The Gong Show

I went to the Met Opera in the Park event last night in Central Park. The opera was Gounod’s Faust. The weather was too cold to stay for the entire opera, but I made it through the first three acts.

One thing that was both bad and nice about watching the opera in Central Park (opposed to in Lincoln Center) is that there are no subtitles. So, if you aren’t fluent in French (like me), you just have to sit there and let the music and words wash over you, instead of trying to actively follow the dialog and plot with subtitles. It’s a double-edged sword because you’re less engaged as an audience member, but in some ways, it’s also more enjoyable.

I think the best part of the night was just spending time outside eating nice food, listening to music, and not worrying about anything (except the Red Sox score, which I checked a few times on my phone). It’s a beautiful event, and I’m certain I’ll take advantage of it next summer.

Richard Rorty died yesterday. I had the privilege of seeing him debate Dualism at Stanford, and since then he has been one of my favorite philosophers. That said, I always struggled to completely grasp the consequences of the philosophical framework in which he worked.

To grossly oversimplify Rorty’s thoughts on linguistic meaning, he believed that the statements that people make do not correspond to facts about the world. Sentences have no higher veracity than the fact that they are expressions of the speaker’s beliefs.

I’m sure Rorty’s position is tough to stomach for most readers, but lets run with it for a second. Because words are just words, the notion of making progress in the world can be defined as doing things that make people use new words. Simply inventing words like “rebaflamousus” is rather pointless because no one else uses that word, but inventing a word like “Google” is terrific progress because many other people use that word along side the inventors.

In that context, I think the Web2.0 space is very exciting. Lots of new words are creeping out into mainstream society (RSS, Wiki, Blog, etc). It’s a simple and fun way to think about what all the contributors in Web2.0 are doing, regardless of whether you agree with Rorty’s stance on linguistic meaning or not.

And, to any philosophy scholars, I apologize in advance if I’m totally brutalizing Rorty’s philosophy; I just thought this was a fun thread of thought. RIP Rorty.

I attended day one of the Games for Social Change conference today. It was an interesting mix of gamers, developers, non-profits reps, and public policy advocates. I personally self-identify in the “gamer” category. There were a lot of highlights that I should tackle in future posts, but there was one presentation that really stood out:

Clive Thompson (New York Times, Wired Magazine, technology features writer) gave a talk entitled, “Grass Roots Gaming: How digital games have become the new graffiti for artists, activists, and teenagers.” Clive argued that Serious Games should include any game that conveys a message, no matter how cheap, low-brow, and offensive that message is. Clive proposed that games coming from the grassroots of developers such as Super Columbine Massacre RPG and Go, Saddam, Go should be considered Serious Games under this definition.

Clive’s proposal was controversial to say the least. I think Clive’s basic point is right: the current definition of Serious Games is too limited and fails to include a lot of grassroots, low-budget content that is often more enjoyable and more effective that high-budget, boring Serious Games. However, Clive’s extreme examples go to far. Go, Saddam, Go was created to appeal to people’s perverse voyeurism: the point of games like Go, Saddam, Go is for people to gawk at just how offensive other people can be. I don’t think there’s a “message” to convey; I think it’s just 14-year-olds seeking attention in the cheapest way possible.

But, I think my stand on these examples makes me look prudeish and “un-gamerlike” compared to the audience for Clive’s talk. That’s kind of a bummer.

I dug out a classic this week. An old album by DJ Spooky called Riddim Warfame.

Riddim Warfare is a mashup from well-before anyone used the term mashup to describe this work. At the time of the release, it was self-described as “illbient”, but it was best known as a DJ mix, but not like Oakenfold or Paul Van Dyk and their 2 minute songs mixed together with 20 second of blending… by contrast, Riddim Warfare is constantly mixing and blending bits and pieces of sounds (video game blips, song choruses, street noise, crowds, original electronic material, jazz, and more). All these pieces are tied together in each song by a longer feature, like a rapper or a jazz musician, which enhances the schizophrenic nature of Spooky’s underlying mashup.

I think Mashup culture is similar to Sci-Fi in that 98% of it is crap, but the remaining 2% is unbelieveably brilliant. DJ Spooky definitely falls into that 2%.

Added Bonus: DJ Spooky is a Creative Commons user and advocate. Rock on. I’d license my site CC, but I’m not excited about making the copyright status of this site persistently explicit. So, use the material on my blog however you choose as long as it doesn’t harm anyone. That said, CC is the set of ideals that aligns closest to my beliefs so I’m very sympathetic to their goals.

You can find an assortment of DJ Spooky’s newer material at the Hype Machine. There are also some “web-exclusive” mixes on his site. However, what I REALLY recommend is Riddim Warfare, which you’ll have to go to Amazon to pickup.

Update: Looks like this post is subject to experimental problems… just disregard it, but I’ll leave it up so people can try it out on their own files if they’d like.

Original Post: Ars Technica (and The Unofficial Apple Blog) found the Apple’s “DRM-Free” files contained the AppleID of the user that purchased them. That’s a little spooky because it means that DRM-Free files you buy on Apple can be tied back to you, unlike MP3s you rip from your own CD collection. However, adding identifiers to MP3s is not the big story:

The big story is that if a user tries to erase or zero-out the identifier in the DRM, the file is disabled. This was tested and verified by a member of Dave Farber’s (Distinguished CS Prof at CMU) Interesting People mailing list. The direct text of the experimental proof:

I tested:
- downloading the “free song of the week” (DRM free)

I found:
- my AppleID
- my name (as part of my billing address under my account)

I did not find any other information associated with my account,
e.g., I did NOT find:
- my email address
- my street, city, state, or zip code
- my phone number

When I zeroed out the AppleID and name above, the song would no longer
play
- iTunes was happy trying, but acted like the file was
corrupt, and played only a half a second or so.

Conclusion: “free song of the week” is not DRM-free

The behavior of disabling files simply because the user wants remove their personal information from the file is blatantly DRM. It is needlessly restrictive (nothing about playing an MP3 on a computer technically requires your personal information), and Jobs should not be advertising that iTunes Plus files are DRM-Free because it’s simply untrue.

…for 9 hours today. Dreamhost sucks. I’m sure “five-nines” of uptime is shot for the year. Bleh…

Alex Iskold wrote an excellent piece on the evolution of communication last week at Read/Write Web. He lists a series of interesting juxtapositions of means of communication. For example, he sees Email as a faster and compact evolution of snail mail, and blogs an evolution from newspapers. Makes sense, and it’s quite insightful.

I wanted to comment on how IM/Twitter fits into the picture. IM was created originally as a way for people logged into a terminal to communicate with each other. But, it was popularized as a way to take conversations out of a chatroom (like IRC or AOL) into a private setting. As such, IM and chatrooms are integrally tied, and though chatrooms did not directly spawn IM, I see IM as a natural evolution of chatrooms. IMs real value to a broad audience of PC users was not obvious until chatrooms were popularized.

The relationship between chatrooms and IM is especially relevant in their respective attention models. Chatrooms are more demanding on time and attention than IM. To be involved in a chat, you need to read the past history of what people are saying upon entering the room to understand context. Then, once engaged, you need to remain logged into the chatroom and use partial attention to monitor the conversation for relevancy. IM is more lightweight by comparison. In IM, conversations are rarely a continuation, so there’s no investment of time to “catch up” with what has been said. Furthermore, there is no continual drain on attention; being logged in is a passive engagement.

Based on this comparison of attention models, I might pose the following SAT analogy…

Chatrooms : IM :: Blogging : Twitter

Blogging is more demanding on attention for me. When I write a blog post, I have to think about how it fits into the larger conversation of what other people are saying and the history of related memes. Blogging on a particular subject often requires constant partial attention to monitor the conversation and engage using comments or posts when relevant. By contrast, Twitter is more lightweight on attention. I can whip off a tweet from an elevator if I feel the impulse, and it doesn’t necessitate thinking about how it affects a larger conversation. There’s satisfaction in its simplicity. Monitoring Twitter more passive than monitoring the blogosphere. Since the posts are more carefree, it’s ok to miss a few hours (or days). You can feel satisfied seeing the top 20 most recent tweets the next time you hit the site to write a tweet of your own. And, any tweets that really require your direct attention (like direct messages) will notify you via the method you choose (SMS, IM, Email, etc).

Now, I don’t mean to say that Twitter is super-attention friendly. On the contrary, I waste a lot of time playing with Twitter. But, I think its a natural, more-lightweight evolution of communication out of blogging, much like the evolution of IM out of chatrooms.