Book Review – Darknet by JD Lasica

Darknet : Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation
JD Lasica

First heard of this book at Gnomedex2005. While there I watched JD speak on a panel about tomorrow’s media and talk about participatory culture, user generated content and how the smarts are with the audience, not with the people on the stage. He is so passionate about the subject, and was having such a great time talking about the personal media revolution that I picked up a copy of his book that night.

The only problem with this book, like a roller coaster when you are a kid, is that it ended too soon. 267 pages of fun, and interesting people and WTF? moments of corporate and legislative stupidity. JD isn’t pro-piracy. JD isn’t pro-RIAA/MPAA/MS. He lays out an excellent argument for why we need more moderation and common sense and why it is more important that we the people and our legislators have an understanding of historical record behind innovation and copyright and culture.

Lasica tells a cautionary tale about what might happen if we let the regulators (business, MSM, govt agencies) have their way without our say. They want control over their content, and more importantly, their sources of revenue.

He balances that with a strong warning to the big players: there are more pirates than there are lawyers, and they are fighting back against the limitations. Without being silly or sci fi, he takes the reader through a short tour of the darknets, giving the reader a peek into the people and motivation inside.

This book touches on copyright, free culture, software, file sharing, business, Hollywood, professionals and amateurs. Lasica’s writing style is fast and clean and very direct. It is a fun and fast read with a great set of footnotes at the end the user can follow up on.

Get the book here
Check out JD Lasica’s site http://www.darknet.com
Check out OurMedia at http://www.ourmedia.com

Doc Calls It

This is what we are fighting, folks. The open and free marketplace the Internet provides is shortly going to look like the best darn mess of few-to-many distribution systems for “content” the world has ever known. It will not be the free and open marketplace it was in the first place, and should remain. The end-state will a vast matrix of national and private silos and walled gardens, each a contained or filtered distribution environment.

FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) results is control, regulation, restriction and nonsense. Doc, Lawrence Lessig, Christoper Locke (Rageboy), Dave Winer, David Weinberger, JD Lasica and others have been writing and talking and acting on this for a long time now. The problem is, the people (FCC, Congress) who are supposed to be looking out for our interests (meaning the people, not the lobbyists or the corporations or the RIAA/MPAA, BSA) aren’t negligent in their duties, they are siding with the wrong arguments (for a number of reasons).

And most of us won’t know what we missed, because it never quite happened.

Read his entire post here

Son Volt – NOT SOLD OUT

Turns out Son Volt wasn’t sold out for Tues night’s show (thanks technorati and BrooklynVegan.

Looks like I am going to go to Dave Winer’s meetup in the city (NYC of course) on Tuesday before the show. This is gonna be fun. A long day of work, a cool discussion about outliners, and then a live show with one of my favorite bands.

Tuesday is gonna be buuuuussy.

Students: Downloading not unethical:- – Business News – Webindia123.com

Students: Downloading not unethical:- – Business News – Webindia123.com

The link above, which is a UPI feed on WEBINDIA123.com shows that the BSA is framing the debate:

Downloading music is a gateway to downloading software, the survey found. Among students who say they would always download music or movies without paying for them, 27 percent said they regularly download software from a peer-to-peer network.

Generation Y has largely grown up using the Internet and the majority of this group is extremely comfortable with technology, said Diane Smiroldo, BSA’s vice president for public affairs. Unfortunately, this survey shows students who engage in these illegal behaviors are likely to continue after college and when they enter the business world.

The genie is out of the bottle. BSA/RIAA/MPAA are trying to plug holes in the dam with various appendages.

I believe artists should get paid for their work, as a matter of principle. There needs to be engagement on both sides, not just framing music downloading a “gateway” to downloading software (like marijuana is a gateway to harder drugs).

Patronizing isnt the answer.

hands off MY ATTENTION

Nick Bradbury: Microsoft, RSS and Attention

Above is a link from Nick Bradbury to a post about gnomedex/Microsoft/RSS and Attention. It is a great post and gives a brief glimpse into the long term power of RSS and the stakes involved.

My takeaway:
A. Gnomdex was great (hell yeah)
B. MS will get the benefit of the doubt on RSS, and an A for effort connecting to the community
C. RSS is critical in powering Attention architectures. What you read, what you subscribe to. Nick uses the Amazon analogy of recommendations WHICH IS PERFERCT.
D. Our attention belongs to us. Not MS, not Google, Not Yahoo!. We should determine who has access to our attention data. We should be able to share it with whoever we want. We should not be locked in to any one person or corporations attention architecture.

What do I think? Attention needs to have a framework that is tangible for the community to understand it. I dig it. Nick Bradbury digs it. We need something we can wrap our hands and heads around. But make no mistake. I OWN MY ATTENTION. I do not want to be locked in to any one viewpoint of how my data is used or shared.

My attention
On my terms
Through devices and architectures of my choice.

Doug Kaye » The New Project

Doug Kaye, the Master of Ceremonies behind IT Conversations (including the Gilmore Gang which I love) is talking about a new project that fits well with what he has been doing for a while now. You can find his original post here. and a follow up here.

My new project is to capture (record) all of these presentations, post-produce them, and make them available worldwide for free.
-Doug Kaye

I LOVE LOVE LOVE this idea. Not a little, but a whole lot. A community of people who are attending conferences podcasting them. Making a digial archive. Conferences participating in documenting the action and making their conferences more popular. Oh yeah, there is some Darwinism here. If you stink the whole world (and not just the poor schnooks who paid to see you speak) will know it.

This is a great example of citizen media and I have thrown my hat into the ring to help.

Rocking Gnomedex

J.D. Lasica was the ‘DJ between the lines’ at Gnomdex last week, providing a ton of music for the conference when we were waiting for the next panel to start up, or checking out the shwag we just scored.

Here is a great listing the ‘Gnomedex Soundtrack’

back to blogging

So 1 week ago Gnomdex kicked off… what a blast.

I have been spending a little time each day revising my liveblogging of the panels and unconferences. Man, I am not a touch typist and this was a ton of work. It has really been fun to clean it up and relive a little bit of what was going on at the time. I keep needing to recheck gnomedex‘ s wiki for speaker info, correct spellings of names etc. I havent blogged at all since the conference ended, and I am a little disappointed about that. The biggest disappointment I have with my own blogging is that calendar on your right. Every time I see a date in the past that is not in bold it pisses me off.

Somebody call Rich Hall and get a Sniglet going for that.

Hopefully this experiment turned obsession with blogging will pay off by improving my writing as well as my processing, and analysis of information.

Last up, I will finish up my notes from JD Lasica’s presentation on citizen media. Incredibly fun. JD mentioned me on his blog the other day, and for some strange reason my traffic is through the roof. Been reading his book Darknet since gnomedex and it is gggggrrrrreeeeeaaaaattttt!

Hmmmm…. And when you google “one hot piece of rss” I am the only ranking. Hysterical.

So in the last few months I have been cleaning and sharpening my pitch on participatory media/RSS/blogging/podcasting.

I recently got a few friends to create their own blogs, started my own, and have successfully convinced one of my biggest clients to start doing a podcast along with pushing RSS through their organization.

Browse -> Search -> Subscribe.

Podcasting with Adam Curry Part 1

Adam Curry takes the stage.

Interestingly enough, Adam realized the other day it was his 199th Daily Source Code (his podcast).

Adam has decided to do the 200th DSC with the crowd, at GNOMEDEX… LIVE!

AC is the closing keynoter of gnomdex. This guy can really demo, tons of stage presence.

Adam shares with the crowd the reason why DSC is 40 min long – back in the day Adam would create podcasts and ask Dave Winer what he thought of this part or that part. Dave would have missed it and Adam couldnt figure out why. Turns out, Dave would play Adam’s podcast on his walk (which was only 40 minutes). Everything after the first 40 minutes would be missed.

In the tradition of Dave Winer’s Unconference vibe, (term coined from bloggeron) which starts the conference off with a song we all sing together… Adam has decided to present a mashup at the end of the conference:
Sgt Peppers Paradise – jimmy james (Sgt Peppers with Paradise City)

(this is hysterical – people dancing and doing the wave in the back)

JD Lascia just hatted Scoble with a Firefox hat on the red couch

Adam:
1969 some of the brightest and creative musicians got together for woodstock
gnomdex is a lot like woodstock
100s of the most talented creative minds with new instruments and the world is moving with us
1000s of blogposts from technorati, flikr with millions of photos
WE ARE THE MEDIA – it is astounding

What message should we be sending from Gnomedex?
We need to take back the media in our hearts, not just our hands
Internet is powerful marketing and communication tool/platform
we need to admit it and embrace it

A lot like Free Love – we need to be continuouly enabling that
bringin in our audience, making them a part of it
people catching on to it
early adopters? -> we are the lunatic fringe
MS we need fuel, Apple we need fuel, audible we need fuel
we are telling you what we want
how are we gonna get this done?

Yesterday on Ginlmore gang – 2000 meeting w/ DW and it spurred dave to do enclosures
reeses peanut butter cups analogy (2 great tastes that go great together)
results in huge media files, posting talking
peanut butter and choc got old and nothing happened

Thnk of the movie BIG with Tom Hanks
Dave Winer is a Developer and Adam was a user. Like BIG – magic happened when they swtiched places – Adam became the DEV and Dave became the USER
how did that happen?

Adam Curry was recieveing new content from Dave
showing up automatically
when Dave Winer became frustrated with radio and trad media he wanted to make it himself
Steve Gillmore inspired him

result – programs or shows or audioblogs that come down to dave recording with
microphones falling, breaking, totally amateur, totally loving it.

Adam had his own frustrations
2nd bloggercon – Adam asked devs ‘how do i move files automagically from the feed to the device” – the same way Dave Winer was asking radio guys how do i record, get a better sound, techniques, gear etc.

seems like we should be able to create something that ids an enclosure and puts it on the ipod
AC built the piece that made life easier for him – The BIG moment and another example of users and devs partying together

thats what helped Podcasting take off

swapped roles = different dimension

experiences quickly and efficiently now

AC learned THIS DEVELOPMENT SHIT IS HARD WORK
(huge laugh, round of applause from the crowd)

writing for machines is an artform like writing for humans
(more applause)

Adam hopes there are devs who learned a lot about users
the problem is, easy shit gets done last
Users and Devs work for big companies too – they are just people

Podcasting support is being built into itunes (HUGE)

We as a community, the lunatic fringe, need a better ‘signal to noise ratio’ in the conversations

we need to promote the power of subscription, extend the reach of subscriptions, make more things subscribable

Subscriptions are the dream of the Main Stream Media – thats why they want media by appointment (3pm timeslots, hey join us tomorrow,/cheesey radio DJ voice>)

Curry’s challenge to the lunatic fringe:
1. fix some things now – get one click subscription working now (Hear Hear)
2. Aggregators said ealier “we are switzerland” – Adam jokes that Switzerland is a neutral and expensive place to live – Aggregators hold the key to this stuff
3. Users want to watch and read and write and create audio and video
4. Metadata – there is good work going on, MS lists, Apple namespace, Media RSS from Yahoo!
5. attention.xml – we need to get on it – critical we get it going (big tip of the hat to Steve Gilmore)
6. Bandwidth is still an issue – time to make a corner turn on p2p – for podcasting and others – fully intend to implement and support bittorrent, use the distributed swarm to move files, create a real efficiency in downloads

Adam looks forward to working with aggregator developes and making it work, and making cool stuff happen. Huge potential with the group we have seen and met here at Gnomedex.

Amazing changes will happen in the next 6 months
music industry is part of the media we will take back quickly
tools for pros are the same as the amateurs: Pro Tools, Audtion, Garage Band

Its all about how talented we are – same quality tools that Mick Jagger is using (Garage Band) -same push into the world

sales mechanisms are getting into place – cdbaby – itunes with podsafe tracks

what are we missing? look at the music indust we have today – awesome power of dist thru radio

when is the last time you heard a DJ say I love this band! – you dont hear that any more

amazing thing happend last year – stumbled across music from band in NY – Lascivious Biddies. Adam liked it, sent an email, asked to play their songs on a podcast – they approved – after it played, email from Leanne Westover – they sold 200 cds in one day as a result of the podcast – the economics are there – 90% profit into the pocket of the band –

Now the biddies are 5-600 room sellouts

podcasters are listenting to each other

playing a track with emails from all over the worls – rob koslow – as a result of sharing his music – booked in 1k seat room gigs, doing movie scores, passing the info, what it is putting them in touch wiht the creators of the music

Adam is playing Rob Koslow music now

A guy with a keyboard – playing with the tools he has – sharing and generating rev and attention go out in the world and continue with his art.

message to the world – we are talking back our media – to the hearts and minds of the people.

Adam thanks the people who made the Gnomedex conference possible. Thank all the devs for what they are doing, David Winer – rss, podcasting, opml, respect and love

RScoble – running MS (huge laughs)
Chris and Ponzi (huge applause)

DSC ends…

Rousing cheers, Standing ovation for Chris and Ponzi

Gnomdex is over