Embracing Chaos

A few weeks ago Lawrence Lessig showed up The Colbert Report to plug his new book, Remix. The interview itself is quite funny. Lessig talks a bit about how traditional copyright laws don’t make sense with modern technology. My favorite part is when Colbert dares the public to remix that interview with “a great dance beat” by saying he will be “very angry and possibly litigious” with Lessig periodically interjecting saying “I’m totally fine with that” and “I give you permission.” Of course, the great dance beats have been showing up. Lessig blogged about a bunch of them. The one that IMO comes closest to having a
great dance beat is this one, at least of the ones I’ve heard so far. I am looking forward to it showing up in clubs across the country, although it probably won’t because promoting such a recording would engender the real risk of being sued by a satirical Stephen Colbert. I expect this would highly amuse everybody involved except the defendant.

Lessig’s book sounds interesting, and since I’m tearing through non-fiction right now, I ordered a copy. I was very surprised to see that the inside flap declares “Copyright © Lawrence Lessig, 2008 All rights reserved.” Below that it says:

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

(As I write this I half wonder if I have violated the stated copyright by typing that in. But seriously I think it’s a clear of fair use.) I expected the book to be released under a Creative Commons license, as Lessig espoused in his interview. I recently started reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother which is available for free download from his website under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.

What’s going on? Could it be that Doctorow is ahead of Lessig in the practicalities of modern book licensing? Or was it that the publishers were enforcing something? I bought a physical copy of Little Brother, and saw that it too has a traditional Copyright note at the front: “Copyright © 2008 by Cory Doctorow. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.” Okay that just doesn’t make sense. I can download the book under CC, but the print edition is All rights reserved. What gives?

Maybe I’ll have a better answer after I’ve read Lessig’s book. Or maybe Lawrence can explain himself. His website also says that “The book will be available under a Creative Commons license from Bloomsbury Academic. Stay tuned for launch.” I’m waiting.

I recently blogged about my efforts to move from TypePad to Blogger.  My friend Brian pointed out that Google just announced a set of tools to convert to or from popular blog export formats, including MovableType which uses the same file formats as my TypePad.  The converters are open source, distributed under the Apache license, so you can download the code and run them on your local machine.  Or, if your blog isn’t too big, you can run the code hosted on AppEngine by going to

• http://movabletype2blogger.appspot.com/
• http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/
• http://livejournal2blogger.appspot.com/

Well I tried this with my blog, and the resulting file it spit out was almost empty.  I think my blog is just a bit too large, since when I ran it on my local machine it came out to 1.03 megs.  So if your blog is smaller than mine you can probably use the online tool.

After a couple of bX-xji785 errors, the file imported into blogger about as well as could be expected, which is to say okay but not great.  The blog is mostly there.  Feel free to take a peak at http://leo-embracingchaos.blogspot.com/ but please don’t make any permanent links to that URL as it’s really just for testing.  The posts and drafts all made it with the right dates and times, along with the comments and tags.  But as previously noted, the TypePad export format does not include URLs.  So if I were to actually use this conversion, all the inbound links to pages other than the homepage of my blog would break, which is totally unacceptable for me.

I started a thread on the discussion group if you’d like to follow along.

Seattle Times just ran a story about a local non-profit that I’m quite fond of.  Blue Nile Children’s Organization has been supporting orphans in Ethiopia for years.  For $30/month donors, mostly local to Seattle, provide Ethiopian children with basic necessities and access to education.  Now they’re expanding the scope of their support by building a medical clinic in Addis Adaba.  From the ground up.  It’s quite impressive.  It will be run by Ethiopian doctors, with regular visits from US and Candian physicians who will help both provide care and train the local staff in specialty procedures.

If you’d like to hear more about BNCO, consider coming to their annual fund-raising Gala on February 21st.  Guaranteed good food and entertainment on top of all the worthwhile stuff.  Or read the Times story.  It mentions my wonderful fiance (did I mention that I’m engaged?) and her ongoing efforts to support the clinic.  I’m really looking forward to seeing it in person when it’s built and operating!

Excuse my newbie exuberance, but OMG Rhapsody.com finally launched profile pages!!!  They’ve been up for a while now, which makes me think they’re for real this time.  A couple of you might remember that this feature was live for something like a week in early 2007.  But it was very slow and didn’t live long.  Sniff.

I worked hard to make this feature possible when I was working at Real.  The fact that I couldn’t get it re-launched was a big motivator for me to move on to greener pastures.  I saw making Rhapsody social as an important evolution of the music catalog’s organizational schema.  It’s also an attempt to bring the product into what Tim O’Reilly would call Web 2.0.  Tim’s canonical essay is long-winded, but I really liked how he summarized it in a recent interview on NPR — basically the product gets better as people use it.  The millions of people who use Rhapsody are an asset that has been almost completely unused, except to take their money.  I saw it as a way to take on one of the product’s biggest shortcomings.

Rhapsody has tons of music.  TONS.  Rhapsody almost certainly has something you want to listen to right now, regardless of who you are or what your current mood or situation is.  It’s a strong statement, but there really is that much music.  The problem is figuring out what you want to listen to.  Rhapsody has a great categorical index of music, so if you know you want to listen to D&B or Emo or Vocal Jazz, no problem.  Or if you know specifically the name of something you want to listen, just search for it.  Other than that, you can take the homepage recommendations, browse the catalog manually, or sift through Playlist Central, a dumping ground for unvetted playlists that is a case study in how not to use user-generated-content (UGC) on a website.

Picking good music is difficult.  This is what DJ’s get paid for.  I originally wanted this feature to be called "DJ Pages."  The idea was to give a voice to the small fraction of Rhapsody users who are fanatical about the product.  People who are serious music buffs love Rhapsody, and if given a voice would and still might add tremendous value to the music catalog.  Right now the editorial voice in Rhapsody is controlled by a politburo of paid editors.  They’re really good, but they’re just a handful of hands.  DJ Pages would democratize the music editorial process so anybody with an opinion can contribute.  The social graph becomes the voting process to select who’s worth paying attention to, just like with pagerank.  What Tim calls Web 2.0, I like to refer to the democratization of information.  Partly because it’s fun to call people Communists when they cling to control of information, but mostly because the analogy is apt and helpful.

The Rhapsody team has made an important step in this direction of openness.  I hope they keep running with it.  If you want to see what’s been playing on my Sonos at home, check out my profile page.  But most importantly, I’d like to express my CONGRATULATIONS to everybody who made this possible again and the first time!!!!11!!1