You may be a technophobe.
I don’t mean if you refuse to get a cell phone. Or if you refuse to join FaceBook (or whatever the current trendiest Networking Service is). I don’t mean if you believe electricity is evil or that we should all go back to being hunter-gatherers. If any of those examples describe you, you definitely are a technophobe and that’s fine. You fall into the category of obvious technophobe. You are a proud upstanding member of the Anti-Technology Party. And although you and I may disagree about certain things, I respect your right to have your opinion. I am not concerned with you here.
I want to talk about a different form of techno-hatred here. Hypocritical Closet Technophobia is apparently very common among people my age and older than myself. (I was born in ’76 so…)
If you believe that:
You are a technophobe. Sorry.
When new media are developed, they do tend to be useful to people already in communication using existing media. So it is true that to a certain degree, new media is used in place of the old. Yes, when new Media are developed, existing conversations do take advantage of them.
But in addition, and this is the important distinction I want to make, new media also inspire communication. In other words, new media make it possible for new kinds of conversations.
It may be true that some of the interactions that take place through Email or Instant Messaging might otherwise take place through Snail-Mail, Telephone, or even in person, but it’s also true that more often than not, the communication that is taking place using the new medium wouldn’t be taking place at all if the new medium didn’t exist.
Imagine the last time you called a local business to see how late they were open. How would that conversation have translated to a pre-telephone world? Perhaps it wouldn’t have happened at all.
The reason I wanted to post this is just because I meet people fairly often that think we’re headed toward a dystopian future where people do not value real human interaction and virtually everything is virtualized.
On the contrary, I want to point out that new media are actually making it easier for people to organize real-world events.
And of course, new media are making it easier for people to find other people in the ‘real world’ with similar interests, needs etc, that often lead to one-on-one interactions.
Anyways… Have a nice day.
Part One – Some Background. Long Tail, Net Neutrality & Free Culture
First, let me apologize for how long this damn thing is. Unfortunately, I need to make sure I get everyone on the same page more or less as far as what I see as the important ideas/themes to consider when looking at the current condition of Music (and all other Media). If the set-up is old news to you, bare with me while I school everyone else for a second.
Second, if you’re interested in what is going on with all this stuff, you really ought to check out the book: The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution by Dave Kusek. The first six chapters are available as a podcast in the iTunes Store HERE (iTunes URL Link). And a variety of links to where you can purchase the entire Audiobook can be found HERE.
This is where I got the idea of “Music Like Water.” In the first chapter of the book, Kusek talks about how in the future, music will flow like water without the constant interruptions we experience now when we have to buy or download it or move it from one drive to another. Music will just be there waiting. Like water through a faucet, it will pour. It will be as abundant and as varied as we like. I believe, as long as the Net remains neutral, this is inevitable.
Right now of course, that’s not at all how it works. But if you’ve got your ear to the tracks you can hear it coming. Digital Media, The Web, Search, Recommendation Systems, Social Software, RSS/Atom feeds, P2P technology, increasing connection speeds, accelerating processing power, the cheapening of storage – We are clearly on the threshold of a paradigm change. This is a particular moment in time when some very exciting things are happening with regard to how media is curated, discovered and distributed, not to mention how it’s created.
This stuff is much bigger than just music too. Of course all of these concepts carry over into Film, News, Literature, instructional products, the list goes on, but even beyond all that, this is a profound moment in history because the very process by which Human Culture grows, changes and spreads is changing because of the Internet and the invention of digital product. Anyone with access to blue-collar amounts of money can create media. Since increasingly anyone can participate in the cultural dialog, people are. This phenomenon is causing the few companies and institutions that have had most of the control over Culture in its many forms for all of living memory to lose market share as they increasingly find themselves in competition with Everyone and Everything else.
The “Everything Else” is also called the Long Tail and is examined by Chris Anderson in his book, “The Long Tail: Why The Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” This is a good book to read or listen to because it brings to light an important fact: There is more value in the sum of all the less-popular and niche products than there is in just the “Top Hits” we’ve grown up with.
The “Everyone Else” is me and you. What we are participating in here is what Lawrence Lessig calls the Read/Write Web. Rather than a one-way, or Read-Only form of media, digital media and the Web are very conducive to dialog. One example of this dialog is sampling in music. Another is the blogosphere. And there are many, many more. The Hands-On, Read/Write, Two-Way “remix-culture” that we are finding ourselves in suddenly makes you and me part of the “Everything Else” I mentioned a moment ago.
In this way, we are taking market share from corporate media and so corporate media is losing influence over our Culture and losing Money as the value they can offer advertisers is falling. And guess what. They want to stop it. That’s exactly what the Net Neutrality debate is about. If the Net becomes un-neutral, it will be like handing the freedom to participate that we now enjoy over to companies that stand to gain from preventing our participation in Media, and our access to a variety of media products.
If you want to learn more about Two-Way Media and how Corporate Media is trying to control it, go read or listen to Lawrence Lessig’s book: “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture.” It’s free!
Almost everyone I know uses illegal means to access media products at leas some of the time. Often it’s just too inconvenient to get media the legal way. Actually it’s often not even an option.
The traditional purveyers of Culture are losing money because of this. Media have been selling eyes and ears to the advertisers that fund them since before your parents were born. It’s not paranoid conspiracy-theory-speak when I say that the corporate media want to maintain control over the Culture Markets.
MORE ON THIS TO COME. In the meantime, check these out:
Trent Reznor Talks to CNET About Saul Williams Release
NIN Releases Ghosts Volume I for FREE
We started with the semantics of document structure. That’s what the World Wide Web is made of. It’s a giant network of HTML pages linking to each other. HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) documents have titles, links, headings and other elements that allow us to see web pages the way we do today. The whole idea of a “Hyper-Text” is referring to the power of a form of semantics. It is a matter of semantics that we see <a>this</a> as a link and
<h2>
</h2>
as a heading. It is the semantics of document structure a.k.a, HTML that have made it possible for documents like this one to link to others and for all of these pages that make up the Web to be rendered by our computers in more or less the same way.
The Idea of “The Semantic Web” is really only necessary for the sake of comparison.
So to sort out the semantics of what we’re talking about when we use the word “semantic” with regard to the Web, The Semantic Web refers to a movement toward not just semantics that define the structure of documents or pages, but semantics being applied to how information is made available over the Net.
Recent trends in the Web’s growth are making computer-language standards for compartmentalizing domains of data. The Semantic Web is a movement toward not just using semantics for defining document structure, but using semantics to make declarations about the context in which a linked resource or bit of information can be useful.
I was pleased to wake up the other day after sleeping over at a friend’s house and find that this was playing on the TV Set via the podcast “The Digg Reel…”
Apparently it’s gotten some love out there. My friend Arin put this video together and he used an early incarnation of the song Starting Over in it.
Two really cool interviews to check out via Charlie Rose.
Chris Anderson of WIRED and “The Long Tail” and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.
Charlie Rose apparently has an awesome archive of a ton of his interviews available on his site. Woah. I’m probably going to spend next weekend there.
Maybe it’s a bit silly to say that there’s “a Killer App (as in one)” for Semantics. Nonetheless, Yahoo! announcing its search results will soon be taking advantage of Semantic Web Standards is definitely great news. Quote from the Yahoo! Search Blog:
“In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.”
Hmmm. Wasn’t I just saying something about Semantics having an effect on Search Results in the near future? I guess Yahoo! doesn’t think that’s such a crazy idea.
Imagine that. Standards for defining the context in which information can be used actually being used to help search engines provide users with more relevant results. What a concept!
And on the SEO and SEM front, can you guess what Google, AOL, MSN and all the others are probably working on right now?
Big Rant.
Using HTML was once a smart move for findability online. Seems obvious to us now, but in case you don’t realize how stupid people were during the initial growth of the Web back in the late nineties, imagine this: People used to send cease and desist or take-down letters to owners of other sites because the other sites were linking to them.
“How dare you link to my site! You have no right to mention my existence and if you do not remove the link, I will sue you!”
In other words, we have a hard time looking beyond the current paradigm. Right now that paradigm is something like, in order to be findable, spend a lot of time working with the wording of your site’s copy, and make sure your metadata and you document structure are written to reflect what search results you want to win.
It’s funny though: Still, one of the best things you can do SEO wise is to have an RSS feed. And in case you didn’t realize this, RSS is a Semantic Standard. Apparently RSS 2.0 is a little convoluted (the adjustments made to the standard since it’s creation are not entirely in line with the Semantic Web school), but the original RSS stood for RDF Site Summary. Blah blah blah. Go look it up.
A little bit of Semantics is potentially way better for your site’s visibility than a whole lot Keyword tweaking.
FOAF, SIOC and the countless other Semantic Markups are a way for you to get your foot in the door now! A bit like the people that realized early on that they needed to have a website at all in the first place.
A little bit of early adoption of Semantics for your information could really pay off as we start moving toward a smarter Web. And we are moving toward a smarter Web. Who will be part of it when it reaches it’s tipping point for large scale adoption? Will you or your business? Or will you wait until some news report announces that the rest of the world has already gone semantic? I know I’ll be there. I already am.
Because what Search Engines are trying to do is provide users with access to what users are looking for, the process of SEO, when it consists of tweaking Keywords and/or document structure around, according to whatever the latest rumors are on what silly and temporary way Google seems to be currently making decisions about relevance, is always going to be flawed and as long as these SEO rumors are floating around, people will be trying to game the engines and in turn, people are collectively increasing the need for the engines to change their parameters, repeat, repeat, repeat. Search engines do not try to index sites based on the sites’ application of SEO techniques, engines index sites based on an attempt at creating an Information Architecture… This is hard to do because most website aren’t presented in a architecture-y way. So we’ve come full circle. Feeds are an architecture-y way to present your content, so it’s no wonder they help with SEO.
You might ask “So what’s next beyond RSS? How can I make Google love me even more?”
My answer is: “Stop lying to them with your SEO, and start helping them with Semantics”
And just remember what happened when a little bit of semantics got put into effect? Remember RSS? Well the blogosphere basically happened and in turn the “Live Web,” Podcasting and all that. Powerful stuff, and Web 2 is just the tip of the iceburg.
This post is aimed at one of my personal heroes, Professor Lawrence Lessig.
Mr Lessig,
First, I want to thank you for all the work you’ve done already to spread awareness about ‘Net Neutrality,’ the need for Intellectual Property reform, ‘Free Culture’ and so on. Your name comes up often as I do my part to help to change the way people think about the ownership of ideas and/or culture, no doubt because many of my thoughts on these matters are derivatives of yours. And finally, as an artist, thank you for helping me to see past my own possessive instincts, and to understand that my creative efforts are best honored if I aim for my work to become part of the Public Domain, because it is there that I can really contribute to the shape of our culture in the future. So thank you. Please keep up the good work.
It occurred to me that you may be the perfect person to spearhead the solving of a problem our government has -a small problem with major consequences. Before I go on though, I just want to urge you not to take this letter the wrong way. I don’t mean to imply that you need people like me to help you to choose your battles. But I know of no one else in the public eye that is such an advocate for the people, and who also seems to understand the implications of digital communication via the Web. You are the only public figure I can think of that generally seems to take the people’s side in all the domains where this issue manifests itself: The need for transparency in government; The need for people to be able to navigate the law to some degree without the aid of lawyers; The importance and potential of the [Read/Write] Web, especially with regard to how it can and does make our Democracy more democratic; etc… You actually seem to understand what the Web is and why it is important, and I fear that many or most of our legislators, judges and executives do not. This is why I’m writing to you.
The problem is that government websites generally lack consistency, search-ability, interactivity and general user-friendliness. On the surface, this may seem to many people like a minor problem. But from my point of view, it is one of the most important manifestations of how our government doesn’t work for the average person. This is a huge opportunity to improve how our democracy works for us.
Here are some of my thoughts on this.
1. Government websites generally have no interoperability between them. It seems to me that government websites should share a common information infrastructure as well as a common basic user interface and query system. If I am looking for information on something like a law on one government site, like say a county, I should be able to expand my search to include less local results, like say the state I am in, or narrow my search to only include more local results, like the City I am in. I think that government sites should be hierachically connected wherever possible to say the very least.
In general, I think it is time for all official government agency websites to become integrated.
2. Government websites do not routinely take advantage of technologies that make it easy for us to get new information from them. With technologies like RSS and iCal, it seems that citizens should be able to access regular updates from all the government agencies that concern them. We should be able to anonymously subscribe to feeds of governmental news, events, changes in policy, Etc. Example: “Effective today: All automobiles must have headlights turned on when it is raining regardless of the time of day. See Vehicle Code XYZ Section abc.”
3. By allowing existing laws to be un-findable, our government excludes us from even being able to understand what we have supposedly agreed upon through a democratic process.
For instance, on many occasions, I have tried to find out the specifics of one law or another. I have gone to my City, County and State government websites hoping for my question to be answered by a quick search, but instead, I’ve found myself hours later with a ton of windows open still trying to figure out the answer to a specific question like “Is [somehting] against the law?”
Again, to some people this may seem like a trivial complaint, but how in the world are we supposed to be law-abiding citizens if we cannot even be sure what the laws are? I believe that most people, in most communities in the USA have a very vague understanding of what is and isn’t legal. To many of us, The Law acts like some sort of urban mythology. We have no idea what the law actually says, and we cannot find the law if we want to learn what it actually says.
I have even had conversations with law enforcement officers in which the officers assured me that I “Can’t do” something, but were unable to tell me what the law says, where it says it, whether it is a local, state or federal law that is in question, or where I could even begin to look to find out for myself. This is scary to me.
I understand that Laws themselves are often confusing to lay persons. But I don’t understand why it is so hard to even find Laws in the first place. We have the technology to vastly improve this situation. It must be improved.
4 . Government websites generally have no place for public discussion or comment. There is also generally no universal protocol for asking the government(s) questions through the Web. Really, there is practically no way to reliably get facts about policy from government agencies in general. Since we clearly have the technology to make it possible for citizens to interact with and get information from government agencies, while keeping the expense to taxpayers very low, shouldn’t this be imperative?
So those are some of my main ideas about the digital government interface. Perhaps it is time for it to become written into law that certain standards and improvements are implemented on all government websites. Indeed, if there are already legally binding standards in place for government websites, they need to be vastly improved.
If technologies like RSS along with Semantic Web technologies were taken advantage of by government agencies, they could lead to vast improvements in our ability to understand and take part in our democracy.
Mr. Lessig, I wanted to write this to you because I don’t know where else to turn with these ideas. I hope you get this, and if you do, I hope you understand why I wrote this to you, rather than, say, The President or Santa Clause.
Of course, I am more than willing to help with this cause in any way that I can.
Sincerely,
Andrew A. Peterson
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