I can’t remember where I read this — email? blog? — but someone has pointed out that while overall music CD sales were down in 2002, the average sale per CD went up, and in a down market no less.

Has anyone ever pointed out that the RIAA is a lying sack o’ ordure?

Jonathan Peterson writes in the comments to this blog entry:

You’re probably thinking of George Zimmerman’s RIAA’s Statistics Don’t Add Up to Piracy

Along that line, if you purchased retail CDs between 1995 and 2000 you should sign up for the settlement against RIAA for price fixing.

Thanks, Jonathan.

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Here’s my starting point:

1. For a digital ID system to be accepted and genuinely useful it needs to grow, bottom up, from some perceived need.

2. Currently we’re not hearing a great yearning for digID coming from the grassroots. Rather, schemes are being imposed from the top down.

3. We have already evolved the digID mechanisms required to do what what currently want to do, everything from username/pwd logins to biometric scans at secure government facilities.

The counter that instituting strong digID will enable innovation doesn’t persuade me since it’s asking us to trade unknown benefits for known restrictions: I haven’t heard any ideas about the innovations other than the enabling of truly intrusive “digital rights management.”

But that’s not what I want to say here. This is:

If our current digIDs represent acceptable solutions to real problems — because if they weren’t, we wouldn’t have accepted them — then what does that tell us about the shape of a digID system that provides one-stop identification? What do we learn from our experience? How about:

– As a one-stop ID system, it lets us enter and update our ID info in a single form. That’s the improvement over today’s chaos.

– We own the info. No one has access to any of it without our permission. Ever. (The federated model is the most reassuring of all the one-stop schemes I’ve heard.)

– We get to establish profiles for various situations, so we can be on an ecommerce site and press a “Business Purchase” profile button that gives the appropriate credit card and address. and we can be on a game site and press our “Fun” profile button that loads in our Quake name.

– There is an identity firewall: You are not able or allowed to go from my online purchase of “Geeks with Guns” to my real world identity (unless, of course, I’ve allowed you to).

– No profile has default significance. That is, no one of the IDs I store in the digID system represents the “real me.”

– There is no ID overkill. Businesses and governments have an interest in over-specifying the digID system, establishing authentication far beyond what’s required for simple transactions (e.g., credit card number) because they want to control our purchases after the fact (= DRM) and control our ideas before the act (= Carnivore and TIA). The digID system we want, based on our experience so far, does not permit this type of unreasonable security. There is no user demand for it.

Have I just described PingID or some other scheme?

Eric responds on his blog site and Bryan Field-Elliot responds in email by pointing to an article he wrote 8 months ago on this topic.

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Adina writes about some informal research done by Valdis Krebs that resulted in this diagram, which you can see full size by clicking here or on this gargantuan thumbnail:

This is a rough-and-ready map of the reading preferences of the political left and the right. Valdis, who does superb maps of complex information, looked at some books easily identifiable as lefty or righty (e.g., Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men and Ann Coulter’s Slander) and then looked at each book’s “buddy list” (“People who bought this book also bought…”). He followed those links and mapped the results.

Given that Valdis is not pretending to have done thorough, systematic search, the results are nevertheless interesting if not surprising: We’re not reading one another’s books. In fact, Valdis found only one book that both “sides” are reading: Bernard Lewis’ What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response.

Valdis puts this diagram forward as the result of some back-of-the-envelope research and nothing more. It leaves me with two questions: Is this clustering getting tighter or looser? And where would we find common ground outside of books about politics? Are lefties and righties both reading Harry Potter, About a Boy or Amsterdam? Are we all keeping up with The Sopranos? And surely concerned citizens of all political persuasions set aside an hour on Tuesday night to watch Buffy!

I hope Valdis approaches Amazon and suggests that they use his tool to let us all see the emergent patterns…

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Just got off the phone with Halley. Friday is the first anniversary of her blog, so we decided to organize a lunch party for any and all bloggers in the Boston vicinity.

Friday at noon at the International House of Blogcakes in Watertown (the one near the Staples). See you there! NOTE: We just changed the venue to Yenching Chinese Restaurant in Harvard Square! (Map)

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Where is the organized civil disobedience against the DMCA? Am I missing it?

I’m up for something. For example, suppose we made up two “ribbons” like these:

Look at the ALT tag. Each contains half of a DeCSS perl hack … sort of. To get it to work as an ALT tag, I had to encode some of the PERL operators into HTML character codes, so even put back together these two code fragments are not actually a working DeCSS hack. No, first you’d have to alter it so that “<“=&lt;, etc.

Don’t like this? Who could blame you? So come up with something better, braver and catchier. I’ll probably be up for it.

The first ranking on Google for “DeCSS” goes to a site that has created innocuous software called “DeCSS” precisely to make life a little harder for those trying to enforce the anti-DeCSS effort (aka The Bad Guys).

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In Grandt Theft Auto 3, the cars you hijack always have their radios tuned to one of a dozen or so different stations that parody different radio styles right down to the ads. The ads sometimes mention websites. The websites work. For example, PetsOvernight.com offers “Any pet, anywhere, overnight!”, including not just kittens and puppies, but also mackerel, vermin and stomach parasites.

The links on that page lead to the game maker’s home page which is also nicely done. There’s a monthly issue of the newspaper published in the fictitious city where GTA3 is set (unfortunately not updated since Oct. ’01), and a “Rhymerator” that provides rhymes and metaphors for emcee wannabees, suitably offensive; for example, the metaphor it suggests for “love” is “love money like I love my mom.”

AI (the movie) remains the benchmark for using the Web to make a screen-based entertainment more immersive, but RockStar has done so many things right with GTA that it makes you wish it wasn’t such a violent, immoral, misogynist game … or at least not so much fun. It’s like a sexist/racist/anti-semitic joke that’s damn funny.

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For the first seminar I’m leading at MIT, the topic has something to do with selves and groups. I’m trying to figure out what to say. Here are my notes to myself. Comments would be most welcome; I’m just thinking out loud.

Part 1: Welcome

1. Description of format of course: 20-30 min. presentation by me and then open discussion. Please don’t hurt me.

2. Overall premise: Why have we reacted so deeply to the Web? It’s alien yet familiar. How can that be? Perhaps because it’s enabling us to get right some of what we’ve misunderstood about ourselves and our relationships with others. (Such misunderstandings aren’t mere factual mistakes since we are our self- understanding.)

Part 2: Default understanding of self

3. Default conception of the self:

(a) M&M view: inner private core surrounded by out public shell.
(b) Assumption that the inner core is the real self, and the outer is a role/pretense.
(c ) A set of moral terms depends on this picture: Integrity, sincerity, honesty, authenticity, etc. , all have to do with the alignment of the inner and the outer.

4. Major default assumption: We are first and primarily individuals.

5. Result of 3 & 4: Alienation. No one knows the real us and the real us is isolated and alone. Boo hoo.

Part 3: New public, new self

6. Web as new public place. Persistent and inter-subjective. We’ve never had a second public place before, simultaneous with the first.

7. A new public place means we are new selves in that public place. What are the characteristics of the new self?

(a) No inner self. We’re only there insofar as we are present ourselves.
(b) Safer – can’t be mugged
(c ) Multiple
(d) Temporary if we want
(e) Volitional: We write ourselves into existence. Relationship to our web self is more like relationship of author to his/her characters. (To discuss: in what ways?)

8. Breaks old moral model: Where there was integrity and sincerity, now there’s play. What is authenticity in RageBoy’s world?

9. Web expresses our social natures: we are not primarily individuals. E.g., weblogs going from self-assertion to shared conversation. More important: 20 billion pages in which we turn towards the world together. (Maybe: Shared interests are always a way of living in a shared world; sociality not as person-to-person but people-to-world.)

Part 4: Open discussion topics

Importance of anonymity

Role of digital ID (cf. Eric Norlin today on video phones, anonymity and digID)

Relationship between Web self and RW self: Legal, emotional, moral

Does the Web really have anything to tell us about what it means to be a self among others?

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I’m teaching a three-session course at MIT starting on Tuesday as part of their January Independent Activities Period. It’s sponsored by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department thanks to Henry Jenkins. It’s a two-hour lecture/seminar (7-9pm, room I-390), open to anyone.

It’s been 15 years since I taught in a college and I don’t remember how to do it. For one thing, I think I don’t need PowerPoints. Or maybe these days you do. Also, at the end I don’t think we all hang around, exchange business cards, and pitch hare-brained “investment opportunites.” Although, again, maybe times have changed.

The title of the series is “The Web as an Idea” and the course description runs:

In these discussions, we will try to understand the Web as more than a technologgy and more than a social phenomenon. What effect is it having on the core ideas in our culture? By analogy, if we wanted to understand democracy, we would look at what it means for foundational ideas such as liberty, authority, citizenship, equality, etc. Similarly, we will look at the Web’s effect on ideas such as individuality, knowledge, space, and even, yes, reality.

But mainly the aim of the course is to have the teacher escape without having to go home and drink himself out of humiliation.

Some things never change.

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Michael Quinlon’s weekly newsletter, World Wide Words, reports that the American Dialect Society has announced this year’s winning words:

Most likely to succeed: Blog.
Most useful: Google.
Most creative: Dialarhoea.
Most unnecessary: Wombanisation (feminization).
Most outrageous: Neuticles
Most euphemistic: Regime change.
Phrase of the Year: Weapons of mass destruction.

Quinlon also points us to the 2003 list of words Lake Superior State University has banished from the language for being overused or just plain stupid. The list includes:

Material Breach
Must-See TV
Untimely death
Black ice
Weapons of mass destruction
Make no mistake about it
Homeland security
Extreme
Now, more than ever
Branding
Having said that (also: That said)
Peel-and-eat shrimp
Challenge
It’s a good thing
As per
Reverse discrimination
Got game
___ in color (e.g., “Green in color”)
Undisclosed, secret location

Boy, I’d like to see those American Dialect Assocation rowdies pummel them Lake Superior eggheads — even their name is smug! — over claiming “weapons of mass destruction” deserves to be driven from the land in shame! Pettifogs at dawn, gentlemen!

(For previous years’ words of the year, see here.)

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The Internet is being used as a tool of mass mobilization in the South Korean elections, according to an article in Canada’s Globe and Mail:

When Roh Moo-hyun’s organizers wanted supporters to vote on election day, they simply pressed a few computer keys. Text messages flashed to the cellphones of almost 800,000 people, urging them to go to the polls.

During his campaign, millions of voters absorbed Mr. Roh’s message from Internet sites that featured video clips of the candidate and audio broadcasts by disc jockeys and rock stars. Half a million visitors logged on to his main Web site every day to donate money or obtain campaign updates. More than 7,000 voters a day sent him e-mails with policy ideas. Internet chat groups buzzed with debate on the election.

Not surprisingly, initially the beneficiary of this outpouring is an outsider:

Until a year ago, Mr. Roh was best known for his repeated failures to be elected to parliament. Self-educated, he came from a poor family and had been jailed for helping dissidents fight the military regimes of the past. But young voters admired the lawyer for his integrity and his image as an independent outsider, and they formed an Internet fan club to promote his future… The Internet allowed Mr. Roh to liberate himself from “black money” — corporate donations that are South Korea’s traditional form of campaign financing.

Cool! Where do I sign up for this Internet of which they speak?

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