Today at South By Southwest: My first session was "Why The Web Matters" by David Weinberg. As usual, the most interesting thing that I took away was something that was only touched on peripherally. I call it "Why Weblogs Matter." In a single phrase, it is this:
Weblogs are interesting not when you tell people about your world, but rather when you tell how the world looks from where you are.
That's assuming it's a weblog for general consumption, of course, not one like this one. That's an important distinction for me, and I'm going to make a conscious effort to go after the latter part above, not the former.
Incidentally, I am writing this from another panel at SXSW through the power of 802.11b. That one isn't quite as interesting. "Doing Good Online: Innovative Ideas From Non-Profits on the Internet." NPR.org webmaster, EFF's Cory Doctorow, and a woman working on web development in Senegal talking about what they do, but not really saying anything that can be taken away to other non-profit activity, like, oh, the ones I'm supposed to be working with. Oh well. At the very least, this is a very clear connection to my real job that got me this pass. I'm going to try to keep up a daily log; I'm going to be busy for the next three days.
Ok, so the non-profit panel was lame. The panelists basically said what their respective organizations did, but they didn't tell us anything generalizable. I gained absolutely zero insight into how the Internet could make my non-profit more effective, nor what opportunities there were for non-profit work in enabling Internet access itself. There was stuff I know, obvious stuff, that they didn't even mention at all. I should have gone to "Effective Online Social Networks" instead. Oh well. Tomorrow will be a busy day also.
Yesterday was a lot to digest. I'm going to have to organize my notes into something more coherent. There were some pretty good sessions. I went to "Trends in How the Internet Connects People" with the meetup.com guy, livejournal guy, and the hotornot.com guy. That was decent. Then there was "Journalism: Old vs. New," with a bunch of people. Lawrence Lessig's speech was good, but nothing new to me. The last one I went to was "Because We Can: Web Publishing for the Hell of It," which wasn't too productive, but was pretty entertaining. Random thoughts:
I need to find a SXSW buddy. Going alone is clearly less fun than it would be with a friend.
Apple is kicking ass in the notebooks for the web-hip department. I'm seeing a 2:1 ratio of Powerbooks/iBooks to PC notebooks. A lot of the Apple users are now also Safari users, which is pretty significant for a project that's only been out for a month and is still in beta.
The web royalty cliques translate to real world as well. They have groupies and hangers-on. It's kind of funny in a high school sort of way. I'm jealous.
I don't know if this is the standard reaction to something like this, but the value in the panels is more in what they provoke me to think about and less in what they actually say. I guess it's because 99% of an idea is coming up with it, and 1% understanding it. They say it, I understand it, and then move on. Or maybe it's just egotism. Perhaps there's a bigger lesson here that goes along with the whole "weblogs as conversation" idea. It's not about broadcasting complete, well-formed thoughts like more traditional media. It's about stimulating people to think (hopefully!) and respond. Or maybe I've been infected with the new media virus.
Real-time weblogging is a gimmick. I have a notebook computer and wireless access in the panels, but it seems completely pointless to post my stream-of-consciousness sentence fragments. I do not endeavor to be a text-mode video camera. It's about how the world looks from where I am, you know? And that doesn't mean what I see, but what I think about it. I need time to sort through my notes and formalize and organize my thoughts (ironically, one of which being the advantage of weblogs being that one doesn't have to, and perhaps should not, stimulated by the "Old vs. New Journalism" panel). And that's going to take a little while, possibly after SXSW is over. Not to mention there's the car time, when my brain is buzzing as I drive home. Unfortunately I can't exactly type and drive at the same time, so I forget most of it. Perhaps that's for the best.
I haven't taken any pictures because there's not really anything worth taking pictures of. I don't know any of these people for real, so they don't mean anything to me. And there's nothing presented visually that is particularly compelling.
Day 3 was more or less a waste. I attended "Surviving Your Own Collaborative Project," Joshua Davis's keynote speech, and "Database Driven Websites." The first was the most interesting, though that's not saying much. The Mirror Project is a site where people upload pictures of themselves reflected in various shiny surfaces. Fray.com is a site for people to share their writing. And k10k is a design zine. All of these are non-commercial sites driven primarily by user submissions. Their sites are interesting, but the panel suffered from the same disease that affected all the sessions I attended today: they didn't really have a point. They did, however, cast off some kernels of wisdom:
Derek Powazek of Fray said: "There is nothing like a collaborative project to make you figure out what your boundaries are." Submission pages start out short and vague and get much longer and more specific as people come up with things you never would have thought of, nor wanted to, which sends you back to the drawing board for your submission guidelines. What is obvious to the site owner is apparently not obvious to the eager but oblivious fans and hopeful participants: "Everything you didn't think you have to say, you have to say." Heather Champ of the Mirror Project showed some of the pictures she had to reject, including a "toilet's eye view" and pictures of non-reflective inanimate objects.
According to Heather, there are just people out there who won't get it, no matter how clear and simple it might be.
As may be obvious, they were all very clear that users will try to pass off others' works as their own, and they had to be vigilant for that sort of abuse.
Derek added later: "If you ask them for 500 words, you will get 1000 words. If you ask for 1000 words, you'll never get it because it seems like too much."
Derek on motivation: "These sites that we make are giant billboards for what we believe in."
They all agreed, as might be obvious, that you need a thick skin. Rejected hopefuls don't take it well, but when a site gets big, there are far too many submissions for them to take, even if they were all top quality.
One thing that they didn't go into (and I should have asked about) was what they thought about systems like kuro5hin or Fark where the main site only had approved submissions, but there was a part of the site to the entire submission queue. I also should have asked about what they thought of Slashdot-like moderation. Oh well.
There's not much to say about Joshua Davis. It seems like he just engages in pointless Flash gimmickry. He demonstrated his noodling (in a rambling and noodling fashion), but I never saw the purpose of any of it besides that it amused him. That's perfectly fine, but when he's supposed to be this design guru, I'd like to think he has a handle on utility. Jothan had hardened my heart against him already, not to mention the Wired-meets-Wallpaper audience member who was sitting next to me muttering things like "Sick" (in a good way!) anytime Davis dropped a bombshell. I didn't get it. The whole "cult of personality" was kind of off-putting as well, even more so than with the weblog elite.
The final panel I attended was also a waste of time. The panelists didn't have an agenda and didn't know what their audience was going to be, so they just ended up having a Q&A with questions all over the map. Fucked Company's Phil Kaplan (a.k.a. "pud") had some questions about how to make his website scale. I only mention it because apparently his website is a mishmash of ASP, Cold Fusion, Perl, and PHP all running on MS SQL Server and some kind of flat-file database. Dude needed help, which I might have offered, but he took a call mid-session and left. His search engine uses LIKE '...%...' against BLOBs for crying out loud. The audience ranged from people who didn't really know what it was to people who had been doing it for years, like the guy who runs Distributed.net's statistics servers. There was one lady who asked "How do I get started? Should I use Flash, or UltraDev, or...?" I don't mean to ridicule ignorance, it's just that the panelists had no agenda, and so didn't supply attendees with useful information on whether they should be there. So nobody left happy. On a side note, I was pretty impressed with panelists Dirk Elmendorf of Rackspace and Ean Schuessler of Brainfood. The panelists were all clearly intelligent and understood the technology, but they were completely rudderless.
Hopefully tomorrow will be more productive. I still haven't finished my writeup from yesterday. Actually, I haven't been motivated to even start. Maybe it'll take a few days to digest.
The following is the text of an email I sent to Lawrence Lessig yesterday:
Dr. Lessig,
I attended your discussion at SXSW here in Austin, but did not get a chance to suggest my idea for helping to reform copyright's greatest abuses. Basically it is compulsory licensing. When I buy a single copy of your work, I also buy a license to distribute a single copy of a derivative work, as long as I include your copy with it. So if I buy your CD, I can distribute a remix CD as long as I include your original CD with my remix, without having to seek further approval. For every one of my derivatives, I must buy and include one of your originals. We have the option of negotiating a lower price for the license to my derivative work, but you cannot charge more than what is charged at retail, and you cannot deny me the ability to build upon your work as long as I pay. I also want to emphasize that this should allow any retail purchase. If I get your CD legitimately from a used CD store for $5 instead of the $15 new, it still counts.
So what does this mean? If nobody wants to build on your work, you get exactly what you had before. If, however, it turns out that my derivative is at least 10% as popular as the original, all of a sudden you have the equivalent of a 10% increase in sales, without doing any extra work. Remixing is huge in the electronic music world, with many songs' remixes greatly surpassing the popularity of the original. If we could apply this to music (bedroom remixes), film ("The Phantom Edit" or the Utah video chain distributing "cleaned up" DVDs), short stories, poetry, or any other kind copyrighted media, the potential is vast. As a content producer, you have the advantage of other people testing out ideas. If there is potential in my derivative, you can offer me cheaper licensing terms to encourage higher sales, or to get a bigger chunk of the added revenue. If there is no added potential, there is no loss.
Another, more subtle benefit would come in the long term, when this is a more common way of working. If you expect that others will build upon your work, the onus is not nearly so great to provide a complete package. You don't have to provide pretty pictures in the liner notes, or a second disc of remixes, or get that Senegalese tribal drummer into the studio. You can put out a less-fully articulated expression because you don't have to be complete or authoritative. In that situation, your up-front investment can be considerably reduced.
One could even take this further and use creators of derivatives as a "farm team." In the electronic music world, a new, potentially hot talent can start out with remixes to prove their ability, and then move on to original works (or, given the low cost of home production, the reverse). The computer gaming world has been revolutionized by the success of the Counterstrike mod of Valve Software's Half-Life, a mod which was so popular that it was packaged in a retail box and sold on store shelves long after Half-Life itself had grown stale and irrelevant. The threshold for both publishers and creators is considerably reduced, because the latter can take baby steps into the field, while the former can audition candidates for hire with real portfolios and minimal investment. Perhaps the producers would even get into the habit of distributing the raw source material, such as individual, unmixed tracks, which would be even further lower the level of difficulty in producing a derived work. Like the GNU movement, this would blur the line between a producer and consumer.
Of course, I see several problems with this proposal, as I mentioned initially. If you can create derived works for a fee without other restrictions, there is less impetus to fix what is wrong with copyright in the US in the first place. I would argue that might not be the reality as this plays out. Once the big media publishers get into the habit of seeing their customers as potential co-producers instead of enemies, then their strident calls for copyright regulation would quiet. It would also open up potentially greater revenues for them while reducing their costs, taking the wind out of the financial argument for extended copyright.
The other problem that I see is with works that are subsidized or outright paid for with advertising. Since there is no retail price for those, derivative works under this system wouldn't be possible. It's also conceivable that big media would then embed advertising in some form into all works, just to make it impossible to create derived works. Given the revenue potential, I don't expect they'd be that short-sighted, but then, I used to work at Audiogalaxy and should know better.
The big picture here is that this system would separate money from creative control and eliminate much of the economic friction that exists in licensing today. This wouldn't eliminate that source of revenue, though, as you could always negotiate a cheaper license for a derivative work; in fact, it would often be in the best interest of the producer of the original to do so.
I feel the strongest part of this idea is that the cost for becoming a "remixer" is the exact same as the cost of being a consumer. Further, the copyright owner has no control over the derived work, but is still fully paid. If you have a flawed production of an essentially good idea, someone can realize it to its potential. Society at large benefits from the best expression of a particular idea. And the creativity of other producers is not stifled. I recognize that there are flaws with this idea, but if we waited until our ideas were perfect before revealing them to the world, they would never be revealed and they would never be perfect.
I especially like the phrase I coined to end the email. I feel so smrat.
One of the panels I attended at SXSW was called "Trends in how the Internet Connects People." The panelists were James Hong (Hot or Not), Scott Heiferman (Meetup.com, and Brad Fitzpatrick (Live Journal). There were some interesting things that I may write up later, but the most interesting part was a digression into why Google bought Blogger. Brad claimed that Evan (the main Blogger guy) had said Google didn't really have an agenda, that they bought it just because it was cool. I didn't buy that at all. There was some speculation that access to weblogs would help Google make its search results more useful and timely because the normal web is more static. Informational pages, FAQs, etc. on a given site don't get created on a daily basis (I call this "slow content"). Over the whole WWW, there are many such things created on a given day, but Google doesn't know when to look at them. However, Google knows that webloggers are finding these things on a daily basis and posting about them ("fast content"). Google knows where the weblogs are and it can thus use them to find the newer and updated slow content.
From this I gleaned an insight. People find interesting information in ways that cannot be emulated by crawler programs. There is too much out there on the WWW for even Google to index completely in a short period of time. It might take a month for Google to find out that some Britney Spears biography has been updated. But a weblogger might find that in a day and post about it. Google can then pick up on that and index the bio weeks before it would have otherwise. And if no webloggers link it, it's a good indication that people don't much care about it so Google can wait a few weeks to index it. From that Google can also infer some information on how useful the link is in ways that they cannot currently from slow content.
This is the same genius that Google is built on: rather than attempt to emulate human judgment (as Altavista and others did in the pre-Google days), Google skip the unreliable guesswork entirely and extract the human judgment that has already been expressed in the web by people constructing web pages. Webloggers do exactly that, except much faster than the more traditional, slow web that existed a few years ago. Each weblogger that Google tracks and indexes is in some sense a human equivalent of a Google web crawler, finding interesting information faster and more intuitively than a program ever could. The example at the panel was weblogs about chihuahuas. There's no way that Google would have a web crawler looking for information about chihuahuas. And, it turns out, they don't need one. They have the chihuahua webloggers doing that for them already. All they have to do is visit every now and reap the fruits. If you have a weblog, you have been deputized. You are part of the Google search posse. You work for them now. And this is a good thing.