Science Library Pad

conversations: local realtime versus global asynchronous - as applied to FriendFeed

FriendFeed has launched its Twitter-like "real-time" redesign, which has some of us unhappy and thinking about why we're unhappy.

What I think is that there are two different modes of operation you can address: real-time and asynchronous.

Across Realtime

So first, what is the nature of realtime, what characteristics does it have?
It's kind of a strange question in a way - we live in realtime.  It is now, I am typing.
But that nature is its strength and its limitation.
In realtime, a big part of your thoughts are concerned with yourself.  This is Facebook and Twitter.  Twitter's question is: What are you doing? but there's an implied "now" on the end.  What are you doing now?

Not what are you thinking.  Not what ideas have you developed.
What are you doing now?

This is a legitimate mode of interaction.  But it has issues:
* realtime doesn't scale, because you only have a very narrow window of immediate attention

I can talk to one person.  I can have a conversation with two people.
Apocryphal stories of Millenials or whatever gen we're up to now having dozens of chat windows open simultaneously aside, there's only so much time in the now.  In the now you can broadcast to many people.  But converse?  It's not like you can type into chat windows simultaneously.  The "multiple conversations" people have is really: slice of attention, slice of attention, slice of attention, slice of attention, one after the other.  We are not multitaskers.  We are serial taskers.  At some point, that attention gets sliced so thin that all you can say is "yes", "no" and "lol".

Realtime by the nature of the limited slice you have, has to be: I, me, doing, now.

* realtime creates a false sense of urgency.  realtime is the pace of short-term business thinking.  realtime is the tick-tock of self-centred false importance.

Look at the crackberry man, out in the world, but staring at his little screen.  Out in the world, but living in his email.  He sent a message almost 10 seconds ago!  Why has no one replied?  Don't they realise he's important?

Yes, it's a caricature, but it has some truth.  Between your twitter follower alerts and your friendfeed follower alert and your facebook sheep throwing and your spam messages and the 100 other new emails and your tweetdeck and your calendar alarms... where are the cycles to, you know, actually think about anything.

Realtime is the buzz buzz buzz of busy-ness.  Business busy-ness.  But don't confuse activity with productivity.

* realtime is time-zone discrimination.  realtime is local.

Your scope of immediate thought and action is local.  In the now, a fire across the country is interesting, a fire in your building is ALARM ALARM.  Realtime is a great tool for re-connecting with your local community, with the people who are awake when you are, where you are.  But realtime by its very nature excludes the non-local, the timezone outsiders.

* realtime is loss of control

You can't keep up, the thought is gone, the tweet is gone, the friendfeed posting has scrolled... run twice as fast as you can.  Realtime brings not only false urgency, but since no one can keep up with everything, simultaneously, it means a loss of control, over information and over your ability to act.

* realtime is cr*p to monetize, except for search

Realtime is very rapid conversation.  Conversation is inherently hard to monetize.  Conversation is between people, in order to monetize it, you as the advertiser, the stranger, have to step in between the two people talking, and shout.  Imagine how popular that is.

Realtime conversation, scrolling off the screen second by second, is even worse.  Oh, they're talking about cats, I'll put up a cat ad... oh wait, they're talking about dogs... oh wait, they're going to go see Wolverine... oh wait, they're gone.  Oh ya, that's a genius space to try to stick your ads in.  Good luck with that.

You can monetize the search of realtime conversations, but don't confuse search with conversation.

** In Summary **

Realtime has value.  I'm in Ottawa, now.  If GCPEDIA goes down, I tweet that it is down, I see tweets when it comes back up.  I can ask a question of my local community, what's happening tonight?  is Bank Street closed?  where are the buses re-routed?

This is an absolutely useful connection and capability.
But it is only one possible way to interact.

Around the World in 80 Postings

The global asynchronous conversation, web pages linking to web pages, which turned into blogs linking to blogs, is another mode of operation.

There is no question hovering above the big empty box of your Blogger posting.  There is just a word: Create.

Not what are you doing, right now.  But what are you thinking, whenever.  Like this blog posting that I write now, but you may read at the appropriate time for you, in hours, days or weeks.

Asynchronous can have a measured pace, can be reflective, can weave in many different threads from many different sources, because you have the luxury of time.

* asynchronous is about the flow of conversation, not about the immediate individual acting

You link to me, I think, then link back.  I connect to your ideas, I don't speak directly in the moment to you.

* asynchronous is global, timezone agnostic

My friendfeed has people from all over the world.  Some are ending their day as mine begins, others haven't yet awoken.  Where's Berci?  Where's Bora?  Well it doesn't exactly matter, because if they post, I see their thoughts at the time of my choosing, and vice versa.

* asynchronous is actually a lot better to monetize

Because we're taking our time to scan and interact with long form ideas, you can figure out what we're talking about, and stick an ad next to that conversation, and we may actually have time to look at it.

** In Summary **

Asynchronous is about the global circulation of ideas.  I don't need to know where you are, or when you are, because I'm interacting with your thoughts at the time and place of my own choosing.

What this means for FriendFeed

Facebook and Twitter are already in the realtime, "what am I doing now" space.
Delicious and StumbleUpon and others are already in the "look what I found" space.

FriendFeed's strength was in the global, asynchronous conversation about the things that we'd found, the ideas that we have.  This is a particular type of conversation support that lends itself very well to scientific discourse, bouncing ideas back and forth around the globe, day after day.  The scientific discourse is a global asynchronous conversation, by its very nature.

Realtime mode is a nice feature for supporting conferences, when there really is immediate "this is happening now" to report on.  But it's a mode mismatch for long-form conversation about ideas.

As I have suggested on FriendFeed, it may be that in the end, with the divergence of the founder's goals from some of the users, we may have to write user requirements for the global asynchronous conversation, and if FriendFeed can no longer support them, then move elsewhere, or have a replacement site built.

What FriendFeed will lose is people who, at the time and place of their choosing, spend a lot of time on the site.  Time is attention.  Attention is eyeball you can put ads in front of.  FriendFeed will lose the people who were paying the most attention.

I was inspired to write this by Cameron Neylon's thoughtful posting Science in the open » “Real Time”: The next big thing or a pointer to a much more interesting problem?

In a way, this posting is part of my conversation with Cameron, despite the fact I have only the vaguest sense of where (in the UK?) and when he is.

We have taken different approaches to the issue of realtime, and in particular I want to raise a very important, indeed critical point that Cameron makes: filtering takes time.  One of the other incredibly powerful aspects of FriendFeed in asynchronous mode is that it bubbles up items of interest, through the collective action, the filtering that results from my friends liking and commenting on items.  When I open async FF in the morning, what I see is not the latest ideas, what I see is the most important ideas, based on the filtering of a community I trust.  Realtime, by its nature, has no time for filtering.  No time for filtering turns a curated stream of useful information into a firehose of content, the little specks of gold that dance in the stream lost because they are mixed in with the flood of useless noise.

Previously:
April 6, 2009  why I don't like FriendFeed beta

in which I realise Twitter can make money

(I was going to say something about "monetization" but that term is getting a bit old.  Can I make it through the entire post with out using it?  Let's see...)

Ok, social networks are hard places to make money.  Sure you know a lot about the users, but they're busy flirting with one another or posting pictures of their cats or digging up embarassing images of people passed out last night.  They're not searching for information, they're interacting with people.  Trying to wedge commerce into friendship, as Facebook is trying to do, trying to make money from social interactions - just doesn't work well.  Wrong mode.  See previous posting the difficulty of (making money from) Web 2.0 eyeballs.

So I thought Twitter was probably hopeless in terms of a business.
But then I realized that Twitter is also real-time search.
And search we do know how to make money on.  Boy howdy do we.  To the tune of billions of dollars.

So Twitter actually has it easy.

1. Do the usual adsense matching ads to keywords thing on search.twitter.com
2. When you can't parse the keywords well (as may be the case with hashtags, e.g. #lotf09), build a metadata directory to figure out what the hashtag maps to and then match the ads to that - in which case, ideas like tagalus are going to be worth lots of money - you heard it here first

So Twitter should be fine.  Should be big dollars fine, in fact, as real-time search grows in popularity.

This is also a very simple lesson to all you Twitter-wannabes out there (are you listening, Facebook and FriendFeed?) : you want to make money from the real-time web dynamic whatever - fine, just do it in a separate search interface, not in your main user interface.  When they're in separate search, you know they have intentionality.  Intentionality, you can make money from.  When people are expressing a desire, you can use ads to meet that desire.  That's like, probably the whole underlying concept of ads (yeah, I watch Mad Men).

Whereas ads while people are socially sharing links, pictures, and whatever, not so much intentional seeking, not so much any opportunity to make money.

UPDATE 2009-04-07: I should also mention a current approach that Twitter is experimenting with

3. Subject-specific portals

Since Twitter provides aggregated real-time conversations, you can try to find various ways to slice the conversations up by topic or other  attribute.  The two approaches I am aware of so far are:

* to slice by "authority" or identity - ExecTweets is a portal to "executive" Tweeters (which I think is a bit nonsense, in an age in which authority emanates from your ideas, not your position) - the portal is sponsored by Microsoft - there are other portals that slice out particular celebrity twits etc.

* to slice by content - MarchTweetness/TitleTweets is a portal around the US March Madness basketball thing, sponsored by AT&T - one can imagine a similar soccer-oriented site for the international audience

So one can imagine e.g. a site built around the launch of the SF series Caprica, that captures all the #caprica tweets and attempts to target people interested in science fiction, selling BSG merchandise etc.

I personally think this idea is pretty weak overall, because subject-specific portals generally fail.  Google beat Yahoo.  People jump from topic to topic as they explore the web, as the impulse strikes them.  No matter how much info your portal pulls in, there's always going to be some rival portal on the same topic that people want to check as well.  You cannot hold people on a specific website.  Also, unless you do this in an automated fashion for all topics (in which case it will look generic), it is a lot of work to do a custom siloed portal for each and every particular topic you want to make money from.

I can imagine though they will continue the TitleTweets trend of searching for the "big eyeball" sweet spots like the SuperBowl for custom Twitter portals.

Kindle 2 burns on the horizon

Front page news on Amazon.com and being promoted to Amazon Associates, the Kindle 2 has arrived.
Personally, I don't see why you would buy books you can only license, never own.  Books on a device that's available only in the United States.  Isn't technology amazing?  It can create arbitrary barriers that never existed before in the physical world.

But if you want one, here you go.  It's US$359 and will be released February 24, 2009.

pre-order Kindle 2 from Amazon.com

 

I do have to admire Amazon for understanding a deep truth of the digital world - in the end, you can only monetize physical things.  Apple understood this by making their money on the iPod, not the music.

UPDATE: Also the note at Amazon that "original Kindle owners are first in line to receive Kindle 2 [if they order one]" reminds me that this is new technology.  That means unlike paper, which is rather well-established, the Kindle will become obsolete.  Rapidly.  Those books that have been sitting on your bookshelf for 20 years - no problem, reach over and open them up.  In 20 years, how many generations of book-reading technology do you think you will have to go through, between upgrades and failures?  At hundreds of dollars for every replacement.  For content that you don't even own in any meaningful way.  I don't think that's progress.  ENDUPDATE

Personally I think a more interesting development is Google Book Search Mobile.  As well, the New York Times reports that Amazon is also working on delivering "Kindle books" to cellphones, presumably with the same DRM.  There is no sign of that being available from Amazon today (and I don't see what their incentive would be, since it breaks the "you only make money from physical things" model).

Full disclosure: The above are Amazon Affiliate links (price and everything are identical, I just get a percentage of your purchase).

South Park on Internet monetization

I forgot to include this with my recent monetization post

while the Internet is new and exciting for creative people, it hasn’t matured as a distribution mechanism to the extent that one should trade real and immediate opportunities for income for the promise of future online revenue.

South Park - Canada on Strike - via Will Video for Food

I would link to the clip, but thanks to geofencing, I can't actually see the clip in Canada, I can only watch full episodes.  (This is very common in Canada, where we get some parts of show content rehosted on a Canadian site, but not all the web extras that are available on the US site.)

the difficulty of monetizing Web 2.0 eyeballs

I've written in the past that you can monetize attention

Attention is transformed primarily into money through ads and other affiliate linking arrangements.  The more attention, the more clicks, the more clicks, the more money.  I'm not sure whether attention can be exchanged for anything else.

But it's a little more subtle than that.  You can monetize attention, if the intention was information gathering about something that is related to a purchasable item (i.e. e.g. you can monetize searching about hybrid cars, but not searching for a particular individual).

This nuance is part of the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0

Web 1.0 looked a bit like traditional media - you visit a web page to get some information or entertainment, in the same way that you read a magazine or watch a TV show.  You accept advertisements alongside or intermixed with the content.  You may even be reading your computer magazine and get value from the ads, "oh cool, Protovision".

Or if I'm searching for cool LED clocks and you show me a neat Thinkgeek ad, maybe I click (assuming you haven't hit my adblock and flashblock filters).

But Web 2.0 is about connecting with other people.  Web 2.0 is like the telephone.  So imagine this scenario: you're talking on your telephone with your friend about how tired you are from the new baby and your phone goes BEEP and a voice says "The following is a paid advertisement: Diapers from BabyCorp, $9.99  This ad has been provided by VoiceMatch Algorithmics International".  I don't know about you, but I would be inclined to throw my phone in the river.

The point being, when you're making social connections with your friends, you have a completely different intentionality.  Not only are you not looking to buy anything, commercial interruptions are unwelcome.

So this is a huge problem.  You can monetize a Web page on a particular topic, or a Web log (err, blog) on a particular topic, as long as it has any commercialisable aspect.  But Gmail? Twitter? Facebook?  Not only are people not in purchase mode, they may be actively annoyed by any ads they actually notice.  The counter-argument is you can "target people by their characteristics and interests" but this, in my opinion, doesn't work.  People don't want to be targetted in a social environment.

Technology Review has a good issue on the Web 2.0 bubble (registration required, plus ads... which are easily adblocked/flashblocked).

Social Networking Is Not a Business* (July/August 2008). 

Goldstein should know, since his company, Social Media, sells advertising linked to the applications developed for Facebook and MySpace--products like Scrabulous and Compare People, which are hugely popular among the sites' users. "The trouble," says Goldstein, "is we're putting ads up in front of users, where they can ignore them. We've got to get them between users."

Goldstein's comment had the air of a slightly worn sound bite, but it did acknowledge a problem that outside observers describe more bluntly. "It's a really bad place to advertise," Jason ­Calacanis, founder of Webblogs and Mahalo.com, says of social-­networking sites. As he wrote in an e-mail, members of social networks "are busy in conversations and don't want marketing messages."

If you take this out of the virtual space, "getting ads between users" is clearly mad, as in the telephone example I gave above, or think of it like this: you and a friend are at a party talking about last week's skiing outing and some stranger steps IN BETWEEN YOU and offers to sell you ski equipment.

For this reason, I'm not entirely convinced that Twitter, FriendFeed and other similar social services are going to survive beyond their VC funding.  They're valuable communications infrastructure, but who is going to pay for them?

context and location awareness

A lot of buzz about the next generation of technology providing better information and services by being aware of the context in which the device is being used and the location.

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, president and CEO of Nokia, came to the Mobile World Congress... to declare that Nokia will "reshape the Internet."

Nokia believes it, not Google, can deliver operator-independent, cross-platform phones through new software and services. How does Nokia presume that it can reshape an Internet so firmly established already? Nokia's answer lies in Maps 2.0, which the company claimed enables a "context-aware Internet" that combines multimedia features, Internet and Assisted- GPS, "We can bring more relevant and powerful context" to users browsing on the Internet, claimed Kallasvuo.

Niklas Savander, Nokia's executive vice president of services and software, added: "By adding context--such as time, place and people--to the Internet, the Web will become something very different from the one you have today."

EETimes - Nokia, not Google, sees itself reshaping the Internet - February 11, 2008

Some of those in the thick of battle are resigned to having a lot of company. “If there weren’t competitors, there wouldn’t be a market,” said Dan Harple, founder and chief executive of GyPSii, a mobile social network based in Amsterdam that is a contender. “Maybe there are 30 or more now — in three years, there will be 5 that matter.”

The prize, as these start-ups see it, is the 3.3 billion cellphone subscribers, a number that far surpasses the total of Internet users. The advantage over computer-based communities, they believe, is the ability to know where a cellphone is, thanks to global positioning satellites and related technologies.

...

Most mobile social networks seek to capitalize on location information. The SpaceMe service from GyPSii, for instance, will show users where friends and other members are in real time.

New York Times - Social Networking Moves to the Cellphone - March 6, 2008

Well established as the business mobile device of choice, the BlackBerry may soon become a much more social smartphone, says the co-CEO of creator Research In Motion Ltd.

Jim Balsillie says RIM wants the BlackBerry positioned to tap into the growing trend of Internet social networking sites such as FaceBook.com that allow consumers to share information about their lives, and access multimedia content, particularly music, on their mobile devices.

"Architecturally, music and the social networking are going to merge," Balsillie said ahead of a Thursday speech to the Canadian Music Week festival in Toronto.

CP - RIM looks to make social networking part of BlackBerry's strategy - March 6, 2008

Although the above is about mobile, Google is already "location aware", to the extent that each country version of Google ranks results in a different order, presumably based on language and click tracking, amongst other things.  So e.g. Google Canada will list hits in a different order (for the same search) than Google France.

It gets pretty complex to try to make meaningful context decisions though.  If it knows you're in a coffeeshop, should it return higher ranking results for "java" as it relates to coffee?  What if you do all your computer programming in coffeeshops?

This applies beyond mobile devices, to context awareness for any app being used on any platform anywhere, whether at work, at home, or on the go.

Of course, there is an extent to which the computer either implicitly or explicitly knowing more about the context and location of your activities is very privacy intrusive (e.g. hypothetical location-aware shopping application "I see you're passing a drug store on the way to your girlfriend's apartment, perhaps you should purchase some prophylactics?")

To rephrase something I wrote in my Twitter, I find my online and mobile walled gardens either have too many walls, or no walls whatsoever.  I would like to have a lot more control over the barriers and translucency of those barriers.  If my friends want to know my exact location down to the metre, that's fine, but as my circle of acquaintances expands outward, I want the the precision of my location to decrease, so that maybe people I know less well are shown what city I'm in, and people I don't know at all only get to see that I am currently somewhere in the vicinity of planet earth.

In a way, this is old news anyway.  The next thing that was supposed to follow on from the e-commerce bubble in 2000 was "m-commerce".  The cellphone companies conceived this as the m-commerce "value chain", by which they meant, extracting value FROM you, FOR them, all the way along the chain.  So they wanted not only to charge Amazon for placement on their wireless portal, they thought they should get a cut of everything you bought from Amazon.

I thought this was ridiculous when they were talking about it in 2000...

"E-Commerce value chain has many more steps and players than standard"

Notes on Wireless Internet for E-Commerce seminar - April 28, 2000

and when Tod Maffin talked about "CRM M-Commerce" in 2001, my general feeling was that the day a coupon pops up on my phone screen when I pass a store is the day I throw my cellphone into the river.

Accordingly, given people's widely varying expectations of privacy and "value", we are going to need much more granular and much more interoperable tools in order to achieve workable context awareness (including location).

Yahoo`s Fire Eagle is an infrastructure piece, an architecture for sharing location information between applications.

Plus which, this is all very nice in theory, but given that in Canada our mobile providers near-total control over their nextworks, and have data plans that are expensive and/or limited, mostly incomprehensible, and don't cover roaming outside Canada anyway, I think it will be a while before most Canadians are willing to use any sort of advanced mobile applications.

I actually think the carriers are setting themselves up for a fall, because Canada is concentrated in a few cities with lots of WiFi, so as soon as more phones have WiFi, people will use that to the exclusion of wireless data, and may even try to do a lot more VoIP over WiFi as well.

Related:
February 15, 2008  CNet reviews Nokia 6210 Navigator GPS phone [including Maps 2.0]
February 05, 2008   Nokia Location Tagger: in-phone photo geocoding

Elsevier Patient Research beta

Elsevier has launched a beta pilot that supports patients and their family members looking for medical information; providing access to individual full text journal articles from selected Elsevier publications. The articles are delivered via email for a minimal handling fee of $4.95.

http://patient-research.elsevier.com/patientresearch/about

Permitted Uses

You may access in a given twenty-four hour period a reasonable number of Content items, and you may download and print such Content after it has been delivered to your e-mail address. Such access and use is for your own personal use, although you may also share and discuss such Content with family members and medical professionals involved in your medical care or the care of a family member. You can make further copies for such family members and medical professionals.

Prohibited Uses

Personal use does not include the use by researchers, instructors or students for research purposes or educational use.

http://patient-research.elsevier.com/patientresearch/terms

You can see the list of journals covered at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/patientresearch

There is a Facebook App, that provides a search box and also lists "popular articles".

It's not clear to me how you search without using the Facebook App.  There are some hits on various articles visible in Google.  The terms of service says

After ordering the article and confirmation of payment, we will e-mail the document to you typically within 2 hours, but no longer than 24 hours.

Facebook App seen via Carol Serroul.

audiobook DRM on the way out

Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anticopying software on digital downloads of audio books.

...

Random House was the first to announce it was backing away from D.R.M., or digital rights management software, the protective wrapping placed around digital files to make them difficult to copy. In a letter sent to its industry partners last month, Random House, the world’s largest publisher, announced it would offer all of its audio books as unprotected MP3 files beginning this month, unless retail partners or authors specified otherwise.

Penguin Group, the second-largest publisher in the United States behind Random House, now appears set to follow suit. Dick Heffernan, publisher of Penguin Audio, said the company would make all of its audio book titles available for download in the MP3 format on eMusic, the Web’s second-largest digital music service after iTunes.

...

Mr. Heffernan said the company changed its mind partly after watching the major music labels, like Warner Brothers and Sony BMG, abandon D.R.M. on the digital music they sell on Amazon.com. “I’m looking at this as a test,” he said. “But I do believe the audio book market without D.R.M. is going to be the future.”

New York Times - Publishers Phase Out [AntiCopying] - March 3, 2008

(The actual NYT headline "publishers phase out piracy protection", while alliterative, is stupid.  Copying is not piracy.)

I think it's a shame that more libraries didn't push back harder on publishers about DRM, but it appears that it is dying a well-deserved death anyway.

The Web Revolution - May 2008 - Toronto - not free

Chris Anderson will present his new book, FREE.

The conference, not so much free: $590 if you register before April 15, $790 after.

Interactive Marketing Conference: The web revolution
Date:     Thursday May 15, 2008
Location:     Metro Toronto Convention Centre
(255 Front Street West, Toronto) *Limited seating

08:30 to 3PM, Chris' closing keynote is at 1:30 PM.

If you prefer your free stuff to be, err, actually free, you can see video of him at Nokia World, listen to him at IT Conversations, or wait for his audiobook version, which is supposed to be given away free.

IT Conversations link via David Flanders twitter.

when recommendations go bad

Seems like a "related category" filter might be in order...

"Would you like some pepper with that wifi, sir?"

Previously:
January 07, 2007  things you won't see on the WebOPAC

carbon labelling

If Loblaws follows other retailers in green labelling, shoppers could get the chance to literally calculate their exact carbon footprint from a new pair of boots or even a box of chocolates.

Loblaw Cos. Ltd. is thinking of adding carbon labels to its private label products to show consumers how much carbon dioxide was emitted in producing the goods.

Following in the footsteps of shoe specialist Timberland Co. and grocer Tesco PLC, the Canadian supermarket retailer's potential initiative could capitalize on consumers' growing concern about climate change and greenhouse gases.

Globe and Mail - carbon footprint - January 18, 2008

If this is done properly, it should help people to relocalise their commerce, since transportation is a big component of the carbon footprint.

Jon Udell has been writing about this, the idea of tracking carbon through the production chain.
Having information on product labels is nice, but this information should also be available for any online transaction as well.

See e.g. The transparent supply chain.

There is also some positive news coming out of conferences (I hope conferences will start banning bottled water as well).

The first place SLA expects to see a significant chance to make an environmental impact is the SLA Annual Conference & INFO-EXPO in Seattle in June 2008. Seattle is well-known as a pioneer in green initiatives and has been recognized for its citywide environmental efforts. In addition to what the city offers, such as public transport and green hotels, there are a number of ways for attendees to make their own conference experience a greener one. SLA will be working with INFO-EXPO exhibitors and conference sponsors as well as attendees on how they can participate in this initiative by offering options such as providing the opportunity for them to purchase their own carbon offsets, and supplying free wireless Internet access throughout the conference center, allowing attendees to access hand-outs electronically and eliminating the need to print thousands of paper copies.

Special Libraries Association Announces Green Initiative - January 11, 2008

Previously:
December 3, 2006  airlines and everything with built-in carbon offset

the currencies of the digital realm

I have been thinking about how the digital environment behaves.  What kinds of properties does it have?  How does it differ from the physical world?

One major aspect of the physical world is the economy.  You make a thing, you sell it, you get money.

In the digital realm, you imagine a thing, you share it, and you get attention.

Attention is the first currency of the digital realm.

In practice, you expend a certain amount of your attention to e.g. craft a blog posting, and get small slices of attention from others in return.  (In the case of a technology review, this may be 4 to 6 hours of my time, for a minute of every visitor's time.)

Attention over time becomes reputation.

Reputation is the second currency of the digital realm.

Both attention and reputation can be converted into various rewards, both monetary and non-monetary.

Attention is transformed primarily into money through ads and other affiliate linking arrangements.  The more attention, the more clicks, the more clicks, the more money.  I'm not sure whether attention can be exchanged for anything else.

Reputation, at least in the library blogging context, converts mainly into opportunities: it might be a job offer, or an invitation to speak, or a request to write an article.

And of course, money is still a currency of the realm, but I would consider it the third currency.

Upon discussing this at lunch with Steve, I realised that this analysis should be quite understandable to the scientific community, as it is almost directly analogous.

If I write in Nature, I may get a lot of reputation, convertable into grant funding, employment offers, conference invitations, Research Assessment success.  But I may not necessarily get much of a fraction of the general public's attention.

If I write a newspaper column on science, I may get a good chunk of attention, but not as much reputation.

And of course, as many people have discussed elsewhere, the reputation-weighted network of scientific citations has much in common with the reputation-weighted network of web links.

In a way, Google can be considered as a reputation ranking engine, and make no mistake, it does everything in its power to measure attention (through ads, Google Reader, FeedBurner, and much more) to ensure that attention is being appropriately converted into reputation.

To me this means that in the digital realm, you have to stop thinking that you're in the XYZ business (the information business, the document delivery business etc.) and start thinking that you're in the attention and reputation business.  The number of sites that can use a traditional physical world model of converting things into money is tiny.  The rest of us (assuming we want to make money) have to use the primary digital currencies of attention and reputation, and convert them into money.

So you need to ask yourself, how big is your organisation's attention surface?  How much digital stuff (blog postings, search results, images, whatever) does it have to attract attention?  How is it using its reputation?

Some of these thoughts were inspired by reflecting on Chris Anderson's presentation at Nokia World (video), talking about his upcoming book on the topic of Free.

Amazon Kindle: books you can never share

Ah yes, progress.  Now for only $10 you can buy a book and read it.

ONLY you can read it and ONLY on Amazon's $400 Kindle e-book reader.

Want to give it to a friend?  Sell it?  Pass it on to your children?  Donate it to a library?  Sorry, too bad, it's "licensed digital content", don't you know.

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

Restrictions. You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

(Some emphasis above mine.)  I find it interesting that in all the Engadget hoopla, and on the entire snazzy Kindle page, this is never mentioned.  You have to go to Kindle Support, and find the last item on the page (Amazon Kindle Terms of Use and Policies), and then you get another list of pages where you have to select "License Agreement and Terms of Use", and then find the Digital Content section within that item.

How many people do you think are going to do that?

I also like this language "you may not, and you will not".  Um, ok I can see how you can forbid it, but "you will not"?  What is this, like a contractual limitation on reality?

one search, multiple publishers, articles on your desktop: CISTI PPA

<marketing-mode>

CISTI offers a Can$12 flat-base-fee^*, credit card payment, electronic article delivery service: Pay Per Article (yes, it sounds like "paper article"; I didn't choose the name).

There is a single search box, it does a search across many CISTI holdings available for immediate or 24 hour delivery, including a little publisher you may have heard of called Elsevier.

http://ppa-ac.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/payperview/jsp/find.jsp?lang=en

http://ppa-ac.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/payperview/jsp/faq.jsp

As always, if you have questions about this or any other CISTI service, don't contact me.
Contact CISTI Help Desk, your CISTI client service person, or CISTI Communications, as appropriate.

^* C$12 plus taxes and publisher fee.

</marketing-mode>

web design enabled... tissue?

Kleenex, beloved product of the weepy, the sneezy, and teenage boys, has gone all prosumer:

http://www.mykleenextissue.com/

But where's the Kleenex API?  I demand an API!

Chris Anderson's tail in Canada

Another Canada 2020 presentation

On March 28 [2007], Chris Anderson the Editor in Chief of  Wired magazine and author of  "The Long Tail"  discussed how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to millions of niches.

http://www.cpac.ca/asx/show_pr_can2020Anderson_mar28-07_eng.asx

If you want to skip the politicians, Anderson starts speaking at 12:20 in.

Previously:
August 03, 2006  my review of The Long Tail

DRM and legal music in Canada

I haven't been tracking this issue much lately, I'm afraid I'm such an early adopter that my interest started in 2001

http://web.archive.org/web/20010607052414/http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~rakerman/digimusic.html

and that after Apple (finally) launched iTunes in December 2004, I stopped paying much attention to the issue of the availability of legal, Mac-friendly, and ideally non-DRMed music in Canada.

There has been a lot of buzz about the topic of music DRM lately though, plus my new Sony phone plays MP3s but not, of course, the protected AACs from the iTunes store.

Steve Jobs has been under pressure in Europe to open up iTunes, his response was to examine a number of options, ending with what some read as a call for the elimination of DRM.

With cellphones gaining more features each year, it's becoming obvious to me that the phone is the logical place to have your music, rather than juggling two devices.  Other figures in the electronics industry see a strong benefit from removing DRM, in order (one assumes) to open up more content for use on their phones.  The Globe reports today on RIM speaking out in favour of non-DRMed music.

"I think [DRM is] just going to break down with the normal proliferation of the Internet," Mr. Balsillie told analysts and investors at an RBC Dominion Securities Inc. conference in Toronto. "It's going to be tough. I think [content providers] are going to have to shift their business models. But they will go down swinging."

As well, out yesterday was Cassandra Szklarski's CP story Music labels flirt with looser DRM rules.  The big news is that PureTracks, a Canadian service, is selling unencumbered MP3s for a small set of artists now, in addition to its tradition WMA Windows Media DRMed songs.  However, if you're on a Mac, you're still greeted with

A polite message that would, nevertheless, in another context be called a "PFO".  Basically, thanks for visiting, only Windows is supported, have a nice day.

For Nettwork at least (BNL, Sarah McLachlan and others) you can buy directly from their Nettwerk Werkshop store (formerly Nettmusic).  Works great on a Mac.  I bought The Perishers - Sway EP from there a long time ago, still one of my favourite sets of tracks.

Rogers has also been promoting something called the Rogers MusicStore

http://rogers.com/musicstore

It has three basic features:
1. An application called Rogers MediaPlayer that is Windows 2000+ only.

2. The ability to have "unlimited" downloads to a PC or PC and mobile phone.  These downloads are DRMed, I think they will only play in Rogers Mobile MediaPlayer on selected cellphones.  And if you stop your subscription to the unlimited download service?  Poof, no access to any of that music any more.

Rogers FAQ: What happens to the songs I’ve downloaded to my PC or mobile phone when I cancel my Unlimited subscription?

If you cancel your Rogers MusicStore Unlimited Music Subscription, you won’t be able to play the songs you have downloaded to your PC or mobile phone.

3. Pay per download.  Still DRMed.

Rogers FAQ - What are Rogers MusicStore pricing options?
What is pay per download Music?

Pay per download Music refers to purchasing tracks a la carte, one at a time. Each downloaded track will appear as a unique charge on your wireless bill. Pay per downlaod songs also are encoded with DRM, but these tracks are owned by the customer indefinitely. The songs can be played an unlimited number of times, at any time the customer wants. These songs can also be burned to CD.

Pay per download pricing is, err, a bit outrageous

You can browse, preview and download songs to your PC for $1.25 per song or download songs to both your PC and your mobile phone for $1.99, plus a $1 mobile download fee.

To download music from the MusicStore on your phone you must have a supported phone because you must use the aforementioned Mobile MusicPlayer (624KB download).  Featuring a big glowing red EULA you must agree to before starting the software.

Attempting to buy ABBA's "Money, Money, Money" through my cellphone brought up yet another set of terms and conditions, in which I appeared to be agreeing to a monthly MusicStore subscription, so I cancelled the purchase.

Ridiculous.

But the Sony phone is no better in a way - it has a proprietary interface, the "Fast Port", rather than a regular headphone jack, which means that in order to use any normal headphone I have to buy a special FastPort-headphone jack adapter.

Basically the underlying problem with any proprietary technology, whether it's DRM or an interface, is it makes hugely unreasonable assumptions in an age of technological change, along the lines of:

• everyone uses a Windows PC or device that supports Windows DRM or
• everyone uses an iPod
• hard drives (or any other forms of storage) never fail
• authentication services (needed to verify and play DRMed songs) will never fail, and will be available forever
• you never need to move content from one platform to another

What I also find frustrating, and part of what motivated me to create my page on digital music 6 years ago, is that even if you want to obey the law, the music (and movie etc.) industry puts barriers in your way.  In 2001 the main problem was I couldn't buy many songs online legally in Canada at all.  Now there is a lot more content available, but still not all.  Want to get the UK TV series Hex on DVD in Canada?  Sorry, region 2 DVDs only.  Want to buy "Glass Vase Cello Case" by Tattletale from the iTunes Music Store Canada?  Sorry, not available.  Want to buy any TV show of any kind from iTunes Canada?  Sorry, no TV shows available.  How bizarre is it that I have no way to legally acquire desired digital content?  Talk about your marketplace gaps.

UPDATE: You can also buy music legally in Canada from Sony Connect

http://www.sonyconnect.ca/

Windows only, you have to download their SonicStage app or access a different site that only supports Windows Internet Explorer.  The test songs I bought were all downloaded as OpenMG DRMed ATRAC files.  Brilliant, take a format no one uses (ATRAC, "the 8 track of digital music formats", yet another bit of proprietary Sony brilliance) and then put extra DRM on top of it.

ENDUPDATE

EMusic remains my fave store so far, although I haven't bought from them since their long-ago days of unlimited legal MP3 downloads for a fixed monthly fee.

You can find more (somewhat dated) info at

http://www.akerman.ca/digimusic.html

PS I took a picture of the music store purchase agreement when I tried to buy the ABBA song but--I am not making this up--my camera's hard drive crashed.  Which is a good reminder that the probability of a hard drive failing is 100%.  On the plus side, it had lasted something like 7 years--it was an IBM/Hitachi 340MB Microdrive.

Amapedia - Amazon Product Wiki next generation

I'm not sure this effort is going anywhere, but what I find interesting is the amount of content that Amazon is able to get customers to contribute for free.

http://amapedia.amazon.com/

via Ten Thousand Year Blog

Previously:
November 26, 2005  Behold the power of Wikizon: Amazon adds ProductWiki

my review of Wikinomics

Summary

Wikinomics is a good book for managers who want to understand the latest trends in technology and society.  Toffler's The Third Wave (1980, ISBN-13: 978-0553246988) and Friedman's The World is Flat (2005, ISBN-13: 978-0374292799) are better books, with deeper insights and more thoughtful analysis, but they are also a bit more theoretical and much longer.

Details

I was initially quite sceptical about this book, the articles in the Globe were interesting but a bit short on caveats.  The tone of the book is extremely positive, to the point of sometimes excessive technology evangelism hyperbole.  However, I found that as you get farther along in the book, they do provide more balance and perspective.  If you separate out some of their marketingspeak, there is content of value.

I am a bit concerned about the approach of using a small number of "business case" exemplars, as I don't believe in the business case idea - I think most businesses successes are a result of a unique confluence of events, that wouldn't work if you tried to duplicate them.

For me, the most interesting chapters were #4, about marketplaces for ideas and innovation ("ideagoras"), #6, about shared and collaborative science, and #7, about creating technology platforms that enable innovation and expansion.

The first three chapters are ok, a basic overview of the current technology and social environment.  This will be nothing new for those of you who have been tracking these changes in your RSS feed readers, but may provide a useful capsule of information for managers and others wishing to understand these new ideas and activities.

I myself am always interested most in information that is new to me, and the chapter on idea marketplaces was an eye-opener.  As in all chapters, they pick a few specific business examples, with InnoCentive being singled out for particularly lengthy discussion.  InnoCentive describes itself as a

web-based community matching top scientists to relevant R&D challenges facing leading companies from around the globe

I think that's an interesting idea - just as eBay has been able to match buyers with sellers, InnoCentive aims to match problems with solutions.  Can you make the world your R&D department?  I think it is profoundly challenging to outsource anything, but nevertheless, it's worth experimenting with.

Chapter 5 is about Prosumers, which is Toffler's idea, The Third Wave does at least get a citation at the back of the book, although I would have liked to have seen more prominent exposure in the actual text (for that matter, why not interview Toffler, if possible).  Prosumer is basically the idea of anyone being able to both produce (with potentially global distribution) and consume media and information.  They have some good examples, but are a bit behind the times in criticizing the mainstream media, "Why is this happening on digg and not CNN..."?  Err, actually, it is happening at CNN, they call it CNN i-Reports.

I was particularly interested to read about "Sharing for Science and the Science of Sharing" in chapter 6.  There is lots of good information about how the web is an enabler for science collaboration, and many ideas for how your organization can take advantage of open science.  They do, in my opinion, rather oversimplify the issues of peer review, implying that you could replace it with the Wisdom of Crowds, an idea I have already disagreed with at length.

The next chapter covers "platforms for participation", and this is a set of ideas that I already praised when they had an article in the Globe.  This chapter should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the huge advantages of building networks of APIs (perhaps implemented as Web Services).  They talk about the activities of Google, Amazon and the like, and explain how they benefit from providing their services for use at this machine-to-machine level.  They also provide some much-welcomed caveats about business models built around platforms.

Chapter 8 is about the "Global Plant Floor", which I don't really care about since I'm not much interested in manufacturing (or similar very complex collaborative design efforts).  In fact I think that this idea of globally sourcing designs and parts is in for a big challenge if the full carbon pollution costs of vast distribution networks start to be accounted for.

Chapter 8 does end with some guidance on "harnessing the global plant floor" which I think is applicable to any type of "harnessing the new web".  Here are the subheadings:

• Focus on the critical value drivers
• Add value through orchestration
• Instill rapid, iterative design processes
• Harness modular architectures
• Create a transparent and egalitarian ecosystem
• Share the costs and risks
• Keep a keen futures watch

If reading this book leads to people and organizations embracing even a few of the above activities, it will be of great benefit.

The final two chapters deal with how your can try to bring collaborative, dynamic work patterns into your organization, and harness the power of open collaboration.  Some good guidance is provided about when these patterns may and may not be useful.

Overall I thought it was a useful book.  I learned some new things and I also got some ideas about how to present some of the complex technology topics I deal with, including numerous concrete business examples.

In the spirit of open collaboration, their book's final chapter 11 is a blank wiki online, for the readers to create.

Product details from Amazon.com

# Hardcover: 320 pages
# Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover (December 28, 2006)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1591841380
# ISBN-13: 978-1591841388

Previously:
November 24, 2006  the Wikinomic Generation

Tapscott on collaboration and Wikinomics in the Globe

Don Tapscott has the great fortune to get not one, not two, but seven articles in a series in the Globe based around his ideas in his new book Wikinomics.

The third article is out today.  I will update this post as the rest come out.

UPDATE 2006-12-30:

Part 4: The New Alexandrians

I wasn't able to extract a lot of meaning out of this, other than

A shared research infrastructure, in turn, allows project participants to harness insights and resources from thousands of university researchers, and hundreds of company researchers, too.

These efforts are speeding the industry toward fundamental breakthroughs in molecular biology -- breakthroughs that promise an era of personalized medicine and treatments for intractable disorders.

So keep that thought of shared infrastructure, shared platform in mind.

See next posting for part 5.

ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2007-01-02: The final two articles. ENDUPDATE

Part 3: The Prosumer Revolution - Life game a signpost for future

in Rosedale's business, customers do 99 per cent of the work. His "product" is a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG, for short) called Second Life, a fascinating world where more than 400,000 participants socialize, entertain and transact in a virtual environment fabricated almost entirely by its users.

In fact, Second Life residents are far more than just "users." They assume virtual identities, act out fictitious roles and activities and even create virtual businesses that earn some 3,100 residents an average net profit of $20,000 a year.

The end sentence is a bit misleading.  "earn some 3,100 residents (out of a total user base of over 2,000,000)" might have set the context better.  Yes, I'm still bitter that I only have a dollar.

Second Life is no typical "product," and it's not even a typical video game. It's created almost entirely by its customers -- you could say the consumers are also the producers, or the "prosumers." After all, they participate in the design, creation, and production of the product, while Linden Labs is content to manage the community and make sure the infrastructure is running.

It's interesting to see that the "prosumer" terminology continues to gain ground, after being introduced so long ago by Toffler.

Part 2: Ideagoras - A new marketplace for ideas

In addition to broadening and deepening its own proprietary networks, P&G searches for innovations in Web-enabled marketplaces such as InnoCentive, NineSigma, and yet2.com. These combined efforts led to hundreds of new products on the market, some of which turned out to be hits. In the process, Mr. Lafley and his managers like Mr. Huston transformed a lumbering consumer products company into a limber innovation machine.

I'm all for collaboration and external sourcing of innovation, but make no mistake, collaboration is hard.  Think about how difficult it is for you to communicate ideas within your own organization, to people who already have some common context.  I spend person-weeks every year doing this, with only limited success.  Now imagine trying to extend that conceptual integrity outside of your walls.

Part 1: Peer Pioneers - Get your mass collaboration road map set

Though it is unlikely that hierarchies will disappear in the foreseeable future, it's clear that the traditional business enterprise is no longer the sole engine of wealth creation in the economy.

The quintessential example of mass collaboration is Wikipedia -- a collaboratively created encyclopedia, owned by no one and authored by tens of thousands of enthusiasts.

See, this makes me dubious right away.  Wikipedia is a very finely tuned collaboration engine with an actual number of active contributors that is very small.  Businesses need to be very wary of the idea that they can just wave some collaboration wand and get useful results.

Not part of the series, but effectively Part 0: The Net Generation is entering the workforce

According to New Paradigm's research, N-Geners are used to more choices in their everyday lives than previous generations, whether it's which of the thousand songs they want to listen to on their iPod, or which blog read. They thrive on the freedom to chose, yet are not naive when it comes to the boundless determination of marketers to sell them stuff. They are especially discriminating when it comes to evaluating companies and what they sell, and will not buy from — or work for — one with a poor reputation.

The traditional approaches to planning, decision-making and information transfer are painstakingly slow to this group reared on instant everything. They are incredibly well-connected and can tap into a huge network of their peers, either through their instant messaging contact lists or through social networks. Nothing stays secret for long. N-Geners don't take well to the hierarchical and authoritarian management style; they like to work in teams, collaborate, so that problem solving becomes a communal task. They expect to be involved in decision making.

There is a Wikinomics Blog.

Previously:
November 24, 2006  the Wikinomic Generation

more Second Life, plus South Park

Or should I say, Second Life 2.0?

Networman - Great Northern Way Campus & Second Life - October 31, 2006

Netwoman - New Masters of Digital Media Program - November 24, 2006

I just wanted to pass on some information about a new Master's program - one of the many hats I wear is that of a Virtual Research Consultant for the Centre for Digital Media at Great Northern Way Campus in Vancouver, British Columbia. On Saturday, November 25th, 2006 the Masters of Digital Media (MDM) program at the Great Northern Way Campus will host an Open House for prospective students from around the globe in the online metaverse Second Life™, where a Virtual Centre for Digital Media building is currently under construction. This event will be held in conjunction with a Real Life Open House taking place simultaneously at Vancouver's Great Northern Way Campus. At both events, potential students will learn about an innovative graduate program in digital media planned to launch in September 2007.

More information can be found online here:

http://www.gnwc.ca/mdm/
http://www.mastersofdigitalmedia.blogspot.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gnwc

Incidentally, the campus is at Erie (136, 32, 25).  (In Second Life, a location is a placename + X, Y, Z coordinates.)  Here's a SLurl for the location - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Erie/136/32/25/

Le marketing à l'écoute - Novembre 2006: Faire des profits tangibles dans l’univers virtuel, est-ce réel? (podcast)

Michel Leblanc, M.Sc. commerce électronique - Archives pour Second Life

Michel Leblanc - Edgar Bronfman interviewé dans Second Life - December 4, 2006

L’un des plus célèbres Montréalais, Edgar Bronfman Jr., de la célèbre famille du même nom et maintenant P.D.G. de Warner Music, est interviewé dans Second Life par le journaliste de Reuters Adam Reuter.

and for no particular reason, here's some info on the South Park "World of Warcraft" episode...
Ok, ok, um, "in order to better understand the Gaming Generation, I present this insightful examination of using machinima to produce television".

South Park recently aired an episode involving World of Warcraft in which half of the show featured custom machinima footage.
...

Q: How were the custom animations created? How were they used inside of World of Warcraft - were they imported back into the game? What hardware/software did you use?

JJ: When Trey started thinking about how he wanted to start off the current run of episodes, he really wanted to do something big, and new. So, the idea of the "video game show" as we were calling it, resurfaced. We had a production meeting at Trey's house on Friday, Sept. 1st, and went over all the experiments and design work we had done to date. Once again, the idea was brought up of using WoW to shoot the in-game footage, with the added possibility of re-creating the characters in Maya, the 3D animation program we use to produce the show, in order to do close ups with full lipsynch and facial expressions. I mentioned that Blizzard had been very eager to help us when we ran our initial tests, so perhaps they'd be willing to let us use their own character models as well, which would save us a great deal of time and effort. All we would have to do then is re-rig the faces so we could animate them to the degree needed.

Eventually, it was decided that we would push forward in both directions, starting to model our own characters as well as contacting Blizzard and seeing how interested they would be in participating. We met with several people from Blizzard on Thursday, the 7th of Sept. and it became obvious that they were extremely eager to make this happen, and seemed willing to do whatever they could to make sure it did. Luckily, they also use Maya to do their in-game character animation, which meant we would be able to just grab their files and go, in theory. So, we asked them for a couple of their Maya character rigs to test with. Less then 7 hours later, we had male and female models for every race in the game, all fully rigged with every single animation cycle already assigned. It was exactly what we needed to get started.

from Machinima.com

airlines and everything with built-in carbon offset

Will SOA save the world?  We're working on it.
Jon Udell has a fascinating InfoWorld article "The carbon-adjusted supply chain: SOA-enabled optimization can help reduce businesses' impact on the global environment" and accompanying blog posting.

Does Amazon know enough about its supply chain, ... to assign a value to the atmospheric carbon attributable to the manufacturing and shipping of its products? Bezos thought that the answer was no, but he was clearly intrigued by the question. So am I.

...

Economists have a wonderful euphemism for environmental impacts. They call them “externalities,” and we can blithely ignore them until Rhode Island-size chunks of Antarctic sea ice start to vanish. Then we start to realize that, in a closed ecosystem, there are no externalities.

In order for Amazon to be able to measure and report its externalities, of course, Amazon’s suppliers would themselves have to be able to measure and report theirs. That would be a major challenge, to be sure. But it’s exactly the kind of challenge that SOA-enabled supply chain optimization prepares us to tackle.

To my surprise, there are already a number of initiatives to help people offset their carbon from air travel, although I don't know how big the idea is yet in those paragons of carbon production, the US, Canada and Australia.

Anyway, my Big Idea is quite simple and appears to be already underway at various sites: every airline should include, as one of its option fees, a pre-calculated carbon offset cost with a trusted offset vendor.  Air Canada, are you listening?

Ideally, offset providers should have calculation Web Services and payment Web Services that other sites could use.

[UK] DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) - Carbon Offset Scheme Launched - September 12, 2005

British Airways has launched a new scheme, backed by the government, where its customers can volunteer to help to offset the carbon dioxide emissions from their flight by making a contribution to an environmental trust.

The money raised will be used by an organisation called Climate Care to invest in sustainable energy projects that tackle global warming by reducing carbon dioxide levels.

Air travellers can choose to make a donation from today (September 12) via a link from the airline's website, ba.com, for the cost of the emissions created by their journey. For example, the donation on a return flight from London Heathrow to Madrid will cost £5 and a return flight from London Heathrow to Johannesburg will cost £13.30.

You can visit http://www.britishairways.com/travel/climateimpact/public/en_gb for more info.

Silverjet, also in the UK, is building carbon neutrality into their price.

Silverjet, the first British airline to offer a low fare, exclusively business class service across the Atlantic, today announces that it will be the world’s first airline to become carbon neutral on all its flights.

Included within its ticket prices will be a mandatory carbon offset contribution, giving passengers the opportunity to reinvest the “carbon points” thus earned back into a number of climate friendly projects around the world. This still enables Silverjet to offer low fare long haul, exclusively business class, transatlantic flights from as little as £999, return.

The scheme is being set up in partnership with the leading climate change business, The CarbonNeutral Company, and it has been developed in accordance with the CarbonNeutral protocol, which is the leading standard and quality mark for action on climate change.

Silverjet PR - Silverjet is the world's first airline to go carbon neutral - November 26, 2006

In Canada, there is UNIGLOBE Travel's Green Flight Program

UNIGLOBE Travel's Green Flight Program is one of the ways you can achieve your CO2 reduction goals.

UNIGLOBE Travel's Green Flight program is getting much press for its ability to provide companies in Canada with the mechanism that has, for a long time been missing to meet carbon emission offset goals. One way to achieve these goals is to purchase carbon offset credits from UNIGLOBE Travel that are calculated on the number of miles flown in an aircraft generated by companies business, conference or employee incentive travel.

The monies collected from the credits are then invested into environmental programs supported by Environment Canada.

UNIGLOBE's offset provider is Baseline Emissions Management Inc., and the specific site provided by Baseline is

http://www.greenmyflight.com/

Also, via The Great Canadian Carbon Offset 2006, I find a rather roundabout offset arrangement - buy a WestJet ticket via offsetters.ca and offsetters will use their affiliate income to offset some of the carbon. (GCCO2006 link via Treehugger.)

lastminute.com UK also offers this option

Customers using lastminute.com are to be given the option to offset carbon dioxide emissions from flights.

The online retailer claims to have become the first major travel company to make CO2 offsetting an integral part of buying a flight in a Government-backed initiative.

Payments will be invested in sustainable energy projects to reduce the damage done to the environment in a partnership with Climate Care, an organisation which tackles global warming.

TravelMole - Lastminute.com to offer emissions offset option - November 24, 2006

and indeed the option appears prominently at the top of their UK site, with accompanying web page

and not at all on their US site

cheapflights.co.uk has a variety of information - Air passengers can offset CO2 at Treeflights

Passengers who want to offset the carbon dioxide emitted from their flights have the option of using a new carbon-offsetting website where they can pay to plant a tree.

Treeflights, whose motto is "You fly – we plant", will plant one tree in a Welsh forest for each flight taken, at a cost of £10 (or $19/€15).

as well they list other options on their Carbon Emissions page

Al Gore uses Native Energy to offset all of his travel, but unfortunately it's a bit US-centric (miles? map of the USA?)

http://www.nativeenergy.com/travel/

There are lots of competing carbon offset providers, unfortunately I have neither the skills nor the time to evaluate them all.  I may expand this posting as I learn more.

Wikipedia - Carbon offset is probably another good starting point, and they'd take away my Canadian environment blazer badge if I didn't point to David Suzuki.org - Go Carbon Neutral.

Second Life: reality bites

Did we learn nothing from the dot-com bust?

Um, no.

It's just five years after everyone woke up to the absurdity of investing in loss-making petfood retailers promoted by sock-puppets and other wonders of the dot-com bubble. Yet the only advance we seem to have made is that our financial naivety has reached new levels of sophistication. Here in the 21st century, investing in companies that retail physical goods and property is old hat. Now we invest in imaginary companies that trade in imaginary goods and services using an imaginary currency — and yet still we complain when the bubble bursts — or at least the denizens of the Second Life virtual community are complaining.

via Software as Services blog - Reality pricks the Second Life property bubble - November 23, 2006

Amazon Web Services in Second Life

I can't believe there is already a Second Life Business Magazine, but there is, and they have interviewed Jeff Barr about using Amazon Web Services in Second Life.

If you would like to read it, simply download the PDF and then skip forward to page 71.

via Amazon Web Services Blog - Shopping For Real: Amazon Web Services in Second Life - November 1, 2006

It just goes to show that exposing your internal capabilities and data as Web Services can lead to uses you might never have imagined.

Also see Jnana - Build Your Own Expert-Powered Amazon Store in Second Life.

Amazon Nobox - no video downloads for Canadians

As predicted, Amazon.com has released their Unbox video download service.
No video downloads for Canadians.  No Amazon.ca Unbox store.
No support for Mac users.
You can buy in some cases, rent in others.

They have a lot of stuff to download... if you're in the USA.

Price includes both a DVD-quality video to watch on your PC or TV, and a video file optimized for compatible portable video players.

Usage: US customers only. You can keep purchased videos on 2 PCs and 2 portable video players at the same time.
System Requirements: Requires Windows XP.

$1.99 to buy TV shows.  $9.88 to buy The Matrix. 
$2.99 to rent Office Space.  You can store it for 30 days, but wait... once you start playing it, it self-destructs after only 24 hours.
$14.99 to buy Napolean Dynamite.  $13.87 to buy V for Vendetta.

The file sizes are huge, which is kind of interesting for the US, a country with mostly terrible broadband.  For a one hour show:

Run Time: 51 min
Video File Size: 840.2 MB
Portable File Size: 248.2 MB

That's over a gig just for one show.

In case you're wondering, Canadians still can't buy downloadable movies or TV shows from iTunes either.  Which is interesting, considering we have way better broadband than the States.