Technovia

Dave, you're still not getting it

In what I think is a pretty "interesting" turn of events, Dave Winer is now accusing those who criticised his description of Blogher of "gender bashing"him:

Liz, it's time to bend over backwards to create safety for men to speak on this subject. Many of your colleagues are already doing this. There are still a few standouts, and you are one of them. No more gender-bashing, lecturing and name-calling, and no more tolerance for that. I will consider what you have said. Now it would be great if you would do the same.

It's worth reminding ourselves about how Dave described BlogHer:

They are beautiful babes, but not like like booth bimbos, more like Thelma and Louise. So you got a great ratio, and they’re smart and driven, but that’s not all — they’re also bloggers! Which means I don’t have to explain what blogging is.

Dave, choosing to concentrate on how the women look at a technology conference is a form of gender bashing. It's saying "the most important thing about a woman is her appearance, no matter what the context".

"Respectful discourse on gender", something that you request, doesn't start with labelling women according to their appearance.

Lasadh: I hate mommy bloggers

Sherri posts on her BlogHer experience as a non-mother in I hate mommy bloggers:

Seriously. I've spent one evening in San Jose (and BlogHer hasn't even officially started yet) near a handful of obnoxious "mommy bloggers" and I already want to rip their fucking ovaries out.

Having been married to a woman who didn't want kids, and who was constantly angry at how the media (and other women) portray the childless woman as somehow not a "real woman", I completely understand where Sherri's coming from. And some of the comments are amazing: one numb-nuts even accuses Sherri of "hate speech"! The simple equation that being a woman is not equal to being a mother seems to pass these idiots by.

UPDATE: Just to make it clear, I'm not in any way criticising BlogHer itself. Judging by the posts, some people seem to have enjoy it and got a lot out of it, while others had a less positive experience. Given that I wasn't there, I would be well out of line criticising it - and, to be honest, given that the conference was a space for women bloggers and (last time I checked) I wasn't one, it would be churlish of me to do so.

Sorry - which century am I in?

Dave Winer goes to BlogHer, and comes back refreshed Scripting News Annex:

I think it was Scoble who said he wished college had been like this. Amen. The ratio was great, probably 20-to-1 women to men. And these weren’t ordinary women. They were (as Ze likes to say) hard chargers...

Some adjectives: They were good-natured, friendly, flirty, exceptionally beautiful, smiling, and glad to see guys like me there.

They are beautiful babes, but not like like booth bimbos, more like Thelma and Louise. So you got a great ratio, and they’re smart and driven, but that’s not all — they’re also bloggers! Which means I don’t have to explain what blogging is.

That sounds you hear is my jaw hitting the floor. And not because I'm dribbling at all the "babes" that Dave wishes had been at his college. How the hell can anyone, in the 21st Century, churn out this crap?

In the gift economy, who gets the biggest gifts?

Digg poster “Mike” popped up in the comments to “Kevin Rose: Get a grip” with this, which I thought was worth replying to in a post as it encapsulates a lot of the issues that I have with the whole “free” Web 2.0. First of all, Mike's post.

“You dont get it do you? I dont go to digg because I make money off of it. I go there because it has good news and ideas. I don't contribute because I get paid to I share because I have an idea or story that might be interesting to someone else. You fail to understand that the social web creates a gift economy, where I share whats cool to me because I like the things that others share. If the founders make money off of ads good for them, they have bills to pay.
I guess what I'm saying is digg is about the comunity, without the community digg isn't digg, and the community isn't about money, its about sharing ideas because you make the community better. Therefore digg the concept isn't about money.
Ads and such arent part of the digg community, they might be on the site, but someone has to pay the hosting bills and im glad it isnt me.”

This perspective treats sites like Digg as if they were part of the commons. Digg, the theory goes, is nothing without its users - and the users communally benefit. Therefore, as the community itself isn't about the money, therefore Digg isn't about the money either.

There's many problems with this, but the key one is simply that, while it's communally made, Digg isn't communally owned. It is, in fact, a classic capitalist model: the owners of the means of production (the site) take the profits, while the workers (those who contribute) take their “wages” - although in this case, the “wages” aren't cash, but the enjoyment of contributing to the site.

The clever trick that the proponents of Web 2.0 sites like Digg is to convince people that somehow because they're NOT getting paid, it's “open, free, and democratic”, when in fact it's no more “open, free and democratic” than Ford, Coca-Cola or AOL. The owners of the means of production take the profits, while the people who create the value get nothing. Saying that “without the community digg isn't digg” is exactly equivalent to saying “without the people who assemble cars, Ford isn't Ford”.

On one level, I have a sneaking admiration for this: it must rank as one of the greatest con-jobs in business history, and it certainly demonstrates the old PT Barnum dictum of “never give a sucker an even break” still works, even in the information age.

However, the funny thing is that I have a sneaking suspicion that, with a few exceptions, some of the owners of the means of production really believe the hype themselves. Which is why I suspect they usually end up selling to someone larger - because growing the business themselves and raising an IPO would force them to confront the fact that they're in the same old business of exploiting cheap labour as most of the rest of the capitalist world.

Mr Hammersley

My friend Mr Hammersley is currently off in Afghanistan, and is chronicling things via his Flickr stream. Given that Ben is a rather fantastic photographer, the results will undoubtedly be very, very good.

Just get yourself back in one piece, please, Ben.

A response to Stewart Butterfield on Web 2.0 hypocrisy

In my post in response to Kevin Rose's proclamation about Digg, del.icio.us and Flickr being “true, free, democratic social platforms devoid of monetary motivations”, in which I talked about “the hypocrisy of the Web 2.0 generation”, Flickr's Stewart Butterfield added the following comment:

“Ian, surely this statement is as dumb as the one you're criticizing? That can't be your considered opinion as to the dynamic between, say, Flickr and the people who use it.

There's a distinction to be made here between some of the Web 2.0 sites and others. Flickr, for example, has value to the user even if you have no other people using it. It stores your photos, makes them easy to find and categorise, and shows them off to the world. In other words, if all I do is store my photos on there, it has value to me. The same is true of del.icio.us: even if I am the only person using it, there's value to me there as a place to store bookmarks across machines. Of course, both services gain value if more people use them. But, as Bill Gates has pointed out, so does Microsoft Office: the more people use it, the more people can read Office-formatted documents, the more value the product gains as a ”lingua franca“ for electronic document interchange.

The social aspects of Flickr, while great, aren't necessary for it to have value. It's an online photo service, and on that level no more or less ”Web 2.0“ than Yahoo! Photos was/is.

Services like Digg and Netscape, on the other hand, have precisely zero value other than as aggregators of user-generated content. ALL they are is an aggregation of content created by users. The vast majority of their value to each individual user comes from the fact that lots of people contribute to it. And yet, up till what we might call ”The Calacanis Moment“ there was no recognition in any meaningful sense that the vast majority of the value of the site was created by the users themselves. Sure, there was lip-service paid to it, but who made the money? Not the people who gave the site value.

While Flickr and del.icio.us are analogous to traditional software services, Digg and Netscape are more like magazines that don't pay their contributors. They're the small press of the internet era, with contributors who are expected to ”do it for the love“. But, like all successful small press publications, there comes a point at which you have to stop expecting people to do it for the love and start paying them for the value they add to ”your“ publication.

Kevin's hypocrisy is this: he's implying that  people should and will continue to do it for love, because they feel like the site belongs to them. Yet, of course, the site doesn't belong to them - it belongs to him, and he will sooner or later make money from it. You can call that hypocrisy, or you can call it the oldest Capitalist trick in the book. Either way, it smells bad.

So was it fair to lump together everyone who thinks of themselves as ”Web 2.0“ and call them hypocrites? On one level, no: there's a clear distinction between sites that gain all their value from user-generated content (like Digg) and those that offer a service that would be valuable even if only you were using it (Flickr, del.icio.us).

But on the other hand, there's a steep resistance amongst many in the Web 2.0 world to recognising that the ”collective intelligence“ that their sites harness creates much of the value of their sites - AND that it should be compensated for its time and efforts in dollars, not ”love“. There's constant talk of ”openness“ and ”democracy“, and yet there's an emerging class of ”site owners“ who are happy to talk of democracy and take all the money for themselves. To dive back to Marxism 1.0, they're the owners of the means of production: the taggers and the diggers are the proletariat. It's time the capitalists recognised that the workers need to get paid.

The Good Doctor Reid

John Reid's tenure at the Home Office is already shaping up to be one of the biggest disasters in the history of this government. Within the space of weeks, Dr Reid has managed to demoralise his entire department by declaring it "not fit for purpose", infuriate the Attorney General by attacking a judge who had delivered a sentence on a child molester that was actually determined by legislative contstraints, and now declare an interest in releasing details of the whereabouts of convicted paedophiles to local communities. The fact that this move has been described as unworkable and dangerous by police chiefs, and as counterproductive and likely to actually increase the danger to children by child protection specialists is water off a duck's back to Dr Reid.

Dr Reid is, of course, driven entirely by seeking out headlines rather than working out policies that will benefit the public. Take his new-found committment to consider longer sentences for the carrying of knives. The fact that less than a year ago, Dr Reid voted against a Tory amendment that would have done just this is a flipflop that Olga Korbut would have been proud of. But now that the issue is in the papers, it must be responded to. Before, when it was only kids doing something dangerous, it didn't matter.

More worrying yet is that, by all accounts, Dr Reid is Blair's favourite minister. Elevated from transport (where he gave the rail companies a free ride to carry on not investing) to health (where he sponsored several initiatives that have been quietly dropped by his successor in order to actually make the NHS work) to the Home Office, Reid has followed the perfect Blairite pattern. This involves forgetting about all notions of good governance in favour of responding to the newspapers, in order to ensure you get relected.

The extent of the doublethink in doing all this is remarkable, and only makes sense if you consider the business of the Labour Party to be retaining power, rather than benefiting the country. The Home Office is suddenly not fit for purpose - a fact that the Labour ministers of the previous nine years somehow seemed to miss. Knives are a rising problem, that suddenly appears, out of nowhere - something that a minister could have found out by talking to teachers (perhaps they were too busy demoralising and degrading the status of teachers to do that). Judges deliver sentences in line with Labour-originated legislation, and are scolded for it.

Six years ago, for the first time in my adult life and after having been a Labour member in my teens and twenties, I did something unthinkable: I didn't turn out and vote Labour. Having been in the party during the 1980's, I knew that anyone capable of taming the sprawling, radical mess (as Blair had done) was likely to have streaks of ruthlessness and authoritarianism a mile wide. While I trusted such a person to get the party on the right road, there was no way I could trust them with governing the country. Blair hasn't let me down: he has simply proved that he should never have been given the keys to Number 10.

Factoryjoe on trademarks

FactoryJoe posts onWhy BarCamp is a Community Mark at FactoryCity, and in the process makes a specious comment on trademark law. Responding to my claim that “trademark laws are designed to protect consumers, not ensure a revenue stream for companies”, Joe claims:

This is the correct interpretation of trademark law as it was intended in 1876. Yeah, that’s right, 130 years ago... Intellectual property protections at one time served to protect the consumer, the little guy, the entrepreneur. That was back when the feedback loop that corrected fraudulent activities was slow, tedious and often ended with a dual in the middle of main street. With patents being filed en masse by folks like Texas Instruments (who will likely never use or enforce the majority of their portfolio), with copyright being used to stifle creativity and expression and trademarks being applied to community-protected language and ideas, it’s clear that the original uses and purposes of these legal concepts are not only under scrutiny, but may have finally become the last ditch effort large power-mongering corporations with major budgets to go after the smaller, more nimble independents that they were designed to protect.

While I have some sympathy with Joe on both copyright and patent law, I disagree with him on trademarks - and I don't see a coherent argument in this post. He claims that my description of trademark law was accurate 130 years ago, and then supports this claim with examples about patents and copyright. That's basically constructing a straw man, which is a rhetorical trick that's as old as the hills and that generally indicates a specious argument. In other words, Joe is wrong.

So I'll ask two questions of Joe:

1. Can anyone give an example where trademark law - NOT patents or copyright - has been used to stifle innovation or damage the interests of consumers (and no, the O'Reilly spat can't be used - the facts of the case aren't exactly clear, especially if you read Tim O'Reilly's response).

2. If trademark law was removed from the statute books tomorrow, what would be the consequences?

Apple loses blogging case

27B Stroke 6:

The Sixth District Court of Appeals on Friday roundly rejected (.pdf) Apple's argument that the bloggers weren't acting as journalists when they posted internal document about future Apple products. “We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalis(m).' The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here,” the court wrote.

Apple's claim that subpoenaing the offending web sites - O'Grady's Powerpage and Apple Insider - was the only way it could find out how leaked its secrets was also thrown out. Even better was this:

Apple alludes repeatedly to the notion that the publication of trade secrets cannot be found to serve the public interest because of the policy embodied in trade secret law itself, which presupposes that trade secrets possess social utility justifying special protections against wrongful disclosure. This is, of course, a false dichotomy. It is true that trade secrets law reflects a judgment that providing legal protections for commercial secrets may provide a net public benefit. But the Legislature’s general recognition of a property-like right in such information cannot blind courts to the more fundamental judgment, embodied in the state and federal guarantees of expressional freedom, that free and open disclosure of ideas and information serves the public good.

This is a significant victory against the idea that trade secret laws give companies carte blanche to subpoena journalists and others rather than conduct proper internal investigations into how information is leaked. It also supports the important principle that trade secrets laws don't overrule the idea that “free and open disclosure of ideas” is, if anything, more important to the public good.

For the techno-hippies, mob rules

It's been a quiet day at work, which means that I've been able to follow the growing controversy over CMP Media and O'Reilly's apparent cease and desist letter sent to an Irish non-profit over its use of “Web 2.0” in the name of a conference. I don't think I've ever seen a better example of internet hysteria, mob “justice”, and general stupidity for a while.

First of all, the facts. O'Reilly and CMP have been organising the Web 2.0 Conference for several years, and, in fact, first came up with the term when brainstorming the idea for the conference. As is standard practice, O'Reilly and CMP applied for a service mark for the name to protect its business. Just as IDG owns the service mark “Macworld Expo”, so CMP owns “Web 2.0 Conference”.

A non-profit body in Ireland called IT@Cork is organising a conference about the same themes, and called it “Web 2.0 Half Day Conference”. Note the similarity. Unsurprising to anyone familiar with trademark law, IT@Cork then got a simple cease and desist letter from CMP's lawyers.

Enter “Outraged of the Internet”. The normally sensible Thomas Hawk claims “until Tim O'Reilly apologizes for this asinine move I'm going to start using the term Web 2.1 whenever I mean Web 2.0”. Marc Canter claims he “takes shit like this personally”. And on. And on.

Of course, the generally attitude of all these outraged netizens is that O'Reilly has behaved badly. A lot of them seem to think that O'Reilly is trying to own the phrase “Web 2.0”, which is simply nonsense. O'Reilly/CMP have long organised the Web 2.0 Conference. Someone else decided to make a conference and call it “Web 2.0 Half Day Conference”. That's exactly the same as me deciding to organise a “Macworld Half Day Conference” and being surprised when IDG came after me.

You can call a web site a Web 2.0 site. I could launch a magazine called “Web 2.0”. Someone could print “Web 2.0 sucks ass” on a bunch of t shirts - and none of this would infringe on any service mark of O'Reilly/CMP's. What you can't do, and I can't do, and IT@Cork should have known it couldn't do, is create a conference called “Web 2.0 Conference”. It's nothing to do with controlling the term, and everything to do with protecting the reputation of a conference than O'Reilly and CMP have worked hard to establish.

But, for the techno-hippies – some of whom have made fortunes from intellectual property – what O'Reilly has done is shocking, an outrage. So they call in the blogging lynch mob, many of whom know nothing about IP law and all of whom are prepared to be whipped up into a fervour by the A-List as required.

Wisdom of crowds? More like Mob Rules.