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November 26, 2007
I’m watching the tivo’ed version of episode #9 of Heroes. And because so many of us have the audacity to watch programs when we want to and not when the network says we should, the network has posted in-place ads over the episode as if it were a Nascar race car.
Wow. How customer-hostile can you get?
Alan Patrick of the Broadstuff blog wagers 3:2 that now that the “A List” has weighed in against Facebook’s new ad program, Facebook will drop it.
I’d like to think so (see my post here), but I’d wager 100:1 that Facebook will continue. Of course, I’m neither a bettor nor much of a predictor (remember the glorious eight years of the President Howard Dean administration?), but here’s my thinking:
1. The A-List ain’t what once people thought it was. The folks Alan mentions are influential within the tech community, but they are not the head of the long tail and thus don’t have much direct influence over the broad base of Facebook users. (Alan has me on the list, which makes little sense in terms of readership or influence. But, what the heck. I’m just happy to be on a list.)
2. There has been no great uporoar from Facebook users.
3. Facebook has justifications — rationalizations, in my view — for their decisions. For example, Facebook says if you don’t click on any buttons on the popup that invites you to share news of your purchase, it defaults to “yes” because Facebook wants to encourage users to try the program. Besides, Facebook says with some justice, you have to explicitly click on a “yes” button once you log into Facebook before the news is shared. (Sorry this is confusing. See Ethanz for a clear explanation.) True enough. Nevertheless, this strikes me as an anti-user decision that Facebook wouldn’t have made if it weren’t going to make a gazillion dollars from their ad program.
4. Facebook will make a gazillion dollars from their ad program.
November 25, 2007
Slashdot quotes New York Country Lawyer:
“According to a report on p2pnet.net, the RIAA’s latest anti-college round of “early settlement” letters targets 7 out of 8 Ivy League schools, but continues to give Harvard University a wide berth. This is perhaps the most astonishing display of cowardice exhibited to date by the multinational cartel of SONY BMG, Warner Bros. Records, EMI, and Vivendi/Universal (the “Big Four” record companies, which are rapidly become less “big”). The lesson to be drawn by other colleges and universities: “All bullies are cowards. Appeasement of bullies doesn’t work. Standing up to bullies and fighting back has a much higher success rate.””
While it’s true that Berkman founder Charles Nesson has called on Harvard to fight the RIAA (yay, Charlie!), I don’t find Fear of Harvard Law sufficient explanation. There are some other pretty good (!) law schools around, and the RIAA is happily suing those universities. I don’t get it.
(See NY Country Lawyer’s comment at Slashdot for some useful links.) [Tags: riaa harvard copyright]
November 24, 2007
There are times when you don’t want to do something ,and you know it’s ok not to but you can’t think of an excuse.
That’s when we could really use a crowd-sourced excuse. Or an online excuse exchange. Oh, where are the Internets when you need them?!
(This arose in a conversation with Paul Hartzog.)
MyCokeRewards.com requires you to register with them before you can check the code under the cap. Is that even legal? Well, yeah, it probably is since Coke can probably afford to hire a lawyer or two. But it’s bad marketing. Well, it’s probably good marketing since Coke can probably afford to hire a marketer or two, but it annoys me.
November 23, 2007
Mario Cuomo has called upon lawyers to speak up for the rule of law and, in particular, the fact that the president is not entitled to declare war. (Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.)
November 22, 2007
Just a reminder: Saddam Hussein was not behind 9/11 and the theft of 25 million personal records in Britain does not bolster the case that the Internet is rife with identity theft. The data were on two computer disks that were stolen.
Gene Koo of the Berkman Center blogs about a paper by Danielle Citron titled Technological Due Process, a topic Gene has been studying for a while. Writes Gene:
Professor Citron describes how software code increasingly executes our public laws. Decision support systems, she convincingly argues, quickly become decision making systems. And invariably, the vagaries of the legislative and administrative processes leave large gaps in the specifics of how a given law should be executed. Without firmer guidance from proper governmental bodies, the programmers charged with translating legal code into software code essentially wind up creating law to fill the gaps. (I describe this as “shoving analog pegs into digital slotsâ€). From a procedural – even a Constitutional – perspective, this is a grievously inappropriate delegation of governmental functions to the private sector, not unlike the hiring of Blackwater mercenaries to achieve military objectives. Professor Citron finds, therefore, the need for “technological due processâ€: safeguards to ensure that software is literally up to code.
Gene adds his own example of how letting software administer law can go wrong: the distribution of food stamps.
This is a big deal…all part of the squeezing out of human judgment and the leeway it enables in the name of efficiency.
Here’s a poem, via Ethan Zuckerman.
The Icelandic Language
In this language, no industrial revolution;
no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
The middle class can hardly speak it.
In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
The door groans; the old smell comes
up from under the earth to meet you.
But this language believes in ghosts;
chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.
The woman with marble hands whispers
this language to you in your sleep; faces
come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.
In this language, you can’t chit-chat
holding a highball in your hand, can’t
even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
all your grief and failure come clear at last.
Old inflections move from case to case,
gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
icebergs back and forth in its mouth.
— Bill Holm
November 21, 2007
Jessamyn West, who has been putting the rarin back in Librarian since 1999, posts about the fact that someone she respects has started doing pay-per-post postings. And then she goes all meta on the topic. Quite amusing. As she concludes: “Ten dollars well spent, I think. Don’t you?” [Tags: jessamyn_west, mat_honan pay_per_post, blogging, blogosphere libraries -berkman]
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