New Canadian Copyright Law Book is Under CC Licensing, Royalties Go to CC

Professor Michael Geist writes about In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law (all chapters available for download):

Of possible interest - with the Canadian government nearing hearings on proposed copyright reform, 19 Canadian copyright professors today launched a new book examining the bill and copyright law in Canada from a public interest perspective. I served as editor with the contributing professors representing ten universities from across Canada. In a first for major legal title in Canada, the book is being published under a Creative Commons license with all royalties going back to CC.

The book is divided into three parts. Part one includes three essays that provide context for Canadian copyright law. Part two features 11 essays on the current legislative proposal with several pieces on TPMs, education and copyright, and ISP issues. Part three looks ahead with pieces on copyright term, user rights, fair dealing, extended licensing, and crown copyright.

Nice!

What's going on?

The deal. I've been working like crazy. My calendar is bloated full of interesting events and people I want to see because they ARE wonderful and interesting. But then I was off the grid for a bit while at a workshop this weekend that was mindblowing. And it will help me so much in my on-the-grid work.

Om Malik blogged something about Treo's and a lawsuit again Palm, and now a gazillion people are leaving amazing comments about their Treo experiences (good, bad and ugly) on my old blog post about the cynical approach Palm had on developing the 650.

Scott Beale of Laughingsquid.com sent me a fabulous present in the mail today of beautiful stickers for my laptop. Thanks Scott. You so rock!

I was sorry to miss Webzine due to my workshop, but I did get the stickers, and now I may need a new laptop cause the old one is getting so full. There's a marketing campaign for Apple: Buy a new powerbook for your latest stickers... because well, let's face it, your old laptop just can't hold any more of them.

Is there Moore's law for stickers? This is bad, but good.

Also, been reading Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity. Really great.

Participatory Media discussion group tonight with Howard Rheingold and Xiao Chang. That should be great.

Oh, and a very close friend, whom I've known all my life, died yesterday around 1pm. That's the ugly part. That's really hard.

So, my blogging has suffered. Sorry. And there is so much I want to blog! Drat.

Metrics for Weighing Blogs

Last week I spoke at Bill Flitter's eBig monthly meeting on Blogs and RSS. My talk was about metrics and weighing blogs. Shel Holtz recorded my talk (thanks!) which is here (warning, giant mp3 follows that link) or see it here at the Hobson and Holtz Report.

Oh My

It's true. Ms. Manner's would be appalled.

Google Launches Blog Search

I just checked out the new Google Blog Search. I've been hearing about this for months, and now it's finally here. Of course, I checked searches I'm familiar with, to see how it does. One for my blog name (as key word) turns up many matches but also is missing a number of references I know exist. Not sure how they determine the relevance matches but on that one, for my own blog name, I come up the most. I would say that page after page of me referencing myself is not so useful, and I can't believe I'm more relevant than many of the people who link to me. But what that means is that they are likely matching terms as well as linkrank. It would be helpful if they filtered out the blog with the same name, or relevance searches for any blog that matches will just be useless lists of page after page of that blog's posts.

URL lookups are similar.. with many matches but many missing items as well. However, since I rarely link to myself, under a relevance view, I get lots of other people's posts linking to me. But wait, they are all strangely in reverse chron order, even under relevance. Date view shows the same exact list of results in the same order. Blog search is still in Beta.

The advanced search, under data range, appears to start March 1, 2005. Still, it's really useful to be able to isolate any period we want, and once there is significant historical information in Google's database, this will become far more useful.

I did about 20 searches on terms and links that I regularly monitor, and found that references created by a blog or blogger or concept associated with a blog show up as the top result(s), for those same searches. I'm not so sure that seeing blogs referencing themselves is so useful, and maybe these should be a third view, after relevance and date, where they provide *all results* including those kinds of references. Again, I'm seeing page after page of results that show the blog associated with my search term, instead of everyone else talking about that concept, blog or url. Not terribly useful as I can just go to that blog to see all its own posts. I want to see what others are saying about it. These searches are ones I have watched for years in my aggregator using 5 different feed search services, and I'm noting there are a lot of recent missing entries at Google as well.

I'll keep playing with it, but I think they have a ways to go in understanding blog search and getting the result sets right. And they need to pull in the rest of the results I know are there for all the searches I did. However, the search result layout is clean, and organized. It's a good start. And is very fast.

One more thing, Google Blog Search's FAQ says that it is searching RSS and Atom feeds only. It doesn't spider blogs. So it will only pick up what goes through a feed. Blogs that send through partial posts, will only have that part of the post in the RSS feed included in search results. This is a drawback, because the possibilities for finding topic communities are lost when a service doesn't spider blogs, because the full information is going to be necessary in order to figure out that problem.

Anil Dash has a good write up on the overall issues with this new search.

All things mechanical..

...seemed to fail or their failures became apparent yesterday.

I got a beep on my phone indicating voice mail, but there was no ring. So I got into VM and found there were 50 messages from the past two weeks. Took me 20 minutes to listen to them. Thank you Cingular.

And if you called me in the past two weeks, I'm sorry, the calls were apprently not all ringing through and for those who left messages, neither were they getting to me quickly. And now they magically are again. Thank goodness for small favors. I guess it's a favor when you pay for service and you actually get it?

And the DSL, from SBC Global.. spotty to non-existant for most of the day yesterday.

And my car, at the shop for a regular checkup.. they replaced some sort of dual oxygen censor.. and now it appears one of the new censors was bad. So I have to go in again. But the 'check engine' light that came on yesterday while on the bridge was not fun.

Lastly, Firefox and moveable type 3.2 are not cooperating. Third time this has come up with the new version.. I otherwise love the new 3.2, it's organized, easy, and thank god they made it possible for me to customize the new entry windows.. so that it can exist at a reasonable size. But they have no info yet on keywords (what are they, how do they work, are they like categories, can i display them.. so i'm not using them til i can figure out the value). Hopefully, after three attempts, I'm still hoping to get this and my other post on Andrew Rasiej up there.. after all.. the election is tomorrow!

By the end of this day, I wished I'd stayed in bed.

Lisa Rein's Songs from the Commons

songs from the commons
on MondoGlobo.net

All songs have one or another Creative Commons licensing, and sez Lisa:

The purpose of this show is two-fold.

On the one hand, I am featuring CC licensed music from the various libraries of it online. Explaining more to artists about how CC-licenses work, and demonstrating that more and more artists of increasingly professional quality are becoming involved in the Commons Revolution.

On the other hand, this show will provide a step by step basic understanding of Copyright Law and how the big cases affect the public, so they can understand better when new cases are decided by the Supreme Court in the years to come.

So basically, if you want to spend five minutes a week learning about Copyright Law, in an attempt to begin to understand what the hell is going on with these landmark cases and how the average person is ultimately affected, while listening to cool music in-between, then you’ll like this show.

This week's focus: The Copyright Bargain {{{MP3}}}

It's hard to move forward in discussing the current copyright situation without first learning a bit of background about the original intentions of the Founding Fathers when they created Copyright and added it to the Constitution. This show will discuss this briefly, and then, in contrast explain the current state of Copyright today.

Great cause and the music is awesome! I especially like Human Nature.

Flickr and Yahoo and Identity Management

(Note, updated below, 8:30am 9/5/05) I've been thinking about this identity issue since it came up Monday (okay, yes.. I'm really trying hard to take this week off from blogging but here I am, blogging).

Anyway, I had a thought Tuesday, and figured I would toss it out there. So, Yahoo could take it's hundreds of millions of IDs (that all authenticate in Yahoo's system through the front section of their email accounts) like joeblow468 which is really joeblow468@yahoo.com, and change those to iNames. Yahoo could become an iBroker for all of it's IDs, which are unique, turning them into:

=joeblow468

or better yet

=joeblow468.yahoo

These IDs could then easily be interchangeable with Flickr IDs:

=photojoe.flickr

... I think what Yahoo is really looking for is something simple to integrate IDs between their company and those they acquire, as well as ways to make themselves more open. I don't think they intend to freak everybody out, or make them paranoid because of the necessary integration. If Yahoo used an iName system, all ID's no matter where they come from could be made into iNames, with Yahoo as iBroker, where they could then integrate additional ID's into this system. ID's from newly acquired systems could remain essentially the same.

Also, it seems like what really matters for Yahoo is not the hundreds of millions of IDs (well, yes they do for now..) but rather Yahoo wants to be thought of as forward thinking, innovative and useful. And they want to *be* heavily used. Creating user ease and control for authentication, and being new and innovative with identity management could accomplish that. Having great services like Flickr that users love makes them want to come back, not lock-in.

The point here though is that people are very sensitive about their identities. It may not be rational or in proportion to the issues at hand, but user's reaction to identity integration is one that you can expect to get from people if you build systems that don't take into account how emotionally and personally people take their identities, and digital representations of our identities.

(Update 9/6/058:11am)
Yahoo did not reset cookies last week, per Stewart's comment below. Instead, it just appears to have happened coincidently for a group of users I was with, and then someone confirmed this to me a Yahoo. But actually, it's not true. Instead my cookie (and about 10 others) were just randomly triggered to ask for a login, where we were asked to reenter our login IDs.(End of update).

I was presented with a login screen which had two entry points: one for my Flickr ID and one for my Yahoo ID, with a note underneath the Yahoo entry saying that once I used the Yahoo ID, I would need to always login with the it (this has since changed to explain the tie in of ID's with either type of login, but doesn't warn users that once a Yahoo ID is used, there is no going back). This was a bit jarring. I could not go back to my Flickr ID (the backend authentication ID, though my front end ID stays the same). I love Flickr. I use it everyday. It's my photos, my emotional representation of how I spend time, who my friends are, who I see now and then, what I care about. And they want me to integrate with my Yahoo ID, not something I feel is the least bit cool or fun or that I have emotional attachment to compared to Flickr.

I had to think twice about whether I wanted all my Flickr photos to be associated with my Yahoo ID, which represents 9 years of random email, plus some old website data (once upon a time, hodder.org was hosted there for 6 months or something), and various yahoo groups, plus other random stuff. I don't think I do, because information online doesn't age very well. So I'm going to make a different Yahoo ID, when the time comes where we have to change over, so that my Flickr stuff can stay separate. But for now, I'm mourning a little bit the coming loss of my Flickr ID (for the login part of things). In a way, it actually represents both me, and my community interactions there.

(Note and lengthy update added here:) When I say the loss of my Flickr ID, what I mean is, the authentication ID that I use, which is an email address that I like. I don't mean the front end ID, which is slightly different, and what the world sees when they go to my photos. Nathan Arnold pointed out below in a comment that the front end ID isn't going away. And he's right. But from a user perspective, what I login with is a backend, or functional ID (my email address which is mary at hodder blah blah) and what appears in the front end is my Flickr ID name, or Mary Hodder, and for the user, these are functionally tied together. I put in the "mary at hodder" login email to get to the "Mary Hodder" account.

Which brings up another point. When I was making the example above, I used joeblow468 because to me it looks so much like what so many Yahoo and Hotmail and MSN and AOL emails look like: an address the user tried to get, that actually represented themselves, like joeblow, which was taken, so they wound up with some crazy kludge at the back of their ID or namespace, usually in the form of numbers.

My own Yahoo ID is not what I wanted, even from 9 years ago. It's got an extra "o" on the end of it, because at the time, the name I wanted (an old nickname from my boyfriend at the time) was gone. So since it had the extra "o" on the end, which I've never really felt good about. If it had some random number on the end, which at the time I was getting it, Yahoo offered me as a choice, I would feel even more random about my ID/email at Yahoo. It's one of the reasons I made that email sort of a dumping ground for (frankly) garbage. I couldn't get the name space I wanted, either for login (backend) , or as an email (front end and to be shared with others) that I cared about or for things that I want to keep well, like my Flickr account, which is perfect and pristine. So, by asking me to tie my perfect and accurately representative Flickr name space ID on their frontend, to my bastardized Yahoo namespace on the backend (for authentication), it feels bad. And I suspect this may also be what's behind some of the discomfort people feel when Yahoo asks us to enter a Yahoo ID to login, in order to come to a Flickr ID on the front end.

What iNames might do for Yahoo is allow them to also give many more ID names that people care about (maryhodder, for example, sans numbers) with something attached (like .flickr or .yahoo or .yahooligans or whatever they want to give after the initial namespace). That way, we could have the ID in the first section of the namespace that we care about, but have a different second name after the dot, which means that there could be lots of maryhodder's without a large number at the end). My guess is, we would start caring much more about things like our Yahoo accounts if we had a name ID that reflected what we wanted, and how we view ourselves.

No one views themselves as joeblow468... they view themselves as joeblow, and the idea that we have to put a number at the back serves to tell us that we are not unique, we don't really own our name (someone else does), and therefore I suspect that many feel like me about making it the place we don't care about or keep well. When all the good name spaces somewhere are taken, what's left is often treated as garbage. Others have told me they use these kinds of accounts as their "spam" accounts, but it would be interesting to do some research to see if many users are experiencing what I have just described. (End of update).

If Yahoo used iNames to manage identity, this wouldn't really matter. They could just take an iName into their system as a unique ID, whether it was =joeblow468.yahoo or photojoe.flickr or =mary.hodder. Then they could show themselves to be really cool, by being open as an iBroker to allowing IDs to flow in and out of the system as well, as users choose to move their iNames about from broker to broker.

It would be an awesome thing for identity management if I could use my Yahoo ID to log into the NYTimes, or my bank, or whatever, or use my =mary.hodder to login to Yahoo or the NYT or my bank, with single signon where I control who gets what information from my iBroker and I can have a couple of IDs to quell nervousness if I feel too much is held in one place. But the fact is, having something simple that works everywhere would be really cool.

One of the people who works for me showed me a database on Monday, while we were discussing the Flickhoo flap, that she's been maintaining for the past 10 years of all of her logins all over the internet. She has 249 different logins at that many sites. Solving this problem, so that she could just use one or two or three logins everywhere, makes a lot of sense. And Yahoo could really take the lead on Identity Management by adopting a system that would create simplicity for users, and simplicity for themselves. And turn down the public relations flap a notch when they acquire companies and have to integrate users and ID's into the company.