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Lessig has yet another interesting article on Remix culture, this one adapted from his new book.  The key take-aways we’ve already heard.  In my view, the most important of them is the need to simplify the automatic generation of copyrights for the wide variety of remixes that have no commercial cost to the copyright holder.  Yes this would reduce the power of the copyright holder, but to the benefit of our society, which, after all, ought to be served by the copyrights.

John

There’s a very interesting story on Hot Hardware (of all places) about how two news robots interacted to help kickoff the (false!) rumor that UAL was going bankrupt, leading to a huge selloff in the stock.  Apparently the news bot for a newspaper moved the story to the front page because someone read it during a “low news time” — during which even a single read was a lot.  Google News saw the story on the page, and picked the date up from the top of the page, since there was no date on the article.  This date was the current date, not the six years ago date of the original story.  An analyst saw the story on Google News, and a billion $ later, the rest was history.

As a recommender researcher, the scariest part of the story is the inference drawn from that single view of the article, which looked at the time — in the wee hours — like a statistically significant indicator that the article was becoming interesting.  This problem reoccurs in recommenders all the time: if we’re looking to make recommendations of items that are not popular, we’ll often be recommending based on not very much data. 

John

Read/WriteWeb has an article about a fascinating new browser plugin called SpinSpotter. The idea is that readers of journalism on the Web can mark it up as “spin”, and propose alternative edits to the text that was in the original article.  For instance, if a journalist writes “Most observers believe that …”, the reader might change it to “Some observers believe that …”.  (If the reporter doesn’t have a study to cite, it’s spin for him to suggest that he knows it’s “most”.  He might be right, but journalism demands that he either cite a source or leave the opinion out.)  Other readers can then choose to see the original text, the original text with symbols marking the “spin”, or the edited text.

Two studies that would be fascinating to do: (1) Does the presence of the spin markers change the messages that a reader takes away from an article?  Are readers able to judge articles more carefully because of the markup?  (2) Do different users agree on the appropriate spin markers?  If not, should a recommender system be used to show users spin marks that they agree with?  What effects does that have on the messages readers take away from articles?

John

Interesting article on Read/WriteWeb about how YouTube is thriving despite the fact that much of its content is copyrighted by others. The basic business model is simple: if a content owner finds its content on YouTube, it can ask for the content to be removed — or it can choose what ads should be shown next to it, and presumably take a profit from the ads. Apparently many content owners are choosing to let YouTube keep their content live, because they benefit more by having it seen by the YouTube crowd than be preventing its borader sharing.

This development is exciting for the file-sharing crowd, because it offers a potential path for broad sharing of information, in increasingly creative ways. However, there are important limits to the potential benefit. The simplest to understand is that mashups are likely to not thrive under the advertising business model. In most collaborations everyone thinks they’re pulling more than their share of the load. Thus, the owners of the content in a mashup are likely to each individually want more than their share of the advertising profits. (This problem is exacerbated by the fact that profits in this model are mostly shared after the popularity of a video is known; as founders of startup companies know, doing a deal before you know how much value you’re splitting is easier.)

The deeper problem is that this approach to enabling creativity only works in an ad-supported content model. There are cultural risks to offering large companies the most access to people’s attention. Over the long term, it might be healthier for people to directly pay for the media they wish to consume, but the YouTube approach is continuing us along the ad-supported path.

John

Read/WriteWeb has an interesting article about a new phone service called fonolo. 
The basic idea is that the fonolo web site provides a navigable
interface for a bunch of different companies that have deep phone menus
(“press 1 for …”).  You select the part of the company you want to
speak to on fonolo’s web site.  Fonolo then calls the site, and calls
you back once they’ve reached the part of the company you want to talk
to! 

Sounds like a cool hack … but the long-term solution is to have much
better navigation and naming in the phone system.  This solution
reminds me of the early days of the Web, when Gopher — developed here
at the University of Minnesota! — was a significant competitor.  One
of the problems with Gopher is that it had no naming system beyond the
site.  To tell someone how to find a Gopher resource, you would tell
them the location of the site, and then tell them a bunch of menu
choices to make to get where they wish to go.  By contrast, of course,
the Web has a rich namespace in which nearly every accessible page has
a unique name.  You can direct someone to a Web page by just giving
them the URL — which takes them directly there, with no navigation.

The phone system is still in the bad old days: each company has a phone
number, and then you need to follow a path from that phone number to
the resource you wish to access.  Companies like fonolo (and GetHuman)
will do the navigation for you.  But this is window dressing on a
broken system.  Really, once we’ve looked up the resource we wish to
access, we want the equivalent of an URL that will take us right
there.  Re-engineering the phone system to support such a service will
likely be difficult; perhaps internet telephony can get us there first.

Note that there is no financial conflict here between the companies and
their customers.  It is true that the companies prefer to use phone
menus to get people to information, rather than have a human
representative read the information (because it’s much cheaper to have
the customer navigate the phone menu than to have a human
representative do the navigation for them).  However, the company would
be happy to have its customers connected to their information more
quickly.  Doing so would just reduce phone costs further.

Of course, an alternative would be for the phone system to stop being
used for this sort of information.  For instance, on an iPhone,
customers can access the web site rather than dial the company.  There
are many situations, though, in which a voice interface is more
convenient than a screen interface.  For these situations, a better
“PhoneURL” would be useful for everyone.

John