Now, I’ll be the first to admit that Microsoft has changed a lot. I am no longer embarrassed to dual boot and I do find MS Office 2010 to be a fantastic suite of applications. In a lot of ways, Microsoft has done a lot to repair an image that needed it. That impetus for change didn’t happen overnight and it didn’t happen without an economic incentive. The same is true of Apple. If you want to help stop the proliferation of dumb licenses, help make the competition better. I am not asking you to code. I am not asking you to become a software designer. I am not even asking you to switch operating systems. I am just suggesting you look at the tools available and decide what works the best not just in the short term, but for the long haul. Use the open tools that are available or push your vendors to create standards-compliant products that can compete.

I know it is hard to compete with a free product. Then again, I don’t really think Apple’s iBook Author software is free. It is, potentially, the most expensive software available today. It pre-emptively takes full commercial control of any creative work designed in the software. I keep reading these arguments that try to liken it to a publisher buying a book and sharing the profits. Some point to Amazon’s publishing its restrictions that I would also strongly suggest everyone pay careful attention to. That said, as far as I am aware, Amazon isn’t dictating licensing based on a software package. I am able to create my work using whatever software I see fit. I can then shop my work to other publishers or sell my creation myself. Amazon only cares when they are the method by which I choose to sell, and that (like choosing Apple as a channel) is purely the author’s prerogative. More realistically, Apple’s stance would be like Microsoft demanding the right to sell and publish every commercial novel that was written with MS Word.

Hmmm….on second thought, let’s not give Microsoft any ideas. I am not so sure they have changed that much.

I know that Lanier has his axe to grind and that is all well and good. We all do. I even agree with most of what he has to say. It is dangerous to frame any discussion in regard to regulating the Internet purely in terms of black and white. This is especially true when we are talking about battles between corporate interests. Several of the companies that oppose SOPA have less than stellar track records when it comes to supporting an open Internet community. In their continued attempt to enact a form of modern day enclosure on the content their users create they often end up working against the very ideals that first allowed them to grow and prosper. He and I have no disagreement in this regard, whatsoever.

Since we agree that much of the opposition to SOPA comes from companies with specific economic goals, I have to admit I was surprised by the direction his piece took. Lanier’s assumption that the argument against SOPA is somehow about the maintenance or worship of “free” content is completely off the mark. In fact, I would say just the opposite. Opposition to SOPA is about making sure that content creators, of any size, can continue to reach users. For some, this is merely about switching corporate gatekeepers where “new media” behemoths take the place of “old media” behemoths. For others, it is about preserving a creator’s ability to openly share content free from any gatekeepers without the fear of costly lawsuits that would essentially eliminate any chance they would have to share their work.

Google and Facebook do not oppose SOPA because they are the “good guys.” They oppose SOPA because it’s costly. That’s it. They may blanket us in the pretty rhetoric of openness and freedom but, ultimately, they’re talking about the bottom line. In all honesty, they probably could survive a post-SOPA world albeit in much different capacity. They have the financial strength to create licensing agreements with the MPAA and RIAA. The rest of us don’t have that luxury.

The Internet is bigger than Google or Facebook. It is bigger than any single company and, personally, I hope it always remains that way. In this case, the profits of these powerful companies align with the best interests of the Internet community and that works in everyone’s favor. We already know that this won’t be the case forever, though. Indeed, that is why I am heartened by the very thing that seemed to scare Lanier: the backlash against companies that supported SOPA. I am ardent supporter of free speech, but free speech involves responsibility. I believe organizations and people have a right to choose where they spend their money. If a company supports practices that I disagree with, I have the right to not patronize that company. I also have the right to share that disagreement with others. Is this behavior the beginning form of some sort of orthodoxy? Perhaps, it is. Is it any different than refusing to sign up for a website because you disagree with it polices? Not so much.

Lanier is right in arguing that there needs to be an aggressive look at models of payment for content beyond advertising. Information isn’t free even for those sites that provide content without cost. That’s one of the reasons why Wikipedia spends so much time asking for donations. I agree that we do sometimes get caught up in the “everything must be free” mentality and that there is still a long way to go in providing solid solutions to content creators of all sizes. Blaming “free” content, however, does nothing but play into the hands of those who support measures like SOPA. This not about an Internet without rules where content is merely a pointless commodity to be traded on the nearest torrent site. This is about an Internet where practical and sane content protections do not displace or harm a growing, vibrant, and increasingly important creative community that continues to push our boundaries and the possibilities of what technology and art can do regardless of their size of their pocketbooks or their lobbying firms.

September 29, 2011 – 7:00pm
Iowa City Public Library
Neal Stephenson

In a special event co-sponsored by The Iowa City Public Library, Prairie Lights brings Science Fiction Writer Neal Stephenson to read from his new novel, Reamde.

Linked from the Iowa City Public Library

After a chaotic week I found myself on the edge of a long weekend without my usual access to the Internet. I was, for several days, disconnected (I think I just shuddered a little). I could connect and interact in very basic ways but anything beyond that was all but completely impossible. Essentially, my communication stream became read-only. For a fellow used to living in a read-write universe, this was a true tragedy.

Now, I wasn’t alone. In fact, last weekend was surprisingly filled with family and friends. With our usual escapes lost in the digital ether, we did what we do best: we played games. Steve had introduced Pandemic to us a couple of weeks before and I have to say that the game is incredible. It’s remarkable in that it is a cooperative board game. Rather than competing, we strategized together and tried to figure out the best way to save the world from the rampages of disease. I honestly think we could have played several more games without getting bored or tired.

We followed that up by playing another game with a cooperative option, A Touch of Evil. As far as games go, it was enjoyable, but it took a lot longer to engage the player. I am hoping the advanced version makes the game a bit more interesting.

So, what did I learn from my extended separation? I learned that disconnecting (for a while) can be a good thing. Of course, it is better when you pick the date. This happened at a really terrible time. I had just offered to be involved in helping to push Diaspora as an alternative social platform and then I disappeared. Not only is this rather poor form, it also means I have a lot of things to catch up on.

My absence helped in other ways, as well. I reminded me why I am pushing this so aggressively and that has everything to do with the value I place on community, global and local. I love meeting people from around the world and the Internet helps me do that in a whole wide variety of ways. I also love meeting the neighbors I haven’t met yet or the weird guy down the street who isn’t so weird once you know him (even though he probably is). I’ve spent most of my life developing small but vibrant communities that center around some (usually strange) shared interest. What I quickly learned is that these communities often need a physical and a virtual space in which they can evolve. This is nothing new but it’s important to understand that there is a give and take between physical and the virtual (as my separation would seem to show) and it’s important that neither get neglected.

I met with a good friend and artist last Wednesday and we discussed a local Diaspora server as part of a grassroots effort to engage a local community. This, to me, is the best of both worlds. We engage a local community in our environment. We build events and activities that bring people together in a physical space and then connect them with a global network of others with whom they can communicate. We do this in a free and open atmosphere that is not interested in leveraging users as financial resources but as valuable members in a growing community.

Idealistic? Perhaps, a bit. If we can come close, though. We will have accomplished something significant and I think that makes it all worthwhile. There will be a lot more on this in the next month or so. We’re meeting weekly to drive development (and because we tend to be far too easily distracted) so I am sure we’ll have more to add. If you live in Iowa and want to be involved, comment below and we’ll talk.

In the meantime, I’m back. I’m still catching up but slowly things are coming back together.

Here’s hoping the trend continues!

Someone did mention that I sound a bit official in these posts so I want to stress that I am just a user. These opinions are mine alone and (except where linked) do not necessarily represent the opinions of the developers and staff of D*. Okay, moving on!

Shawn
The question is: how many other people will you be able to interact with on Diaspora? With everyone on Facebook, and many now obsessing over Google+, is there any more room for Diaspora?

While I think a lot of the craze for invites does have a lot to do with the “Ooooo…shiny” effect, I also think the heavy interest in the Diaspora project highlights a growing sense of unease that people have with Facebook and Google and how they run their platforms. I don’t think that Diaspora will supplant Facebook or Google in the near future but it definitely has a large enough base to keep everyone active and I think it has the real possibility of eventually reshaping our social networks. Imagine being able to join a pod built by your University or club or family (these are examples that Diaspora actually references). Getting to control and manage how you use your data and where you take it is an incredibly powerful thing in today’s environment and I think many people are just now beginning to realize that.

CRZ
You may have done a better job selling D* than the D* folks have. (Also, it sounds like you’ll actually send me an invite! I’ve been on their waiting list more months than I can remember….I’m still intrigued, but I haven’t been intrigued enough to be pushy about getting an invite. Also ALSO, the fact that D* would link here from their twitter feed just seems…I dunno, passive aggressive. But I can probably roll with all of this.)

First off, thanks! One of the things I found interesting about Diaspora when I first logged in was the fact that it did integrate with Twitter and Facebook. Now it’s fairly obvious that I won’t be using the Facebook option but I do use the Twitter option from time to time. From what I have read, the developers are not seeking to supplant these social giants. Rather they want to offer a better, more distributed, more open, vision of the social web. Essentially, they want to give us more options and let us choose. Now, it is my hope that this option takes the world by storm. I would point everyone to Yosem Companys (Diaspora’a Chief Evangelist) comments on this matter. What he says there is something that I have thought for a very long time and is one of the key reasons why I am so supportive of the Diaspora environment.

di Lampedusa
signed up for an alpha centuries ago, way before even people started talking about Google+, and I am still waiting… Lately I got an email asking me not to dispair, that the invite was coming soon, but I am still waiting.
Luckily, as you said, I can sign up in others’ experimental servers (but there’s no much activity there so far).
What do you do in Diaspora? Have you brought enough friends with you to have an active network?

My friends have been slowly trickling in, but I can’t say that my network was active enough based solely on friends who transferred to Diaspora (Obviously, things changed a bit today.). I didn’t need to rely solely on my existing contacts, however. Finding people with shared topics of interest in Diaspora is one of the easiest things to do. I just searched on a specific hashtag (say #photography) and added it to my followed tags list. Just like Twitter, this allowed me to find people posting on topics of interest and respond in kind. That hashtag list became a feed I could follow and add people accordingly. I think this is what Google had in mind for Sparks as well but that implementation was nowhere near as solid. I used those lists to find people and content. I quickly realized that Diaspora had done an excellent job of attracting some truly incredible people from all walks of life. It was a very pleasant surprise to say the least.

Pio
I’ve been following the development of Diaspora* since its inception was made public and anticipating its arrival as well as spreading the news (as I have done with your review) I think that since fb has become such a ubiquitous means of communication, while hoping for Diaspora to bring about its demise, we should propagate becoming more conscious participants of the means on our hands (paying closer attention to privacy settings and limiting the data we provide fb’s databases with) instead of, however rightfully, decryig Zuckerberg’s policies.

If you read Yosem’s comments above I think they offer a view that I can stand behind. There was a time when AOL was ubiquitous and I was never on that, either. I still had my access (ah, my SLIP account from Primenet.com) and that was enough. That said, I wholeheartedly agree that people should press on Facebook to increase its privacy controls and that they should educate themselves about the controls that already exist. The EFF has done some excellent work in this area helping users figure out FB’s somewhat complicated settings and FB has begun to simply things which is also a positive. By offering a choice, Diaspora continues to push FB in the right direction. If anything this serves as a benefit for users all across the social web.

Diaspora

When Google Plus came out, I was incredibly excited. Here was an opportunity to get in at on the main floor with a company whose motto is “Do No Evil.” I hunted for an invite and when a close friend sent one out to me, I jumed at the chance. To be fair, Google Plus had almost everything I wanted. The circles concept was genius, the ability to hang out was actually a lot of fun. While the site still had a long way to go, I really thought that I had found a place where I could settle into and become an active participant.

I was wrong. Within weeks, Google began to cut into its users. Anyone suspected of not using their real name was summarily removed from the network. No judge, no appeal, just erasure. Then Eric Schmidt reveals that Google Plus is not a social network but an identity service. This was surprising to me because I thought I was signing up for a social network. Furthermore, I don’t want Google acting as my identity service. I didn’t mind using my real name because I am actively seeking to merge my online and offline personas, but I quite understand the need for aliases. Personally, I use them all the time especially now that I am merging personas. There are certain things I don’t want listed under this name.

This is not wrong, it is the wonderful nature of an online universe that allows us to shed one persona for another, to discover new aspects of ourselves that we never could have imagined in the physical space (this is to say nothing of those who must conceal their identity online to actually avoid being murdered for their beliefs). Of course, it also makes it a hell of a lot harder to sell to us. It feeds incorrect data into all those carefully managed databases that track what we like and don’t like and that..well that just pisses Google off. After all, their money comes, almost entirely, from advertising. The better their information, the better the sales.

And there we have it. Google Plus and Facebook: so different, and yet, entirely the same.

Needless to say, I was frustrated. So I went to a small group of upstarts who made a splash on Kickstarter a little while ago when they suggested an distributed social network. I gathered information, found @diasporainvites on Twitter and requested an account. It is still in Alpha but this is a social network the way it should be. In a lot of ways, it feels like Google Plus. Considering how long it has been in development, you can tell that Google heavily borrowed from Diaspora’s look and feel. Circles are really just a new name for Diaspora’s Aspects and in Diaspora those useless Sparks that were on Google Plus become hashtags that allow you to track conversations inside Diaspora itself. I use them all the time. Best of all, Diaspora is built for the user. You want to use an alias? Feel free. You don’t want an account on joindiaspora.com? That fine. There are several sites (called pods) that you can sign up on. Don’t like the idea of storing your data on any of those sites? Don’t! If you want, you can run your own Diaspora server (although, right now, this is recommended for only experienced users). Create a small pod for family and friends and then connect that pod to the larger Diaspora community. Your data stays with you and no one claims any ownership.

As for financial incentive, Diaspora runs because some of the users pitch in to help. This is a community of people and users. It is built not to collect data for sale to highest bidder but to honestly connect people with one another. That is exactly what this giant Internet is supposed to do. It’s supposed to make our world a little bit smaller, a little bit closer, and little bit more open for everyone. That is why I moved to Diaspora. That is why I chose donate what I can (which isn’t much so they could use your help too!) to support Diaspora. That is why Diaspora is the first social network where I am actually going to be social.

If you want to join me, you can find me at textandhubris@joindiaspora.com. If you need an invite, leave a comment below with an accessible email and I will send you one immediately. Join a social network (ahem, or more accurately, a distributed social web) where what you do and what you say doesn’t feed some giant machine but rather helps to make the community stronger and more valuable. When was the last time that happened?

Now yes, I have a gmail address and my Google account is important to me. It is not the sum of my online identity, however. It is merely an aspect. If Google were to disappear tomorrow, I would still have all my contacts and my email and my photos. Which, once again, reminds me of the most important thing to remember: never trust your data to the proverbial internet cloud. It doesn’t matter how reliable they may seem. You don’t own that cloud server and, at any moment, its rules may change and your data with it. I may share data in the cloud but I keep every image and creative work backed up to a local PC which is then backed up to another hard disk. Technology is a great thing. It evolves and grows at a tremendous rate and I love a lot of what had been done with it. I even love a lot of what Google Plus is doing. It doesn’t mean the old rules don’t apply, though. Always keep backups and remember to police what you share and where you share. It’s your data and your identity, make sure you treat it like it is worth something.

The truth is, in some cases, the author is absolutely right. We’ve all seen some terribly formatted e-books in our time. Usually, a lower price means less editing and a less polished final work (hence my occasional typos). This has been a typical argument against self-publishing for years and in a lot of cases it is spot on. There is also a deep fear that a low price point will hurt authors. At such a low price new authors may not be able to afford, as Margaret Atwood put it in her talk at ToC, “their cheese sandwiches.” This is a concern, I suppose, but I think it misses the greater point.

The point is that how we buy literature is changing. We all know this. Production and distribution, especially in digital formats, continues to get easier and cheaper. No, print isn’t going away. In fact, with print on demand (P.O.D.), I think that is all but assured. We simply have more options now and that’s not a bad thing. The 99 cent e-book novel is simply a part of that process of change.

Rather than shifting our models with these changes, I think we get bogged down in concerns over form. People seem to forget that the novel isn’t some sacred idol of book technology. It’s only one of innumerable ways to tell a story. Rather than bemoaning a shift in one form of writing why not find ways to deliver content that fits both your readers and your economic needs. No, I don’t think that digital novels will start selling, in the long-term, for 99 cents. I think chapters will. That’s what matters. I think in some ways we are seeing the rise of serials and I’m not opposed to that. To be perfectly honest, that is what’s been going on in YA and genre fiction for a while anyway. Harry Potter was a serial. It was just published in larger sections.

Yes. Writing and publishing is a business. I know it sometimes hurts to think of it like that but it is. For some, writing is a job. They dedicate themselves to their craft and that is important. We need authors and poets. They provide context and create the culture and the personality of our nation. In this country, that means they need to make money. I just hope that most are willing to change with the times.

Creepywalker on IndieHorror is right to call out poor quality and sales gimmicks. Neither work. A wholesale rejection of the 99 cent model isn’t wise either, though. In some cases, it probably is the most practical pricing structure.

[nbcite print="default" ]

In other news, I got to witness a brief battle in the age old war of prose vs. poetry today as I listened to a short lecture on the use of rhythm in prose. It wasn’t that the lecturer (a prose partisan, to be sure) was actually wrong. He wasn’t. I just didn’t feel he was complete enough. Essentially, he discussed how prose uses rhythm and word placement to emphasize specific words or phrases and how that can alter the feel or meaning of a paragraph. In this case we were examining the effect of different translations of the same work. While all of this was rather evident, what caught my attention was his description of the musical nature of prose that allowed it to count rests as beats in the rhythm. He conspicuously left that ability out of poetry and even went as far as to show how poetry does not include rests in its definition of meter.

On the latter point, I believe he is correct. In technical terms, a pause is not counted. We do have hypermetrical lines and headless iambs but those are still roughly categorized according to a generalized metrical structure. I don’t see an issue with this, though. The meter is a guide not a declaration of sound or even a distinct rhythm. All music in 4/4 does not sound the same. The rests and pauses exist as readily in poetry as they do in prose. End-stops, caesuras, white space, along with word choice and word placement all provide the poet with a full arsenal of tools capable of defining and playing with pauses and spaces in his or her work.

As is usual with these discussions, I always end up feeling like a little kid watching mommy and daddy fight. They really don’t need to. One of the interesting developments in some of the more recent works that I have been reading, both online and off, has been their melding of poetry and prose. This melding isn’t even all that new anymore and I don’t think it’s a trend that will be stopping anytime soon. If anything, our increasingly networked minds seem to crave these moments of text that press on the definition of prose and poetry and expand them outward into new and exciting forms.

For me, that’s the space to be in.