when I said we need to ask How do I assemble knowledge from the information I find? In Erick Schonfeld’s detailed article on TechCrunch, he shows a number of examples of how this better guided search, with a decision-oriented result can work. It seems Bing will provide a lot of smart contextual information around searches to better identify what people are looking for and deliver results that a person will find useful for taking some sort of action.

I said before that we lack intelligent authors to assemble a structured knowledge for acquisition from the content of the Internet. The search engine should morph or augment itself into something that will provide that or come close to providing that (or else be usurped by an alternate application).

Microsoft is making a lot of a statements about changing the search game. Considering the launch of Bing occurs in such close proximity to the launch of Wolfram|Alpha, I think it’s fair to say that there is a real chance people are recognizing the need to change the search game in this direction. Wolfram|Alpha calls itself a computational knowledge engine and makes a point of differentiating itself from search engines. Wolfram|Alpha explains that

“You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing…”

From what I can see in Microsoft’s Bing and Wolfram|Alpha, neither have fully accomplished the game-change that is needed. However they’re each on the path. It’s clear that Google has a wealth of apps and interconnected information, which they’re subtly making visible and more-and-more intelligent over time. If you spend any time flipping back and forth between Google’s variety of apps, you start to see some interesting connections that overlay search results. Rather than launch an entirely new system, I think Google is evolving itself in this direction. I like that Bing and Wolfram|Alpha have become quite public, I think it will push Google more and it’ll be fun to see how these companies finally deliver on CASAA.

Some of the article meshes in interesting ways with what I was thinking about in my last few posts. I enjoyed reading what he had to say, so I felt like commenting on it. For example,

“And just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet, now something new is emerging on top of the Web: I call this the Stream. The Stream is what the Web is thinking and doing, right now. It’s our collective stream of consciousness.”

It does feel intuitively right to me that something will emerge on top of the Web but I don’t really think the Web emerged on top of the Internet in an equivalent way. I think of the Web as a conscientiously designed markup language, protocols, and interfaces (browsers) that “resided” on the Internet as their medium. The result of all that was the huge variety we see today. Whereas the stream, also residing on the Internet medium, does not have an analogue in terms of the Web programming I just mentioned. The stream seems to be a lot of different applications or meta-applications that serves various purposes. Some use common protocols or other standards but many might also be considered rivulets within larger streams. So if we want to say there is a stream as something emerging on top of the Web, I think we have to envision it wholly differently than the Web that emerged on top of the Internet. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to think of the stream is an emergent property of the Web?

I’ve been dissecting this stream idea without even saying what it is. Spivack calls out an example in microblogging, of sites like Twitter he says “…they are literally streams of thinking and conversation…” And later he points out that “The Stream is a world of even shorter attention spans, online viral sensations, instant fame, sudden trends, and intense volatility. It is also a world of extremly short-term conversations and thinking.”

That may touch on the same phenomenon I was thinking about when I claimed that people now have short attention spans by necessity. To acquire knowledge people have to pull together many shallow atoms. Spivack’s article recognizes a problem with inexorable onslaught of the stream. So many streams of information, constantly streaming away, how can we cope? The answer seems to be that we’ll need tools to aggregate, filter, and manage our streams for us. [update 14 May: after posting this I read a great post on the Emergent Chaos blog about this very issue... twitter bankruptcy]

But I wonder, we’ve had “constant now” technology for a long time in the form of a telephone. Phone conversations are essentially immediate. There are reasons that we do not stay constantly connected with the now of the phone. What is compelling us to think that we should attempt that with the Web? Just because the Internet is accessible constantly, the Web is updateable immediately, and a computer device can open access to innumerable streams, do I want to be exposed and engaged with that? Increasingly, people seem to be saying yes. I don’t know that that will continue but this is worth exploring more. Nevertheless, because we can transmit information so rapidly I don’t think it means we necessarily will start focusing on the Web for what is happening as opposed to what happened. It may be the case that all of this access, these streams are valuable to us because they keep us rapidly up-to-date with what just happened not what is happening.

“Just as the Web is not any one particular site or service, the Stream is not any one site or service — it’s the collective movement that is taking place across them all.”

I get why it’s so tempting to compare the Stream to streams of consciousness. On the whole, you seem to get a constantly flowing array of stuff with all sorts of lateral connections. Maybe if we place ourselves way above the Internet, and think of it as a mind, these things taken as a whole, would indeed seem fluid like a stream of consciousness. But if we were to focus any one particular person’s Twitter stream for example, it’s much more like an archive than a fluid stream. People select bits of their thoughts and convey them to Twitter, where they appear and remain. Spivack recognizes this because he goes on to discuss the linear nature of most streamlike services. He also states that

“The transition from a slow Web to a fast-moving Stream is happening quickly. And as this happens we are shifting our attention from the past to the present, and our ‘now’ is getting shorter.”

What’s the value in an RSS feed or following a microblog? I think it may be, at least in part, the fact that it is conveying, not the now, but a constant archive of the now. It’s value is that we can look on what has passed, very easily, in a sequential or somehow ordered context and still communicate with it in our own now. Perhaps what we want from the stream is not to be engaged in the now but to be engaged at our own command, with the recently passed. That’s all very unlike a telephone. In this, I don’t see a fluid now like a stream of conscious, but something more like a conveyor of discrete selections.

I’ve often argued in the past that companies selling stuff like music on CDs should recognize that their distribution medium changed. Rather than selling content on discrete units of physical storage media (compact discs), they needed to recognize that the Internet is the medium for distribution.

The old physical delivery mechanism, CDs, mostly have no value. There’s little reason to buy a physical item that requires a lot of effort and resources to produce and deliver but provides no significant advantage (nor even quality anymore).

I was never a fan of AOL but when Time Warner and AOL announced their merge in 2000, I thought it was a sign that finally a big media company delivering all sorts of content had recognized that their delivery mechanism changed. Big media got a clue. Rather than complaining about people copying and distributing content on their own (thus losing sales of their discrete physical storage medium), Time Warner must have realized that the delivery medium they should be selling is the one that people value, Internet access. That’s how content will be delivered, so if they wanted to collect money from customers, they’d better offer the actual product (actually that product is now a service) that’s in demand. But I don’t think Time Warner ever really did get this concept. They failed to recognize their own combined strengths and offer them in an appealing way to customers.

Time Warner has been divesting its control over access to the Internet medium. It spun off its Time Warner Cable division earlier this year. They’ve been driving AOL further into the ground, as far as I can tell, since they went from providing Internet access to being largely just a consumer profiling and advertising delivery system. Thats’s the big opportunity that they missed taking advantage of. Rather than doing anything truly interesting and innovative with their merged relationship.Had Time Warner/AOL/Time Warner Cable really focused on gaining Internet access subscribers, they could have used their content to offer people all kinds of innovative, quality, unrestricted content, attempting to boost bandwidth usage (sell more of their service medium). But now Time Warner doesn’t want AOL anymore either.

In the meantime, what’s been happening with Time Warner’s core content publishing business? According to the press, it doesn’t sound fantastic. From the AFP:

“Revenue from Time Warner’s Networks unit, which includes CNN, HBO and Turner Broadcasting, rose six percent in the quarter to 2.8 billion dollars.

Filmed Entertainment unit revenue fell seven percent to 2.6 billion dollars on lower DVD sales and only moderate box office success…

Revenue for the publishing unit fell 23 percent to 806 million dollars with advertising revenue down 30 percent and subscription revenue down 16 percent.

Advertising sales at AOL… were down 20 percent while subscription revenue fell 27 percent.”

The company’s publishing, film, and advertising revenue all fell (notice the drop in DVD sales/physical delivery medium). Its television networks unit rose a bit. But essentially that’s another publishing medium that will be reproduced through the Internet. Ad and subscription revenues there, I imagine will be effected.

So Time Warner, making all kinds of content (and continuing to focus on that area of business), still faces challenges for harvesting money from the content it makes. It seems that won’t happen through owning access to the dominant distribution medium–they never put the right effort into making that successful. Perhaps they foresee problems with that model as well–free wireless community access is on the rise (though that’s an oversimplification).

Whatever it is they do with their content, I’m certain that the (movies, music, etc.) will continue to be widely replicated through the labour of individuals on the Internet and will take place quite outside of Time Warner’s control.

Search engines initially answered our question of “How or where can I find the information I want?” but in indexing the content of the Internet and providing access, they created a much more troubling problem. That question tends to overshadow another question, which is equally if not more important, “How do I assemble knowledge from the information I find?” That question will be solved by computer-assisted shallow atom assembly, which I think may be a new significant stage of Internet-related development.

Let me open up the problem a bit more.

The ubquity of “search” (whether through an Internet search engine, individual site search, etc.) has given us a more burdensome onus to seek out and gather the right shallow atoms for the knowledge we need. Search engines both enable and testify to this. Although they haven’t come close to solving my second question they’ve become slightly more sensitive to it: search results are not simply lists pointing to likely sources of information sought. Search engines offer more context for the results. They encourage things like voting on relevance, they offer information related to the results but tangential, for example searching for a company’s name will often also offer news about the company, stock symbols, addresses, display ads about related products and services, etc.

Search engines increased the pressure on individuals to find and assemble shallow atoms of information into the knowledge message or narrative answering their need for knowledge. Search engines provided us with functional access to the immense universe of discourse that is the Internet but it’s all based on the unadulterated results of computation. We thus lack intelligent authors to assemble a structured knowledge for acquisition from the content of the Internet. The search engine should morph or augment itself into something that will provide that or come close to providing that (or else be usurped by an alternate application). That will be a great advance.

The Continuum

I’ve been saying that we have a more shallow atoms now and have adapted our attention spans suitably for the labour we must undertake to acquire knowledge. Here’s what I mean.

Although we’ve always had, more or less, shallow atoms for knowledge acquisition, I think that the availability of these has increased in our Internet-oriented era. I see the deep unit and shallow atoms as points on a continuum of methods for knowledge acquisition. Event without electronic means, we have shallow atoms. For example, a poster plastered to a construction site might announce a rally for a political cause. It would likely contain just a few words or phrases about the cause with some pertinent information on the time and place of the rally. Someone seeing this atom would still need to acquire information from other sources in order to develop sufficient knowledge for understanding the issue. Magazine articles too, these lie in a more middle ground of the continuum. They’re relatively short like an atom but they’re structured more closely to a unit.

Virtually, we’ve created so many new types of shallow atoms, not to mention facsimiles of the physical ones I just mentioned. Take the Web concept of linking, which just encourages the shallow atom mode of defining information. Because we can include a link within one shallow atom to another, there is no need to deepen the individual atom. An atom that references something requiring more information includes a link to one or more atoms to satisfy that requirement (and those atoms may include links as well).

Considering this continuum is essential to considering the changes in our methods of knowledge acquisition. Whereas I’m asserting we’ve had various forms of knowledge from the continuum for a long time, I also think that the technology of the Internet and that which branches from it have immensely increased the quantity, forms, and occurances of shallow atoms. The impact on people acquiring knowledge is that while perhaps we maintained a certain type of balance in terms of analysing, interpreting, and synthesizing our information in the past, we’re now taking on a much greater synthesis role before we can engage in the other activities. We lack the authors that formerly acquired, designed, and assembled the knowledge message.

The Onus of Labour

The increase in shallow atoms proportionally requires that we spend more of our knowledge acquisition activities in designing and assembling the knowledge we seek prior to considering it as a whole. We must do more of our own authoring before analyzing and understanding. Previously, with a deep unit, we could accept the assembled whole (I refered to this as the author’s message in my last post), consider it, analyze it, and synthesize our understanding together. The big difference is that analyzing a unit is quite different than analyzing atoms. Synthesizing the knowledge of the unit feels very different from synthesizing that of the atoms, which have to be selected first. I think it is for this reason that search engines must work much harder to help us answer the second question if the companies operating them wish to continue dominating our knowledge acquisition activities.

Consider many of the new technologies being offered on the market. Gadgets like GPS devices do not simply enable mapping and direction giving knowledge, they’re increasingly used within the context of revealing restaurants, stores, etc. I’ve read about technologies being tested to visually superimpose meta information on objects of everyday life: ingredients on food in stores for example. In my own neighbourhood, there were a number of old houses on some streets that had plaques identifying them in a special way that let people know they could dial a number on their mobile phone as they passed to hear historical information about that area. These technologies offering context-relevent atoms, seem to exist in recognition of the need for assistance in assembling knowledge from the quantity of shallow atoms flooding us.

I’m not convinced that what is called “Web 2.0″ advanced our interaction within our world much (it just formalized some of it better). However computer-assisted shallow atom assembly could significantly advance our interaction through substantial knowledge acquisition, on top of the massive problem search engines created on the shoulders of the Internet.

Aside from basic needs satisfied from an atom or two, will search engines cease being simply search engines and instead truly assist users in substantial knowledge acquisition needs? They’re not doing this now but the seeds are already being planted (intentionally or not). Google has seen the need to insert related context links in much of the results it presents and is collecting more intelligent sorts of feedback from its users. Steps in the right direction, sure. Additionally, Google’s push of its OS to mobile devices says something about the need for a search engine to be constantly assisting our lives. Our handy pocket search. But that had better become something that assists me with the multitude of shallow atoms rather than just present me with more of them in an increasing quantity of contextual situations. Facebook with its multitude of information streams (or other current social networks) are early, lucky, symptoms of the desire for what is needed ahead.

A crude example is that search engines could capture the amount of time someone spends reading a page of search results. They could capture the time over the course of multiple “next, next, next” button pushes in a set of results. Each search could be a category within a hierarchy of a knowledge narrative. The search result links prioritized and selected from (for example) Google’s algorithms for page rank and relevence. After several sequential searches, or searches with related topics, the engine could display a page of introduction, body content, and conclusion, that provides a comprehensive knowledge narrative the seeker could acquire.

That system might present a body of shallow atoms in a wholistic message as if by an intelligent author, yet it results as a sympathetic mirror of the user/seeker’s activities. But as I said, that’s a crude example-I’ve neglected many problems and details with how something like that could work. I’m sure there are much more sophisticated things that could be (and must be) done to develop computer-assisted shallow atom assembly.

[side note: after writing this last week, I came across an article about an exciting new application, Wolfram|Alpha that may be a step in the direction I've been describing. Got to go try it out]

Let me delineate a few parameters. I do not intend to make a value judgement on any method of acquiring knowledge. My main interest is to examine current changes in our popular methods of knowledge acquisition and what these mean for our understanding. I’m not thinking of experts in a domain of research (though there are some interesting challenges). Rather, I’m considering the everyday person that wants to learn something substantial about a subject or issue in his or her world.

Prior to the Internet if someone wanted to learn about a subject to any non-superficial degree, one would probably read a book. Documentary films could also provide some solid depth of information (or sometimes television shows, though these may also move us away from the deeper end of the continuum). Each of these examples is a single, self-contained, deep unit covering the necessary amount of information for the layperson to learn a satisfactory bulk of what he needs on the desired subject.

I call something a deep unit if it is a self-contained gathering of information related to a specific subject. A book that explains the history of Canada, a documentary on the social structure of ant colonies, a television magazine that devotes an episode to the unsafe build quality of a famous auto manufacturer, these are all examples of units about a topic that, anyone familiar with these mediums will recognize provide a well-focused gathering of information structured in a way that the person apprehending the media will be able to learn a relatively deep amount of knowledge about their subjects.

In contrast to the deep unit, consider the shallow atom. I call something a shallow atom when it provides a, discrete quantity of information in a concise scope. Consider an online encyclopedia (for example Wikipedia) entry about Canada, while it will provide some history it will not be sufficient in itself to provide the deeper knowledge the book does.

Consider a scientist’s blog talking about her day-to-day research insights on her observations of ant colonies. Each individual blog post will provide some information but it won’t provide the wholistic depth of a documentary on the subject. Consider, a consumer web site that allows its visitors to vote on the quality of different cars, it may indicate a low rating for a particular car but it won’t identify the systematic administrative cover-ups of safety violations the manufacturer engaged in, it won’t reveal tests confirming the safety problems. These are all examples of shallow atoms.

I would like to emphasize that although I’ve set up what seems to be a comparison between deep units and shallow atoms, it is not a comparison of the value or capacity. Rather I want to identify distinguishing examples. If my theory is right it won’t be because a shallow atom is equivalent or better than a deep unit but because a great, enmeshed quantity of shallow atoms can provide equivalent knowledge as an individual deep unit.

Design and Assembly

There is both a significant qualitative difference and a difference in apprehension, in virtue of the design and assembly of deep units versus shallow atoms. The deep unit is designed by one or more individuals to have a certain continuity of structure. Its entire quantity of information is conveyed via a predesigned (meaning not left to the person acquiring it) conceptual skeleton. The shallow atom, on the other hand is but a bone within the conceptual skeleton and requires that the person acquiring it design his or her own conceptual skeleton for assembling the required information.

To return to my example of the documentary piece on the subject of ant colonies’ social structures. A team of people no doubt developed a well-defined and edited structure for how they’d convey the information to their audience. The documentary would likely have some sort of introduction teasing peoples’ interests as well as providing an overview of the show’s topic. Later the documentary would go further and further in-depth about the issue, probably interviewing different researchers, explaining scientific analyses, connecting commentary to provide a more extensive context to the point. It may discuss parallels with human behaviour or technological innovations, and ultimately it would wrap up with a conclusion and some sort of summary of the its contents. The point is, there is a directed message in the deep unit that those producing it attempt to convey.

Compare that with the scientist publishing a blog about her research on ant colonies. She may post daily, a new observation she’s made while studying her colony. One post might identify a certain behaviour between worker ants and their queen. Another post might discuss the food storage strategy of the colony. These posts would continue for so long as she’s doing her research. It might be tempting to argue that the entire blog, covering the topic of ant colony research is a deep unit but I don’t think it is. Aside from the overarching topic of the blog, it is not a unit assembled along a structure that has been defined to convey a unit of knowledge. In fact, if it were, it would lose its value as a blog.

Each blog post is a more-or-less self-contained entity-an atom. The blog post contains usually, a bit of information about something which encourages people to comment on it or link to it (also a form of interactive commentary). Blogs are designed to encourage conversation. If the blog post was instead a whole book, the threshold for commentary would be much greater. That is, to comment, people would have to invest much more time and effort to read it. However, the blog post’s appeal and success at developing conversation lies in large part with the fact that it has a relatively low threshold to acquire. Someone can read it without fear that he or she is not getting the full picture by not reading the rest of the blog posts. That enables each post to be commented on, as its own discrete unit. It also means each post is only likely to deliver a small portion of information, so if someone wants to acquire knowledge, say about ants, he’ll only get a bit from the blog post. He’ll have to follow its links to videos of the colony, other scholarly publications, perhaps a government-funded research site from some other country, to round out the full scope of knowledge he wants to acquire. Of course, before the widespread existence of all these information media that scope of knowledge would likely have come from a deep unit, like a book.

But what does that mean to the person acquiring knowledge? It means he or she has a lot of additional work to do. There is no one author or group that has designed and assembled the appropriate information into a deep unit ready for knowledge acquisition. I can easily think of a number of tasks the knowledge acquirer will have to do, there are probably many others.

1. must validate the trustworthiness of each atom
2. must decide upon the utility of each atom
3. must select which atoms to pursue for further related information
4. must seek the right sources to use for discovering atoms

What about the message of the deep unit’s author? Is that another thing that the knowledge acquirer must take upon him or herself to develop? I’d argue that any person wanting to acquire some knowledge has a responsibility to do some critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, etc. regardless of whether information comes in the form of a deep unit or a shallow atom. Still, I feel that in the case of the deep unit, the author’s design and build, implicit with its message, is an added value in virtue of the perspective provided by the author. It might also be argued that that muddies the waters for the knowledge acquirer. Now, with all the new methods for communication we’ve developed, that perspective might also be obtained through later discussion.

In any case, the design and assembly of the knowledge acquired through shallow atoms is a very different thing (structure, quality, onus of labour, etc.) from that acquired through deep units.

Have you noticed how those belonging to the generation labeled “millenials” are often accused of having short attention spans? They’re always connected for social and information acquiring reasons. They use mobile phones, Web search engines, type short frequent text messages, maintain instant messenger windows on their computer screens, worship metadata (though not always consciously), use blogs, microblogs, social networks, view short video clips online as opposed to television, mix music in collage fashion from small clips of other sounds, etc. The items I just listed provide instantaneous access to shallow atoms of knowledge.

If we think of how the millenials acquire knowledge with these media, then they have short attention spans by necessity. In order to acquire the knowledge they seek on a subject, they have to pull together many shallow atoms.

Imagining ways of knowledge acquisition along a continuum from the very deep, dense sources to the manifold shallow, smaller sources reveals that people not only are taking advantage of newer technologies and media but also are changing their behaviours in response.

I have more to post about this subject in the next little bit. The implications of how we’re changing our methods for acquiring knowledge extend to information archival, opinion making, our responses to news, certain social interactions, and as I’d like to talk about in another post, the next most important change for the Internet. Search engines accomplished their job. And they created a big problem in helping us find all the shallow atoms we want. But there is an incredible, unexploited opportunity for search engines to evolve into something new, solving the problem they created.

The point seemed to be that the US would make a deal with other countries, leaving manufacturing to them but idea production to the US.

It managed to present the issues in a passionate way that, I imagine, should capture the imaginations of many people who otherwise wouldn’t care about copyright issues at all.

“RiP: A remix manifesto is an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture. Created over a period of six years, the film features the collaborative remix work of hundreds of people who have contributed to this website, helping to create the world’s first open source documentary.”

Filmmaker Brett Gaylor encourages remixes of the film too.

I wanted one of these mini notebook computers for several reasons. First, I was tired of banishing myself to my office when I wanted to work on my novel. It’s winter, I’d rather be sitting in front of a fire, listening to some music, and comfortable on the sofa. Not hidden away from my wife in another room.

Second, when I travel I like to travel light. Normal sized laptops have never seemed convenient to me for carrying onto an airplane. Most laptops are smaller than a regular computer but still big, heavy nuisances. Now that I’m used to my mini, standard sized laptops look like giant relics, the way mobile phones from the early 90s do.

I did a lot of research before buying. I compared the review sites. The main contenders seem to come from Asus, Acer, HP, MSI, and Dell though I’ve also seen a fair amount written on the Lenovo Ideapad and a host of others. Most netbooks come with pretty similar standard specs, like an 8.9″ display (now heading up to 10″), either solid state or regular hard drives, 512MB or 1GB memory, an Intel Atom processor, and a Linux variant (usually Ubuntu, Linpus, or SUSE) or Windows XP. I’m not sure what HP is thinking but their prices are way out of line with the other companies so they were easy to eliminate.

I decided on a system with 1 GB RAM and a 1.6 megapixel webcam for those occasional evenings where I want to have a pint or dinner with some long distance friends via Skype. (Also more pleasant in the living room than the office).

I also chose the Dell Mini with a 16GB solid state drive (SSD) over a regular hard drive. It seems to me that the price of extremely large capacity external hard drives is so low, that one might as well just buy an external drive to plug into the mini for all the major document storage. Then just use the Mini’s internal drive for the documents, photos, whatever that you want to bring while travelling or doing some immediate work on. Besides if you need extra memory while travelling, a USB memory stick or SD card are relatively inexpensive, very small and portable. A massive regular hard drive in the Mini doesnt’t seem very valuable to me. This choice eliminated the likes of MSI and Lenovo.

I’ve read that SSDs are faster, generate less heat, less prone to failure, and I love the idea of eliminating moving parts in my computer, especially since the fewer moving parts there are, the less noise the thing is likely to make. In fact, noise was one of my primary considerations. Something that sets the Dell Mini apart from every other mini notebook (netbook) I’ve researched is that it has no fan. I hate fan noise from computers, especially when I’m trying to hear some music and immerse myself into a creative state for writing. The Dell Mini, in its lack of fans and moving parts, is completely silent.

Based on reviews I read, it seemed that the Dell Mini’s keyboard size was just behind the Acer Aspire One’s but larger than the Asus Eeepc. Keyboard size is especially important if, like me, you intend to do a lot of touch typing. The Acer is mostly parallel to the Dell in other respects. There are some tradeoffs, for example the Acer has a lower grade webcam. But both the Acer and Asus have fans and when I listened to an Acer in a store it sounded quite noisy. So that pretty much eliminated the other contenders.

Although the Dell designers made a few strange keyboard choices, which require some adjustment the Dell Mini presents no significant problems to extended bouts of touch-typing. Examples of the strange choices? There are functional F11 and F12 keys but they’re not labeled as such. Also Dell chose a glaringly awkward place to put the apostrophe key, which is probably the single biggest design flaw I can think of. I’m adjusting, in time I probably won’t notice. I might even grow to love its placement. Years ago, my first car was an old Saab 900, which was famous for its quirks, like having the ignition on the floor instead of by the stearing wheel. I loved that.

The Dell Mini is silent, more attractive than any other netbook (in my opinion), and surprisingly fast. In a lot of forums, people tend to say that these new netbooks are slower than other laptops or desktops. That’s true in benchmarks I’ve seen. I assume that if you’re using it for heavy gaming or other intense processing the Mini might feel slow. For example, I haven’t experimented with any of my midi or other audio work on it yet but I suspect that the difference in speed will show up in that sort of situation. Nevertheless, for most of what I do the Dell Mini feels indistinguishable from my high-end 64 bit desktop system. Hook up a nice external monitor, keyboard, and mouse and I believe it would be perfectly fine doing double duty as a convenient desktop replacement for most people.

The operating system: here is a criticism of Dell. Dell promotes its Windows version. When I purchased my Mini, I went through the ordering process for both a Windows version and the Ubuntu Linux version. For an identical system, Dell offered a special deal, which strangely brought the Windows version price below the Ubuntu version. I haven’t used Microsoft products like Windows on a home computer in many years. I don’t like Windows and all of its problems. I don’t want to deal with viruses or digital restrictions. In most aspects I also think the Windows user interface is more difficult to use than Linux counterparts. In other words, there’s no good reason for me to pay for a computer with Microsoft Windows pre-installed. I wanted the Ubuntu version.

But Dell was doing a counterintuitive promotion and offering the Windows version cheaper than the Ubuntu version. So I bought the Windows version. When I received it, I immediately booted to an Ubuntu install USB drive and just overwrote the system with Linux. Now that might not seem like much of an issue however, the point is that it took me some time to do that. Dell would be providing a much better user experience if they would allow people to configure systems with Linux preinstalled for the same price if not less than the Windows version. I wonder how many other people did what I did.

The Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) for the LPIA architecture I understand is designed to take advantage of the low-power Intel Atom processor. It doesn’t come with the support for certain proprietary features like flash, but that can be easily added through a related repository.

I’d like to comment on the UNR edition of the Ubuntu distribution. Canonical seems to have put some serious effort and good intentions into developing a specialized interface, I think with a smart goal of better addressing the small screen space available in the netbook size. I tried this new interface and believe that while it has some interesting features (like the way it combines the taskbar with top of the windows), ultimately I chose not to use it. It covered the desktop with all the application icons in a cluttered, segmented menu system and it only allowed me to display one maximized window at a time. While that made the most of the desktop space, in my opinion it did so by removing useful functionality. Like the ability to have a couple windows open and dragging between them. I also disliked what I felt was a high quantity of clutter in the new interface.

Fortunately there’s a fairly simple option to switch back to the standard Gnome interface. If I were Dell, I would shipped the Mini this way. However, the standard Gnome setup in Ubuntu is not well suited to the Mini’s 1024×600 9″ display. The standard Ubuntu Gnome interface has a panel at the top of the screen and a window list panel at the bottom (so two chunks of screen space are always used up). Worse, the menu panel is segmented with lengthy text for each menu. I saved a lot of space by getting rid of one of these bars, removing the menu item text and substituting it with a single menu button icon. Now the only thing on my screen is a panel at the bottom that lets me easily access all my programs or places. I also find that the multiple desktop feature in Linux is more useful on the Mini because it minimizes window clutter on one desktop screen (plus the touchpad will nicely switch between desktops by brushing its top right corner). This solution seems to me like an easier way to make the best use of screen real estate without sacrificing the usability that most people expect. Plus it doesn’t require a whole new specialized interface. It’s essentially the same type of setup that you’d find on a Windows system or KDE interface–I think this setup works better.

I have a preference for KDE and would like to try the pretty new KDE 4.2 on my Mini, but I want to wait until there is an LPIA-specific version. In the meantime, I’ve grown to appreciate Gnome much more than I remembered and with the small changes I mentioned above, find it a totally comfortable, appealing, and usable interface. With Compiz effects installed too, the Mini’s interface is so elegant, it matches its hardware design.

Finally, the Dell Mini’s LED display is clear and bright as others have noted in far more detail than I. Aside from the slick design, noiselessness, price/features, speed, and Linux-capable nature, what else do I like?

Forget the technical aspects, the point is this computer feels, actually, personal. It’s a trusty aid available when I need it without demanding room space or other resources. I sit down in the living room and access whatever I want through the wireless Internet connection. I can write to my heart’s content with the Dell Mini comfortably on my lap (unlike most regular sized laptops). It’s not like an appliance that would degrade the appearance of the room. When I’m done I put it to sleep and toss it on the bookshelf–guests don’t even notice a computer is sitting there.

Too many of us suffer from a condition that is going to leave our grandchildren bereft. I call it personal digital disorder. Think of those thousands of digital photographs that lie hidden on our computers. Few store them, so those who come after us will not be able to look at them… it’s my job to ensure that this does not extend to our national memory.

She takes the personal analogue and raises it to a national level. Her article goes on to cite examples of the ephemeral nature of whatever is present on the Web, and explains the loss inflicted when this web material disappears.

Brindley identifies the issue as an important responsibility for libraries and archives, which of course reminds me of the 2007 Canadian Digital Information Strategy draft from Library and Archives Canada. (I wrote some thoughts on that as well).

I thought, after the speech from the throne that that opportunity had passed. But Harper’s Conservatives pushed ahead with an economic “update” that was both wrong-headed and strangely partisan (at a time when that should be the last thing he was playing at) this in-turn activated the other three parties to form a coalition, somewhat like I’d imagined. Actually I imagined the coalition would have involved different groups (I originally thought the Green party was going to play a bigger role). Also it’s not clear whether the coalition that is taking place is the product of Dion’s strategizing. It could possibly be closer to Layton’s.

Anyway, Harper and his Conservatives can yell all they want that this is “undemocratic” or that the Conservatives were the ones Canadians elected but they’re wrong. The Conservatives were elected as a minority meaning they were supposed to work with the other parties. They didn’t. Instead the other parties, which together compose a much much greater percentage of who Canadians voted for, have come to an agreement to work together, and the’ve done so exactly as proscribed by Canadian Parliamentary rules. I think this is great. Here’s an easy page to read to understand the process. http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/library/idb/forsey/parl_gov_02-e.asp

Just in case, for some reason that site goes out of order or mysteriously gets changed, or you just can’t get to it, I made a PDF as an exact copy of the page, you can download it to read, study, and comment on here: Parliamentary Government

In the meantime, I’ve started a new project (conmem.ca) that a friend tells me, makes me seem like a crank and he’s probably right. I’m going use that blog as a public memory of the Conservatives’ deads. Eventually, I’ll expand the scope so that it’s more of a public conservation of memory of other issues, but right now the conservatives’ scandalous approaches to governing provide sufficient fodder. I’ve only posted two examples on that blog so far, though I have many others ferretted away, which I’ll publish in December. This month I’m a little too occupied with Nanowrimo.

As for this blog, come December (again), I ought to have some new little essays about ready to post about “intellectual property” issues.

I just read Dipper Chick’s blog post explaining the problems with the Facebook vote-swapping mechanism. Her initial and important point is that it’s a manipulation of the already problematic first-past-the-post voting system we employ. Worse, it relies on blind trust, which mitigated through a Facebook app is fickle at best. Dipper Chick points out that

“…the biggest flaw in this vote swap system lies in the group’s major premise: that anyone but a Conservative is A-ok.”

And I believe that connects with the issue that I wanted to raise. “Anyone but a Conservative is A-ok” is a negative approach to voting. It’s asserting that you dislike a certain candidate, policies, or way of representing your interests so you will vote against that to ensure it doesn’t happen. Actually it ensures very little. By voting negatively you’re not asserting a positive participatory voice.

In my opinion, the point of casting a ballot is to assert what you believe in, to state that this is the sort of representation you’d like, and that these policies or ways of handling events are they direction you’d like our country to head. When you treat an election in this manner, you’re asserting a positive, constructive voice. Rather than say “I don’t like that” and not offer a solution, you say “This is the direction I would like”, clearly the latter is the more constructive choice.

Back to the spoiler idea I mentioned at the beginning. Vote swapping with the “anything but” attitude, and thus participating in a negative vote strategy denies your choice for how you’d like the country to head. You’re saying that rather than move in the direction you think is best, you’re perfectly happy to accept another direction. Yet that other direction may be equally unsuitable as the “anything but” direction for your stance. To understand this, you must stop viewing the political spectrum in an oversimplified left/right dichotomy and instead consider each candidate and party for the individual platform it represents and actions taken.

Consider this. Accepting a simplified left/right dichotomy pretty much requires accepting that whichever party has the greatest pre-existing momentum from your side of the left or right, is the one most likely to win and thus an ok choice for your vote. But that party may not represent your voice at all if you consider its platform. Just because it is perceived to be on your supposed side of the dichotomy does not entitle it to your vote.

Swapping votes in order to strategically not-elect a certain stripe of MP only makes sense in the white-washed context the left/right dichotomy with a refusal to consider individual policy. It opens the door to manipulation through entitlement, which gets justified in pre-existing polls. If you’re just following along with the polls, what chance is there really for much change? Wherever history has built the greatest momentum, the polls are going to dictate that you follow that momentum.

For example, one could say “the liberal candidate represents the left-of-centre, polls indicate he has the greatest pre-existing support, so it’s ok to vote for him.” But looking at that candidate may reveal that he doesn’t represent what you’d like your voice to stand for. If you do vote your voice, selecting a different supposed left-of-centre candidate, you get considered a spoiler.

But what are you really spoiling? Actually nothing if you stop looking at the situation as a left/right dichotomy. Without that dichotomy it’s nonsensical to be a spoiler. The left or right ceases to have any entitlement to your vote because you’re not voting left or right. The momentum of polls ceases to influence your voice. Rather your voice gains the opportunity to positively and constructively influence the country’s direction. Vote swapping makes little sense outside the context of a left/right dichotomy.

The other morning as I walked to work, I was puzzling over the parties’ bizarre responses to letting/not letting Elizabeth May into the televised debates. Here’s my theory: Dion’s liberals have the more likely chance of forming the next government. Dion’s strategy has nonchalently been in play over quite a few months. In spite of how the media and ads are portraying the situation, Dion and the liberals are in fact on the offensive while the conservatives have been on the defensive.

To understand that, think about the justification for, and the process that takes place upon the Governor General disolving the minority government and then what must occur after the election if the party only wins a plurality.

Side note: I am not writing this from the perspective of a Liberal fanboy (in case my little hint at the beginning of this post wasn’t clear). I’m just enjoying some interesting strategies.

Maybe my statement/prediction sounds off base at first glance–I think these are main elements at play in the strategy and I’ll explain what I see in each.

• Dion/May riding agreement
• Main Conservative campaign principle is to attack Dion’s character
• A real record now exists of Conservative deeds
• Green party popularity has been rising
• The leaders’ perspectives on letting Elizabeth May debate
• Voter intentions (polls) have shown, throughout the run of this government, a sort of political stasis

The Dion/May Riding Agreement

Back in early 2007 Dion and May worked out a deal not to run candidates in each others’ ridings. Most news organizations and pundits discussed the issues in terms of how it bolstered public perception of Dion’s green credentials and added to the feeling that he’s a different, more respectable sort of politician, while it gave May a much better chance of beating Conservative Peter MacKay for the Central Nova riding (personally, I dislike the exchange because I think it semi-disenfranchises voters). However, none of that is very important. It was a well-calculated part of the Liberal strategy for a totally different reason, and I’ll say why this was actually important at the end.

Main Conservative Campaign Principle is to Attack Dion’s Character

Recall when Dion won his position in the Liberal party, the Conservatives began their campaigns (quite effectively) to drive a negative public perception of Dion. Notable is the Conservative-inspired impression that Dion is not a strong leader. It was backed by their use of weak-looking images and especially by how they framed his lack of bringing down the government on a series of confidence votes. It worked. The repetition of the weak leader meme stuck. It made its way into all the news media and citizens continued uncritically repeating the characterization until its become a hallmark of any debate about Dion. The importance and repetition the Conservatives put on this reveals their focus on character assassination as opposed to real tangible issues, it all sunk to a new low today with the puffin poop campaign gaff.

A Real Record Now Exists of Conservative Deeds

Does Dion lack leadership because of his temporary unwillingness to force an election on Harper’s orchestrated series of confidence vote landmines? Consider the major basis for the claim–the lack of bringing down the government–it doesn’t really stand up. I’m fairly certain that every party has at some point during the last few governments, voted in a way (or abstained) to avoid bringing down a government in a confidence vote, even though the party opposed the vote in principle. Why? Because it wouldn’t have benefited the given party’s situation to engage the country in an election at that moment. Same thing with the current Liberal situation.

Considering that the Conservative party hadn’t formed a government before, most of the negative arguments opponents could make against it were hypothetical or fear-based (just consider how the meme of “what’s Harper hiding” still floats). Letting the Conservative party get to work with its agenda could only provide the Liberals (and other parties) with real tangible issues and evidence to campaign against. The longer the liberals waited (as official opposition), the more opportunity they’d garner to point out the Conservatives’ lousy policies, mismanagement, or corrupt cover-ups. For example:

1) Lousy policy –> consider the bill C-61, that has spawned enormous public demonstration against its ridiculous rules and the harmful results it would wreak on Canadian freedoms and culture. Danny Williams made dissatisfaction with the Conservative/Atlantic Accord situation quite public. What about Conservative dismantling of support for fostering Canadian culture? Conservative cuts to the court challenges program? Negligent treatment of the environmental mess, which Layton has been calling attention to? Or how about the Tories shameful lack of direction and action on Kyoto.

2) Mismanagement –> no better example than the 200 page Conservative book on how to obstruct parliament (this alone ought to have incensed every Canadian citizen). Parliament is dysfunctional, indeed.

3) Corruption cover-ups –> Between the Cadman affair and the investigation into their campaign spending.

In other words, it could be argued that Dion was letting the Conservatives get their hands dirty enough to offer real issues of shame rather than hypothetical ones for the Liberals to condemn.

Green Party Popularity Has Been Rising

Where might the votes go? Think about the last election, in which Paul Martin’s version of the Liberal party was ousted largely because of its sponsorship scandal. To which of the major parties would disaffected Liberal voters turn? I suppose any right of centre or centre ones would likely go to the Conservatives. Some centre and left of centre ones would probably consider the NDP or Greens. Of course the NDP and Greens have their own base of voters, they also probably galvanize some voters that wouldn’t vote at all. Isn’t it interesting that in all the polls that keep getting published in the major newspapers, Green support seems to be rising this time around?

The Leaders’ Perspectives on Letting Elizabeth May Debate

Now, about the televised debates. The record seems to be that Harper, Layton, and Duceppe didn’t want May in the debates but Dion did. How does this fit a superficial conventional view? Wouldn’t you think it’d be Harper that wanted May in the debates but not Dion? After all, shouldn’t the Conservatives feel that the Greens are competition for the same voters that would otherwise likely consider the Liberals (or NDP)? Shouldn’t Dion be worried about that, especially when polls show the Liberals currently chasing the Conservatives? One might think Harper worries about the environmental pounding he’ll get from all the other candidates… which he more or less admits, claiming that it’s unfair to have two parties debating on the same platform (I paraphrase his stance on the Liberals and Greens). But that doesn’t explain Dion and Layton’s positions.

Layton brought scorn on himself with his position against having May in the debates. It felt uncharacteristic and contrary to the spirit NDP supporters usually express [Update 10 Aug. Layton and Harper changed their stances, so May will debate]. And Dion’s positive support of May debating–if he was really worried about the Greens getting voters that might otherwise vote Liberal, you’d expect him to have a different position. No. Dion seems to want to help, in an indirect way, the Green party gain popularity. I think his strategy almost requires that the Greens get a few seats and if they get them at the expense of the NDP or if the Greens got prior Liberal voters that Liberals cannot woo back, so much the better.

It fits well with the Dion/May riding deal that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Dion helps May win her riding in exchange for what? What could the Liberals get from key Green wins? A coalition.

Voter Intentions (Polls) Have Shown, throughout the Run of this Government, a Sort of Political Stasis

Polls have indicated over the period of this Conservative minority government that an election will result in little difference in the distribution of MPs. The Conservatives remain in minority territory. Harper was essentially forced to call an election, cutting his losses before his opportunities (with the economy and scandals) worsened. He did this very publicly under the flimsy auspice of a dysfunctional parliament.

But if the election results in roughly the same distribution of MPs, we can’t simply go back to the exact same minority conservative government. Liberal strategy shines here. None of the parties agreed that parliament could function in that minority situation. Clearly we cannot re-elect a dysfunctional government. So we have to turn to the alternative.

A re-elected Conservative minority means Governor General Michaëlle Jean, will have to ask the leader of the opposition to form the new government or else have a fresh election (which I don’t think would be very effective). The opposition party Liberals are in this position and could form an effective coalition with the Green party (no other coalition combination makes as much sense). In other words electing Green party MPs, especially in Conservative- or NDP-contested ridings will help a Liberal/Green coalition to govern. (The other parties must have recognized that in their original stances against letting May into the debates.)

Dion’s riding swapping strategy and push to have May in the debates = shrewd. His delay in bringing down the Conservatives = useful for the campaign. The Conservatives’ only choice, if they wish to form the next government, is to get a majority, existing polls show that’s not yet likely. Besides, remember how Dion won the Liberal leadership in the first place? Similar approach. He worked out arrangements with people that were unlikely to win and obtained their base of support. The Conservatives have been on the defensive for quite some time acting like they’re on the offensive but I suspect “underdog” Dion layed his strategy and has the upper hand.

—

(16 Sep. 08 — Ok, it dawned on me that I short-cutted a bit of reasoning here. The parliamentary web site that I referenced above for why the Governor General would have to ask the opposition leader to form the new gov’t, actually includes some stuff in between. Still, I assume that if the votes tally up a Conservative minority, the opposition will immediately vote down a confidence motion and thus secure itself the governing mandate.)

We were brainstorming article topics, some research projects, etc. at TEC the other day, when my colleague, David Clark, came up with the bright idea of guiding a fictional start-up, with its growing pains, through its ERP selection project.

He just posted the first installment on The TEC Blog.

The thing I like about this (and the reason I’m writing this post) is that it’s an interactive serial. Everyone reading the post can vote and comment on the direction that the company, TurtleSpice, should take to procede with its selection project.

Dave is keeping track of the votes and comments. He’ll publish the next step in the series based on how our readers vote. Of course, it’ll all be cross-referenced according to TEC’s regular guidance for software selection best practices.

Should be a fun experiment see how people would like to steer this.

“First, it does not make business sense for an analyst at a major firm to change research that displeases a vendor, even one that is a client. If an analyst developed a reputation for being that malleable they would soon have no clients as what they sell in part is objectivity and independence.”

I completely agree with this statement. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to show vendors that they’re not helping their cause when they try to undermine the objectivity of the analyst’s perspective. Occasionally a software vendor does try to unseat this balance–I’ve felt the implicit if not sometimes explicit threat of cancelled business. TEC based its model on trying to be an “impartial advocate for the end user” which is why our company has an audience that software vendors want to be in front of. That objectivity and independence is the wellspring of the audience the vendor seeks.

I tend to agree with most of the SageCircle points except I’m uneasy with the following.

“…analysts are not responsible for contract value so they don’t care if a vendor client cancels. Yes, the sales rep whose year just went down the drain will care, but the analyst just shrugs.”

But really, A cavalier attitude toward the work produced is unlikely to do anyone much good. Although the analyst may not be the one directly making the sale (in my company’s case we try to maintain a sort of church/state separation), all employees of a company do need to pull together in their work–after all the analyst’s job is every bit as much on the line as the salesperson’s. Does this imply that no analyst can be entirely objective? Well entire objectivity is a full topic in itself and covers a lot more ground than just where the money comes from.

So where am I going with that comment? Look, how could an analyst do his or her job well if s/he wasn’t attentive to a vendor’s concerns (even if they do involve threats or bullying)? There may be some underlying issue that has not been well understood or another sort of misunderstanding. The analyst, conscientious toward his or her labours, ought to critically consider these possibilities rather than shrug. I’d argue that the analyst ought to have the intellectual capacity to separate the threat from the issues so that s/he can rise above a vendors’ unsatisfactory communication skills (which, in the end, is all that a threat boils down to) in order to deal with the issue at hand.

As for the rest of the SageCircle post, it continues with a series of nicely-made other points on the topic of cancelled-business threats–I tend to agree with those and won’t comment further here. Software vendors, it’s worth a read!

I’m thinking about this in relation to Shirky’s insightful commentary on the notion of a cognitive surplus, which our era is just starting to come to grips with. He proposes this value that it’s better to do something than nothing. I don’t think I’m comfortable with that. His post highlights some of the ways that people use their time to collaborate on projects through Internet technologies and social media types of applications. The idea is that after the industrial revolution we live in an era with a significant amount of “free time” (I guess that essentially refers to time not spent in the context of a job). For a good portion of when this free time became available to us as a society, we’ve chosen to occupy it by watching television shows. Shirky, if I understood correctly, calls this doing nothing. Now, we’re waking up to the potential of this “free time” and we’re employing it in an active way–that is, doing something. Examples include writing wikipedia pages, contributing to group mapping projects, developing free and open source software, etc.

Actually, I don’t think watching TV is doing nothing. It’s doing something, passively. You let the program come to you and you don’t really direct your intentions onto anything in the world. You don’t act upon anything to produce some sort of an outcome. Since you at least have some perceptions and thinking or whatnot while you’ve positioned yourself in front of a TV, you’ve at a minimum passively-doing. So Instead I’ll refer to this as passive-doing instead of Shirky’s doing nothing, and in contrast to active-doing something (which would be the equivalent to Shirky’s doing something).

It so happens that I don’t watch much TV. I know, that sentence raises an irresistible temptation to stereotype me as one of those people who gloat and speak in a pedantic voice about how they never watch TV. That’s not what I’m aiming for here. I like a bit of TV and think it serves an important role (don’t want to get into that in this post though). Nevertheless people often identify excessive TV-watching as problematic. In my case, TV just rarely is my thing, and not because of what I’m doing through the Internet (though I definitely occupy myself that way too). I tend to have other activities or projects that I do (a lot of the time they don’t even involve electricity, like sometimes I’ll write with pen to paper. Sorry, did that support the stereotype?). Active-doing something and passive-doing are not doing nothing.

What’s wrong with doing nothing? Sometimes, I just sit, without a TV, and let my thoughts wander but I don’t do anything in particular. I don’t produce something or bring about some sort of change in the world (in the common sense). In fact these days I feel like I don’t do nothing often enough. I’m sure I’m not the only one as I can’t help but notice there appears to be an increasing interest in meditation–talk about doing nothing. I tend to think, as a society we’re very concerned with maintaining states of constant occupation.

This notion of a cognitive surplus points to the cultural phenomenon exploding via digital technologies. We’re waking up to what we’ve begun, socially, to do to ourselves with the Internet. And it’s amazing. Shirky’s idea seems to be that we’re just now starting to figure out how to handle all this free time. Why is it a “surplus”? Can we have such a surplus?

Surplus leads me toward supply and demand, production and resources; it feels rooted in commerce. The television watcher that Shirky implies was doing nothing (passive-doing) was a consumer of free time. But according to Shirky this has changed, now this same person can be doing something, in other words producing something via the Internet and social applications, or else some other modicum of digital living. Shirky says

“And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, ‘If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.’”

I ask, why is it better to do something than to do nothing? Why should that be a general principle? Why the grounds for how we occupy our free time?

What about an evening occupied at a playhouse? In a sense this is quite similar to TV. Except we tend to consider the play an art that is outside the realm of television. It’s still essentially as passive, in the sense of doing, as watching TV. Some plays involve audience participation but these are hardly the norm–perhaps there is a reason participatory plays aren’t more popular. Sometimes we need to not occupy ourselves with producing. With being “on” and actively involved, our intentions trained on doing.

If the regular consumer of free time shifts his consumption from one of TV watching (passive-doing) to one of researching, debating, and writing Wikipedia entries (active-doing something) then doesn’t he become a producer? He’s consuming his free time by producing (intentions and energy trained at doing something), which is exactly what so many Web 2.0/social media enterprises are hoping will make their business models successful. Shirky is right in more ways than one to make his industrial revolution/gin stupor comparison to our current day digital tech & Internet/TV situation.

I wonder if we’re losing our ability to develop the mental dexterity which enables us to wander through an open-ended forest of perspectives on what we do do. The notion of reflection could be lost. If we always occupy our free time by doing something, we’re occupying ourselves out of time we might otherwise occupy in, for example, meditation. If using the cognitive surplus means we take up the value that doing something is better than doing nothing, I fear we may create a problem as unhealthy as the excess in passive-doing known as watching TV.