Jesper is going to talk about the affinity of games and computers. [Abstract]

Why do we play computer games? Well, why do we play games at all? The real question is: Why do games fit computers so well? Computers are an enabler of games the way cinemas enable story telling.

He gives a nuanced analysis of classical games. Then he looks at what happens if you remove one of the elements. For example, games classically have rules. Take away the rules and you can have freeform play. If you remove the fact that we place a value on the outcomes (i.e., we like to win), you can get Conway’s game of life or watch a fireplace. So, this is a definition of games that — despite Wittgenstein — is useful since it provides a way to think about assumptions.

The elements of the classical model have been removed since around 1970. E.g., pen and paper role playing games don’t have fixed rules and Doom doesn’;t have a quantifiable outcome. The one thing that hasn’t changed is the fact that the player feels associated with the outcome.

Games aren’t tied to any particular media. They can be “transmedial.” E.g., computer hearts is just like real world hearts, but John Madden Football isn’t.

He concludes: Games have moved onto computers so easily because we have spent millennia driving the ambiguity out of games. He says, “Expanding the field of games is one of the computer’s most important contriutions to human culture.”

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Ted is an economist. He’s the guy who wrote the paper about the economics of Evetrquest. You can find more papers by him here. [Abstract]

He surveyed users of Everquest, and got 3,619 answers. He applied some standard economic techniques to evaluate the economics of that Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG, i.e., More-Peg). And, most entertainingly, he found that 20% of respondents said that they live in Norrath (one of the game’s worlds) and visit the real world. The average of all respondents is spending 4.5 hours per day playing the game and have put a total of about 800 hours into their main avatar.

“This is a frontier.” It attracts people who are stigmatized. It can greatly increase human well-being.

Ted reports on new, unpublished research. He wants to see if two characters sold at ebay have different prices because one is male and one is female. At a $400 typical auction price, the female sells at about a 10% discount.

Ted also tracks currency prices for the virtual world’s money against the US dollar. At the moment, Korean bucks are worth less than virtual simoleons.

He says that the current model in which a corporation is in charge of the virtual world isn’t working too well. Players are constantly pissed off and feel completely alienated from the governing body. It will have to change but he doesn’t know how.

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Greg is talking about the severe pressure the game industry is under. Development budgets have increased in a Moore-like way but revenues haven’t: A game ten years ago cost about $200,000 to produce; now it costs $2M+. App size has gone up two orders of magnitude in just a few years. Most of the costs are for graphic design. I.e., it used to take a one person-day to build. A Doom III level takes 2+ weeks.

But the industry feels it has to keep moving up. The audience has no “Indie game” aesthetic. And games are sold to distributors on the basis of brief demos that highlight the graphics. Actual gameplay is too hard to judge to play much of a role in the decisions. And, historically, supporting advanced hardware has increased sales, but (says Greg) that’s because the hardware has sucked.

Games lose money. And it will get worse. Consequence: The field is driven by mega-hits. Over 89% of sales are generated by thhe top ten games. Publishers will continue to consolidate. And games will be more like other games; the most lucrative approach is to publish a sports game that has minor annual updates. And basing a game on a commercial character (or doing a sequel) reduces the risk. It has to fall into an existing category, with innovation only on the margins.

There is interest in independent game development because people are desperate for a hit. Also, mobile games are showing signs of life becausegames mobile platforms require much less develop time.

But, overall, says Greg, we’re facing the “comicization” of gaming, marginalizing it as an artform. But, the field is wide open in terms of possible innovation.

Possible solutions: Keep costs down by having the games companies conspire to work together. Or find new sources of revenue. Or online distribution, which works for puzzle games (e.g. Jewel, Tetris) on Yahoo Games, etc. We will see a revival of shareware. And mods will survive, although there’s no real business model. We need a parallel distribution channel for independent games, analogous to the indie music scene an d art house for film. Possibly we’ll see “advergaming” as per WildTangent. And the academic environment is producing some interesting games.

Or maybe we won’t keep pushing against Moore’s Law once we have cinematic quality games. And then perhaps cinematic quality won’t be required in every game: photography gave rise to abstract art, says Greg.

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Micah is providing a way to think about the self online and off. [Abstract]

Self psychology was originally developed by Heinz Kohut to deal with personality disorders. He talked about selfobjects, which are anything you encounter that you consider constitutive of you. Some are healthy and some aren’t. Idealized selfobjects tell you how to be. Healthy ones might be a teacher or a hero. An unhealthy selfobject is destructive of your personality, e.g., Jesse James. A mirroring selfobject gives feedback to you, e.g., an audience that nods as you talk. A drill instructor might be both an idealized and mirroring selfoject.

What are online selfobjects?

An idealized electronic selfobject might be a computer (accurate, great uptime, logical) or Google.

An electronic mirroring object might be your program’s ability to compile (if you’re a programmer).

An electronically mediated idealized selfobject might be someone you know mostly online or online relationships (clans, guilds) you hold in high regard. Or the apartment on the TV show Friends.

An electronically mediated mirroring self objects might be comments on your blog.

Implications for real life: People who segment their online life from real life may appear significantly different when online. People who are more “integrated” may show online traits offline as well. And, of course, just because you use a technology doesn’t mean that you take as a selfobject.

I am my blog. My blog is me.

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The Tutor begins by reminding us that his presentation is the property of the Happy Tutor. [Abstract]

His 19 aphorisms and one parable are essentially poetry. You can read a close version of them for yourself here.

Quite wonderful.

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Semiotics has been associated with a type of idealism (Rob says), dealing only with immaterial signs. Rob is going to see if there’s a way of also anchoring it in the earth: something can be both a material thing and a sign (e.g., a communion wafer). [Abstract]

Everything is being branded these days. Brands are “unstable composite entities” joining a thing (product) and language. Brands don’t become real until tokens of them (e.g., individual cans of Coke) are taken up and used.

Rob will give three pathologies of brand will illustrate the way they are composite and what their semiotics are: genericide, ingredient branding, and viral marketing. These will show us how names and things are vulnerable in different ways.

Genericide=when a court decides that a brand name is now generic. Consumers take over the brand and the product is a mere commodity.

In ingredient branding, the product, not the name, becomes invisible. E.g., Nutrasweet, Intel, Dolby. In this case, the mark, logo or brand name, is the only part of the product that is visible to the consumer. The marketing folks think that the consumer needs help in making the value of the ingredient product. The host and ingredient brands circulate independently, but lending each other value: if you’ve seen Intel Inside on a Dell box and then a Bob’s Computers box, some of the value of Dell rubs off on Bob.

Viral marketing as in Hotmail means that the customer provides an “involuntary endorsement.”

In synthetic worlds (chats, MMORPGs), people’s interaction is mediated by names. We make ourselves available to one another via names. There is a chain of names from user name to IP address to social security to a real person. “Sooner or later, you strike meat.”

Conclusion: Brands provide a new type of relationship among people. The semiotic vulnerabilities exist in synthetic worlds. E.g., a man in the real world was arrested for selling someone else’s online property. So, there is something special about the earth after all.

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Molly is going to talk about similarities between architecture during the Weimar period (1919-1933) and the Internet. [Abstract]

Just as architects in the Weimar period took their work into a theoretical and communicative sphere in order to forge their conceptions of modern architecture, information architects, web designers and content developers explore their ideas through blogs, comments and email lists.

During the 20s, there was a lot of utopian discourse around design. But Molly doesn’t find much such talk on the Internet.

Molly uses Bruno Taut for her insight into the expressionist architecture of the 20s. He was all over the map, but believed that architecture could lead a revolution in art and thus in society. He formed “The Crystal Chain,” which was in effect a paper-based mailing list to talk about such ideas. There was an exchange of “fantastic, beautiful letters.”

Today there’s some interesting conversation going on, e.g., Crispin Jones, Howard Rheingold, Derek M. Powazek The digital revolution has taken place, but not in the boardrooms. It’s in how the Web “grows communities almost without trying.” But not enough conversation is stretching the boundaries. We’re in a time like Weimar when the contracts are boring. So, we ought to do what Taut recommends: become imaginary architects.

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Anne is going to talk about “technologically augmented cities.” [Abstract]

There have always already been four facets of “the real” that need to be considered when looking at the virtual. There’s the real and the possible, and the ideal and the actual. The virtual is the ideally real. The abstract is the possibly ideal. The concrete is the actually real. The probable is the actually possible.

“The virtual is a real idealization. It’s like memory or a dream or even intention. It belongs in the past, in a sense.” (I hope she says more about the past.) The concrete is the present. The abstract exists outside of time. The probable exists in the future. Communication occupies all four quadrants. We shoujld be looking at movements between categories. Thus, we can’t say that the augmented city is a real city or virtual city. Rather, we need to look which elements are actual, concrete, etc. And for whom and when? And that’s what Anne is working on.

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Biella asks: “Might the categories of the virtual and post-modern to describe social interactive space on the Net obscure more than reveal?” She’s going to compare IRC and Carribean street culture. [Abstract] (Herpaper is here, at least temporarily.)

There have been two shortcomings in discussions of social interactions on the Net: 1. Proving that a community is “real” rather than looking at the community itself. 2. Lumping the Net into one universal bucket, missing differences.

Biella says (and I quote from her paper):

IRC and Caribbean street talk, both a result of diasporic realities, are public spaces in which clever word play, performance, and stream of consciousness conversation predominate. …

Like the street, IRC is not really a “culture” but a public space with its own norms and conventions where people can drop in from time to time to see what is going on, engage in the topic of the day, get some work done, or just lurk. In both domains, stream of consciousness talk readily flows because of the multiple threads of conversations that occur simultaneously…

There are, of course, many ways the two are not alike:

Caribbean street talk unfolded under the heat of the sun, with bodies in full motion, tone and gesture being an integral facet of the linguistic play borne from a brutal history. Understanding the female domestic zone of the yard and the familial push for respectability is required to contextualize street talk and reputation building as part of a broader social world.

IRC’s context is that of socio-economic privilege…

Why does this type of comparison matter?

The virtual may really not be as important of a facet in this case although really it is only through serious and sustained comparison that we can even arrive at a more clear sense of what is unique about this form communication

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My Wired article on DRM was slashdotted yesterday.

In response: No, I am not a Holocaust-denier. Yes, there are other examples better than the ones I used. No, I don’t think all laws are bad. Yes, I am the biggest, stupidest jerk whoever walked the planet.

Glad I had an opportunity to clear that up.

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Steve is going to try to find what’s characteristic of blogs. [Abstract] Is it the technology used? Formal properties? He wants to look at how we read blogs.

Novels ask us to read them through the interpretation of the narrator. Journalism asks us to read through the supposedly interpretation-free objectivity of the author. Blogs do both and neither. Blogs can only be read through the blog author. Readers have to discover the author. This isn’t like interactive fiction, although both are labyrinths, because interactive fiction is done and finished whereas the blogosphere is always under construction. The entry points are dynamic and beyond the control of the author. The sequence is up to the reader. Readers can link to the blog or enter comments on the blog page, thus increasing the labyrinth.

To understand blogs we have to see them as text created by authors and readers, not by tools

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Holly is talking about slash fan fiction, which is fiction written by fans that extends a narrative series by describing homoerotic relationships, e.g., Kirk/Spock. She’s interested in what this tells us about community, for the slash community (via mailing lists) is strong. [Abstract] The gen fan fiction writers (”gen” = general audience) are often outraged by the slashers rendering their heroes as gay. Slashers are generally sensitive to this and label their stories as “adults only.” In fact, an entire vocabulary has emerged for specifying exactly the sort of offense might be taken. The communities consist of adults who treat one another respectfully. Holly says that this is a type of community that Robert Putnam missed in Bowling Alone.

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Daniel is talking about the arise of alphabetical order. [Abstract] Yes, it was an invention. Alphabetizing was highly unusual in the Middle Ages. E.g., in a book from the 11th century, the author had to explain exactly how it works. 150 years later, another author claimed he’d come up with a new way of organizing a list of words in the Bible. And the idea was then forgotten again. Again in 1604 an author had to explain the system to the reader.

There was a serious debate about whether it made sense to arrange encyclopedias alphabetically rather than topically, perhaps keying off the Bible’s own taxonomical preferences. The debate depended on imagining a new type of reader: not a scholar who reads continuously but someone who looks things up. Cross-references were invented in the 18th Century to connect topics dispersed by alphabetical order.

“Alphabetical order remains an insult to logic.” E.g., the 1987 edition of the Britannica tries to organize itself thematically as well as alphabetically, resulting in a bit of a hodgepodge. And on the Web there’s no need to store things alphabetically. “We will soon no longer need to learn our ABCs.” We’ve cut ourselves off from secular humanism and alphabetical order. “We now float free in the sea of information.”

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Seth’s title: “Hebrew and Aramaic as Semiotic Technologies: Toward an Ethnography of Early Alphabetic Writing” [Abstract]

We aren’t determined by our technology. What does shape us? If we’ve always already been virtual and involved in making worlds, what is new about digital genres? How does newness enter the world? Seth is going to look at how the alphabet began.

The alphabet was invented around 2,000BC. It contained about 30 consonants. What was the effect of the alphabet on the development of Western thought. Seth’s old advisor, Cross, said that the link was ironclad. Static societies gave way to “alphabetic” societies. Because the alphabet is easily learned, literacy is democratized, encouraging challenges to authority.

But, says Seth, Cross underestimated the difficulty of learning the alphabet. It takes years, not months. And it seems not to have changed practice all that much. For example, documents were originally authenticated by writing in a list of witnesses, but for an extra layer of security, people could use stamp seals, a preliterate practice. Further, the new literacy seems not to have affected the practices of Socratic Greece. For example, plots of land were marked by rocks, not by recording deeds of any sort.

So does “semiotic technology” have nothing to do with the development of culture? No, it has something, but you need a fine-grained investigation. The first signatures weren’t in alphabetic writing. Thus, the signing system is tied to the medium (handwriting on papyrus, thumbnail imprints in clay), not to the writing system.

We need to look to ideology, practice and medium to see how the new arises, not simply to the nature of the semiotic technology (i.e., the arise of the alphabet in Seth’s example).

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Theo is talking about howthe Hittites (c 1650-1180 B.C.). managed their clay tablets. [Abstract]

He estimates that at any particular time in storage there were about 7,000 tablets being stored and managed. Fragments are identified by date and author. Stacks of shelved tablets were labeled by smaller clay tablets. And they sometimes copied onto one tablet the text of several related tablets.

Fascinating.

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Rabbi Rosenberg is talking about the Talmud and the Internet. His question: Is the Talmud just like the Internet?

The 6th Century text is printed with commentary all around it. [Illustration] Traditionally it is studied by people in pairs, taking turns reading it aloud and then arguing over the meaning via reference to the commentaries.

The Talmud’s hyperlinked presentation is like the the Internet. But the Internet is “insufficiently oral” and is much less fixed than the Talmud. Blogging is like commenting on the Talmud, but not every commentary counts as part of the Talmud.

He asks what difference it makes whether the Internet is like the Talmud? Are we saying that the Talmud is hip or that the Internet is holy (or both or neither). “Suffice it to say, the Talmud is not just like the Internet.”

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Q: (The Happy Tutor): AKMA, did you feel awkward sort of kind of giving a blessing to a mixed body.

AKMA says he did feel awkwardness since he’s aware that not everyone wanted to be blessed. So he omitted the performance of the blessing he was talking about.

Q: (Me) Does AKMA’s and Trevor’s position make bodies subordinate to ID?

I don’t trust myself to paraphrase their answer, but here goes: AKMA says that his position doesn’t denigrate the body, but he also doesn’t want to locate identity merely in the physical. Trevor says that the lump of flesh you drag around with you isn’t the only type of body: communities are also bodies. I reply that there is something special about the lump of flesh: communities can’t have sex, make babies, feel pain or die.

Betsy Devine says there’s a continuum of physicality and presence. E.g., when she was young, families had a special viewing room in the church. Does that mean that the families weren’t there for the Mass?

Alex says that digital IDs reflect things we already know about. What are we importing into our understanding of digital ID. (Great question.) What’s going on with Digital ID is a continuation of our separation of identity from the physical. I say that that sounds like alienation to me. This is not a popular idea with the attendees because it’s “value-laden.”

Alex says: “When you live in a digital world, you need a really good chair.”

[Note: This entry commits inadequate bloggery.]

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Naomi’s title is “Battles of Blood and Ink: Apophasis, Identity, and Naming Conventions across Digital and Theological Genres.” Yikes! [Abstract]

Discussions of digital identity say that it’s about making online interactions secure and safe, etc. But real world interactions have never been characterized by this. DigitalID folks say that there’s a possibility of returning to a ideal state. They want to move digitalID from the impersonal to a rich, complex human context, as if it’s obvious that a human context is a good thing. [Is this in question? Uh-oh. :)]

Some bloggers make up a pseudonym, some have multiple ‘nyms, and some just use their real world name. Naomi uses a pseudonym. But many of us distrust people who have too many names. We associate names with identity. In fact, names come to stand for everything we know about the person’s identity.

But G-d has many names. How can they resolve into G-d’s singular identity? She’s going to look at just one commentator on this: The 13th Century Jew, Abraham Abulafia. Naomi hands out a poem he wrote in which blood and ink are at war in his soul. Ink wins. This is an intellectual triumphalism, which is like the digital ID folks’ belief that eventually there will be a perfect online IDs that mirror our RW IDs. (I’m doing a particularly crumby job reproducing Naomi’s argument.)

Digital ID debates make normative statements about reality. They’re assuming a metaphysics. “We shouldn’t ignore the long history of philosophical and religious thought about the nature of identity.”

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Lacey is going to talk about blogging and Baha’i. [Abstract]

The middle ground between the individual and the ecollective relies on the same eneregy, as evidenced by the similarities between the Chicago weblogging community and the Baha’i youth organization. No East is a magazine and Fertile Field is a blog. Lacey has noticed similarities.

No East is a ‘zine by the Chicago area weblogging community for creative people. Each issue has a theme (e.g., “the streets of Chicago”). So does Fertile Field, although its themes are related to Baha’i. Fertile Field is written by youths while No East is written mainly be people in their twenties.

Both weblogs and the Baha’i faith have provided a medium by which communities can form. (Lacey is careful to say that religion and blogging are not exactly equivalents.)

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Trevor is AKMA’s co-Disseminarian. He’s talking about performance.

Performance requires focusing on a particular text.

It is a type of praxis

We pay attention to feedback: there are risks, and we’re always strengthening or weakening relationships.

All three of these (text, praxis, feedback) situate us in our individual body. But they also brings us together as a social body. (Trevor uses the Eucharist as the paradigm of performance.)

The question for today is: Does performance also situate itself in virtual bodies? Trevor has been reluctant to accept this: a televised mass? Television isn’t embodied. It’s not interactive. [Trevor is about to give some spoilers for the new Matrix, so a couple of us leave for a few minutes.]

There’s something “ontologically significant” about touch, as feminist thinkers have noticed, and there is no online equivalent to touch. (Someone says that we’ll have digigloves, etc. Trevor replies that digitally mediated touch can’t be the same thing as a real touch.)

We need to get better at giving a positive account of virtual embodiment. Here’s Trevor’s attempt: Blogs do allow us to become virtual bodies, to perform online in Trevor’s rich sense of performing as something that leads to understanding. Blogs are more oral than other types of writing. They are interactive. The connect to others. They’re hypertextual and form a web of social connections like the web when we take the Eucharist in that it creates a community. Identity sticks to blogs (a reference to AKMA’s question).

Blogs are narratives. “If performance is the best way to understand who we are, then blogs are ways of extending these formative traditions and texts and genres. Blogs are stories.” Trevor goes back to the three characteristics of performance — text, praxis, feedback — and finds all three in blogs.

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AKMA wonders what we can learn from millennia of thought about what constitutes identity. He asks: What does a digital blessing stick to? What is the who of the Web? And how does that affect the proposal for digital identities, e.g., Passport, Liberty Alliance,…

Biometric makers push the idea that physical characteristics mark you as a particular human. But that doesn’t account for pod people. Blessings adhere not to the physical marks but to “something more” that AKMA’s tradition calls “soul.” ”

Now AKMA brings it back to the digital world. Our digital identity is created by our digits — our fingers typing digits. (He later connects “fictive identities” with the Latin root for fiction: fingere. Cool.) Our fingers enact identity through the words we type. Our acts further substantiates our digital identity. Someone whose physicality is limited may find his/her online identity to be more real. We make ourselves online. But what are the characteristics and limitations of our online identities?

The key point: Our identities are already constituted nonsubstantially. Our online identies don’t represent a new space and type of identity but is instead a recognition and embracing of what has always been at the heart of identity. It thrusts role-playing and authorial voice to the fore in the question of “true” identity.

So, “perhaps blessings stick precisely to our identity as we play them, blog them, confect them, mold, share and make these fictive selves physically and online…”

Wow. Terrific lead-off presentation.

[Great point. But it leaves me back worrying about ignoring the body as inessential to the identity. AKMA, am I missing your point?]

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Alex Golub has put together what looks like it’ll be a really interesting conference. About 30 of us representing a few different genres of online creativity: bloggers, gamers, anthropologists, theologians, historians…

AKMA is about to present the first paper.

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This panel consisted of three people implementing open source content management systems, one trying to figure out what to do, a very smart guy from the W3C and, um, me.

Jennifer Lynch (U. of Missouri), has been implementing a Typo3 system. She and a colleague have built a substantial system in just a few months for a total cost of $5,000.

Marc Lavallee has been converting Boston.com to Zope. Twelve people have spent a total of 14 months (including a four month RFP process) building a system that will go live in ten days. He figures it is about a million dollar project, all costs included, a figure substantially lower than what it would have been had he been using commercial, proprietary software.

Hal Roberts from the Berkman Center has been installing a WebGUI system, which entails importing 175,000 static pages. He chose WebGUI in part because of its object orientation and because it lets you edit pages on screen, not in a separate editing mode.

Sam Quigley, of the Harvard Art Museums, is trying to figure out how to figure out which system to use. This raised the question of the value of consultants. I said I thought they could be helpful. Hal replied that it’s continuing expertise that ought to be brought in house. The audience had diverse opinions. I personally don’t disagree with Hal; in-house tech expertise can be crucial, especially if the project is big enough. But a consultant who keeps up with the field for a living can help match the application needs to the right application faster and better. (No, I do not consult in this field.)

Then Dave Winer sparked controversy — shocking, I tell you! — by saying that it’s like the early days of word processing when everything was hard and expensive. It shouldn’t be as technical as it is. It really should be a $200 solution, he said, that does the 80% of what actually needs to be done.

Hmm. I don’t think the users on the panel could get what they need in that 80%. They’re not looking for a desktop application like word processing. To them, CMS is a system, and it does something complex that will only get more complex. It manages documents and document fragments. It provides versioning. It handles permissions. It moves stuff through workflows. It worries about archiving and records management. It automatically lays out pages. It provides editing tools for content and for styles. It serves up personalized pages. It tracks hits. It enables cash transactions. It plops ads onto pages based on who’s seeing them and accounts for every view and click. It integrates with the rest of the office software environment. And if it doesn’t do all those things now, that’s where it’s headed.

We got a demonstration of why CMS will remain complex software. Someone in the audience asked if it’d make sense for his small college to get together with a bunch of other small colleges and come up with a set of app requirements so that they could share the cost of customization. The general sponse was: “It sounds like a good idea, but… ” For example, Hal and Marc both said that their own installations were unique. Someone in the audience agreed. I pointed out that this reminded me of the SGML wars of the ’80s when entire industries tried to build a shared DTD. It turns out that everyone’s needs and vocabularies are different enough that trying to produce a common spec is extraordinarily difficult.

Now, it certainly can get easier. I spoke afterwards with Bob Doyle of CMS Review who is trying to come up with CMSML, a way of describing CMS features that would work for all content management systems. Bob knows that there isn’t one ideal and perfect way of doing it, but believes that you could at least make it easier for customers and users to compare systems.

CMS is inherently tough and complex. Implementing a CMS system is always going to require someone with strong skills because it touches the way an organization thinks about and handles documents. It will always require looking at document processes, the social structure, and the power relationships in an organization. It requires understanding the legacy “document schema” and looking ahead to the near-term and long-term futures. CMS will resist commoditization for as long as I can see.

Which leads me to conclude: Did I misunderstand Dave’s comment? Do we disagree about the definition of a CMS? Or do we just disagree? Unfortunately, I’m about to leave for Chicago - the Digital Genres Conference - so I’ll be out of contact for the rest of the day…

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I was on a panel at the Open Source Content Management Conference 3 at Harvard yesterday and attended the prior session. Both sessions (exempting my own embarrassingly how’d-he-get-invited performance) were rich in idea and information.

The first session I saw was on intellectual property. the panelists were Mike Olson (Sleepycat), Larry Rosen (OSI), Aaron Swarz (Creative Commons) and Liza Vertinsky (Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks), moderated by John Palfrey (Berkman Center). Quite a line-up. Most of the time was spent on Q&A. Among the points that struck me:

Joseph Reagle of the W3C asked if you can you copyright a DTD or schema. And if someone uses someone else’s DTD, is the resulting work a derivative work? Liza replied that the law around forms probably is relevant, and that you can’t copyright a form.

A Harvard Law School professor in the audience (I didn’t get his name, but he was terrific) said that the question reminded him of the Teddy Ruxpin case in which a provider of third party tapes for the semi-animatronic toy was sued for “contributory copyright infringement.” (The kids who stuck the tapes into the bear were the actual copyright infringers, apparently.) In fact, at the Illegal Arts festival (?), someone prepared a tape of William Burroughs materials for Teddy Ruxpin.

Reagle followed up by wondering if all documents created with Microsoft Word count as derivative works of Word’s XML schema.

Someone asked if it’s legal to scrape content and display it. Aron said that it’s legal to scrape. It’s less legal to display scraped content.

And (someone pointed out), there’s a difference between scraping up stuff marked for RSS feeds and just scraping what’s on the Web.

Dave Winer commented on this from the audience. He said that Radio Userland doesn’t have an option for turning off the RSS feed. “We wanted to promote RSS feeds. … A few times a user didn’t know it was producing and RSS feed and then saw his content on someone else’s site…Generally once they understand that it’s a feature of the software and it’s deliberate, the problem goes away.” But, he says at some point it won’t go away for someone.

Dave and Larry disagreed about the implications of casual copying, e.g., sticking a cropped photo from another source onto your weblog. Dave says it happens all the time, and not just with photos, and that’s just the way it is. Larry, getting all lawyer-y, agreed that it happens all the time but that there’s risk there. Aaron interjected that the Google cache and the Internet Archive may be massive copyright violations, but they’re so socially useful that they ought to be allowed to continue without prior restraint.

Then Charles Nesson (Berkman) asked a great, simple question: Has anyone ever tried to enforce the GPL?

No, it’s never gone to trial.

Liza: Because there’s no money in it.

Aaron: One reason is because the community is strong.

Larry: But I wouldn’t be surprised if someday a company the sized of Microsoft were to challenge the validity of the GPL.

Yikes! The validity of the GPL has never been tested in court. Ulp.

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I’ve posted an article called “The Internet Constituency” that reviews the webbiness of the various presidential candidates’ web sites. Only two show any promise, IMO. One of them I actually like: Howard Dean’s, especially his staff’s weblog. See, for example, the currently lead article on the Dean site which is an open letter to the FCC opposing the proposed rule change that would make it even easier for the media to concentrate itself into a ball so dense that no light escapes from it.

Here’s the opening of the article:

The Republic of the Internet certainly has been downgraded since the day John Perry Barlow declared its independence in 1996. The Internet is not a nation, it’s not a state, and it’s not even a county. But is it at least a constituency? If so, most of the presidential candidates are campaigning there about as seriously as they are in Alaska: it’ll be surprising if their campaign plane alights there even to refuel…with one encouraging exception.

(Disclosure: I’ve done a little volunteer work for the Dean campaign.)

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Rebecca Blood, in her keynote at BlogTalk, worried that bloggers only read bloggers who agree with them, thus greatly limiting the potential for growth and understanding. Worse, only reading people who think the way we do can result in an “echo chamber” where the echoes seem to confirm our beliefs.

Rebecca used as her example the blogs for and against the Iraqi war. But that is one of the most divisive of issues. Is it true for less contentious topics?

I suspect it is to some degree. (Note: Joho the Blog remains true to its pledge to be 100% Research Free.) But I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.

It sort of has to be true because conversations need common ground. So, if it’s a debate about software patents, the people involved in all sides of the issue will likely be fairly technical, sharing some assumptions about the nature of software and how markets work. Nevertheless, the homogeneity is what enables there to be vigorous debate.

Some degree of homogeneity is a condition not only for conversation but also for understanding and learning. For example, when AKMA upbraided me for something stupid and mean I said about Foucault, we were only able to talk about it because we share a base of presuppositions about philosophy. Because of that shared base, AKMA was able to show me where I was wrong and opened up Foucault in a way I had dismissed. Are AKMA and I Western, intellectual (in my case, add a “-wannabe”) white guys who are carrying very roughly the same baggage? Sure. But are we also an echo chamber in which we can’t learn anything? Nah.

Echo chambers definitely do exist. Sometimes they exist precisely in order to solidify opinion. But not every case of homogeneity is an echo chamber. Because we can only understand the new in terms of the familiar (which is the same as saying that understanding means placing something in context), agreement is the ground on which learning can occur.

Nevertheless, I find it impossible to resist Rebecca’s conclusion that we - I - ought to be more adventurous and open in what we read and think about. Agreement simultaneously enables learning and tends towards complacency.

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Here’s an interview with me in Hungarian. I don’t know what I said, but I renounce it all.

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Here’s a transcript of a moderately interesting online chat with Xander and Anya from Buffy from shortly before the show ended.

(Don’t send me spoilers! The finale was on while we were away and we haven’t seen it yet.)

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I’ve posted a review of the Knopf Guide to Vienna at Blogcritics. (I don’t yet have the permalink to it. In fact, it hasn’t quite shown up on the site yet, as of 9AM Boston time.) Let’s say that it’s not the strongest recommendation imaginable.

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BTW, The Guardian ran a column of mine last week. It’s on the DNS mess and Google URLs.

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It is with great shame that I post this page of photos from Vienna. What am I, a 12-year-old??

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“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day. To the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty blogs.” 

Even Shakespeare thinks we all need a vacation.

So, here’s my proposal: We all take the first two weeks of August off. All of us. Yes, you. You just remove your keys from the keyboard and find something else to do with your time.

Saturday, August 2 through Sunday August 17. “Through” means you don’t start blogging again until Monday the 18th.

All in favor, swing your hammock to the left…

Brian Dear has a suggestion:

Dave Weinberger suggests all bloggers take the first two weeks of August off in a mass “blogiday”. He’s even got the logo you’re supposed to attach to your blog during that time, to let everyone know you’re taking off time when Dave is taking off time.
I say, keep on bloggin’! If the blogerati want to take off two weeks in August, fine. It’s a great opportunity for other blogs to get some attention.
A suggestion to vacationing bloggers: rather than just showing a blogiday logo, how about providing some prominent links to a lesser-known blogs, ones they like but for whatever reason ones they haven’t put in their blogroll. A sort of “while I’m away, I recommend the following fine blogs” followed by a list. Share your discoveries!

BTW, my RW vacation will be the last week of July and the first week of August, so it’s not quite me suggesting everyone stop when I stop. Besides, do you really think I’m going to stop for 2 weeks?

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Ulrich van Stipriaan has posted more photos of the BlogTalk conference in Vienna. (Through the miracle of bad lighting, I actually look like I have more hair than I do.) He also has photos of Vienna here, here. and here.

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I paid 2 pounds at Heathrow to pick up my email at a payphonish net terminal, but it won’t accept an https address so I deided to waste your time instead.

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