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April 10, 2004
I’ve been trying to work through some issues about digital identity by thinking about ordinary language uses of “identity,” and this morning I came up with a question:
Talk amongst yourselves.
April 9, 2004
This is a fantastic interview with Clay about NYC. Funny, brilliant, twisty in its insights.
Harvard’s Berkman Center’s Mary Bridges and friends have put together an 8 minute audio report, from the SXSW conference, on social software.
I spent yesterday consulting with a company whose salesforce is having trouble explaining exactly what its software does, a common problem with enterprise applications since software tends towards functionality sprawl in ways that, say, refrigerators and asphalt don’t. Not to mention that this company’s software is genuinely innovative.
The company’s impulse is to address this need in the usual way: Build a PowerPoint “deck” (sorry, “deck” instead of “slide set” still sounds unnatural to me) with the sort of corporate overview appropriate for an industry analyst. But, the deck a salesperson needs is, of course, quite different. The rep isn’t there to explain what the company is. She’s there because
…Continued over at Worthwhile Magazine’s blog
April 8, 2004
Over at Loose Democracy I have some comments on the Kerry campaign’s hiring of Zack Exley of MoveOn.org to direct their online organizing…
April 7, 2004
This is a near-transcript of a commentary of mine that ran on NPR’s All Things Considered on April 5. You can listen to it via Real or Windows Media Player. (And please forgive my over-simplifications and overstatements.; I only had 3 minutes, which makes it tough to be subtle.)
From the begining the Web has seemed like the Wild West. But now we’re being told that it’s actually a looting spree, with people smashing-and-grabbing all the music and movies and copyrighted text they can, for free. The irony is that thanks to Big Content companies such as the recording industry and movie industry, big computer companies and big government, three technologies are being pulled together that may make control over ideas stricter on the Web than it ever was in the real world.
Right now, once you’ve loaded a song or an article onto your computer, you can do what you want with it. But digital rights management technology, the first of our trio, would change that. If, for example, Metallica’s recording company will let you pay to download a song of theirs and listen to it just once, DRM would make sure that it’s erased after that one play. Or maybe DRM will let you read an online book but not print more than two pages from it or copy any paragraphs out of it. That gives content companies stricter enforcement rights on line than in the real world — after you’ve bought a physical book, the publisher can’t physically stop you from reading it a second time or lending it to a friend. DRM can. Adobe and Microsoft are beginning to build DRM into their software, and so are hardware companies, such as Hewlett- Packard.
But for DRM to enforce the content company’s rights against you, it has to know who you are. That’s where the second piece comes in: digital ID. It’s good for online merchants and has an obvious role in homeland security, but again, it goes further than ID in the real world: In the real world to buy stuff all I need is a credit card; in the digital world, I’ll also need to present the equivalent of a valid passport. I’ll be less anonymous on line than I am in the real world.
But how will anyone know that the ID I’m using in fact belongs to me? That’s where the third leg, “trusted computing” comes in. A trusted computer – a term I find Orwellian – has cooked into its hardware and software the ability to authenticate itself to other computers, and to keep you from running software in any unauthorized way – including that Metallica song you want to listen to a second time, you pirate you! Trusted computing gives content companies more control over your machine than you have. Microsoft has announced it’s building trusted computing into the next version of Windows, called Longhorn, due in a couple of years, and major chip manufacturers such as Intel have agreed to redesign their chips to work with it. This is real, and it’s on its way.
Put ’em together – DRM, Digital ID and so-called trusted computing – and you have a world that’s far more locked down than the real world ever could be. No leeway, no judgment calls, our computers will decide for us. Content companies will be happy, at least short term, because every note, word, image, phrase, every idea can be owned and tracked and accounted for. But the free market of ideas needs to let us play with works, incorporate the images and phrases and ideas into new works of our own. That’s how culture grows. And if the Internet – the greatest force in history for growing the public domain – if the Internet ends up bringing on a regime of control that locks us out of our own culture, it won’t be ironic…it’ll be tragic.
April 6, 2004
Last night NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran a commentary of mine on the danger that the convergence of three technologies – Digital Restrictions Management, Digital ID and “Trusted” Computing – threatens to make content on the Net far more owned and restrictive than in the real world. Here are links to the RealPlayer and Windows Media Player versions of it. (Please keep in mind that I had three minutes to cover a lot of territory, so, yes, what I say is waaay over-simplified.)
It appears that Gary and AKMA have settled their dispute over Gary’s proposed BLX standard (pronounced “bollocks”). (Begin the thread here and then follow it in the main page of Gary’s blog.)
Trouble ahead, though: Now that BLX has incontestably become an important part of the Web standards toolkit, Microsoft has announced that all future versions of Office will embed key summarization information in “islands of BLX” that will be accessible only via Microsoft’s own parser.
April 5, 2004
Clay’s being brilliant again (damn him!), this time on the rise of software that works because it isn’t intended to scale. This is not only a trend, it’s a clarifying meme.
Worthwhile Magazine doesn’t exist yet, but that hasn’t stopped it from starting up its blog, under Halley’s editorial eye. It’s an interesting model for a print magazine aiming at the big time market: Blog first!
Worthwhile is about what makes work worthwhile. Its editors – Anita Sharpe and Kevin Salwen – each with serious editorial experience and credentials, are prepping the first issue. I’m proud to be a contributor to the Worthwhile blog, along with Tom Peters, Halley, David Batsone, Rebecca Ryan, Kate Yandoh, and Anita and Kevin.
My first three entries are on why massages are like bad jobs, why I don’t want to travel on America West again, and what should come before “create shareholder value” in a mission statement.
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