Doug Rushkoff is bullish on Google's plans to launch a Chrome OS (I blogged the news here on Boing Boing last night).

Snip from his essay today in The Daily Beast:

In a sense, Google is just bringing computing back to the way it was supposed to be. When Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and saw computers running the first operating system that used windows and a mouse, he assumed he was looking at a new way to work a personal computer. He brought the concept back to Cupertino and created the Mac, then Bill Gates followed suit, and the rest is history.

What Jobs didn't happen to notice was that the computer operating system he witnessed and copied wasn't meant as a way to organize the software and data on a single machine--it was actually a way for computers on a network to share resources. Not only files, but the software to work with them. The computers themselves were to be just dummies--terminals from which to run software and access files that were stored on someone else's expensive computer.

Instead, our operating systems have moved away from sharing and towards ownership. We buy a big powerful machine and do everything on it ourselves. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: they create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on. (It's as if the car companies and asphalt industry worked together, building roads that required new kinds of cars, and then cars that required new kinds of roads.)

Google's War On The PC (Daily Beast)

Rushkoff is also the author of the recently-released book Life, Inc..

Nine months after having launched the Chrome web browser, Google just now announced the Google Chrome Operating System, "an attempt to re-think what operating systems should be." Google plans to offer the OS for use on a wide array of devices in about a year. Snip from the official Google Blog:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

In the New York Times, this thoughtful piece by Noam Cohen on the links between online communication tools and political crises -- namely, the ongoing turmoil in Iran:

# Tweets Are Generally Banal, but Watch Out

"The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful," says Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor who is an expert on the Internet. That is, tweets by their nature seem trivial, with little that is original or menacing. Even Twitter accounts seen as promoting the protest movement in Iran are largely a series of links to photographs hosted on other sites or brief updates on strategy. Each update may not be important. Collectively, however, the tweets can create a personality or environment that reflects the emotions of the moment and helps drive opinion.

# Buyer Beware

Nothing on Twitter has been verified. While users can learn from experience to trust a certain Twitter account, it is still a matter of trust. And just as Twitter has helped get out first-hand reports from Tehran, it has also spread inaccurate information, perhaps even disinformation. An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so).

Twitter on the Barricades (New York Times)

"Life, Inc." author and former BB guestblogger Doug Rushkoff has a piece up on Daily Beast about the fanboy fallout over recent news of Steve Jobs' liver transplant:

Feel better Steve, but what about me? I mean, I know cancer surgery is no picnic, but what does the possibility that you'll reject your new liver mean for my Apple share price? Or my iTunes collection? Should I be converting it all to MP3? I just got a friggin' iPhone - what if you leave us before my five-year contract with AT&T ends? I made a commitment...How about you?

Sorry, but that's the emotional current underlying nearly all of the coverage I'm seeing about the Apple founder's just-revealed liver transplant operation in Tennessee for his metastasized neuroendocrine tumor. It's not what I expected from the Apple community, but perhaps it does serve as the most accurate expression of where the once-renegade personal-computer company has ended up.

To buy an Apple product is to bet on the longevity of the closed system to which we've committed ourselves. And that system is embodied--through marketing as much as talent--by Steve Jobs.

"He said all he needed was a little rest!" one commenter on the Fortune magazine Web site complained. "This is bullshit." On Bloomberg, all the talk is about share price, Apple's chronically cryptic and delayed press releases on Jobs' health, and whether this deputy Tim Cook is capable of taking the helm. Such "me-first" sensibilities don't fit with the highly humanized, creative individuals celebrated in Apple's early commercials--but rather the cultish consumers and shareholders that those commercials, and the products, actually succeeded in generating.

Apple's Army of Whiners

At one minute past midnight Eastern Time this Saturday, Facebook users will be permitted to claim a unique user name, which may well spark a virtual vanity landgrab the likes of which we've never seen. Author and former BB guestblogger Douglas Rushkoff says this is the moment when Facebook becomes obsolete.

This is more than 200 million users, already engaged, simultaneously scrambling in the greatest territory dash since the Oklahoma Territory's land run of 1889, albeit with fewer shotgun injuries.

But Facebook's new page-naming scheme actually brings up other memories for me, ones that hold bigger stakes for the company itself. It reminds me of the moment that AOL, formerly a completely closed network with its own content, allowed its users onto the greater Internet for the first time. Internet USENET boards were filled with what we called "newbies" wandering around and asking anyone they could find how to download pornography. Formerly high-level conversations were quickly brought down to the lowest common denominator as a huge population of people uninitiated in basic Internet etiquette flooded the networks faster than we could educate them.

The impact was far worse for AOL. By opening itself to the greater Internet, AOL revealed itself as something of a wading pool. A mini-Internet. Once people could use AOL as a portal to the true, unadulterated, global net, the company was reduced to an ISP. AOL became series of phone numbers you dial to get online, and little more. Steve Case knew his moment was over, and used his inflated stock price to purchase some real assets like Time Warner. We all know how that turned out.

The Facebook Land Grab (Daily Beast)

(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube)

UPDATE: Astronaut Scott Parazynski, the astronaut whose climb we followed in yesterday's episode of Boing Boing Video with Miles O'Brien, has reached the summit of Mt. Everest! Read more about their trumphant ascent here, including the GPS devices they're using to track and publish the effort. He tried this last year, but was injured when he was very, very close to reaching the summit -- so this success, a year later, is all the more sweet. Congrats, Scott!

(Download this video: MP4, or watch on YouTube)

In today's episode of Boing Boing Video (sponsored by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus), Academy Award winning visual effects guru John Gaeta (Matrix, Speed Racer) offers a sneak peek inside his newest project, Ninja Assassin.

Along the way, we explore a broader realm of questions about the future of games, movies, and interactive entertainment. Will movies become more like games, offering new ways for us to insert ourselves inside the stories? Who will create them, using what tools, and how will the experience be different? Will computer-generated actors replace human actors, or stunt persons -- or will the two realms overlap in ways we can't yet predict? All of this we ask of the guy who invented "bullet time."

Due in theaters this fall, director James McTeigue's Ninja Assassin follows the story of Raizo (played by Asian mega-popstar Rain), one of the world's most deadly assassins. As Gaeta explains in this video, the movie merges blindingly badass Bruce-Lee-esque martial arts stunt work with tastefully integrated post processing work.

Below, and after the jump, a partial transcription of the longer conversation we had about the future of interactivity and "hybrid entertainment" -- and why Hollywood is, in Gaeta's words, "like a mule."

This interview took place during our live coverage of the 2009 Game Developers Conference, and many of the questions I pose were taken directly from our live chat audience.

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Xeni Jardin: John, your involvement in "Ninja Assassin" was a little different than in "Speed Racer" and the "Matrix" films, where you were the lead visual effects designer.

John Gaeta: Ninja Assassin was directed by James McTeigue, who directed "V for Vendetta." It's sort of a family tradition of the Wachowskis to help James in parallel with other odd films. After "Speed Racer" was completed, we went back to Berlin and decided to make this super psycho horror ninja movie. Supremo stunts and martial arts. We're friends with the action design firm 87eleven, they've worked alongside Wu Ping for many years, after the "Matrix" Trilogy they did "Kill Bill," "300," they're fantastic. It was really their show. They were told they could be very creative and so they were. Lots of inventions!

Xeni: What was your role?

Gaeta: I didn't want to miss it because it seemed like it would be very fun. I was only helping out with some special unit directing, but no visual effects for me personally.

"Ninja" is surprisingly invisible on effects work, and intentionally so. No virtual humans in this one. The only real post processing comes from heavily stylistic color grading, think graphic tones like "Se7en," compositing and some CG weapons and blood augmentation. But this film shines brightest for the martial arts team. To put it another way -- it's old school.

There is far more going on in this movie with respect to "stunts technology" and innovation with respect to specialized and "next gen" rigs and flying machines.

Xeni: You are known for visual effects in motion pictures, but every time you and I have spoken, there's this idea of hybrid entertainment that comes up. Can you tell me more about what you're doing there?

Gaeta: I'm curious about possible destinations where there's crossover with regard to simulation cinema, "sim cinema," ways of creating elaborate trapdoors and portals between different mediums. Also, over the years, there are strange subgroups from the visual world like Douglas Trumbull -- I used to work for him many years ago -- their passion went beyond cinema to immersive content. Virtual reality, perhaps games, are a step toward that -- so are other methods of surrounding people with an experience. There are a lot of interesting progressions going on with immersive cinema, immersive entertainment, hybridizing the two.

(Interview continues after the jump)

From the TED archive, a new video:

Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe is outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead: discovering new, deadly viruses where they first emerge -- passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa -- before they claim millions of lives.

Armed with blood samples, high-tech tools and a small army of fieldworkers, Nathan Wolfe hopes to re-invent pandemic control -- and reveal hidden secrets of the planet's dominant lifeform: the virus.

TED Talks: Nathan Wolfe (thanks, Jason Wishnow)

On an NYU aid and development studies blog, this video of NYU Professor Leonard Wantchekon talking about a cultural challenge to development in the country where he grew up, Benin. As regular BB readers are probably sick of me mentioning in blog posts by now, I spent the last few weeks traveling and shooting video in that West African country.

So, in this clip from "What Would the Poor Say: Debates in Aid Evaluation," a recent conference held by NYU's Development Research Institute, Wantchekon talks about the lack of interpersonal trust within a community as a major challenge to economic development.

Communities in Benin where he has seen this phenomenon manifest most, he says, are the same communities where the highest amount of slave exportation took place from the 1600s to the 1900s -- villages and towns in the southern part of the country, where the huge slave ports once stood, and where massive numbers of (basically) war captives were sold into bondage. Wantchekon documents all of this in a research paper he co-authored with Nathan Nunn.

I realize the point in this video is to help aid workers think about how to quantify, define, and deal with this factor in development programs in Africa. But as I watched, I kept thinking about what this means in my own personal community back here in the US (and around the internet). How I and my friends and colleagues are, in many ways, really "banking" on that trust with each other to come up with creative ways to survive the economic crisis.

Video: "If You Don't Trust People You Know, It's Over."

You should also watch another clip by Wantchekon at this conference about the "Real Costs of Funerals in Benin." Might sound tedious and weird but it's (at least to me) fascinating. According to Wantchekon, some 30% of the monthly income of many middle-class families in Benin is spent on funerals!

(NYU Aid Watch blog, Thanks, Hugo von Tilborg!)

Guest blogger Paul Spinrad is not unacquainted with the grape. 

After our distant ancestors developed language, everyone could benefit from the experiences of others. But the bandwidth of speech is so low compared to one's own senses that it required huge compression and decompression at each end of the communication. This process of describing and interpreting was enabled by detailed world models that everyone carried in their heads.

Because these world models vary from person to person, the codec is lossy, and misunderstandings are inevitable. But the imprecision also makes words more timeless and intimate. If the impressions that some words convey to you resonate with you, it's because they are literally built out of the way you view the world.

Words can also lie, but along with interpreting words, we automatically assess the trustworthiness of their source. We can learn not to believe everything we hear, or to distrust certain people, and we can also set the Bible trust level to 100. No such counterpart exists for visual communication-- cameras, television, and Photoshop haven't been around long enough.

That's all background, and here's my point: It seems to me that every so often, the dominant political and cultural machine grows so large and incestuous that it loses its connection to people and makes them feel powerless and irrelevant. When this happens, in the West anyway, there's inevitably a revolution of words, of back-to-basics and idealism, against the image-conscious, superficial, wealth-obsessed Babylon. Because it's based on words, people can place their trust in it fully and spread it, and it will continue to make sense over time. It doesn't propagate through image, might, or personal influence. This empowers people again-- perhaps simply by making them feel empowered.

Big examples are the formation of Christianity and Islam, and the Protestant Reformation. Today we see other fundamentalisms. But the inevitable next one doesn't have to be intolerant and destructive. If we engage with the task of developing it, rather than avoiding it and leaving it to others, it can be a nice one.

Photo of 1522 edition of Martin Luther's 95 Theses, courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 

 

Above: Funeral for Analog TV, starring the lovely and talented Bruce Sterling. "The service took place at the Berkeley Art Museum Tuesday, February 17, at 7:00 PM." More:

Audiences joined author Bruce Sterling, technology pundit Paul Saffo, and other special guests on the UC Berkeley campus to mourn the loss of our long time acquaintance, the Analog Television Signal. Born in the 1920's in San Francisco, the signal has been an integral part of all our lives, bringing us news of the rich, the famous, the politicians, the wars, the Apollo landings, the thrills of victory, and the agonies of defeat. While Analog Television has not been a good friend to us all, it has been important to each and every one of us. Analog Television is survived by its wife Digital Television, and its second cousin Internet Television.

Visitors brought their Analog TV for display and recycling. We stacked the first 40 in memoriam to our life long friend and the remainder were responsibly recycled. At the ceremony Paul Saffo spelled out the sordid history of the Analog TV Signal's life, the group Author & Punisher performed the funeral dirge, and author Bruce Sterling delivered the eulogy (above) just before the analog signal winked out for the last time and the frequency wasteland was invaded by pirate TV artists. It's rare that the entire nation gets a specific date on which one major medium dies and is replaced by another. This event was a scholarly and artistic reflection on the passing of one of the dominant mediums and cultural influences of the late 20th century.

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. And here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

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About a year ago, Boing Boing's video production crew was having our weekly content pitch meeting and my colleague Jolon brought up a video project he'd been following called "How's Your News." It was a news program in which the presenters are people with physical and mental disabilities. Some have Downs Syndrome, others cerebral palsy, and so on.

We didn't get around to producing a BB feature, but then just this past weekend, I met with Matt Stone and learned that he and fellow South Park creator Trey Parker are producing a version of How's Your News as a new MTV series. It debuts this Sunday, February 8.

He kindly offered to allow us to take a sneak peek at the first few episodes, and cut together an exclusive preview. That is today's episode of Boing Boing Video.

Matt explained that he and Trey are mostly hands-off with regard to the creative and editorial process on the MTV series, they're more like "godfathers" on the television project. HYN creator and director Arthur Bradford and the correspondents are pretty much in charge. It sounds like MTV has handled the project admirably, too.

When I first saw the internet version, I remember first feeling a little guilty or awkward for laughing at people with disabilities on-screen. But when I watched the MTV episodes in entirety with the BBV crew, I started to feel like I knew these people, and was more comfortable with it the more I watched. Maybe part of the lesson here is that people with disabilities are real people. They don't need me to feel "precious" or "protective" about them. It is okay to laugh with them, and when they are being funny in a comedy series, it's okay to laugh at them, too. Not as people to be pitied, just as people.

Matt Stone tells Boing Boing,

One of the first things that Arthur Bradford said about doing How's Your News as a TV show was that he absolutely didn't want to pitch the show to Lifetime or PBS or anyplace else where you would EXPECT a show like this. He wanted to fly into the center of the sun and have the show on MTV. The How's Your News crew is about redefining expectations and the show is by far their best work. It is my favorite show on television beside South Park....

Heh. And I asked Arthur Bradford to share some words with us, too. He says:

I think the big question everyone has about our TV series goes something like this "Does this show really belong on MTV? Aren't all those kids going to laugh for all the wrong reasons?" I have so many thoughts about that I don't know where to begin, but let me just say that I think this line of questioning does a sort of disservice to both people with disabilities and the kids who watch MTV. People with disabilities don't really need a bunch of watchdogs looking out for their "best interests". They are most often able to do this themselves and I can assure you our cast is extremely proud of the work they did on this show, as are their families. And the kids who watch MTV are much smarter than we are giving them credit for. They deserve something like this, a show that doesn't assume they can't decide things for themselves.

We had a lot of fun shooting this series. Everywhere we went people would stare at the bus and come up and talk to us. For me, as the director, it was often exhausting and sometimes stressful, like when one of our reporters would have a seizure or shit their pants in the middle of shooting something important. Both of these things happened more than I'd like to recall. But it was overall a pretty magical experience and the fact this this show is now going to air on primetime and be available to so many households across America is something we should all rejoice in. It's a small miracle, really. We're like that guy on the British American Idol, Paul Potts, the car phone salesmen who got up there and shook everyone up with his passionate opera voice. He was pure genuine desire and authenticity without the annoying gloss and it was great to see him break through. That's what you'll see on How's Your News: pure, unpolished gems.

And about Jeremy, the HYN correspondent waving to you in the video frame above and in the middle of the trio below (photo), Arthur says:

Jeremy Vest is one of our greatest reporters. He is so eager to talk to everyone and he would not even know how to be a fake douchebag like so many people we see on TV. My favorite moment with him was on the red carpet at the Grammys when he blew off all the big pop stars like Rianna and Slash because really wanted to talk to the guy who did the voice for Kermit the Frog. He literally refused to talk to Slash because he was so concerned that Kermit would leave before he got the chance to say hello. For Jeremy, meeting that muppet was the biggest thrill of the night, that and meeting Wolfgang Puck.

Here's more on the MTV series, which you can catch on-air starting this Sunday, February 8. Notorious crankypants critic Tom Shales at the Washington Post gave it a good review. I'm looking forward to it.

(Photograph by Kevin Steele.) Alexander Rose of The Long Now Foundation says, "Long Now is holding an event I thought the Boing Boing crowd might enjoy: The Funeral for Analog TV with Bruce Sterling and Paul Saffo. The service will take place at the Berkeley Art Museum, Tuesday, February 17, at 7:00 PM." The website for this event explains, "In a soap-operatic melodrama fit for TV itself, Congress has debated changing the official date for the switch to digital television; however our event will proceed on Feb. 17 because we prefer to bury a fresh corpse rather than wait for the walking dead to fall over."

Jesus, *everyone* is twittering/emailing/suggesting this 2800+ word monster op-ed in today's New York Times by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn. Here's a snip:

Americans enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street.

This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. Good God, the world seems to be saying, if they don’t know what they are doing with money, who does?

Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?

To that end consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing.

The End of the Financial World As We Know It (NYT). When you're done with that, don't miss the companion piece in the same NYT edition, How to Repair a Broken Financial World, which is another must-read, clocking in at 2,000 words. And when you're done with all that, go watch "Keeping up with the Kardashians" or "Dog The Bounty Hunter" and eat some Hot Pockets, because AFAIAC, you'll have paid your thinkin' dues for the week.

About the writers: "Michael Lewis, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of Liar’s Poker, is writing a book about the collapse of Wall Street. David Einhorn is the president of Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund, and the author of Fooling Some of the People All of the Time."

Boing Boing partner and Federated Media founder John Battelle publishes a list of predictions every new year -- and at the end of that year (like, as in now) he revisits them, to see how he did. In short, he was pretty spot-on for 2008. His year-in-review posts are fascinating and insightful, and he's frank about even the parts that missed the mark. Snip:

Reading over my predictions for 2008, I was struck with one thing: It wasn't a list. It was more of a narrative, making decoding how I did that much more difficult. After the narrative, I focused on the biggies - Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, AOL, and Newscorp/FIM. I'll have to keep that in mind when I post my predictions for 2009 on Jan 1 next year.

Excerpts from a few of the company-specific predictions, reviewed:

Google:
1. 2008 will be the year Wall Street gets frustrated with Google. Sometimes, a picture says it best [ Image above, at top of post - XJ ]. It's clear the bloom came off the Google Wall St. rose in 2008.

2. Google will continue to struggle with its display advertising business, at least as it is traditionally understood, in part due to a culture conflict between its engineering-based roots and the thousands of media-saavy sales and marketing folks the company has hired in the past two years
I think this clearly occurred (note Armstrong's acknowledgement of this issue here, Comscore noted that Google had just 1.5% of the display market by June), but with the appointment of David Rosenblatt as President, Display, I expect the conflict to be resolved, at least temporarily. I do not believe, however, that this issue is anywhere near off the table. To do display right, you have to act like a publisher.

Yahoo:
1. Yahoo, meanwhile, will spend most of 2008 trying to figure out what to do with what it bought in 2007, and attempting to articulate a strategy that is anything but "we have 500 million users, so we must be important." By mid year, it will have succeeded.
Well, I was right about the first part, and very, very wrong about the second. I guess I was just too optimistic that Yahoo would get its shit together by mid year. Both the bear hug that was the lost Microsoft deal, and then the goat rodeo that was the lost Google deal, killed any clarity at Yahoo. But I do believe there is a comeback story to be written there. It just won't be Jerry writing it.

Predictions 08: How Did I Do? (Battellemedia)

Ed. Note: The following is Boing Boing guestblogger Clay Shirky's first post. Clay's traveling today, so I'm posting this one on his behalf. Image above: "Don't believe the Devil, don't beLIEve his book," a CC-licensed photo by Celeste, a Flickr user in Buenos Aires - Argentina. --XJ

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Every now and again, there is an essay that is so well written, so cleanly expressed, and so spectacularly wrong that it clarifies something you previously understood only dimly. James Gleick's recent advice to the publishing industry, How to Publish Without Perishing, was that for me.

Gleick's thesis is that publishers are people who sell objects, and he means this not just as a description of their past, but as strategy for their future as well. He makes much of the book as a thing, noting that we talk about "book lovers", but never "CD lovers", he writes of books in terms of possessing them, and his advice to publishers is to cede speed, relevance, and even popularity to digital businesses, and to shift publishing into reverse:

Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.

This proposed Ye Olde-ing the industry makes the choices faced by publishers suddenly seem more urgent.

There are book lovers, yes, but there are also readers, a much larger group. By Gleick's logic, all of us who are just readers, everyone who buys paperbacks or trades books after we've read them, everyone who prints PDFs or owns a Kindle, falls out of his imagined future market. Publishers should forsake mere readers, and become purveyors of Commemorative Text Objects. It's the Franklin Mint business model, now with 1000% more words!

In the same way the internet has forced newspapers into a 'news vs. paper' moment, the publishing world is in a 'readers vs. book lovers' moment. In this environment, the single most important choice anyone in publishing has to make is this: "How many generations do I want to be in business?" Because hawking Ye Olde Codices to aging connoisseurs is a one-generation business.

Businesses don't survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else. Can you imagine a 25-year-old telling a publisher "To get my business, you should stick to a single, analog format? Oh, and could you make it heavy, bulky, and unsearchable? Thanks."

From Aldus Manutius until recently, book lovers have been the most passionate readers. Now they are mostly just the oldest readers. Thanks to digital data, there is a fateful choice to be made between serving lovers of the text and lovers of the page; I think even Manutius would have sided with the readers over the collectors. I hope today's publishers do as well.

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Clay Shirky Boing Boing Guestblog posts:

* Video from the Presidential Campaign, Republican Division
* Jeff Smith's comic RASL
* Publish Without Perishing
* Here Comes Clay Shirky (The Changing of the Guestbloggers)

Snip from a Salon opinion piece by Michael Lind, which argues that Obama's victory marks "the beginning of a new era in American history," and that such eras are sparked by technological change.

[W]hat causes these cycles of reform and backlash in American politics? I believe they are linked indirectly to stages of technological and economic development. Lincoln's Second American Republic marked a transition from an agrarian economy to one based on the technologies of the first industrial revolution -- coal-fired steam engines and railroads. Roosevelt's Third American Republic was built with the tools of the second industrial revolution -- electricity and internal combustion engines. It remains to be seen what energy sources -- nuclear? Solar? Clean coal? -- and what technologies -- nanotechnology? Photonics? Biotech-- will be the basis of the next American economy. (Note: I'm talking about the material, real-world manufacturing and utility economy, not the illusory "information economy" beloved of globalization enthusiasts in the 1990s, who pretended that deindustrialization by outsourcing was a higher state of industrialism.)

Naturally, the Americans alive during the founding of new American republics have other issues on their minds. The Civil War was fought over slavery, not steam engines, and the New Deal, for all of FDR's commitment to nationwide electrical power fed by hydroelectric dam projects, was animated by a vision of social justice. The broad outlines of technological and economic change merely provide the frame for the picture; the details depend on the groups that emerge victorious in political battles.

That is why it is too early to predict the outline of the Fourth American Republic. Its shape depends on the outcomes of the debates and struggles of the next generation. But it is possible to speculate about its life span. If the pattern of history holds, the Fourth Republic of the United States will last for roughly 72 years, from 2004 (or, if you like, 2008) to 2076. And if the pattern of the past holds, we will see a period of Hamiltonian centralization and reform between now and 2040, followed by an approximately 36-year long Jeffersonian backlash motivated by ideals of libertarianism and decentralization.

Obama and the dawn of the Fourth Republic (Salon)

Fleet Foxes and Wilco covered Bob Dylan's "I Shall be Released" at a recent live show, and they're giving it away online if you promise to vote. Wilcoworld (via James Home on Twitter; photo of guitar rack on-stage at Wilco's set during Outside Lands via Crowdfire; image by John Battelle).

NASA confirms, beyond any earthly doubt, that water really really really does exist on Mars.

Laboratory tests aboard NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander's robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.

"We have water," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. "We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted."

NASA Spacecraft Confirms Martian Water, Mission Extended (nasa.gov).

I've also been enjoying the cheerful tweets of the Mars Rover, where I first heard this news. The future is pretty terrific, you know? And it's here.

Today was an amazing day out at Mojave Spaceport.

Burt Rutan, Sir Richard Branson, and a bevy of space celebs (including Dr. Buzz Aldrin) gathered for the launch of Virgin Galactic's twin-hulled mothership, "Eve," named after Sir Richard's own mom -- who formally christened WhiteKnightTwo with the pop of a champagne bottle. Branson explained that the spaceliner was also named "Eve" because she was conceived as an historic first for humankind.

The Boing Boing tv crew was there, and we'll be airing video hijinks later this week.

For now... here are a few random iphone snaps, and I twittered until my daggone fingers fell off (first tweet in series, and last tweet in series).

Here is coverage from other blog-pals we ran into out there:

Mojave historian and photographer Alan Radecki has posts up at MOJAVE SKIES

GIZMODO's Brian Lam took some fantastic photos (including some goof-off shots I dumped on Flickr), and has a dreamy little video up.

Over at WIRED: Photographer Dave Bullock and astrobiologist/space evangelist Loretta Hidalgo checked in with images and first-person accounts. She's going on the maiden voyage with her husband, George T. Whitesides of the National Space Society, for their honeymoon. Dude. Tell me that's not cool. Update: More from Bullock here.

The fine fellas at JAUNTED.

More photos from Dave Malkoff of CBS News.

(Space-helmet-tip of thanks: Charles Ogilvie and Abby Lunardini)

Chris Borroni-Bird is the director of Advanced Technology Vehicle Concepts at GM. He's leading the effort at GM to make fuel cell vehicles, based on a "skateboard" style chassis called AUTOnomy that incorporates the fuel cell, motors and electronics control.

GMnext kindly invited me to visit with Dr. Borroni-Bird and have a discussion with him about "innovation, technology, energy, the environment, and their impact on the future of the automobile." He's a fascinating innovator with ideas that could change transportation around the world. I hope he succeeds.

Here are more videos from our conversation. (Note: GMnext compensated me for my video appearance.) Link Chris Borroni-Bird and Mark Frauenfelder in conversation (GM Next)

Snip from an essay published by Kevin Kelly today over on his Technium blog:

All extropic  systems -- economy, nature and technology -- are governed by self-accelerating feedback cycles. Like compounding interest, or virtuous circles, they are powered by increasing returns. Success breeds success. There is a long tail of incremental build up and then as they keep doubling every cycle, they explode out of invisibility into significance. Extropic systems can also collapse in the same self-accelerating way, one subtraction triggering many other subtractions, so in a vicious cycle the whole system implodes. Our view of the future is warped and blinded by these exponential curves.

But while progress runs on exponential curves, our individual lives proceed in a linear fashion. We live day by day by day. While we might think time flies as we age, it really trickles out steadily. Today will always be more valuable than some day in the future, in large part because we have no guarantee we'll get that extra day. Ditto for civilizations. In linear time, the future is a loss. But because human minds and societies can improve things over time, and compound that improvement in virtuous circles, the future in this dimension is a gain. Therefore long-term thinking entails the confluence of the linear and the exponential. The linear march of our time intersects the cascading rise and fall of numerous self-amplifying exponential forces. Generations, too, proceed in a linear sequence. They advance steadily one after another while pushed by the compounding cycles of exponential change.

Balancing that point where the linear crosses the exponential is what long-term thinking should be about.

Where the Linear Crosses the Exponential [Kevin Kelly]

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)

Presenter: Brain Cox works on the Large Hadron Collider that's about to become operational at CERN.

Aim of particle physics is to find out what everything is made of. As you get back to the early times of the universe, things were simpler. In the 1st billionth of a second it was very simple. Everything was made from 12 particles of matter stuck together by four forces. "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." - Ernest Rutherford

Large Hadron collider is 27 Km in circumference and will accelerates protons to 99.99999% the speed of light (I might not have gotten the right number of 9s, sorry if this spoils your calculations if you are trying this at home). These will collide with another beam of protons going in the opposite direction.

Higgs gives mass to fundamental particles. Particles are massive because they are surrounded by Higgs particles. (Maggie Thatcher shown here surround by a Higgs field). The LHC will hopefully verify the existence of Higgs particles. If not, it'll find whatever is responsible for giving mass to stuff.

What particle physics means to me: gives modern science a creation story. We know universe beAgn 13.7 billion years ago as a dot smaller than an atom. Universe underwent exponential expansion in a billionth of a second and continues to expand. AFter 400 million years, the first stars formed and other elements were cooked in them. On some planets oxygen and hydrogen formed into water, liquid water on some planets. On at least one planet, life formed.

Here at TED, I met a man named Steve Varon. He's a warm and gregarious man who runs a successful children's underwear company on the East Coast. For the last year or so, he's been working very hard to make his dream possible: to see the Dalai Lama carry the torch in the Chinese Olympics. He made a short video about it, which he submitted to Pangea Day, but you can see it now on YouTube. I wish him luck in his quest.

The TED Prize event is streaming live now. I watched it last year and it was very moving. I imagine it will be again this year.

About the 2008 TEDPrize

The TED Prize was created as a way of taking the inspiration, ideas and resources generated at TED and using them to make a difference. Winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, and more importantly, a wish. A wish to change the world.

During today's session, webcast live from Monterey, California, the 2008 TEDPrize winners will unveil their wishes for the first time. Prize winners Neil Turok, Dave Eggars and Karen Armstong will be joined by singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela.

Link

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA) Presenter: Irwin Redlener, MD.

Irwin Redlener, MD is president of the Children's Health Fund spoke about how much loose nuclear material there is in the world, and how easy it is to make a suitcase nuke. Nuclear terrorism is probable, but survivable, he says. I missed most of his talk while typing up the last one (I'm sure Ethan Zuckerman will have a nice report on the talk). Here's a slide Redlener prepared on how to survive a nuclear attack.

Photographer Dave Bullock, whose work I've blogged here many times before, says,

When I opened up this month's National Geographic I was filled with amazement and a bit of envy. World class technical photographer, Peter Ginter, shot these really outstanding shots of CERN. His technique is unmatched.

Link.

Dubai is cloning the city of Lyon, France on a 700-acre plot, replicating its cultural institutions in a grand and surreal gesture of I'm-not-sure-what. Alas, the newtown is called "Lyons-Dubai City" and not "Baudrillardville."

Lyons and Dubai had already signed a "pact of cooperation and friendship" but al-Gandhi's idea adds a new twist to twinning: the new Lyons will cover an area of about 700 acres, roughly the size of the Latin Quarter of Paris, and will contain squares, restaurants, cafes and museums.

Al-Gandhi could have picked a worse place. Famed as the home of gastronomy and the birthplace of cinema, Lyons sits between two of France's best-known wine-growing regions. Even so, Dubai is unlikely to want to copy the decrepit tower blocks that ring the real city, symbols of the urban violence that periodically plagues France. Nor is the country's recent smoking ban in public places expected to be exported.

The desert city will include a Paul Bocuse Institute, like the one in Lyons named after the hallowed chef, in which students will study hotel management and gastronomy.

Link (Thanks, Grey!)

(Image: Old Lyon, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Will Palmer's Flickr stream)

Four people, including a pilot, saw an unusual UFO in Selden, Texas last Wednesday.

“The ship wasn't really visible and was totally silent, but the lights spanned about a mile long and a half mile wide,” [pilot Steve] Allen said. “The lights went from corner to corner. It was directly above Highway 67 traveling towards Stephenville at a high rate of speed - about 3,000 miles per hour is what I would estimate.”

Allen said the lights were not those of a normal aircraft. He said they were more like strobe lights, and while they were all watching, the lights reconfigured themselves from a single horizontal line into two sets of vertical lights.

They also said they saw two military jets ("possibly F16s") chasing after the ship. Link

Have a peruse at the 54 pages (and counting) worth of entries in this "Design a Nanohazard Logo" competition. Then, add your own! Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

Competition from a free municipal WiFi network in Lawrence, KS (a one-ISP town) has forced the local monopoly into providing a competing free service:

Lawrence has been touted nationally as the "land that anti-trust forgot". It is one of the few cities in America where one company owns the cable provider, cable news channel, daily newspaper, online news journal, weekly independent and most popular website. What keeps this media machine running smoothly? Broadband Internet revenue. According to Ralph Gage, former Chief Operating Officer of The World Company, 53 percent of the World Company’s annual revenue was generated by broadband Internet access.

"What better place to start a municipal WiFi project," jokes Joshua Montgomery, founder of the Lawrence Freenet Project and CEO of the organization’s for-profit service provider, "I mean what could possibly go wrong?" The Lawrence Freenet municipal WiFi project was launched in April of 2005 by a small group of local geeks. "Mostly we just wanted to see what we could do with Wi-Fi," says Montgomery, "we started off with a $50 WiFi access point and a DSL connection. Now the organization has one of the largest mesh networks in the nation and serves over 1,100 members with broadband Internet access – all without a single dime of tax payer money."

Link (Thanks, Offlogic!)

Evan sez, "Meraki makes it brain dead simple to share wi-fi and pushes it out to massive scale at super low costs. The result is free wi-fi across areas much bigger than previously feasible by individuals, and at much lower cost and subject to much lower red tape than previous municipal wi-fi projects."

Free the Net is a community-built network. Meraki provides the technology, but we rely on people to help build and grow. There are a number of ways you can help:

* If you can see the Free the Net signal, sign up for a free repeater to boost your signal.
* Volunteer to host an outdoor repeater on your roof or balcony. The outdoor units help spread the signal throughout your neighborhood and are critical to the growth of the network.
* Spread the word! Tell your friends and neighbors to sign up at http://sf.meraki.com.
* Check out the network map and keep yourself up-to-date on our progress.

Link to project, Link to map

I've been traveling in Central America for the past few weeks, so I'm late on blogging a number of things -- including this. Each year, EDGE.org's John Brockman asks a new question, and a bunch of tech/sci/internet folks reply. This year's question: What have you changed your mind about?

Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?

Link.

I was one of the 165 participants, and wrote about what I learned from Boing Boing's community experiments, under the guidance of our community manager Teresa Nielsen Hayden: Link to "Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending By Human Hands."

Here's a partial link-list of my favorite contributions from others:

Tor Nørretranders, W. Daniel Hillis, Ray Kurzweil, David Gelernter, Kai Krause, Clay Shirky, J. Craig Venter, Simon Baron-Cohen, Jaron Lanier, Martin Rees, Esther Dyson, Brian Eno, Yossi Vardi, Tim O'Reilly, Chris Anderson, Rupert Sheldrake, Daniel C. Dennett, Aubrey de Grey, Nicholas Carr, Linda Stone, George Dyson,Steven Pinker, Alan Alda, Stewart Brand, Sherry Turkle, Rudy Rucker, Freeman Dyson, Douglas Rushkoff .

The Endless Belt Trains for Futuristic Cities described in the November, 1932 ish of Modern Mechanix is one of my all-time favorite tomorrows of yesterday -- a world run on rails, rising high above the city, slicing through it with arrow-straight, improbable lines:

Passengers board the first local train at any point, and it stops every 50 seconds for a period of 10 seconds. When the doors close, a gong sounds and the local platform starts moving. Now there is another signal and gates open for a second platform, or express, on which the passenger takes the major part of his trip. After ten seconds the gates close and the local slows down for another stop, while the express picks up to a 22 m.p.h. speed.

Noise of the system is at a minimum, and passengers are delivered at no more than 300 feet from their streets. All stations are controlled from one central point, all elements being so timed that there can be no hitches.

Link

Last week on CBC Radio's national science program, Quirks and Quarks, they broadcast a recording of a fascinating panel discussion on "The Physics of Information: What the Universe Doesn't Want You to Know," held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. In this wide-ranging discussion a panel of distinguished and likable physicists run down such subjects as the universe as a computer, quantum teleportation, the fundamentals of information science, The panelists were in a state of near-hilarity through much of the the event, and that only made the subject better. Included on the panel were: Dr. Leonard Susskind (Stanford), Dr. Seth Lloyd (MIT), Dr. Christopher Fuchs (UNM), Sir Anthony Leggett (Urbana-Champaign), and the moderator, Bob McDonald, host of Quirks and Quarks.

The Physics of Information was the topic of a recent public forum, sponsored by Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, and moderated by Bob McDonald. And Quirks was there to record the event. Do ideas about information and reality inspire fruitful new approaches to the hardest problems of modern physics? What can we learn about the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, the beginning of the universe and our understanding of black holes, by thinking about the very essence of information? Those are some of the questions our panel tackled.

Link, Link to MP3, Link to podcast feed

This November, 1939 Popular Science article fantasizes about a futuristic "skyscraper airport" for the "city of tomorrow." Pretty good predictions, except they missed the whole no-shoes, no-liquid, no-dignity policy. Link

Mitsubishi has erected a tall, skinny, hollow tower filled with elevator shafts for testing high-speed lifts:

The 173m-high (567ft) structure is called Solae and dominates the skyline of Inazawa City...

The 5bn-yen ($50m;£25m) project will allow Mitsubishi to test new drives, gears, cables and other lift systems.

Link (Thanks, Geoff!)

Scotland's Falkirk wheel is a $34.8 million engineering marvel. It's a rotating elevator for boats, and is fun to watch in action. Link

Destiny sez, "At a Craigslist Foundation conference in San Francisco, Oakland lawyer-turned fundraiser Van Jones stole the show with an inspiring speech of surprisingly frank tips that are 'counter-intuitive and probably immoral' for non-profits. #3 is simply 'Don't Lie.'"

There is something about the relationship between the not-for-profit sector, the government, the foundations, and the donors that creates a massive incentive to lie -- flagrantly, and often.

And it's not just a one-sided thing. The relationship between not-for-profits and foundations is like the relationship between teenagers and parents. You don't really want to tell them everything that's going on, and they don't really want to know. So there's this dance of deceit, shall we say.

"What'd you do this weekend?"
"Oh... Studied! With my friends."

And the parents say 'Good! So glad to hear that!' Because they don't want to know. And so what do you say?

"How did the year go?"
"We had success after success! All goals were met, and a good time was had by all."

And what was there left to say? 'Good! Good!' They don't want to know....

I met Van last summer and was absolutely blown away -- he's a smart, committed, incredibly effective activist who's funny, personable and convincing as hell. Link (Thanks, Destiny!)

Antigua has won the right to pirate $21 million worth of US copyrights in the World Trade Court, because the US violated the World Trade Organization agreement when it banned Antiguan Internet casinos. The US was an extremely aggressive promoter of the WTO around the world, leaning on countries to drop trade protections that gave their own industries advantages over US competitors -- and now the US is being held to the same standard, hoist on its own petard.

By pressing its claim, trade lawyers said, Antigua could set a precedent for other countries to sue the United States for unfair trade practices, potentially opening the door to electronic piracy and other dubious practices around the world.

Still, carrying out the ruling will prove difficult, the lawyers say.

"Even if Antigua goes ahead with an act of piracy or the refusal to allow the registration of a trademark, the question still remains of how much that act is worth," said Brendan McGivern, a trade lawyer with White & Case in Geneva.

"The Antiguans could say that's worth $50,000, and then the U.S. might say that's worth $5 million." He predicted that "the U.S. is going to dog them on every step of the way."

Link (Thanks, Lee and Robbo!)

Five years ago, Dave Winer made a "long bet" with New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz: "In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site."

Five years later, Rogers Cadenhead has done the math and concludes that blogs are edging out the Times (but that other mainstream media outlets are beating both of them -- thanks to the NYT having squandered the golden years of cheap googlejuice acquisition by erecting a registration and paywall on their content, causing them to fall behind less well-known, but more readily linked news-sources).

Most interesting of all is that Wikipedia (only a year old in 2002) is clobbering both of them -- more proof that the future is weirder than we can know. In 2002, it seemed like the two choices were "amateurs you trust" or "unbiased, accurate, and coherent" information from an "authoritative source." In reality, the third, unforeseen choice was "a horde of nameless, faceless amateurs who are not required to prove expertise in the subjects they cover."

Whenever someone asks you which of two futures you think is more likely, your best bet is always "none of the above." Link (via Kottke)

Johnny says:

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday. Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licenses, and living there would be tax-free -- provided residents renounce their US citizenship.

Excerpt:

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.

Link

From the November, 1932 issue of Modern Mechanix, this skeptical account of a telepath-powered gramaphone!

Major Raymond Phillips, O.M.E., late member of the Inter-Allied Commission of Control, claims to have evolved apparatus which will cause a gramaphone or kettle to function entirely by will power.

Major Phillips explains that the human body acts as an earth and the constant capacity is maintained within three yards of the apparatus. A momentary pause in the flow to earth through the body—produced entirely by mind concentration—is followed by an upward surge of sufficient intensity to cause a series of relays to operate.

That’s the story. You can take it or leave it. We have a sneaking suspicion that somebody is being kidded.

Link

Carl sez, "The people who make up Public.Resource.Org have traditionally tried to do something fun and new at Christmas. This year, we're pleased to present a bunch of broken Powerbooks reading 'Twas the Night Before Christmas.; The Crippled Macintosh Rehabilitation Choir is reading from our original 1994 production of Clement Clark Moore's classic tale. Link (Thanks, Carl!)

Noah Shachtman points us to the Wired DANGER ROOM holiday gift guide.

The Pentagon is burning billions, to equip the soldier of the future. With DANGER ROOM's holiday gift guide, you can spend thousands, to get pretty much the same gear, today. Besides, who doesn't love a lil' pink Taser for Christmas?

Link.

The two enterprising gents shown here decided prison didn't suit them, so they removed some cement blocks that stood between them and the verdant paradise known as New Jersey. They figured the warden might object to their plans, so they covered their egress with "photos of bikini-clad women." It worked.

Espinosa, 20, an alleged gang member, was awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to manslaughter in a 2005 drive-by shooting in Elizabeth. Blunt, 32, was awaiting trial on charges of robbery and weapons offenses.

The men helped cover up the break by placing dummies under their bed blankets, and hiding the wall holes with magazine photos of women in bikinis, authorities said.

Authorities launched a review of security measures, and barred inmates from pinning up pictures from magazines on their cell walls.

Link

Fred sez,

I've just finished building CommitteeCaller.com, a site that allows one person to target an entire congressional committee over the phone. The web application utilizes the open source Asterisk PBX system to connect you to every senator or house member on a particular committee. No more digging around the 'net entering zip-codes to retrieve phone numbers of representatives -- CommitteeCaller.com automates the tedium of repetitively dialing your favorite politicians.

Just go to the website, select a committee, enter in your phone number and click "Put me in touch with democracy!" and you'll be called by our system and sequentially patched through to the front office of each member on that committee. You can even rate how each call went -- information that will enable us to rank representatives on how accountable and responsive they are to their constituents.

This is an excellent opportunity to contact the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- the politicians who are debating today whether telecoms should receive retroactive immunity for spying on your phone calls and e-mail.

Link

Google today announced Knol, which would appear to be their response to online knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and Mahalo:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

Link to Scott Beale's post, with pointers to some of the many online discussions around this today.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio programme Search Engine did a great segment this week on the Canadian DMCA kerfuffle, focused on the grassroots campaign that packed the house at Industry Minister Jim Prentice's Christmas Party last week and the Parliamentary fight that followed. This is inspiring stuff, hearing from all these friendly geeks who're trying out activism for the first time because this issue really moves them. You gotta hear the Parliamentary fight -- the New Democratic Party's copyright critic is on fire, and Prentice comes across as a bumbler. Link

(Disclosure: I am a paid columnist for Search Engine)

See also:
Canadian DMCA rally/celebration in Toronto next Tuesday
Canadian DMCA cancelled (again) (for now)
Canadian DMCA to be reintroduced -- your action needed NOW!
Canadian DMCA stalled, won't be introduced (today, at least)!
Canadian DMCA rally in Calgary -- photos, videos, reports
O Canada! The Canadian DMCA version of the national anthem
Canadian DMCA introduced
CANADIANS! Tomorrow is your best chance to fight the Canadian DMCA! Event in Calgary, national phone-in
Canada's DMCA won't get any consumer rights added to it for a decade
Facebook group for fighting Canada's DMCA growing fast
Ranting hand-puppet tackles Canada's DMCA
HOWTO Fight Canada's coming DMCA copyright law
Canada's coming DMCA will be the worst copyright yet
Canadian DMCA: how it might have happened
CBC radio show needs your input for question with Minister responsible for Canadian DMCA
Canadian Industry Minister refuses to defend Canadian DMCA in public