Course Material on Content Sharing

I thought this was going to be all about Napster, Bit Torrent and the like. I was wrong, it is much more interesting!

Thanks to the Mathes paper, terms I have heard before like taxonomy (science of classification) and folksonomy (tagging by the masses) I now understand. This paper highlights a concern I have felt when reading previous topics, that allowing users to create their own tags from an "uncontrolled vocabulary" will surely lead to numerous tags all meaning the same thing ("lack of synomym control"), and similar tags meaning different things ("ambiguity"). But then, Delicious suggests tags already applied to documents, so that's one way of reducing tag plethora. I like the Pareto-like analogy - compared to structured taxonomy, uncontrolled folksonomy delivers most of the value for a fraction of the effort! And, in my limited experience, searching keywords certainly does yield interesting and distracting surprises.

I never knew that Google's PageRank system was named after a person called Page. I thought it was just a way of ranking, well, pages on the WWW!

The Weinberger essay reading uses flowery language to say interesting things on the evolution of language (the archetypal folksonomy?) and how tags converge (e.g. on eBay, users have decided that "laptop" is preferable to "notepad") and as such folksonomy "operates as a loose, emergent thesaurus".

I've also learned what a "mashup" is. The video examples (both in the video lecture and the Notes) are indeed entertaining, but to answer Tama's question in the Notes, they are examples of both theft (in a legal sense) and creativity. The terms are not mutually exclusive. (One assumes the copyright holders did not give poermission!) To paraphrase our tutor, I am not at all interested on the genre, but I am greatly impressed by the skills applied and the dedication required from enthusiasts to produce these mashups.

In one sense, a mashup gives publicity to the original material, but I don't think it would be either welcomed or valuable. Faden's tutorial on copyright and fair use (fair dealing) was clever and most informative. I really wonder what could be produced if the creative energy of "pirates" could be better directed. Maybe a mashup is a job application?

Creative Commons looks to be a practical approach to copyright tailored for the internet, but one would not expect Hollywood or the major music distributors to embrace it. Nevertheless the Bon Iver record cover "open source culture" example in the Wolk reading is telling and probably cutting edge. I'd better move my Flickr photos over to CC, and tag them as well! And I'll use http://bit.ly/tamawiki to find image and maybe sound for Assignment 4.

Being a scientist, I subconsciously compare technical creativity with artistic creativity. All breakthroughs in science occur by building on someone's previous work. Patents delay that to some extent (26 years in Australia, I think), but (Tama explains) creative copyright has a life of 70 years after the creator dies! The commercial interests which lobbied hard and instigated this inequity deserve the contempt they attract. They are effectively nurturing the piracy they hate so much. Creative artists do deserve protection and reward for their efforts, otherwise, why should they bother? But the mainstream entertainment industry has by its own greed, failed to permit a decent balance between protecting the innovator/creator, and encouraging others to innovate/create.

I think I now know what a meme is, after hearing about them for a while in this Unit, but only because of the Muppet example. I remember them, Tama, thank you from the old-timers!