LG Digital has announced that a full A3 sized e-paper that will be introduced in April. The novelty in LG’s latest marvel, is that it makes the physical distribution and the every day hustle of printing millions of newspapers obsolete. The Gutenberg era of mechanical reproduction is changing into digital reproduction. The smell of ink and the touch of fresh paper soon will be nostalgia. Newspaper corporations are sluggish and conservative in their approach to new media. The distribution costs rise dramatically and the product is a static, disposable, environmentally unfriendly medium. What is the USP of a news paper? Is it the content? The Smell? Selling Paper? Selling emotion? A combination of these elements? In this post, I will briefly elaborate on the contemporary distribution. And I will propose a distribution model that is based on digital reproductivity and its positive effect on the contemporary environment, distribution and costs.
(Engels)
“When Napster told the district court that it had developed a technology to block the transfer of 99.4 percent of identified infringing material, the district court told counsel for Napster 99.4 percent was not good enough. Napster had to push the infringements ‘down to zero’. If 99.4 percent is not good enough, then this is a war on file-sharing technologies, not a war on copyright infringement.” (Lessig, p.74)
What is the percentage of identified infringing material on the Pirate bay? The discourse whether This portal is illegal or not shouldn’t be that complex. Free Culture, to me, is very important. We have should take the distribution of creativity very seriously! Creativity is the catalyst for inspiration, which in its place, is responsible for the social, political, and commercial development of our cultural identity. P2P – as an infrastructure – is a substantial contribution to the development of our cultural identity. The Pirate Bay (what’s in the name) facilitates this contribution as well! but, this has its influence on the revenue of honest creators. If we accept and normalize an amount of distributed infringing material, then, on the basis of the ratio between illegal and legal distribution, we could determine whether a facilitator operates illegal.
A few questions pop up… What really is illegal, when we accept a system that is old and based upon ‘property’ in a virtual world of endless re-productivity? Does a maximum compressed movie-file, which doesn’t comes near the original quality, is eligible for copyright infringement? Or, why should we prohibit or normalize illegal downloading when we technologically could enforce zero tolerance? Why isn’t the government being held responsible when a car driver is speeding and distrusting cocaine? P2P is held responsible in the same way! In my opinion, if the Pirate bay is excessively violating the norm (not 99.4%) then they should be punished! But what is the norm? Maybe we should be focusing on that!
(Engels)
A growing amount of personal information about a growing amount of people becomes publicly available online. When Google-ing someone’s name, it’s normal these days that a whole list of data pops up that could consist of, among others: career related data, past activities, holiday pictures, blogging and commenting, Social Network (SN) profile data, etc. At first it were merely youngsters that have been familiar with using the internet their whole life that did not really care about privacy (or did not realize the importance) and put all their information out there, available and for grabs for everybody. Not long ago also older generations have joined in and are uploading more and more personal content to the web. These are some interesting trends that will probably become more prominent in the near future.
This project has aimed at creating new insights in this phenomenon of publicly available online personal data. After a first brainstorm session about the current situation of peoples’ ‘online lives’, we all agreed that the visualization that we were supposed to develop would have to serve several relevant goals. First of all we wanted to enhance people’s awareness about privacy online, not by condemning their behavior, but by visualizing something and leave the judgment to the users themselves. A second and very important goal which is closely related to the first is that our visualization must give insights in the amount and extensiveness of people’s data online. As a result our visualization will provide people with the possibility to compare different groups of internet users. So our application provides people with interesting new insights in the different ways people use MySpace. With this application we can create insights in how users with specific cultural or demographic characteristics use MySpace in a different way.
After discussing the subject of personal data available online and putting it together with the goals, we started going through possible ways of visualizing our ideas. It did not take long before we were all very enthusiastic about a metaphoric visualization that could show ones detailed and personal publicly available data. The idea originated from a theory: the data body. A data body is all the data available online of someone. It can exist of for instance: background information, comments, interests, general info, etc. In the case of our visualization the data body is everything that is filled in on a MySpace profile.
We got even more enthusiastic about our idea when we did a brief desk research on the concept data body or applications and visualizations available online that depict somebody’s profile extensiveness. It turned out that most of the SN’s we knew did not have any indication for the completeness. Some of the SN’s we looked at indicate the completeness by a percentage. In the most innovative case (LinkedIn) we found the profile completeness depicted in a bar chart. After this finding and some more brainstorm sessions we were all very confident to take our
confident to take our idea to the next level; we decided to make the depiction interactive, give it a global touch, and even make it social by depicting a user with geographical (inter)related friends. Also, we agreed on the form of our application; we were going to make a widget that would trigger people to click on and play with.
Based on all our initial thoughts, desk research findings, and early conceptualizing we have set up the following problem statement for his project:
“No visualization tool/plugin exists to visualise a so-called data body of a person’s profile on a social network”
We will tackle this problem by firstly describing all relevant theory. This includes theory on social networks in general, online identity theory, network theory, and theory concerning the data body. Secondly we will describe the functional design of our application. In this part a detailed overview of MyDataBody is provided. Subsequently after the theory and functional design we will explain the major design choices we have made during the conceptualizing stage of our project.
During the process of conceptualizing and reading the relevant theory we also started setting up a scraper to collect as many MySpace profiles as possible. This process and the structuring of the raw data is described in the Implementation chapter. Finally before the conclusion we describe how we have actually built MyDataBody and for who the application is potentially relevant.
This concept document came about in a professional get together with Maya Aujla, Daphne Ben Shachar, Piet Walraven, James Mostert, Bram Slits and myself.
(Engels)
I just read an article on Tweakers that Ipoque, a German company that sells ‘deep packet inspection-hardware’, has published a study on the distribution of protocol classes. This chart is a representation of their findings.
distribution of protocol classes (source: Tweakers.net)
With the ‘deep packet inspection-hardware’ internet Providers can analyze internet traffic. This hardware also enables providers to regulate the traffic by providing the ability to filtering and prioritize certain protocols. As a result, P2P-traffic is declining. Be that as it may, more interesting to me is the fact that Tweakers mentions the decline of P2P over the ‘normal’ web traffic. I think we could better speak of P2P-traffic as being the norm because of its hegemony. Anyway, the regional coverage of the study has been extended to include eight regions of the world, namely: Australia, Eastern Europe, Germany, the Middle East and Southern Europe, Northern and Southern Africa, South America and Southern Europe. The data that has been analyzed is of one provider/region. The amount of users per region differs between 50.000 and 250.000.
Here are some of the key findings of the study summed up. (published here):
- P2P generates most traffic in all regions
- The proportion of P2P traffic has decreased BitTorrent is still number one of all protocols, HTTP second.
- The proportion of eDonkey is much lower than last year.
- File hosting has considerably grown in popularity.
- Streaming is taking over P2P users for video content
- Usenet, a file sharing alternative for P2P, appears in the statistics for the first time
Would the decline of (war on) P2P-traffic be a result of the ‘creative property’-right lobbyists?
Would this decline worsen the ability to get a hold on ‘creative property’ from of which we get inspired to create our own?
Would this be the end of ‘free culture’?
(Engels)
A few weeks ago, I was watching Paul Bennett, who was one of the guest speakers at the annual TED conference. He, as a creative director, was propagating new ways in thinking of problem solving and solution finding. Doing so by trying to think “out of the box”, as he said. That inspired me into writing this post: Rethinking cooperation.
When we collaborate, each of us contributes special powers (trumps) to raise the efficiency or quality of the collective effort as a well oiled chain. This type of cooperation could be problematic if a key member decides to split, because we are depending on each other’s effort. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, so this could jeopardize the collective effort. Why does, in this example and in many other projects, the collective rely on such a fragile structure? When the individuals pass on their knowledge to their colleagues, they will obviously loose their trump and become replaceable. The collective effort will, on the one hand, benefit from this, because it does not rely on the contribution of one individual anymore. But, on the other hand, the individual looses its competitive advantage and becomes replaceable. Could there not be a way for the two interests to converge?
Maybe we could find a solution, when we take a look beyond sociology into the realms of data management and push ourselves into thinking in metaphors. Hard drives can work together in several combinations (RAID-0 / -5). Each of these combinations have different aims (qualities). RAID-0 combines speed with quantity, but jeopardizes the integrity of the data. Hence, to jeopardize the collective effort when a key member splits. RAID-5, for many companies is the most reliable and fastest solution for data management. A few hard drives are ’sacrificed’ to maintain the greater good (Every member of a project has, besides its own knowledge, a little bit of knowledge of the other members). The RAID-5 solution does not work as fast as RAID-0, but is more reliable. (RAID-5 as a metaphor, could be labour intensive, but could spare a project member).
This brings me to the notion of ‘free cooperation’, which I will go into later on…