I have recently become the proud owner of a wireless Kindle 3G eBook reader. I have always been comfortable reading content on a screen, and getting an electronic reader makes sense. The ebook market is exploding, and with the popularisation of tablet devices I suspect that we are about to see [...]]]>

New Kindle 3G

I have recently become the proud owner of a wireless Kindle 3G eBook reader. I have always been comfortable reading content on a screen, and getting an electronic reader makes sense. The ebook market is exploding, and with the popularisation of tablet devices I suspect that we are about to see a shift towards ebooks similar to the shift to digital photography. It is stupid to think that we will get rid of paper books altogether, but as new technologies allow us to get the same experience in digital format, then I cannot see why we should continue to destroy the environment so that we can sustain our paper fetish (I’m hoping some day we’ll get proper electronic paper).

Obviously, the thing about getting an ebook reader is that one needs to get content as well, so I have been using the Kindle store to download free books (Origin of the Species and Dracula, here I come). I also purchased books that I want to read eventually, but that I’m not interested in having in paper form. The Kindle also allows subscription to newspapers, magazines and blogs. I can understand why people would subscribe to magazines and newspapers, this is a valid business model that may save the publishing industry in the future. But I still do not get the blog subscription model. Who would subscribe to a blog using an aggregator device, when the original is offered for free through the Web? Which type of writer would offer their blog in such a way?

It turns out that yours truly is offering content in Amazon. Browsing the Kindle store, I was somewhat surprised to find that this blog is available for subscription for £0.99 a month. I never signed an agreement with Amazon, so how is this possible? In 2008 I was approached by a content aggregator company called Newstex, which bundles blogs and sells them to content-providers such as Lexis and Thomson. In exchange for the permission to use my content commercially, I would get some royalties at the end of the month. I never really thought much about it, I really never think of this blog in a commercial context, I am not in it for the money. However, bit by bit, the blog has been making a little bit of money, about $25 USD per year on average, just enough for me to buy a nice DVD, a game or a book. As I have not been paying attention to the detail, I had not realised that Newstex also sells content to Amazon. As of today, I have not received anything from Kindle subscriptions, and to be honest I do not intend to. However, this prompted me to look closely at my aggregated accounts, and so far this year I’ve made more than $50 USD in royalties! Now, that’s a DVD, a game and a book altogether. By the end of the year I might even afford a beer. However, I don’t think that the blog will gain a lot of subscriptions from Amazon. Take a look at the screenshot with which they are advertising it:

Dear Amazon, you may want to change the screenshot

What is interesting to me is just how the emergence of aggregators proves the existence of a long tail. I honestly had not really even thought about royalties arising from a free service, but there seems to be a market for aggregated content, otherwise I would not be getting some payment into my PayPal account. With an increase in ebook readers, the role of the intermediary will increase. What I usually criticise about the iTunes store is also the reason why it is so attractive to content owners. Just buy content in a bundle, and you get a cut. ‘The more people buy the content, the more you get.

I am off to email Amazon, maybe I can get a free subscription to my own blog.

Here is Chapter 1. I think it is clear that the book is about networks, don’t you think?

And here is the Wordle for Chapter 4.

First impressions? I seem to use the word “important” a bit [...]]]> So, I’ve finished my book (tentatively named ‘Networks, Complexity and Internet Regulation: Scale-Free Law’). Here is the Wordle for the entire book:

Here is Chapter 1. I think it is clear that the book is about networks, don’t you think?

And here is the Wordle for Chapter 4.

First impressions? I seem to use the word “important” a bit too much in Chapter 1, and “however” too much in Chapter 4.

There seems to be a power law in the frequency of words in both chapters

ETA: And here is a Tagxedo of Chapter 6.

We used to define schadenfreude in technology circles as the warm and fuzzy feeling you got when something bad happened to Microsoft. Now I get the same feeling when something bad happens to Apple. True, they often make it difficult to hate, particularly when they come out with some beautiful technology. But as I have stated [...]]]>

We used to define schadenfreude in technology circles as the warm and fuzzy feeling you got when something bad happened to Microsoft. Now I get the same feeling when something bad happens to Apple. True, they often make it difficult to hate, particularly when they come out with some beautiful technology. But as I have stated often in these pages, one can love their designs and hate the philosophy behind it.

This week we saw the deployment of the tenth version of iTunes to correspond with the launch of a new line of iPods. The most important addition to iTunes has been the creation of a social network that lives within the Apple store called Ping (I will refrain from commenting on the fact that the Silly Names Department has taken over Apple). I turned the feature on just out of curiosity, and when I saw that they recommended Lady Gaga, I turned it back off (apparently, it recommended Lady Gaga to everyone!)

From a marketing perspective, Ping is a work of genius. Users can follow their favourite artists, and located one click away is the iTunes Store, where they can download music from their artists at the same time as they follow their updates and latest news. This joins both the immediacy one experiences through Twitter, and the social interaction and community attained by old MySpace band pages.

From a regulatory perspective, Ping is yet another example of Apple’s walled garden model, where the iTunes store acts as the filter through which you perceive the Internet. The walled garden also acts like a forbidden city, it is intended to keep out the rabble and all unsavoury content (Jobs’ now infamous line “freedom from porn“). Apple is the ultimate censor because they know better than you. If you like their shiny products (and be honest, who doesn’t?), then you will also trust them to make other decisions for you, such as the type of content you want to consume. They will give you the Internet, but it is a scrubbed-clean version, sanitised, inoculated, smut-free Internet, with no porn, no gays, and no dirty content. At the same time that they were advertising Lady Gaga through Ping, they were also filtering out controversial subjects from her news stream, such as gay marriage. You cannot have a clean, family-friendly social network that mentions dem gays, can you?

Another small wave of schadenfreude hit me when I read that one of the first things that happened to Ping was that it started filling up with spam. Let this be a lesson for you Steve, you may want to keep out the rabble, but they will win in the end. Just like zombies, they keep coming at you until you run out of ammo.

27 August 2010 (10:00 – 16:00) John McIntyre Conference Centre, Pollock Halls, the University of Edinburgh.

10:00 WELCOME

Ren Reynolds / Andrés Guadamuz

MORNING SESSIONS

Professor Peter Yu (Kern Family Chair in Intellectual Property Law, Director, Intellectual Property Law Center, Drake [...]]]> Here is the programme for tomorrow’s workshop. There’s still room if you want to book a place:

27 August 2010 (10:00 – 16:00)
John McIntyre Conference Centre, Pollock Halls, the University of Edinburgh.

10:00 WELCOME

Ren Reynolds / Andrés Guadamuz

MORNING SESSIONS

Professor Peter Yu (Kern Family Chair in Intellectual Property Law, Director, Intellectual Property Law Center, Drake University Law School)
Theme: Moral and Personality Rights and the Digital Dilemma

Andrés Guadamuz (SCRIPT Law and Technology Centre – University of Edinburgh)
Theme: Avatar Rights re-visited: RealID and Augmented Reality

BREAK

Assistant Professor Melissa de Zwart (University of South Australia)
Theme: Virtual World Governance, Contract and Virtual Property

Nic Suzor (Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia and visiting researcher at Georgetown University Law Centre)
Theme: The Public & The Private and Legitimate Online Governance

Dr Julian Kücklich (Independent Researcher)
Theme: Governance, Social Gaming, Gambling

13:00 LUNCH

John McIntyre Conference Centre

14:00 AFTERNOON SESSIONS

Andy Moseby (Partner, Kemp Little LLP)
Theme: Business Models, Virtual Goods

Dr Abbe Brown (University of Edinburgh)
Theme: Dispute Resolution and Virtual Property

Jas Purewal (Olswang LLP)
Theme: Dispute Resolution and Virtual Property

COFFEE
16:00′ish AFTER HOURS PLENARY

Ren Reynolds (Founder: the Virtual Policy Network)
Chair

Oh Tufte where art thou? In future courses and textbooks dealing with misleading information design, the Wired infograph declaring the death of the Web will be Exhibit A in how to twist data to make a point. According to the now infamous article by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, the World Wide Web [...]]]>

The shrinking Web?

Oh Tufte where art thou? In future courses and textbooks dealing with misleading information design, the Wired infograph declaring the death of the Web will be Exhibit A in how to twist data to make a point. According to the now infamous article by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, the World Wide Web is dying, and it is being replaced by the app.

I will not even try to demolish this argument, it has been done masterfully in Boing Bong, ReelSEO, The Atlantic, and The Observer. Everyone agrees that the way in which the Wired article displayed the chart is highly misleading, but that it also seems to mistake quantity with quality. For example, while it may be true that video bandwidth is increasing, it is wrong to assume that it heralds similar usage increase. People don’t spend all their time online watching videos, it just happens that it produces heavy bandwidth usage.

However, the important claim of the Wired article is not the graphic, although most criticism has latched on to it. The real claim of the article is that in the future we will all be using the Internet via apps, and that the Web will lose prevalence. This is at the heart of the modern debate about how we think about the Internet. Will we continue to have an open Web, or will we revert to gated communities where content is provided via pre-approved apps obtained through heavily-guarded online stores such as iTunes?

This is what is so disturbing about the Wired article, it is trying to push an agenda, a Jobsian idea of the Internet as a closed and secure system, instead of the open, chaotic and vibrant place that we love and loathe in equal measure. The Apple Internet is a very different place to that which we know, in this vision of the future your browser will be the least important element of your daily interaction with the Internet. In this future, you will open your mobile device (smart phone or iPad), you will read your daily newspaper through a paid app (The Times, The Guardian, NYT), you will also browse the magazines through an app (Wired, The Economist), then you will read your Twitter feed through TweetDeck, check your email through yet another app, plan your route to work using the Google Maps app, and then get to work and read books with the e-book reader app of your choice. During this process, you will not have touched the browser once.

Is this future viable? Content owners want us to go that way for sure, because this is the only version of the future that gives them a steady income. The closed Internet is much easier to control, regulate, but also it is easier to get some money from the apps marketplace.

I believe that we might soon see an interesting split, those who are happy to buy an iPad and be shackled by the closed app universe will happily walk towards the Jobsian version of the future. Those of us who prefer a more open Web, will probably never migrate.

The battle for the future of the Internet is taking place right now. Where do you stand?

Editorial

Reviewed Articles

Normal service will resume [...]]]> I have been blogging only a little because I am busy with trying to finish my book this August, so expect only a few updates in the coming couple of weeks.

Normal service will resume in September.

27 August 2010 (10:00 – 16:00)

John McIntyre Conference Centre, Pollock Halls, the University of Edinburgh.

Overview The Digital Interactive Symposium: Edinburgh (DIS:E) is an annual event organized by the Virtual Policy Network in conjunction with the University of Edinburgh.

The Digital Interactive Symposium: Edinburgh 2010 focuses [...]]]> Digital Interactive Symposium: Edinburgh

27 August 2010 (10:00 – 16:00)

John McIntyre Conference Centre, Pollock Halls, the University of Edinburgh.

Overview
The Digital Interactive Symposium: Edinburgh (DIS:E) is an annual event organized by the Virtual Policy Network in conjunction with the University of Edinburgh.

The Digital Interactive Symposium: Edinburgh 2010 focuses on the legal issues of computer games, virtual worlds and the issues that arise from the convergence of new and traditional media. Speakers include both academics and practicing lawyers.

Reserve your place here: http://dise10.eventbrite.com/

CONFERENCE SPEAKERS AND THEMES

Speakers include:

Dr Abbe Brown (University of Edinburgh)

Andrés Guadamuz (SCRIPT Law and Technology Centre – University of Edinburgh)

Ren Reynolds (Founder: the Virtual Policy Network)

Professor Peter Yu (Kern Family Chair in Intellectual Property Law, Director, Intellectual Property Law Center, Drake University Law School)

Assistant Professor Melissa de Zwart (University of South Australia)

Dr Nicolas Suzor (Queensland University of Technology)

Topics include:

• Consumer White Paper and ‘digital’ products
• Virtual Property
• In game advertising and Advertising Standards
• Games, gamers and RealID’s
• Network Neutrality, ping times, consoles  and on-line gaming