Half asleep and stuff piling up on my desk

I’ve managed to pile up all the books I’m reading (or not reading) in a threatening pile on my desk, have about five cups of coffee and then play megaman 2 for a few hours.

‘Don’t do your thesis. Beat Bubble Man instead!’

Megaman sums up everything I love about 80’s japanese games. Non-existent storylines, difficulty level = impossible, amazing music from an 8 - bit piece of software and awkwardly translated English.

I’ve also become addicted to another awesome webcomic.

myfriends, my space

danah boyd gives a lecture which spans the evolution of social networking sites. Geocities even gets a mention in the Q & A, which is amazing.I remember making a geocities page for my first band. So many good times, and net skillz learnt. Well by the drummer at least. I’m still learning img tags. Man I suck at the internet.    But yes an awesome presentation by one of the best lecturers on the internet. 

Margaret Simons - The Content Makers: Understanding the Media in Australia

This recent publication from Margaret Simons, a writer for Crikey and a research fellow at the Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, is impeccably up to date and manages to cover every news outlet, weird personality quirk of the major players in Australian media and a bunch of graphs pointing in the downward direction, all within one flashy book.Focusing on the ‘content-makers’ of the media industry, Simons highlights a few areas which point to the rise of user generated content. The decline of newspaper readership, the uptake of new media, approximately 6.4 million active blogs, Sunrise as an interactive, audience content creation experiment and the economy of the long tail.The battle and contested ground over information and dissemination is a particular feature of The Content Makers with Simons giving a detailed and rounded look at what it means to be a journalist. A job description which has been under much discussion following the rise of the blogosphere and Crikey in particular.Glenn Milne has some pretty strong views about teh netz.Realising the ABC as a commons and a public space is another interesting notion as is the ‘gift economy’, which can be seen in low-economy but high information output activities like blogging.Wow, this book has everything and a rad cover. It also has nothing to do with copyright or French Theorists…I’m not quite sure if that’s a good thing.

Property and the Problem of Software - Steven Weber

Weber’s first chapter of his book on open source is an excellent look at the nature of property.

Property in a broad sense - not only who owns what, but what it means to own something, what rights and responsibilities property confers, and where those ideas come from and how they spread.

He establishes how the culture of intellectual property is situated in an adversarial role between ‘owners’ and ‘users’ and how property is based around a right of exclusion. What makes open source so interesting in this regard is that it is ‘configured around the right to distribute’. Rather than cornering off their section of the market, innovators in the open source world pass on their creations to be bettered by someone else.

While public goods theory predicts that non-rival and non-excluding goods ought to encourage free riding, open source has becomes phenomenally successful and Weber argues that this raises important questions about how we configure the right to property. The trend in law (especially since the digital age) is to create a closed of system of property which restricts access to information regardless of whether that good is of a rival (I own a car, therefore if you take it I don’t have one) or non-rival (I have a song, you copy it and we both have the same song) nature, DRM restricted songs being a prime example. However, the right to access, right to extract, right to sell or lease and other rights have the potential to be bundled in different ways. As Weber notes, while intellectual property and copyright is a pragmatic compromise between the owner’s exclusive rights and public access these laws aren’t coded in nature.

Open source has been a success, is it possible to build a successful economic system around a different notion of property rights (?) is one of the questions Weber ends on.

It’s difficult to tie all these category strands floating around, with Law, Cultural Studies and Technology all battling for primacy in my thesis however this article definitely got me to dig further into a cultural analysis of what property means, which has been more interesting than law reports but twice as wordy and intense.

How do you draw barriers around a word like property? Is it possible?

‘Obama Love’ infiltrates Fox News.

One of my favourite indulgences when I was house sitting was to watch Fox News for a few hours. The shouting, the moral panic, the outright bald-faced character assasination and stern faces. It’s TV at its finest.

But I’d never thought I’d see ethics.

Fox. I’m shattered. I thought you had standards.

Net Rock Godz to Rock Once More

Trent Reznor and Radiohead, the darlings of the wired crowd and anybody who’s so totally against the record industry are teaming up once more to take on record moguls, japanese super villians and parking inspectors.

Reznor V. Radiohead

Or, Reznor Vs. In Rainbows, if you will. As you all know, they’ve both found success experimenting with album price points in a big way, and debuting music online. And rumor has it they’ll both be headlining Lolla ‘08. On top of that, they’re both using online video networks to commission fans to create visual pieces for their records.

From stereogum.com

And despite their similar philisophical bent it still hasn’t stopped Reznor from getting all angsty, claiming to be way more down with mp3’s and the interwebs than those Radiohead dudes.

“I think the way [Radiohead] parlayed it into a marketing gimmick has certainly been shrewd,” Reznor said when speaking to Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Michael Atkin. “But if you look at what they did, though, it was very much a bait and switch to get you to pay for a MySpace-quality stream as a way to promote a very traditional record sale.”

Reznor is referring to Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows as lossy 160kbps (max) MP3 downloads, which many would argue are sub-par when compared to DRM-free offerings from Amazon and iTunes Store (both of which offer 256kbps DRM-free music). Furthermore, Radiohead’s album is also no longer offered as a digital download, as the band openly stated that they were still going to rely on traditional labels and distribution channels for the rest of In Rainbows‘ sales.

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Reznor continued, “but I don’t see that as a big revolution [that] they’re kinda getting credit for.” In addition to the quality of Radiohead’s MP3s, NIN’s frontman also took issue with the band’s omission of artwork and altogether not taking care of the fans. “To me that feels insincere. It relies upon the fact that it was quote-unquote ‘first,’ and it takes the headlines with it.”

From Ars Technica

It’s just not fair Trent.I’m thinking this might also be the work of our ‘me first’, conspiracy theorist NIN friend.

IT’S SCIENCE PEOPLE.

Promises, Promises.

So I’ve decided to take the hard route and focus my thesis on a subject area I know only from 3pm re-runs of Judge Judy and the occasional Law and Order episode.

For no good reason, but I’ve completely ran from my original ‘celebrity and image’ plan and have ended up through some weird rabbit hole or alternate dimension looking at -
Web 2.0, DIY ethos, networks, baudrillard, music industry, piracy, copyright.

Which are great topics and up until three weeks ago I knew nothing of them. But now I do and while I’m not going to be declaiming judgements and pointing violently at defendants crying out ‘He did it, He did it!’, I feel I’m a bit more down with Law.

And it could be worse. A friend told me today her ex was doing a animal behavioural science honours on the communication of swans. Which is at both times the best thesis ever and the most crazed idea to come out of Melbourne Uni.