Twitter and A Flock of Seagulls, Publishing in a Networked World

I'm not going to name the site that got me starting writing this post. Its a sentiment I've seen on many sites with a traditional publishing orientation. They follow the old tradition from the age of print, where all submitted works are required to be "not published elsewhere," requiring "first print" rights and demanding every "reprint" (copy) should cite the publisher as place of first publication (what is this, vanity?).

These guidelines ignore the reality of the new age of immediacy, of information abundance, of venue abundance, the network. There is no scarcity in publication, there is no value in "first publication" or artificial scarcity on the network. The document is the conversation the conversation is the document. The old publishing world is gone, stop trying to hang on.

The attitude simply does not fit with a universe of networked information being shared and reshared by millions of people, winding its way in bits and pieces and fits and starts through the social network of friends, family, colleagues. The network is the world of social publishing.

Why? Because it is to difficult to find works online among billions of documents and uncounted trillions of ever expanding words. You just can search for things you do not know exist. The social network trades in attention, which is necessary to discover what exists, through your social contacts.

It just does not make sense to "publish" a work to a certain location (or a physical book), then try to get everyone to come read it through clever marketing. It makes no sense to prevent copying, since copies are the method by which information spreads through a social network. The idea of scarcity and exclusivity makes no sense at all in a socially networked world, unless by exclusive you mean being friends with the author.

The network, by the way, does not really need to worry about this issue of citation, since there is usually a trail back to the original author, through a 'retweet path' (if dutifully or automatically maintained) or through carrying authorship information with the work through the social network (as I've talked about here before).

As a poet, nearly every poem I write is immediately published to the social network, so I can't give anyone "first rights" to it, and moreover, that is meaningless. I noticed the Haiku Society of America states, at least for some submissions, " The appearance of poems in online discussion lists or personal Web sites is not considered publication." a much more adaptive policy.

What happens on Twitter is more like a flock of seagulls, making all references to publication, first publication, second publication utterly meaningless, as we tweet to others and they tweet back at us, retweeting and retweeting. I suppose the next thing, is they will want "first tweet" rights. I understand the goal is to keep your publication fresh, but that simply does not fit reality. It says something about a publishing world where the consumer needs to be reassured they are not being "cheated" by recieving old goods, which are turned over from elsewhere, similar to the way "shovelware" became a problem in the 1990s CDROM publishing era. I suppose the same problem exists with bloggers, twitterers, who merely repeat what others write, but I just don't see the problem. In a network world it costs nothing to unfollow or unfriend a source.

Turning off the data tap for Routesy

An interesting question about ownership and rights to data in public use has arisen, chronicled in Apple kills Routesy app, my iPhone gets less useful

Routesy is an iphone application using data provided by the municipal transit authority, through an agreement with a data provider. The details are in the article, if you care to read them.

I have to agree the company has a right to license predictive arrival times, since such information requires investment in research and development, formulating predictive algorithms and such information does not meet the requirement of being "obvious" and thus non-proprietary.

However, the ultimate solution would be an application that took GPS data from every iphone riding the metro at any given moment, if it can be identified as to which bus it is, then do the same kind of approximate arrival time calculations NextBus does, only through peer-to-peer networked computation. Let all the iphones on the bus line find their own position, communicate with each other, track the movement of buses, compare to published schedule and then present the approximate times to the riders. A distributed system of self-analysis. Since all iphones would be held in private hands, and the data shared between peers, who agree to participate by sharing data on their location, the data would be owned by no one. Each person would own their own location and decide whether or not to share it.

Is Hollywood the "Shadow Government?"

Increasingly, as so-called intellectual property becomes more prominent in the economy of the information age, is the entertainment industry becoming our government?

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=11885

Copyright is beginning to destroy our culture and exterminate the arts until Western art will be an empty shell, if it isn't already.

On second thought, this is easy to defeat. Just take an empty media player with you and fill it up from the network once you arrive at your destination...most people will probably fill it up with "pirate" editions since those will be the easiest to obtain. Someday, there won't be any source other than the network anyway. Or, as one person commented, mail your ipod to you.

I have to agree with the other comments that this is a futile effort by hidebound executives to put their finger in the dike. What troubles me is that this erosion of our culture has been going on for a long time, since the introduction of recorded media. I've said before that we should consider avoiding recorded media, that society should return to entertaining itself by playing our music, singing, gathering to hear music played locally, similar to the local eating movement. The invention of the phonorecord, despite the positive of being able to preserve music, has done a great deal of damage to the existing music culture. In the 19th century most people were in a band, played piano, sang in a choir, perhaps many still do, but when I compare our culture and attitudes toward music to a society like Ireland or others relatively untouched by recorded music, there is much greater participation. Everyone sings or plays a musical instrument it seems, and it's not shameful for ordinary people to join in and sing even if they aren't up to "professional" standards, yet the same culture produces some of the best singers and musicians. Recorded music appears to have eroded the incentives to play and sing, and created disincentives to perform publicly, reduced the outlets and venues, turned performance into an industry, much like farming has been turned into an industry.

It is strange to hear music of any and all genre coming at you from random directions and sources. It's like food, with technology, there are no seasons. Hearing music without the musicians divorces it from its culture and locality. One car goes down the street thumping out rap, the next blaring Latin rhythms, a country song, rock, pop, jazz. Which is the real music? Which is the real feeling? I think this is something that recorded music has done, cut us adrift from musical culture, musical practice, musical community. When we can have any music at our fingertips, played back as a card board cutout of the original through speakers, its volume controlled by a knob, it is like food disconnected from the seasons, from growing, from cooking.