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⁣Full English Text Transcription (Video is below)

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Hi guys, this is Robin Good for Master New Media answering your key questions received from my email inbox at robin.good at masternewmedia.org and focusing mostly on professional online publishing and related topics.

This time I’ve got an interesting request from you about,

“Let’s say that I want to create a strong online identity; how do I do that? Is it all about having a fancy name like yours? Is it so?”

Well, that’s a great question, I think.

Let’s refocus it. The topic is ‘Online Identity’. How do you build one? Is it about the name? Is it about the content? Is it about the overall personality, impression, and feeling that you give out?

Well, it’s probably about all of these things. So, an online identity is not so much built by thinking up a fancy, memorable name that reflects who you are and what you’re trying to do, BUT it can also be enabled by that.

I think, in fact, I generally suggest to people who are opening a new blog not to start with their name because the blog name is quite important, and nobody’s gonna search for your name outside of your own friends.

So if your focus is on video publishing, call your blog ‘Video publishing by Jerry O’Hara,’ but you know, put video publishing as the main thing there because that’s the topic you’re talking about.

So many times, people are trying to build an online identity, thinking that this is something that they can strategize from the very beginning. I don’t think this is the case, and it wasn’t the case with me.

I mean, Master New Media was out there before Robin Good existed for a long time until I realized I wanted to have an identity that the person behind Master New Media was, for many people, more important than the Master New Media brand, realizing the Master New Media was not easy to memorize and to spell out again and to pronounce for many people, to this day.

And also, knowing that my name was very long and complex and easy to pronounce for people who were not from my country.

Then, I put that mechanism in place. But otherwise, you should always think that first, you should do something valuable and good and great, and then once you’ve done that, you were probably going to develop your own identity and personality naturally, to which you can inject more character, a better name, and soul but you can’t really build a personality by deciding a fancy name or a cool logo.

That character and the identity is a result of something you do, not just of a name you have.

I mean, it can be as fancy and as memorable as you want, but unless it is deeply and strongly and repetitively associated with something that characterizes, that matches up, that reinforces that name in some way, then it’s gonna have no value.

Duration: 6':01"

So Robin, “How am I going to build my online identity?” Well, you build your online identity by bringing out the best you’ve got about the thing you’re most passionate about, and you’ve decided to cover on your site, on your news magazine, on your blog, or whatever you’ve got.

You should come out by using your singular pronoun for yourself and not always talk like you’re a team.

Come out yourself, show your face, say what you think, take a stand, defend some people who are not in an easy position, challenge somebody, and bring in tremendous gifts to your audience! That’s what you can do to build an online identity no matter what’s your name; that’s really how you can do it.

By having a conversation with them, not just publishing stuff, putting content out there, but trying to come out as a direct human being.

There are some special traits, whatever they are, that you scream all the time, that you complain all the time, that you find only the greatest tools and are always amazed by them, and you analyze why they can be so great.

Whatever that is, give space to a personality to give out and THAT’S how you can build a strong online identity.

Robert Scoble didn’t think up its name. Why does he have such a strong online identity? Well because he has dedicated his recent life just to this. To share, to give to other people, to go explore, make mistakes, get criticized, get squashed by other people who don’t appreciate what he does, and not defend, not try to fight but just try and try and hopefully learn something out of all this.

That’s the way I think anyone, without expecting to become as popular as Robert Scoble, can develop a tangible memorable, unique online identity.

It’s not in the name, it’s in what you do, that’s what I strongly think and I recommend you do. This is all.

Originally recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on Wednesday, 10 December 2008, as, “Building A Strong Online Identity: Robin Good Video”

Robin Good

Building A Strong Online Identity: Robin Good Video was originally published in MasterNewMedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Open source misses the point of defending users' freedom, and assimilating open-source with Free Software only plays against the original Free Software movement ideals and goals.

The necessities of commercial business have somehow eroded the original Free Software ideals, and the operational advantages have rapidly gained key attention over the core “ethical” issues on which free software was born.

This is what Richard Stallman writes in his latest essay on the Free Software Foundation website, advocating more responsible use of words when their meaning can affect such profoundly valuable assets of our lives as our personal freedoms.

Simply reminding people that Freedom Matters is not “good enough” anymore.

As a guilty, ignorant sinner of this very superficial understanding of what Free Software and Open-Source really stand for, I have myself fallen prey of superficial evaluations only because I had had no clear, comprehensive understanding of what and how Free Software and Open-Source deeply differ when it comes to promote individual freedoms as such.

And while good friend and “commercial open-source” advocate Roberto Galoppini attempts to counter Richard Stallman’s attack on open-source, he cites as a major defense the inextricable values of sharing and inter-enterprise collaboration, which Open-Source enthusiasts bring into the equation.

But is it really so?

“Collaboration is an emerging pattern, and firms approaching software production in terms of sharing and cooperation are Free Software’s good friend. Commercial Open Source, as far as based on participation and fostering communities, is aimed at promoting just the same idea of freedom, no less.”

In reality, as Stallman points out very clearly in the essay here below, open-source advocates have long stopped promoting the fundamental issues of freedom that are the roots of the Free Software movement in favor of peddling a more commercial and pragmatical approach that looks more at issues like costs, reliability, security, innovation, and at the ability to have access and modify the source code of any software.

As an outsider viewer, I think he is right.

This is why, while Open-Source may indeed have a lot of good stuff going for it, Open-Source does nothing to protect your fundamental freedoms. Worst. By increasingly assimilating open-source to Free Software, we lose sight of the original reasons for which Free Software first, and Open-Source later came about.

Free software advocates and open-source enthusiasts have made great progress but they have gradually forgotten what they had come here for.

This is why it appears to me as fundamentally important to provide a better and more complete understanding of what Free Software stands for, without having to wage consequently a war against open-source and its many benefits.

It is true, indeed, that many of those not directly involved with either the movement or the software methodology assimilate the two together and have little or no understanding of the history, motives, ideals, and objectives behind each of these two terms, and how it came about that free software advocates coined one day the open-source term.

Most people I talk to in fact I have never heard about Free Software, outside of the kind that is in the form of software programs freely downloadable from the Internet.

“Every time you say “free software” rather than “open source,” you help our campaign,” says proudly Richard Stallman in the closing statement of his last published essay on why open-source misses the point of free software.

Stallman says that open-source misses the point because it does not address nor promote the key goal of free software: not sharing and cooperation as some would have it, by defending ethical values and the final freedom of the user.

I leave it to you to judge and evaluate whether this is just useless philosophical rhetoric or if the issues that Mr Stallman raises are indeed worth, as I think, more time and attention.

Making a clear distinction between open-source and free software is not a silly request in my view, and I am honored to take up this invitation by Richard Stallman and in inviting you to do the same.

1. Why “Open Source” Misses the Point of Free Software
2. Common Misunderstandings of “Free Software” and “Open Source”
3. Different Values Can Lead to Similar Conclusions…But Not Always
4. Powerful, Reliable Software Can Be Bad
5. Fear of Freedom
6. Why Would Users Decline?
7. Conclusion

Why “Open Source” Misses the Point of Free Software

by Richard Stallman

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When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”

These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users’ sake, but because they promote social solidarity - that is, sharing and cooperation.

They become even more important as more and more of our culture and life activities are digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images and words, free software comes increasingly to equate with freedom in general.

Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software; the schools of regions of India and Spain now teach all students to use the free GNU/Linux operating system.

But most of these users have never heard of the ethical reasons for which we developed this system and built the free software community because today, this system and community are more often described as “open source,” and attributed to a different philosophy in which these freedoms are hardly mentioned.

The free software movement has campaigned for computer users’ freedom since 1983. In 1984, we launched the development of the free operating system GNU, so we could avoid the non-free operating systems that deny freedom to their users.

During the 80s, we developed most of the essential components of such a system, as well as the GNU General Public License, a license designed specifically to protect freedom for all users of a program.

However, not all of the users and developers of free software agreed with the goals of the free software movement.

In 1998, a part of the free software community splintered off and began campaigning in the name of “open source.”

The term was originally proposed to avoid a possible misunderstanding of the term “free software,” but it soon became associated with philosophical views quite different from those of the free software movement.

Some of the proponents of “open source” considered it a “marketing campaign for free software,” which would appeal to business executives by citing practical benefits while avoiding ideas of right and wrong that they might not like to hear.

Other proponents flatly rejected the free software movement’s ethical and social values. Whichever their views, when campaigning for “open source,” they did not cite or advocate those values.

The term “open source” quickly became associated with the practice of citing only practical values, such as making powerful, reliable software. Most of the supporters of “open source” have come to it since then, and that practice is what they take it to mean.

Nearly all open-source software is free software; the two terms describe almost the same category of software. But they stand for views based on fundamentally different values.

Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.

For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users’ freedom.

By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better” - in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software movement, however, non-free software is a social problem, and moving to free software is the solution.

Free software. Open source. If it’s the same software, does it matter which name you use?

Yes, because different words convey different ideas.

While a free program by any other name would give you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom. If you want to help do this, it is essential to speak about “free software.”

We in the free software movement don’t think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary (non-free) software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being misidentified as open-source supporters.

Common Misunderstandings of “Free Software” and “Open Source”

The term “free software” has a problem of misinterpretation: an unintended meaning, “software you can get for zero price,” fits the term just as well as the intended meaning, “software which gives the user certain freedoms.”

We address this problem by publishing the definition of free software, and by saying, “Think of free speech, not free beer.” This is not a perfect solution; it cannot completely eliminate the problem.

An unambiguous, correct term would be better if it didn’t have other problems.

Unfortunately, all the alternatives in English have problems of their own. We’ve looked at many alternatives that people have suggested, but none is so clearly “right” that switching to it would be a good idea.

Every proposed replacement for “free software” has some kind of semantic problem - and this includes “open source software.”

The official definition of “open source software” (which is published by the Open Source Initiative and too long to cite here) was derived indirectly from our criteria for free software.

It is not the same; it is a little looser in some respects, so open-source supporters have accepted a few licenses that we consider unacceptably restrictive of the users. Nonetheless, it is fairly close to our definition in practice.

However, the obvious meaning for the expression “open source software” is “You can look at the source code,” and most people seem to think that’s what it means.

That is a much weaker criterion than free software and much weaker than the official definition of open source. It includes many programs that are neither free nor open source.

Since the obvious meaning of “open source” is not the meaning that its advocates intend, the result is that most people misunderstand the term. Here is how writer Neal Stephenson defined “open source”:

Linux is “open source” software, meaning, simply, that anyone can get copies of its source code files.

I don’t think he deliberately sought to reject or dispute the “official” definition. I think he simply applied the conventions of the English language to come up with a meaning for the term. The state of Kansas published a similar definition:

Make use of open-source software (OSS). OSS is software for which the source code is freely and publicly available, though the specific licensing agreements vary as to what one is allowed to do with that code.

The open-source people try to deal with this by pointing to their official definition, but that corrective approach is less effective for them than it is for us.

The term “free software” has two natural meanings, one of which is the intended meaning, so a person who has grasped the idea of “free speech, not free beer” will not get it wrong again.

But “open source” has only one natural meaning, which is different from the meaning its supporters intend. So there is no succinct way to explain and justify the official definition of “open source.” That makes for worse confusion.

Different Values Can Lead to Similar Conclusions…But Not Always

Radical groups in the 1960s had a reputation for factionalism: some organizations split because of disagreements on details of strategy, and the two daughter groups treated each other as enemies despite having similar basic goals and values.

The right-wing made much of this and used it to criticize the entire left.

Some try to disparage the free software movement by comparing our disagreement with open source to the disagreements of those radical groups. They have it backward.

We disagree with the open source camp on the basic goals and values, but their views and ours lead in many cases to the same practical behavior - such as developing free software.

As a result, people from the free software movement and the open source camp often work together on practical projects such as software development.

It is remarkable that such different philosophical views can so often motivate different people to participate in the same projects. Nonetheless, these views are very different, and there are situations where they lead to very different actions.

The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed.

Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes, they produce a program that is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users’ freedom. How will free software activists and open-source enthusiasts react to that?

A pure open-source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say,

“I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?”

This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.

The free software activist will say,

“Your program is very attractive, but not at the price of my freedom. So I have to do without it. Instead I will support a project to develop a free replacement.”

If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.

Powerful, Reliable Software Can Be Bad

The idea that we want software to be powerful and reliable comes from the supposition that the software is designed to serve its users. If it is powerful and reliable, that means it serves them better.

But software can only be said to serve its users if it respects their freedom.

What if the software is designed to put chains on its users? Then, powerfulness only means the chains are more constricting and reliability that they are harder to remove.

Malicious features, such as spying on the users, restricting the users, back doors, and imposing upgrades, are common in proprietary software, and some open-source supporters want to do likewise.

Under the pressure of movie and record companies, software for individuals to use is increasingly designed specifically to restrict them.

This malicious feature is known as DRM, or Digital Restrictions Management (see DefectiveByDesign.org), and it is the antithesis in the spirit of the freedom that free software aims to provide.

And not just in spirit: since the goal of DRM is to trample your freedom, DRM developers try to make it hard, impossible, or even illegal for you to change the software that implements the DRM.

Yet some open source supporters have proposed “open source DRM” software.

Their idea is that by publishing the source code of programs designed to restrict your access to encrypted media and allowing others to change it, they will produce more powerful and reliable software for restricting users like you. Then, it will be delivered to you in devices that do not allow you to change it.

This software might be “open source” and use the open source development model, but it won’t be free software since it won’t respect the freedom of the users that actually run it.

If the open-source development model succeeds in making this software more powerful and reliable for restricting you, that will make it even worse.

Fear of Freedom

The main initial motivation for the term “open source software” is that the ethical ideas of “free software” make some people uneasy.

That’s true: talking about freedom, ethical issues, responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might prefer to ignore, such as whether their conduct is ethical.

This can trigger discomfort, and some people may simply close their minds to it. It does not follow that we ought to stop talking about these things.

However, that is what the leaders of “open source” decided to do. They figured that by keeping quiet about ethics and freedom and talking only about the immediate practical benefits of certain free software, they might be able to “sell” the software more effectively to certain users, especially businesses.

This approach has proved effective in its own terms.

The rhetoric of open source has convinced many businesses and individuals to use and even develop free software, which has extended our community — but only at the superficial, practical level.

The philosophy of open source, with its purely practical values, impedes understanding of the deeper ideas of free software; it brings many people into our community but does not teach them to defend it.

That is good, as far as it goes, but it is not enough to make freedom secure. Attracting users to free software takes them just part of the way to becoming defenders of their own freedom.

Sooner or later, these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, some even offering copies gratis.

Why Would Users Decline?

Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, to value freedom as such rather than the technical and practical convenience of specific free software.

To spread this idea, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the “keep quiet” approach to business can be useful for the community, but it is dangerous if it becomes so common that the love of freedom comes to seem like an eccentricity.

That dangerous situation is exactly what we have.

Most people involved with free software say little about freedom - usually because they seek to be “more acceptable to business.”

Software distributors especially show this pattern. Nearly all GNU/Linux operating system distributions add proprietary packages to the basic free system, and they invite users to consider this an advantage rather than a step backwards from freedom.

Proprietary add-on software and partially non-free GNU/Linux distributions find fertile ground because most of our community does not insist on freedom with its software.

This is no coincidence.

Most GNU/Linux users were introduced to the system by “open source” discussion, which doesn’t say that freedom is a goal.

The practices that don’t uphold freedom and the words that don’t talk about freedom go hand in hand, each promoting the other.

To overcome this tendency, we need more, not less, talk about freedom.

Conclusion

As the advocates of open source draw new users into our community, we free software activists have to work even more to bring the issue of freedom to those new users’ attention. We have to say, “It’s free software and it gives you freedom!” - more and louder than ever.

Every time you say “free software” rather than “open source,” you help our campaign.

Footnotes

Joe Barr wrote an article called Live and Let license that gives his perspective on this issue.

Lakhani and Wolf’s paper on the motivation of free software developers says that a considerable fraction are motivated by the view that software should be free.

This was despite the fact that they surveyed the developers on SourceForge, a site that does not support the view that this is an ethical issue.

Copyright © 2007 Richard Stallman - Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Richard Stallman

Published by Robin on MasterNewMedia on Saturday, October 13, 2007, as “Why Open-Source Does Not Protect Your Freedom: Richard Stallman Explains Why Free Software Is The Only Answer”

Robin Good

Why Open-Source Does Not Protect Your Freedom: Richard Stallman Explains Why Free Software Is the… was originally published in MasterNewMedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Wikipedia, which devotes ten pages to cover Richard Stallman's history and accomplishments, reports among other things:

“While Stallman did not participate in the counterculture of the 60s, he found its rejection of the pursuit of wealth as the main goal of life to be inspiring, and this may have influenced his actions at this time.

However, he was the last of his generation of hackers at the lab. He rejected a future where he would have to sign non-disclosure agreements where he would have to agree not to share source code or technical information with other software developers, and perform other actions he considered betrayals of his principles.

He chose instead to share his work with others in what he regarded as a classical spirit of collaboration.

Stallman argues that software users should have the freedom to “share with their neighbor” and to be able to study and make changes to the software that they use. He has repeatedly said that attempts by proprietary software vendors to prohibit these acts are “antisocial” and “unethical”.

The phrase “software wants to be free” is often incorrectly attributed to him, and Stallman argues that this is a misstatement of his philosophy. He argues that freedom is vital for the sake of users and society as a moral value, and not merely for pragmatic reasons e.g., because it may lead to improved software.

In January 1984, he quit his job at MIT to work full time on the GNU project, which he had announced in September 1983. He did not complete a Ph.D. but has been awarded four honorary degrees.”

If until today you have been thinking that “free software” is just about anything you can download from the Internet and which doesn’t require payment for its use, you better think again: freeware has nothing to do with free software and the characteristics that make free software so important may be considered to be central to the evolution democracy in any society that makes wide use of the software.

“Free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, is software that can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction.

Freedom from such restrictions is central to the concept, with the opposite of free software being proprietary software (a distinction unrelated to whether a fee is charged).

The usual way for software to be distributed as free software is for the software to be licensed to the recipient with a free software license (or be in the public domain), and the source code of the software to be made available (for a compiled language).”

(Source: Wikipedia)

Is that what YouTube, Flickr, Google, and the latest Web 2.0 applications offer you?

Richard Stallman, whom I was meeting for the first time, was kind enough to allow me a short video interview. In it, I asked him directly what “free software” is all about and why it is important to understand the key differences that separate it from commercial software.

If you believe that software may indeed play a very critical role in the life and democracies that we will be able to build in the near future, understanding how such software is directly responsible for determining the degree of freedom we will be able to enjoy is something that you and I may need to become a bit more erudite about.

What is Free Software? A Video Interview with Richard Stallman

Duration: 2':17"

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⁣Robin Good: What is free software from your point of view?

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Richard Stallman: Free software means software that respects the user’s freedom. There are four essential freedoms that the user of software should always have:

· Freedom Zero is the freedom to run the program however you wish.

· Freedom One is the freedom to study the source code of the program and to change it to make the program do what you wish.

· Freedom Two is the freedom to distribute copies of the program to others when you wish. Now this includes republication of the program.

· Freedom Three is the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others when you wish, and this also includes publication if that’s how far you wish to go.

If you have all four of these essential freedoms then the program is Free Software. This means that the social system of the distribution of this program is an ethical system that respects the freedom and community of the users.

If one of these freedoms is missing, then the program is proprietary software, meaning that it keeps the users divided and helpless and gives the developer power over the users. This is an injustice.

Proprietary software should not exist and should not be used. If you want to have freedom while using computers, the only way you can have it is by rejecting proprietary software. And that’s the aim of the Free Software Movement.

We want to replace proprietary software, with its unjust social system with Free Software and its ethical social system. And so we develop free replacements for proprietary software, and other free programs whenever we get an idea, so that the world can live in freedom.

The part that uses computers, at least, in that one area of life. Winning and maintaining freedom in general is a much bigger, much broader, and harder activity, but this is one part of it.

Duration: 0':59'’

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RG: What are the key negative consequences of using proprietary software versus free software?

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Richard Stallman: Well, I’ve pretty much said already why proprietary software is bad because the developer has power over the users, the users are subjugated. And these developers use their power in various different ways, some hurt the user more than others, but they never should have this power in the first place.

So, with proprietary software the developer decides what it will do, and the users are stuck with that. The only way they can avoid whatever the developer decides is to stop using the program, to escape.

Whereas with free software the users are in control, the users decide what the program will do. And so Free Software develops in a democratic manner. Under the control of the users, the changes that are made and accepted are the changes users want to make and then accept.

Duration: 1':26"

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RG: What are some of the key examples of Free Software that you suggest people use or consider using?

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Richard Stallman: The fundamental instance of Free Software is the GNU operating system, which is the only operating system that was ever developed for ethical reasons, instead of for commercial or technical reasons, which is why most systems were developed.

I launched the development of the GNU operating system in January 1984 with the specific goal of making it possible to use a computer and live in freedom. In 1992 the last major gap in the GNU operating system was filled by the kernel Linux.

So the result was the combination of GNU and Linux, which was the first complete free operating system. And because of this, there is at least the possibility of using a computer in freedom.

Before the existence of GNU/Linux, it was simply impossible. No one who used a computer could have freedom.

Long enough in the past, it was different, you know in the nineteen-seventies there were some other free operating systems, but they disappeared, and by the eighties there were none.

There were none that could run on a modern computer back then. And so it was the existence of GNU/Linux that made freedom a possibility.

Duration: 0':33"

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RG: Is GNU/Linux a system that now individuals, professionals, and organizations can start to use for their daily operations?

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Richard Stallman: They do. Lots of organizations, lots of companies, lots of public agencies, and lots of individuals already use GNU/Linux. It’s not particularly hard to use- it’s just different.

So, you have to make a certain effort to move to freedom. But it's not a big sacrifice, so we’re lucky, because there are times and places where people had to make very big sacrifices for freedom, and we’re very lucky that they were willing to do so.

Duration: 1':39"

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RG: To support those, who like me, favor change over the control exercised by large corporations and media, what are the types of actions that individuals can take?

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Richard Stallman: I wish I knew.

This is the greatest political question of our time.

How can we put an end to the empire of the mega-corporations and restore democracy? If I knew I would be the savior of the world.

What I think I can tell is that the media are crucial.

The power of the corporate media enables truth to be suppressed and lies to be passed as truth.

You’ve probably heard that a half-truth can be worse than a lie. A lot of the things that our government and media say are one-tenth truths, nine-tenths lies.

And it doesn’t take many of them together to create a completely fictional worldview, like the one that Bush says - presents - when he talks.

So I recommend that people stop listening to the mainstream media. Don’t watch television news, don’t listen to news on the radio, don’t read news on ordinary newspapers.

Get [your news] from a variety of websites, which are not operated under the power of business money, and you have a better chance of not being fooled by the systematic lies that they all tell because they’re all being paid by the same people to tell the same lies. Or nine-tenths lies.

End of interview.

Interview Notes

As I was closing my camcorder at the end of the interview, Richard said casually: “…and do not post it to YouTube, as it doesn’t use free software!”

Update Nov. 13th 06: Richard Stallman wrote to correct me about this. Though I jotted down his sentence on my notepad right after he pronounced it, Richard says to have said something different.

Here it is: “…and do not post it to YouTube, as it doesn’t work with free software!”

Though I wasn’t able to find an alternative online resource that utilized free software and allowed me to directly stream the above video clips, I thought it only fair to mention here Richard’s own recommendation.

On the human side, Richard showed to be a very unique person, with special feelings and emotions that not everyone who has met him has been able to appreciate.

In particular, I was touched by Richard's ability to tune in to the beauty and love that surrounds us in a matter of seconds.

As he stayed over my house, a wonderful and silent friendship developed between him and my little parrot, who would spend hours sitting on Richard’s shoulder while playing with his long hair.

Here is Richard, touching reply to my closing question:

Duration: 0':50"

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RG: What is the most beautiful memory you’ve had about staying here in Rome?

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Richard Stallman: Well I guess it probably was Funny on my shoulder.

RG: Who’s Funny?

Richard Stallman: Funny is a cockatiel parrot… That likes to lick my hair.

RG: And why did you feel so good when he was there?

Richard Stallman: I guess I just felt loved.

RG: Do you feel loved normally by people like me who interview you, or…

Richard Stallman That’s totally different. Totally different. Sometimes I feel admired, but that’s different from being loved.

RG: Thank you.

N.B.: Check out Funny, my unique parrot as he raps to the music (the girl holding him is my daughter Chiara).

I have in fact recorded a bit more of Richard Stallman’s thoughts, but I will leave those for another upcoming article, cum video, dedicated to the issue of DRM.

One special thank you goes to Rufo Guerreschi of Partecs, who first introduced me to Richard Stallman and who gently hosted the dinner which gave way to this video interview.

Originally written by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on Tuesday, October 24, 2006, as, “What Is Free Software? A Reply From The Source: Richard Stallman Video Interview”

Robin Good

What Is Free Software? A Reply From The Source: Richard Stallman Video Interview was originally published in MasterNewMedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the first part of 2007, I took my personal dive with live video streaming, and the Italian audience who has followed my non-stop reports from several of the largest barcamps held recently here in Italy has seen how much passion and interest I have taken this new communication challenge.

One of the nicest things to happen, thanks to my voluntary experimentation with live video streaming on www.RobinGood.TV, was the opportunity to meet some truly fantastic people, who, excited themselves by my new video discoveries have offered in many different ways their talent and skill to help me out.

Among these one has stood out the tests of time and has invested notable time and efforts to help me several dreams I had been playing with.

These included the ability to build a truly portable video streaming station, together with added peripherals and functionalities that would have helped me video stream hands-free from just about any place, Justin-style.

His name is Fabio “Blaxwan,” and he is a truly passionate technology inventor and experimenter, moved by the desire to play and learn from his own creations.

Not only has he helped me build an open backpack for my portable laptop that makes my mobile video streaming orders of magnitude easier and more comfortable than walking around like a fool with your laptop open, but, as he recounts in deep detail in this review, he has built a full remote control panel console integrating monitoring and control functions for the laptop working with its lid closed on my back.

1. The “RobinPad” Story
2. Overview
3. Building a Custom USB Button Pad
4. Building An Adjustable Remote Control Panel With a Holding Arm
5. Building a Robin Good TV Light Sign
6. How It All Works
7. What Next?

Here are the details:

Intro by Robin Good

The “RobinPad” Story

by Fabio “Blaxwan” Di Niro

⁣
1. Overview

Last April (2007), I was attending a barcamp; it was during a conference when I first met Robin Good.

I saw this funny man struggling with a laptop, webcam, radio microphone and lots of wires as he was live video streaming the OpenCamp.

Such a view had two effects: the first one was that I immediately started to think about ways to build something that would avoid having all those fastidious and uncomfortable wires and dongles.

The second effect was that I missed the conference speech.

Later on, I went back home and I was searching on the net for more info about this Good guy. I rapidly discovered that he was doing a really great job by giving the possibility to those who could not attend the barcamp to follow it live on their broadband-connected computers at home.

Then I thought I could have tried to help him out.

I sent him an email explaining what I thought we could do, and he just answered, “Hi Fabio, you’re the man I was waiting for a long time.” Then we started to have a lot of fun together experimenting with new and improbable mash-up devices.

This article describes the construction and evolution of the so-called “RobinPad”, or at least that’s what we called it.

It is, in fact, much more than a pad as it is a full remote control panel that greatly complements the mobile Robin Good video streaming backpack, allowing it to have video feedback and the ability to monitor and control all of the video streaming functions as it streams.

This unique, hand-made device was the first final tangible product generated by my active collaboration with Robin. He is a great guy who does a lot instead of talking. I like that. And I did have a great time building this rugged but functional device for his Robin Good TV.

2. Building a Custom USB Button Pad

When we first thought about a remote control panel for the Robin Good streaming backpack, we were trying to achieve at least some basic functionalities:

· Having a preview of the cam

· Having some information about the system, like connection status, available bandwidth, battery status, etc.

· Having the possibility to start and stop video streaming at will

To accomplish these goals, we needed a small, lightweight, portable LCD monitor and some panel buttons. Online, we saw that there were a lot of monitors in many different flavors, so this was not an issue.

On the other side, we had to find an input device that needed to be fit in a control panel next to the monitor itself.

We first thought about using USB numpads, but we discovered that these were too big. Then we went on to custom I/O cards (like a PIC-based one that communicates via RS-232), but this kind of communication would need more software development.

So I thought to buy a small joypad and just adapt it to our own specific needs.

So, for the first few times, Robin and I went streaming live with this joypad fastened to our trousers belt. We soon found out that this was definitively not so comfortable.

On the other hand, I soon realized that there existed a lot of software out there that could have taken great advantage, in different ways, of our standard and popular joypad.

This is when I I decided to take out and use just the electronics of the joypad in order to convert it into a simple box that could be more easily matched and installed next to the small LCD monitor.

I carefully unscrewed and opened the joypad to see how I could embed it into a smaller box.

Of course, these instructions cannot apply to all joypads because circuits and technologies may vary from brand to brand and also through different models. So what I’m writing here is just to give you a good basic idea of how I approached it.

Upon opening the joypad, I immediately noticed that the electronics of the unit were made by three circuit boards: a main one containing the core chip, a cabling one and a third one (the bigger) containing all the button contacts.

I decided then to get rid of the third one, saving some space, and to replace it with a custom circuit board holding my own custom buttons.

So, I measured the remaining boards to determine the size of the plastic box to buy.

After some research, I found this plastic box shown in the picture below, which was actually a little bit smaller than the board it had to hold, but I thought that it was better to trim the board a little bit instead of using a bigger box (the bigger size was really cumbersome).

Together with it, I also bought ten board soldering buttons.

At this point, I had to prepare the board on which to install our own custom buttons. Since there were no particular needs for circuit connections, I decided to use a prototyping board and wire it directly to the joypad's own circuit board.

I placed the buttons on the prototyping board and decided on its size, then I cut the board with the Dremel, and soldered the buttons.

Next, I needed to prepare and finalize the box. To do this, I stuck two paper tape stripes on it to ease the drawing of the drilling points.

Then, I drilled the holes for the buttons and used hot glue to place a small piece of wood inside the box between the two rows of buttons. That’s just for cosmetics.

In fact, this piece of wood is used to screw and hold the circuit board in place in order to avoid using any visible screws on the front panel.

Now, I had to finalize the joypad circuit board. The first step was to remove the unused board and trim the used one (I just cut out the edge of the board where the two motors were soldered, as these were, luckily, useless parts).

I soldered a common ground for some buttons, grouping them as I saw on the original button board of the joypad. Then, I used some colored wires to connect the custom button board to the joypad mainboard.

Finally, the last step was to connect my custom button board to the joypad one.

Please note that the joypad we bought was made to connect both to a PlayStation and a PC, so it also had a Playstation connector.

Since I disliked this additional useless connector, the very last step was opening the connector, cutting its wires, and insulating them with some tape so that the pad would have just one connector at its end.

Here is a picture of the button pad, once completed:

3. Building An Adjustable Remote Control Panel With a Holding Arm

Here, our goal was to create a device that would have helped to carry and see the remote control panel hands-free. The idea was to get the control panel to be visible to Robin as he was moving and streaming live.

We considered different solutions, like something to tie to the pants belt or to the backpack belt, but at the end of the game, we finally opted for a flexible arm coming out from the backpack itself (lately, we realized that this was uncomfortable as well).

With this kind of solution, the first step was to build a supporting plate that needed to hold the button pad and the monitor at the same level in front of Robin.

I decided to build this part by using some plastic and taking advantage of a PVC pipe, like the one utilized in sewage systems.

Happily, I had a brand new one, and I cut it and placed it in the oven at a temperature of about 130 C. After 8–10 minutes, it was so tender that I could easily take it out and hold it firmly by using two sheets of wood.

Then I prepared a base to properly bend the PVC sheet in order to give it the right shape for holding the buttonpad and the monitor.

At this point, I cut a rectangular piece from the PVC sheet a little bit bigger than required (because I knew I couldn’t be so precise in bending it) and put it again in the oven for another 5–8 minutes at 130 C.

When the PVC was again soft enough, I took it, placed it on the base, and pressed it hard by utilizing some other plain-surface heavy objects for a few minutes, until it cooled down again.

After some minutes the PVC piece was cold enough to continue to work on it.

So I placed the monitor and button pad on it and first drew and then precisely trimmed the contours.

To build some rigidity in the flexible arm that would be holding the remote control panel (otherwise, the weight of the monitor and control panel would have it fall down) I decided to use some steel wires.

I gathered together several steel wires, gave them some shape, and hot-glued them on the bottom of the holding plate.

Then I inserted the wire bunch in a corrugated plastic pipe, and, on the other end, I just bent out the wires and hot-glued them in a larger pipe that may be easily screwed to something that I had to attach to the backpack.

The last step was preparing something that would hold the flexible arm, as we could not screw this to our belly. So we needed something where we could screw our artificial holding arm in.

To achieve this, I cut a thin piece of wood to the size of the Vaio notebook Robin Good carries in the open backpack. My idea was to basically pace this wooden platform between the Vaio and Robin’s back inside the backpack.

Work done! The “suspended” remote control panel device (of course, the elastic stripes were just a temporary solution; they were replaced by velcro stripes):

4. First Evolution: Building a Case for the Backpack

After some further experimentation with the mobile Robin Good streaming station, we realized we wanted to improve things further.

The number of dongles, batteries, peripherals, cables, and connectors had grown to such an extent, especially after the adoption of the small tube camera Robin carried in its hat, that we badly needed to do something about simplifying and organizing all this stuff in a better way.

The new lipstick-sized camera in Robin’s hat had, in fact, only a composite video output, so we were forced to add a video-to-USB converter.

In addition to this, at this time, Robin opted for a smaller, higher performing, and longer-lasting VAIO notebook, but the new baby had, unfortunately, no composite video output (which we badly needed for powering the small portable monitor).

Here too, we were forced to add a VGA-to-composite video converter. There were just too many things hanging out of Robin’s open backpack.

This is why I decided that the best solution would have been to put all these things together inside a properly designed and compact box to place/attach an open backpack. This way I could integrate all the cables and simplify the use and the look and feel of the system.

Since I also wanted to have a nicely shaped box, I steered away from traditional rectangular boxes and went straight to a big bricolage shop to get some fresh ideas.

There, on the shelves where all the electric pipes are shown, I immediately found something interesting. I bought those two plastic shells you see here below.

These strange shells are traditionally used to bend into the wall of the plastic square pipes that are used to run wires alongside a wall. I don’t know if I gave you a good idea of what they really are for, but what matters is that they were perfect for our purpose.

Back home, I just resized the two shells and cut a matching shape in a thin sheet of wood in order to create a closing panel for them. I then painted in black both the base and the “shells”.

Once I had the box completed, I started to drill some holes in it to screw the connectors and the switches. I assembled then all the circuitry soldering and all the other stuff. I finally used rubber bands to hold the set of batteries together to the converter to the box base.

Here are the results:

5. Building a Robin Good TV Light Sign

At this point, we thought we had some interesting gear in our hands and our desire was to share and advertise the fruit of our work so that people would notice Robin when he was doing live streaming.

But instead of using a simple printed sign, I wanted to build something that could have been switched on when the Robin Good mobile backpack was streaming.

I therefore decided to build a light sign with some Plexiglas and LEDs. Nothing fancy at all, as it was really simple to build one this way, and I had a lot of fun experimenting with those materials I wasn’t familiar with.

As a first step I cut a piece of Plexiglas (acrylic glass) and painted on it the sign lettering (Robin Good TV — On Net) by using a painting mask. This is, in fact was created using liquid latex that gets dry very fast and may be easily removed just by using the fingers.

Then, I sprayed the whole front surface with black paint, and after the paint had dried, I removed the masking.

The last step was carving into the sign the place through which to show the white LEDs that I had soldered in the back.

Work done!

6. How It All Works

For the “action” part on the remote control panel, the RobinPad runs a great scripting tool called Autohotkey. With it you may process user input and perform some actions like clicking somewhere in the screen.

This is essential because we’re using an internet streaming site to video stream (normally that is Ustream), which in turn requires a Flash encoder launched from the browser to run.

Due to this setup, we cannot switch to a custom encoding system, but I’m really confident that sooner or later, we will move to this kind of setup.

The basic idea of the button pad is to use the upper row of buttons for fixed and frequently used functions and to leave the lower row of buttons for general-purpose functions.

In the bottom row the buttons change their functions contextually and can perform therefore multiple tasks. In this way, we can utilize more functions than the number of buttons we have physically available (10).

The core buttons in the upper row perform these basic functions (from left to right):

⁣⁣
Menu

· Start streaming

· Lock/unlock the buttons (to avoid accidental press)

· Start recording

· Stop recording

Those in the lower row perform the functions shown in the following menu screens which can be cycled through by pressing the “Menu” button.

The first image here below is the Menu1, and the second and third images are the Menu2.

Later, I also added a splash screen that is shown when the system starts as well as a “locked” warning that is displayed when the pad is locked (through the central upper button). Obviously, I also added an “unlocked” message that is shown when the central upper button is pressed again:

For checking all functions inside the remote control panel monitor, we have devised ways in which Robin can see the actual controls and feedback indicators, including his video feedback, as they are displayed from Ustream and replicated at a lower resolution on its small monitor.

Next to streaming feedback controls, I have added for Robin a monitoring application called SysMetrix which further provides Robin with real-time numerical indications of its remaining laptop battery time, CPU temperature, and bandwidth in and out.

7. What Next?

Robin and I do realize that there are a million improvements we could still make to this setup. But this is the joy of building something yourself.

Starting from the reliability of the overall physical setup, which is not yet rock solid, to the need to adjust our customer control software as Ustream keeps changing and improving its own interface. In fact, the best would be writing real, dedicated software for this system.

But let me try to summarize here all of the improvements we already took into serious consideration and the general direction in which we want to move this project further.

⁣⁣⁣⁣
From a hardware point of view, it would be nice to:

· Prepare another plastic holding base for the monitor and the button pad without the “holding arm”. This way, Robin may decide alternatively between using the artificial holding arm or simply hiding the remote control panel inside his jacket without using a flexible support arm.

When he needs it, he can take it out of his pocket and use it. Yes, this deserves one hand.

· Put some Velcro on the remote control panel and on the backpack belt so that the remote control panel can be attached to the belt itself.

· Add support for a set of earphones so that Robin may have an audio feedback channel to be used for either talking to the audience or receiving indications from a possible control room through a VoIP Skype-like connection.

· Thinking about a mini-ITX motherboard to evolve the system in a really embedded and self-contained mobile streaming station (wow)

⁣⁣⁣
From a software point of view, it would be nice to:

· Find a piece of software that is able to play a mp3 file “into” the microphone input in order to have some music background streamed in the video (the internet streaming site is accepting audio just from one source at a time)

· Try to leave the internet streaming site or get rid anyway of the need to use the browser and Flash encoder.

Once this step is accomplished, we will go for a more reliable Linux system (and we don’t have to modify the SW to remap the mouse clicks every time the streaming site changes the Flash encoder)

· Write down the application for the Linux box, trying to keep all the functionalities we have now.

· Keep the whole software system as much modular as we can. The final goal is the creation of a setup where Robin can stream directly from the RobinPad (yes, adding video capture functions to it) or where he could stream to a main control room where his signal will be mixed up with the one of other reporters streaming from other locations or with the video of someone wanting to interact from home.

This is the end of the story for now.

We are continuously working to make new improvements to the RobinPad, and if you follow RobinGood.TV, you may be able to see Robin at work with it very soon.

N.B.: Beyond our desire to share how this was all done, your comments and suggestions are what me and Robin welcome the most. If you have ideas or critiques, do not hesitate to make your voice heard here below in the comments section.

Fabio Di Niro

Originally written by Fabio Di Niro for MasterNewMedia and first published on Tuesday, August 21, 2007, as, “Mobile Video Streaming: Building A Remote Control Panel For A Portable Video Streaming Box - The RobinPad Story”

Robin Good

Mobile Video Streaming: Building A Remote Control Panel For A Portable Video Streaming Box - The… was originally published in MasterNewMedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you are to provide your kids with the mental tools and the manual skills required by today's society you must help your sons master early in their teenage years how to express and communicate in person as well as through analog and digital media.

The teachers your government pays for are often the least media literate people you can find around, while leaving this key education component to the self-learning opportunities that the online world offers without any preparation, is akin to trying to learn singing from soccer stadium fans.

But the heart of the matter is not just the training of young minds in the skilled use of new media technologies, but rather the development of their critical thinking skills, their research and analysis methods, as well as their own individual and very personal voice: their public voice.

It is in fact through the ability to analyze, to question, and to understand that one can start to express more personal views and opinions, the very heart of our gradually fading democracy.

New media literacies are nothing else but a set of cultural competencies and social skills that can help today’s teenagers become active participants and contributors to safeguard the health of our future societies and the development of greater forms of healthy cooperation and more civilized living among individuals.

“Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy training from individual expression onto community involvement: the new literacies are almost all social skills which have to do with collaboration and networking. “

In the second part of this vision (see part 1 here) of how education would need to be transformed to provide valuable tools and insight to our future citizens, Howard Rheingold prizes you with a delightful introduction to the design of a new media literacy curriculum while analyzing the key factors at play in this sweeping social revolution you and I are all part of.

He writes:

“I don’t propose Internet media as the solution to young people’s disengagement from political life, or claim to know whether or not youth really are disengaged, but do want to look at participative media as a possibly powerful tool to be deployed toward helping them engage in their own voices about the issues they care about.”

Intro by Robin Good

Vision of the Future - Part 2

by Howard Rheingold

I started thinking about “public voice” as a way to link media skills and civic engagement when I started teaching journalism majors about the ways digital media is changing the practices and institutions of journalism.

One of the texts I assigned them was Phil Agre’s ten-year-old advice, now slightly dated in its terminology, about developing a public voice by writing for webzines.

At about the same time we were discussing Agre, I read Danah Boyd’s speech to the AAAS that referred to this decade’s moral panic about MySpace.

Boyd wrote about the way kids in these online social network environments were creating publics online in an era where physical public spaces were denied to them.

And then the news intervened with the story of high school students in Los Angeles organizing walkouts and demonstrations around proposed national immigration legislation.

A significant percentage of American youth are involved in creating as well as consuming digital media. According to a 2005 survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project,

“The number of teenagers using the internet has grown 24% in the past four years and 87% of those between the ages of 12 and 17 are online.”

Whatever else might be said of teenage bloggers, dorm-room video producers, gamers, or those who maintain pages on social networks, it cannot be said that they are passive media consumers.

They seek, adopt, appropriate, and invent ways to participate in cultural production. Another recent Pew study claims that more than 50% of today’s teenagers have created as well as consumed digital media.

Constructivist theories of education that exhort teachers to guide active learning through hands-on experimentation are not new ideas, and neither is the notion that digital media can be used to encourage this kind of learning.

What is new is a population of “digital natives” who have learned how to learn new kinds of software before they started high school, who carry mobile phones, media players, game devices, and laptop computers and know how to use them, and for whom the internet is not a transformative new technology but a feature of their lives that has always been there, like water and electricity.

This population is both self-guided and in need of guidance: although a willingness to learn new media by point-and-click exploration might come naturally to today’s student cohort, there’s nothing innate about knowing how to apply their skills to the processes of democracy.

I don’t propose Internet media as the solution to young people’s disengagement from political life, or claim to know whether or not youth really are disengaged, but do want to look at participative media as a possibly powerful tool to be deployed toward helping them engage in their own voices about the issues they care about.

Making connections between the literacies students pick up simply by being young in the 21st century and those best learned through reading and discussing texts is an appropriate role for teachers today.

My fundamental assumption for beginning such a practicum, based on my own encounters with students in social cyberspaces and the advice of more experienced educators, is that “voice,” the unique style of personal expression that distinguishes one’s communications from those of others, can be called upon to help connect young people’s energetic involvement in identity-formation with their potential engagement with society as citizens.

Moving from a private to a public voice can help students turn their self-expression into a form of public participation.

Public voice is learnable, a matter of consciously engaging with an active public rather than broadcasting to a passive audience.

The public voice of individuals aggregated and in dialogue with the voices of other individuals, is the fundamental particle of “public opinion.”

When public opinion has the power and freedom to influence policy and grows from the open, rational, critical debate among peers posited by Jurgen Habermas and others, it can be an essential instrument of democratic self-governance.

The American democracy is rather messier and less rational than the Habermasian ideal, but it does involve what Phil Agre identifies as a set of communication skills uniquely associated with participating in influence networks around issues.

Communication acts, whether or not they are always calmly deliberative and rational, are the fundamental elements of political and civic life.

By showing students how to use Web-based tools and channels to inform the public, advocate positions, contest claims, and organize action around issues that they truly care about, participatory media education can draw them into positive early experiences with citizenship that could influence their civic behavior throughout their lives.

Media production differs from other kinds of production because media (unlike other products such as steel or food or clothing) have the power to persuade, inspire, educate, and direct human thought, belief, and activity.

Communities, movements, markets, societies, and civilizations are the products of the human talent for accomplishing complex tasks together -…incited by and coordinated through communication media.

The technical power of many-to-many communication networks is important because it multiplies pre-existing human social networking capabilities that enable collective action.

The technical networks that carry bits from node to node and the media woven from those bits enable the humans at those nodes to learn, argue, deliberate, transact, and organize on scales and at paces that were never before possible.

In Confronting The Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (PDF), Jenkins et al see an entirely new kind of culture emerging from the use of participatory media, characterizing the shift as one that should not be reduced to the enabling technology, but “rather represents a shift in the way our culture operates.”

The emerging “participatory culture” described by Jenkins et al is characterized as innovative, convergent, everyday, appropriative, networked, global, generational, and unequal:

“This context places new emphasis on the need for schools and after school programs to devote attention to fostering what we are calling the new media literacies - a set of cultural competencies and social skills which young people need as they confront the new media landscape.

Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy training from individual expression onto community involvement: the new literacies are almost all social skills which have to do with collaboration and networking.

These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills which should have been part of the school curriculum all along.”

An aside, again from my own experience with the public education system. My daughter looked so crestfallen when she returned from her first day of public school that I asked her what could be so terribly wrong.

“They make you sit in desks all day, and the desks are all in a row, then they ring really loud bells.”

This picture struck me as a perfect example of exactly what participatory media literacy education should NOT be about. Desks in a row are all very Gutenberg-industrial.

For the past several years, I’ve experimented with teaching students blogging rhetoric that leads them to exercise public voice.

For example, the first post is to be aimed at a clearly imagined public — people known and unknown to the author who might reply, learn something, or debate the blogger’s assertions — who could, potentially, join the blogger in some kind of collective action.

First, I asked students to provide links that would educate, inform, persuade, or motivate the public, and to write a post that gives enough context to the link to enable readers to decide whether or not to click it.

Then I asked them to experiment with connective writing by offering two links and their contexts, as well as an overarching description of what connects the links.

Analytic and critical posts follow, taking issue with, contesting, and debating posts made by others on their blogs.

Finally, student bloggers were asked to make posts that advocate a position and provide links to support their assertions.

Concurrent with my direct use of participative pedagogy at the college level, I’ve embarked on a literature review and have begun compiling and adapting the work of educators who have been using blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other participative media.

I invited some colleagues to help. We’ve compiled resources and exercises on a wiki at socialtext.net/medialiteracy - and welcome any of you who want to participate.

I bow to those educators whose efforts I’ve compiled and offer this as a resource.

I hope the wiki and the chapter that I’ve written for the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning will help broaden and expand the community that has been forming around participative pedagogy.

If print culture shaped the environment in which the Reformation exploded and the Enlightenment blossomed, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty-first-century life will take place.

As Henry Jenkins and his colleagues emphasized, education that acknowledges the full impact of networked publics and digital media must recognize a whole new way of looking at learning and teaching, not just another set of skills that must be added to the curriculum.

I’m not sure how to get there, how to evaluate efforts and measure impacts, or whether schooling as we know it is even the place to start building the necessary institutions.

Assuming a world in which the welfare of young people and the health of democracy are the true goals of education, I believe modern societies around the world need to assess and evaluate what works and what doesn’t in terms of engaging students in learning, to look empirically and in a more nuanced way at what civic engagement means today, to better understand what young people are really doing with digital media, and to find ways to help them use their literacies as citizenship skills as well as avenues to entertainment.

End of Part 2

Part 1: New Media Literacy In Education: Learning Media Use While Developing Critical Thinking Skills

Howard Rheingold was the keynote speaker for education.au’s final seminar for 2007 when this presentation was held.

Additional Resources

Howard Rheingold’s keynote presentation - This presentation focuses on virtual communities and the need for new literacies to effectively engage with the new media.

Question and answer session with Howard Rheingold - This audio file features the question and answer session which followed the keynote presentation, on 2 October 2007.

Originally written by Howard Rheingold and first published on MasterNewMedia on Sunday, 28 October 2007, as “New Media Literacy And Education: What To Teach? Public Voice - Part 2”

Robin Good

New Media Literacy And Education: What To Teach? Public Voice - Part 2 was originally published in MasterNewMedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Our current political economy is based on a fundamental mistake. It is based on the assumption that natural resources are unlimited and that it is an endless sink.

This false assumption creates artificial scarcity for potentially abundant cultural resources.

This combination of quasi-abundance and quasi-scarcity destroys the biosphere and hampers the expansion of social innovation and a free culture.

In a P2P-based society, this situation is reversed: the limits of natural resources are recognized, and the abundance of immaterial resources becomes the core operating principle. The vision of P2P theory is the following:

1. The core intellectual, cultural and spiritual value will be produced through non-reciprocal peer production;

2. It is surrounded by a reformed, peer-inspired, sphere of material exchange;

3. It is globally managed by a peer-inspired and reformed state and governance system.

Because of these characteristics, peer to peer can be said to be the core logic of the successor civilization, and is a answer and solution to the structural crisis of contemporary capitalism.”

In this second part of P2P as a Way of Living (first part here), peer-to-peer planetary evangelist Michel Bauwens looks at the political and economic foundations of peer-to-peer governance and democracy concepts of peer governance, production, and property, analyzing their traits and characteristics.

By deeply questioning the false assumptions on which our present economic and political systems are based one can easily see how critical a change would be if governments were to become partners rather than controllers and enslavers, and if peer communities were provided with the economic means to support their social cooperation efforts.

Again, the adoption of alternative monetary systems, taking away some of the extraordinary controls that private organizations have taken over the issue of money and providing the basic resources for all individuals according to their natural vocations and passions rather than being enslaved by economic and production mechanisms that alienate them, is the future for which I am here for.

As I wrote before, let me re-iterate:

“Peer to peer governance, if supported by new socio-economic regulations, including a universal subsidy to all, could be the means by which individuals would be able to govern themselves while engaging in the pursuit of their best interests and passions.”

Intro by Robin Good

1. The Political Implications of the Peer-to-Peer Revolution - Part 2
2. P2P Theory as the Emancipatory Possibility of the Age
3. Peer Governance and Democracy
4. Towards a Partner State Approach
5. A Renewed Progressive Policy Centered Around the Sustenance of the Commons
6. Conclusion: What Needs To Be Done?

The Political Implications of the Peer-to-Peer Revolution - Part 2

by Michel Bauwens

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5. P2P Theory as the Emancipatory Possibility of the Age

Indeed, because an infinite growth system is a logical and physical impossibility with a limited natural environment, the current world system is facing a structural crisis for its extensive growth.

Currently consuming ‘two planets’, it would need four planets if China and India would obtain equity with the current Western levels of consumption. Because of the ecological and resource crisis that this causes, the system is ultimately limited in its extensive expansion.

However, its dream for intensive development in the immaterial sphere is equally blocked, since the sphere of abundance and direct social production of value through peer production, creates an exponential growth in use value, but only say a linear growth in the market opportunities in its margins.

The current world system is facing a similar crisis to that of the slave-based Roman Empire, which could no longer grow extensively (at some point the cost of expansion is greater than the benefits of added productivity), but could not grow intensively either, since that would demand autonomy for the slaves.

Hence, the feudal system emerged, which refocused on the local, where it could become much more productive and grow ‘intensively’. Serfs, who were tied to the land but now had families, a fixed part of their produce, and a much lighter taxation load, were substantially more productive than slaves.

The lords took a substantially lesser part of the surplus. Today, extensive growth is ultimately blocked, but intensive growth in the immaterial sphere requires a substantial reconfiguration which largely transcends the current system logic.

Similarly, the current structural crisis caused a reconfiguration of the two main classes (just as the slave owners had to become feudal lords, and the slaves had to become serfs).

At present, we see the emergence of a netarchical class of capital owners, who are renouncing their dependence on the present regime of immaterial accumulation through intellectual property, in favor of a role as enablers of social participation through proprietary platforms, which cleverly combine open and closed elements so as to ensure a measure of control and profit, while knowledge workers are reconfiguring from a class that was dissociated from the means of production to one that is no longer dissociated from its means of production, as their brains and the networks are now their socialized means of production.

(However, they are still largely dissociated from autonomous means of monetization.) It would be fair to say that currently, peer production communities are collectively sustainable, but not individually, leading to a crisis of value and widespread precarity amongst knowledge workers.

The solution would in my opinion point in the following direction:

1. The private sector recognizes its increasing dependence on the positive externalizations of social cooperation, and together with the public authorities, agrees to a new historical compromise in the form of a basic income; this allows the sphere of cooperation to thrive even more, creating market benefits

2. The sphere of the market is dissociated from infinite-growth capitalism (how this can be done would require a separate article, but the key would be a macro-monetary reform such as those proposed by Bernard Lietaer, associated with a new regime that extends the production of money from private banks to the social field, through open money systems)

3. The sphere of peer production creates appropriate ‘wealth acknowledgment systems’ to recognize those that sustain its existence, and systems that can translate that reputational wealth into income.

6. Peer Governance and Democracy

As peer-to-peer technical and social infrastructures such as social media and self-directed teams are emerging to become an important if not dominant format for the changes induced by cognitive capitalism, the peer to peer relational dynamic will increasingly have political effects.

As a reminder, the p2p relational dynamic arises wherever there are distributed networks, i.e. networks where agents are free to undertake actions and relationships, and where there is an absence of overt coercion so that governance modes emerge from the bottom-up.

It creates processes such as peer production, the common production of value; peer governance, i.e. the self-governance of such projects; and peer property, the auto-immune system which prevents the private appropriation of the common.

It is important to distinguish the peer governance of a multitude of small but coordinated global groups, which choose non-representational processes in which participants co-decide on the projects, from representative democracy.

The latter is a decentralized form of power-sharing based on elections and representatives. Since society is not a peer group with an a priori consensus, but rather a decentralized structure of competing groups, representative democracy cannot be replaced by peer governance.

However, both modes will influence and accommodate each other. Peer projects that evolve beyond a certain scale and start facing issues of decisions about scarce resources, will probably adopt some representational mechanisms.

Representative and bureaucratic decision-making can and will in some places be replaced by global governance networks which may be self-governed to a large extent, but in any case, it will and should incorporate more and more multistakeholder models, that strive to include participants in decision-making, all groups that could be affected by such actions.

This group-based partnership model is different, but related in spirit, to the individual-based peer governance, because they share an ethos of participation.

7. Towards a Partner State Approach

Partner state policy is an approach in which the state enables and empowers user communities to create value themselves, and which also focuses on the elimination of obstacles.

The fundamental change in approach is the following.

In the modern view, individuals are seen as atomized. They were believed to be in need of a social contract that delegated authority to a sovereign in order to create society, and in need of socialization by institutions that addressed them as an undifferentiated mass.

In the new view, however, individuals are always already connected with their peers, and looking at institutions in such a peer-informed way. Institutions, therefore, will have to evolve to become support ecologies, devising ways to create infrastructures of support.

The politicians become interpreters and experts, which can guide the issues emerging out of civil society-based networks into the institutional realm.

The state becomes an at least neutral (or better yet: commons-favorable) arbiter, i.e. the meta-regulator of the three realms, and retreats from the binary state/privatization dilemma to the triarchical choice for an optimal mix between:

1. Government regulation,

2. Private market freedom, and

3. Autonomous civil society projects.

A partner state recognizes that the law of asymmetric competition dictates that it has to support social innovation to its utmost ability.

An example I recently encountered was the work of the municipality of Brest, in French Brittany.

There, the “Local Democracy” section of the city, under the leadership of Michel Briand, makes available online infrastructures, training modules, and physical infrastructure for sharing (cameras, sound equipment, etc…), so that local individuals and groups, can create cultural and social projects on their own.

For example, the Territoires Sonores project allows for the creation by the public of audio and video files to enrich custom trails, which are therefore neither produced by a private company nor by the city itself. In other words, the public authority in this case enables and empowers the direct social production of value.

The peer-to-peer dynamic, and the thinking and experimentation it inspires, do not just present a third form for the production of social value, it also produces also new forms of institutionalization and regulation, which could be fruitfully explored and/or applied.

Indeed, from civil society emerges a new institutionalization, the commons, which is a distinct new form of regulation and property.

Unlike private property, which is exclusionary, and unlike state property, in which the collective ‘expropriates’ the individual; by contrast in the form of the commons, the individual retains his sovereignty but has voluntarily shared it.

Only the commons-based property approach recognizes knowledge’s propensity to flow everywhere, while the proprietary property regime requires a radical fight against that natural propensity. This makes it likely that the commons format will be adopted as the more competitive solution.

In terms of the institutionalization of these new forms of common property, Peter Barnes, in his important book Capitalism 3.0, explains how national parks and environmental commons (such as a proposed Skytrust), could be run by trusts, who have the obligation to retain all (natural) capital intact, and through a one man/one vote/one they would be in charge of preserving common natural resources.

This could become an accepted alternative to both nationalization and deregulation/privatization.

I would surmise that in a successor civilization, where the peer-to-peer logic is the core logic of value creation, the commons is the central institution that drives the meta-system, and the market is a peer-informed sub-system that deals with the production of rival physical products, along with a pluralist economy that is augmented with a variety of reciprocity-based schemes.

8. A Renewed Progressive Policy Centered Around the Sustenance of the Commons

What does it mean for the emancipatory traditions that emerged from the industrial era?

I believe it could have 2 positive effects:

1. A dissociation of the automatic link with bureaucratic government modalities (which does not mean that it is not appropriate in certain circumstances); proposals can be formulated that directly support the development of the Commons

2. A dissociation from its alternative: deregulation/privatization; support for the Commons and peer production means that there is an alternative from both neoliberal privatization and the Blairite introduction of private logic in the public sphere.

The progressive movements can thereby become informational rather than a modality of industrial society.

Instead of defending the industrial status quo, it becomes again an offensive force (say: striving for an equity-based information society), more closely allied with the open/free, participatory, commons-oriented forces and movements.

These three social movements have arisen because of the need for an efficient social reproduction of peer production and the commons.

· Open and free movements want to ensure that there is raw material for free cultural production and appropriation and fight against the monopoly rents accorded to capital, as it now restricts innovation. They work on the input side of the equation.

· Participatory movements want to ensure that anybody can use his specific combination of skills to contribute to common projects, and work on lowering the technical, social, and political thresholds; finally,

· The Commons movement works on preserving the common from private appropriation, so that its social reproduction is insured, and the circulation of the common can go on unimpeded, as it is the Commons which in turn creates new layers of open and free raw material.

These various movements come in the usual three flavors:

1. Transgressive movements, such as young and old filesharers, which show that the legal regime has to be changed

2. Constructive movements, which create a framework for new types of social relationships, such as the Creative Commons movement, the free software movement, etc…

3. Reformist or radical attempts to change the institutional regime and adapt it to the new realities

I personally believe that these movements will not create new political parties, but that these networks of networks will indeed look for political liaison.

While peer-to-peer is a regime that combines equality and liberty and therefore potentially combines elements from various sides of the political spectrum, I believe the left is particularly apt to forge an alliance with the new desires and demands of these movements.

There is also a connection with the environmental movement. While the culturally oriented movements fight against the artificial scarcities induced by the restrictive regimes of copyright law and patent law, the environmental movement fights against the artificial abundance created by unrestricted market logic.

The removal of pseudo-abundance and pseudo-scarcity is exactly what needs to happen to make our human civilization sustainable at this stage.

As has been stressed by Richard Stallman and others, the copyright and patent regimes are explicitly intended to inhibit the free cooperation and cultural flow between creative humans and are just as pernicious to the further development of humanity as the biospheric destruction.

There is therefore a huge potential for such a renewed movement for human emancipation to become aligned with the values of a new generation of youth and achieve the long-term advantage that the Republicans had achieved since the 80s.

9. Conclusion: What Needs To Be Done?

Let’s recall some of our points, and see how the movement against artificial scarcity and sustainability intersect.

We live in a political economy that has it exactly backward. We believe that our natural world is infinite, and therefore that we can have an economic system based on infinite growth.

However since the material world is finite, it is based on pseudo-abundance.

And then we believe that we should introduce artificial scarcities in the world of immaterial production, impeding the free flow of culture and social innovation, which is based on free cooperation, by creating the obstacle of permissions and intellectual property rents protected by the state.

What we need instead is a political economy based on a true notion of scarcity in the material realm, and a realization of abundance in the immaterial realm.

Complex innovation needs creative and autonomous workers who are not impeded in their ability to share and learn from each other.

In the world of immaterial production, of software, text, and design, the costs of reproduction are marginal and therefore we see emerging in it non-reciprocal peer production, where people voluntarily engage in the direct creation of use value, profiting from the resulting commons in a general way, but without specific reciprocity.

In the world of material production, where we have scarcity, and costs have to be recouped, such non-reciprocity is not possible, and therefore we need modes of neutral exchange such as the markets, or other modes of reciprocity.

In the sphere of immaterial production, humanity is learning the laws of abundance, because non-rival goods win in value through sharing.

In this world, we are evolving towards non-proprietary licenses, participatory modes of production, and commons-oriented property forms.

Positive forms of affinity-based retribalization are emerging. But in the world of scarce material goods, a series of scarcity crises are brewing, global warming being just one of them, that is creating the emergence of negative forms of competitive tribalization.

The logic of abundance has the potential to lead us to a reorganization of our world to a level of higher complexity, moved principally by peer-to-peer logic.

The logic of scarcity has the potential to lead us to generalized wars for resources, to a descent to a lower form of complexity, a new dark age as was the case after the disintegration of the Roman Empire.

So the challenge is to use the emergent logic of abundance and inject it into the world of scarcity.

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⁣Is That a Realistic Possibility?

In the immaterial world of abundance, sharing is non-problematic, and the further emergence and expansion of non-reciprocal modes of production will be very likely. “Together we know everything”, is a rather achievable ideal.

In the material world of scarcity, abundance is translated into three key concepts that can change human consciousness and therefore economic practices. The notion of ‘together we have everything’ seems not quite achievable, we therefore need transitional concepts.

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1) The first concept is the distribution of everything.

This means that instead of abundance, we have a slicing up of physical resources and the physical means of production so that individuals can freely engage and act.

This means an economy that moves towards a vision of peer-informed market modes such as fair trade (a market mechanism subjected to peer arbitrage of producers and consumers seen as partners), and social entrepreneurship (using profit for conscious social progress).

Objective tendencies towards miniaturization of the physical means of production make this a distinct possibility: desktop manufacturing enables individual designers; rapid manufacturing and tooling are diminishing the advantages of scale of industrial production, and so are personal fabricators.

Social lending creates a distribution of financial capital, and the direct social production of money through software is not far away from being realized in various parts of the world (see the work of Bernard Lietaer); If indeed scarcity will create more expensive energy and raw material, a re-localisation of production is likely, and peer-informed modes of production will be enabled to a much greater extent.

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2) The second concept is sustainability.

Since an infinite growth system cannot last indefinitely, we need to move to new market concepts as described by the thought schools of natural capitalism (David Korten, Paul Hawken, Hazel Henderson), capitalism 3.0 (Peter Barnes’ proposal to use trust as property forms because they impose the preservation of capital), cradle to cradle design and production processes so that no waste is generated.

We need to move to a steady-state economy (Herman Daly), which is not necessarily static, but where greater output from nature, is dependent on our ability to regenerate the same resources.

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3) The third concept is that of sufficiency or ‘plenty’.

Abundance has not just an objective side, it has a subjective side as well. In the material economy, infinite growth needs to be replaced by sufficiency, a realization that status and human happiness can no longer be dependent on infinite material accumulation and overconsumption, but will become dependent on immaterial accumulation and growth.

Having enough so that we can pursue meaning and status through our identity as creative and collaborative individuals, recognized in our various peer communities.

Only a rich experience economy can avoid a culture of frustration and sacrifice, and the repressions and unhappiness that such could entail. This experience economy, however, will not just be created by commercial franchises, but there will also be the direct social production of cultural value.

Businesses and peer communities, enabled and empowered by a partner state, will have to create a rich tapestry of immaterial value, and the thicker the surrounding immaterial value of being, the lighter our attachment to mere having will be.

End of Part 2

Here you’ll find Part 1.

Originally written by Michel Bauwens and first published by Master New Media as “Peer-to-Peer Governance, Production And Property: P2P As A Way Of Living - Part 2”

Robin Good

Peer-to-Peer Governance, Democracy, And Economic Vision: P2P As A Way Of Living -Part 2 was originally published in MasterNewMedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Haven’t you noticed how your effort to keep trying to follow each and all the new things happening out there is less and less successful? There are already way too many new products and services popping up on a daily basis for you to follow with any real depth and understanding.

There are also a growing number of blogs, news sites, search engines, and other bad and good online resources that provide information on the very topic you have originally chosen to cover.

Many, and an increasing percentage of them carry only garbage, fake, cloned, and stolen content with no links or credit to the original source. Lots of time is wasted going through this junk and weeding out the bad and outdated stuff from the new, good-quality content.

This is the main reason why talented niche bloggers and online writers with noteworthy competence in some specific areas need to scale themselves up to a new level of participation and contribution.

Scaling yourself up means transforming your role from one of contributor, or writer to one that is more focused on being a filter/collector/aggregator of news from other sources.

With the amount of news and information coming to us daily, this is a space that someone will need to fill in any case.

The value provided to others by having someone filter and select ahead of them relevant news fitting a specific topic/ theme will increase its value by orders of magnitude in the near future.

This doesn’t mean that if you are or intend to be an independent online writer/author you need to give up this role. Not at all.

But see, one thing is to try to follow all of the stories and new releases happening out there, often in combat with yourself on what to choose and what to leave out, and one is to follow those stories as a researcher who can test and try out these new solutions without the pressure and constraints that “having to go to press” before others do, inevitably draws.

A newsmaster, as I call it, is the role of this new breed of news jockeys. There have been many, exemplary forms of newsmastering work that have gone unlabelled and unnoticed as such for a long time.

Great examples have been Robert Scoble’s link blog as well as many other bloggers' so-called link roll, daily link list, linkstream, or whatever they chose to name their daily selection of news headlines from other sources out there.

That activity, in and by itself, has so much value that few have yet realized it and taken it to its next level.

Because, no matter what you say, there is just way too much information out there, that is of relevance to you and me, and no matter how many RSS feeds you read, you are going to miss out on something.

Those best set to scale up are those who have learned all the tricks of monitoring and scanning the news, those who have become experts at writing on blogs, who have thousands of visitors per day, and who can see the forest from trees as often as they can look and write at the latest new tools or service.

These may very well be the very best candidates for this newsmastering role.

In the meanwhile everyone else out there is managing the ocean of news coming at them by:

· Visiting 10 or more websites each day,

· Checking systematically saved searches on major search engines,

· Looking at their RSS feed reader/aggregator

· Monitoring email-based newsletters

· Serendipitous encounters, word of mouth, etc.

But if you can do all that work for them, as Slashdot, Techmeme, and Paidcontent.org, or like Stephen Downes’ OLDaily or John Blossom’ Shore do for their own specific audiences, then you become a much more valuable resource in the network at large.

Not only.

By learning how newsmastering can exponentially increase your value to the network as a news curator, you will also free up a significant new time and energy that you had frozen into daily writing activities.

And that precious time can be used to “scale up” also the use of your analysis and research abilities. If you are looking always at the details of this or that technology or issue, can you ever look or spend time exploring the “big picture”? Hardly so.

That is why, for those who can, the move to mini news hubs, provides not only great value for their niche “vertical” audiences but also give them greater opportunity to provide real insight, opinion, and commentary that goes beyond the daily issues.

That is what scaling up as an online independent publisher means to me.

Roles are changing, more opportunities are opening, and the universe of small, micro online value-added independent publishers grows by the day.

Bloggers, at least those that seriously work on thematic news writing, could be seen as street news reporters, the guys out on the front line reporting early on everything they see and put their hands or eyes on to.

But not everyone needs to be a front-line reporter. We need also editors, and news jockeys to look at these and select the important from the superficial, the original from the cloned, and the fresh from the replay.

We need human aggregators and newsmasters to categorize, comment, and annotate their news streams in ways that make their work more analogous to the one of a trusted disc jockey or flower designer than to that of a typical media department editor.

We need information strategists and industry analysts to be able to wrap their future-looking goggles and to see those individual stories as a map rather than a set of individual road lines.

This is why the time is mature for scaling up: for some, from spectators to bloggers or online independent news reporters, for others, from bloggers to newsmasters, news jockeys, and news curators of specific news and information areas.

Originally written by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on Thursday, July 13, 2006, as, “News Aggregation Is Online Independent Publishers Natural Next Step”

Robin Good

News Aggregation Is Online Independent Publishers Natural Next Step was originally published in MasterNewMedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Newsmastering is a new emerging and much-needed network function allowing the huge news flow to be categorized, filtered, de-spammed, re-routed, and contextualized in one thousand and more ways.

The output generated by a skilled and qualified newsmaster enables a great number of individual to avoid needing to subscribe to tens of RSS feeds or to having to visit multiple sites daily to keep themselves on top of the latest relevant news to their specific field of interest.

The newsmaster aggregates and compiles very high-quality news feeds which completely replace the need to visit or subscribe to a large number of RSS feeds, suddenly providing those same individuals with much greater time available to them and much higher quality up-to-date news available to them at all times.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, the official online interviewer at NetSquared.org, took the time to call me up and find out more about this emerging new practice and about the tools and processes required to make it all work.

Here is the full report of his online interview with me and a ten-minute audio excerpt from my exchange:

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Mastering Information Overload: An interview with Robin Good of MasterNewMedia.org

Robin Good is an independent online publisher who works out of Rome, Italy. He is the editor of MasterNewMedia.org (on new media generally) masterview.ikonosnewmedia.com (visual presentation for international audiences) and Kolabora.com (online collaboration).

He also publishes the Communication Agents Journal and is the producer-director behind the first open-source movie about blogs, TheWeblogProject.com.

Robin has worked for the UN, World Bank, FAO, CGIAR, and the Arab Planning Institute in developing complex online information systems and multi/language websites.

His work today focuses on empowering individuals to sustain themselves ethically through the creative use of new media.

Robin Good is the leading evangelist for the creation of a new type of knowledge worker - he calls them Newsmasters.

The role of a Newsmaster is essentially to subscribe to the RSS feeds of a large number of news sources, search queries, and other dynamic resources. The Newsmaster then filters the results of the subscriptions with a combination of machine automation and topic-specific expert knowledge.

The most important information resulting from these filtered subscriptions is then delivered to end users, either by RSS, email, on a website, or by whatever delivery is most appropriate.

Central to the concept is that one person should be responsible for filtering information for others in a group or community.

The responsibility of a Newsmaster is to turn information overload into pure value; thus vastly increasing the recipients’ efficiency, access to information, and ability to respond to key events quickly.

Robin told me that Newsmastering is all about acting as a curator of the huge new stream of information that is coming to us every day.

There is so much information coming at us that it is obviously very difficult to keep up with everything and thus the decision often comes down to “What can I afford to not read?”.

And to that, Robin replies with the belief that information overload needs to be tackled in an effective, intelligent way.

Newsmastering is a new role that fills the need to scale up in order to digest all of this information.

Society has increased the number of media forms and the number of people who contribute to those information streams, but we haven’t increased the number of hubs where this information can be aggregated and filtered in an intelligent way.

People serving this function can increase everyone’s efficiency and access to the most important information by delivering only what is most relevant for any given field or organization.

Newsmastering is an emerging concept, and the first movers are evangelizing a new vision. Until today, most of the newsmastering work has been done to date with custom systems, patching together tools, often free. The key technology in the process, though, is Really Simple Syndication — RSS.

Newsmastering can be as simple as splicing multiple RSS feeds together into a mix with a tool like FeedDigest.com. The next step in sophistication is to filter your feeds and be specific in your sources. More complex topics require strategic choices in sources and filters.

Lest this appears as simple as just finding interesting things on the internet, Robin points out that not just anyone can be a good Newsmaster. The most important qualities to have are passion and competence in the particular field being covered.

In order to select, edit, and manage the real information gems in any sector, a Newsmaster must have a deep familiarity with recognizing news and resources in their proper context.

One of the primary activities of a Newsmaster is to subscribe to the RSS feeds of searches for key terms and phrases. Searches that are too broad will bring in too many results and require too much processing to extract the best information.

Instead, Robin advises subscribing to many highly targeted searches that will bring you just the kind of results that will be useful. A good search subscription may not deliver any results for days at a time, but when results do arrive they will be of high value.

A well-informed Newsmaster should be able to determine what phrases are likely to be found in the most valuable documents online and make good guesses about phrases that would be valuable if they were found in the future.

A quiet search subscription will sit silently in your feed aggregator until a result is found.

In other words, the creation of many small persistent search pipes that only bring the best information is a better strategy than creating big pipes for the immediate psychological reward of getting rapidly many results.

The creation of those queries can be done by thinking about what keywords or phrases are most likely to be found in the really good content in your field.

When setting up a suite of queries on a topic of general interest, Robin recommends the following “universe of sources.”

1. News search: News.Yahoo.com is Robin’s preferred source for news search RSS feeds.

2. Blog search: Technorati.com is Robin’s preferred blog search feed source and he suggests that you consider subscribing to tag searches instead of or in addition to full-text searches.

3. Social bookmarking: From a human, through machine back to your human eyes again - harness the power of everyone else’s research by subscribing to feeds in del.icio.us or digg.com [I would also recommend Furl.net for some subjects.]

4. Industry Press Releases - Many companies only know to put their information out via a press release. The best place to subscribe to a query feed according to Robin is at Newspad.com, which uses press releases from PR Web.

The above sources could be complemented by more topic-specific sources of information as well.

I asked Robin whether there was a clear Return on Investment for organizations dedicating resources to the creation of a Newsmaster position.

He acknowledged that there is not a quantifiable ROI but said that the role fulfills an undeniable and powerful purpose in serving stakeholders.

The aggregation, editing, and delivery of the most high-quality and timely information on a particular topic will help those stakeholders overcome their sense of information overload, will build prestige for an organization offering this kind of information service, and aggregate a body of high-quality content that can be used in traditional newsletters, online or in briefings and research.

The newsmastering concepts presented here are part of an emerging space where early adopters are breaking new ground and evangelizing while the tools develop. Many of the tools available to Newsmasters are experimental, they sometimes cease functioning when overwhelmed by too many users, for example.

And for every feed manipulation tool that fades out of existence, it seems two more appear in its stead and are more capable, professional, and supported. Robin says he enjoys the “carousel” of tools available as it is an incredible opportunity for innovation.

There is some risk with investment in experimental tools in this space, but the risk is mitigated by the fact that RSS is an open-source format that won’t leave users locked into any particular vendor.

Robin emphasized that purchasing inexpensive marketing-oriented newsmastering software solutions that claim to automatically generate the best news on any topic is no substitute for a good newsmaster with the right tools.

Machine discovery and selection are of far less value than the unique power of a well-informed human mind combined with a flexible software strategy.

For those interested in Newsmastering software suites, Robin recommends looking at MySyndicaat.com for hosted solutions working across all platforms or Hexamail’s News2Web for Windows- and Linux-based server software solutions.

I told Robin that some of the tools I’m most excited about right now are those that use RSS to offer alerts in conjunction with IM and SMS. I asked what emerging tools he was most excited about and he said that he believes feed creation tools to be a key area of innovation underway.

Tools like feedyes.com, Ponyfish.com, Mail2RSS.org, and one of the most established in the class, FeedFire.com. These tools let you create an RSS feed to subscribe to updates from sites that don’t offer their own feeds.

The landscape of tools and best practices for mining the living web appears to continue developing rapidly for as long as the risk of information overload is an issue.

Hopefully, Robin Good’s MasterNewMedia.org will remain a key resource for engaging with these issues for a long time as well.

Here are also my unedited original replies to Marshall's questions, as I replied to them live during our online conversation.

Here is a fully downloadable .MP3 version of this 12-minute recording, or you can start listening immediately to the streamable version of the same by simply clicking on the “play” button in the audio toolbar below.

Interview written by Marshall Kirkpatrick for NetSquared.

About the author:

Marshall Kirkpatrick is a new media technology consultant, advisor and online writer.

He is one of the authors/writers behind Tech Soup’s Net Squared- Remixing the Web for Social Change, and he also writes for The Social Software Blog at Weblogs, Inc./AOL. Marshall is also on board at The Committee to Protect Bloggers.

Originally written by Marshall Kirkpatrick for NetSquared and first published on MasterNewMedia on Wednesday, May 24, 2006, as, “The Human News Aggregator: An Interview About NewsMastering With Robin Good”

Robin Good

The Human News Aggregator: An Interview About NewsMastering with Robin Good was originally published in MasterNewMedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mashups are filled with technical challenges and that is why many technologists are attracted by them. The challenge of having to find new solutions to “old” technical issues while “inventing” new ways to mix and combine existing resources and tools is undoubtedly a very positive motivator for any developer out there.

In this second part (Part 1) of this guide to Mashups by Duane Merrill, the focus is on the “Technical Challenges” and “Social Aspects” of this rapidly evolving field.

What to look out for, typical technical challenges, and obvious bottlenecks are examined and explained in an introductory, though technically competent way. Good considerations regarding accessibility, SEO, security, and other issues are often underestimated during the initial planning of any such project.

The social aspects are no less important in the creation of online mashups and in particular the tradeoff between the protection of intellectual property and consumer privacy versus fair use and the free flow of information is a notable one.

As always, plenty of links help you learn and find out more about possible terms and technologies you may not be yet familiar with.

Intro by Robin Good

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Mashups: The New Breed of Web App — Part 2⁣⁣⁣⁣
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1. Technical Challenges
2. ⁣⁣Data Integration Challenges: Semantic Meaning and Data Quality⁣
3. ⁣⁣⁣Component Challenges⁣
4. ⁣⁣⁣⁣Social Challenges⁣

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Technical Challenges⁣

Like any other data integration domain, mashup development is replete with technical challenges that need to be addressed, especially as mashup applications become more feature- and functionality-rich.

This section touches on a handful of these challenges, some of which you can address and mitigate, while others are open issues.

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Data Integration Challenges: Semantic Meaning and Data Quality⁣

Qualitative surveys suggest that the number one enterprise IT concern today is data integration within the enterprise virtual organization.

(In this context, I use the term virtual organization to mean a composition of federated business units, each contained within its own administrative domain.)

Like many enterprise IT managers who find themselves up to the task of integrating legacy data sources (for example, to create corporate dashboards that reflect current business conditions), mashup developers are faced with the analogous challenges of deriving shared semantic meaning between heterogeneous data sets.

Therefore, to get an idea of what mashup developers have in store, you need to look no further than the storied integration challenges faced by enterprise IT.

For example, translation systems between data models must be designed.

When converting data into common forms, reasonable assumptions often have to be made when the mapping is not a complete one (for example, one data source might have a model in which an address type contains a country field, whereas another does not).

Already challenging, this is exacerbated by the fact that the mashup developers might not be domain experts on the source data models because the models are third-party to them, and these reasonable assumptions might not be intuitive or clear.

In addition to missing data or incomplete mappings, the mashup designer might discover that the data they wish to integrate is not suitable for machine automation; and that it needs cleansing.

For example, law enforcement arrest records might be entered inconsistently, using common abbreviations for names (such as “mkt sqr” in one record and “Market Square” in another), making automated reasoning about equality difficult, even with good heuristics.

Semantic modeling technologies, such as RDF, can help ease the problem of automatic reasoning between different data sets, provided that it is built-in to the data store.

Legacy data sources are likely to require much human effort in terms of analysis and data cleansing before they can be availed to semantic modeling technologies.

Mashup developers might also have to contend with several issues that IT integration managers might not, one of which is data pollution.

As part of their application design, many mashups solicit public user input. As evidenced in the wiki application domain, this is a double-edged blade as:

a) It can be quite powerful because it enables open contribution and best-of-breed data evolution,

b) Yet it can be subject to inconsistent, incorrect, or intentionally misleading data entry. The latter can cast doubts on data trustworthiness, which can ultimately compromise the value provided by the mashup.

Another host of integration issues facing mashup developers arises when screen scraping techniques must be used for data acquisition.

As discussed in the previous section, deriving parsing and acquisition tools and data models requires significant reverse-engineering effort.

Even in the best case where these tools and models can be created, all it takes is a re-factoring of how the source site presents its content (or mothballing and abandonment) to break the integration process and cause mashup application failure.

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Component Challenges⁣

The Ajax model of Web development can provide a much richer and more seamless user experience than the traditional full-page refresh, but it poses some difficulties as well.

At its fundamentals, Ajax entails using the browser’s client-side scripting capabilities in conjunction with its DOM to achieve a method of content delivery that was not entirely envisioned by the browser’s designers. (Perhaps this hack-like nature of Ajax lends to its appeal.)

However, this subjects Ajax-based applications to the same browser compatibility issues that have plagued Web designers ever since Microsoft created Internet Explorer.

For example, Ajax engines make use of an XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with remote servers. In Internet Explorer 6, this object is implemented with ActiveX rather than native JavaScript, which requires that ActiveX be enabled.

A more fundamental requirement is that Ajax requires that JavaScript be enabled within the user’s browser. This might be a reasonable assumption for the majority of the population, but there are certainly users who use browsers or automated tools that either do not support JavaScript or do not have it enabled.

One such set of tools is the robots, spiders, and Web crawlers that aggregate information for Internet and intranet search engines. Without graceful degradation, Ajax-based mashup applications might find themselves missing out on both a minority user base as well as search engine visibility.

The use of JavaScript to asynchronously update content within the page can also create user interface issues.

Because content is no longer necessarily linked to the URL in the browser’s address bar, users might not experience the functionality that they normally expect when they use the browser’s BACK button or the BOOKMARK feature.

And, although Ajax can reduce latency by requesting incremental content updates, poor designs can actually hinder the user experience, such as when the granularity of the update is small enough that the quantity and overhead of updates saturate the available resources.

Also, take care to support the user (for example, with visual feedback such as progress bars) while the interface loads or content is updated.

As with any distributed, cross-domain application, mashup developers and content providers alike will also need to address security concerns.

The notion of identity can prove to be a sticky subject, as the traditional Web is primarily built for anonymous access.

Single-signon is a desirable feature, but there is a multitude of competing technologies (ranging from Microsoft Passport to the Liberty Alliance), thus creating disjointed identity namespaces that you must integrate as well.

Content providers are likely to employ authentication and authorization schemes (which require the notion of secure identity or securely identifiable attributes) in their APIs to enforce business models that involve paid subscriptions or sensitive data.

Sensitive data is also likely to require confidentiality (that is, encryption), and you must take care when you mash it with other sources to not put it at risk.

Identity will also be crucial for auditing and regulatory compliance. Additionally, with data integration happening both on the server and client side, identity and credential delegation from the user to the mashup service might become a requirement.

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Social Challenges⁣

In addition to the technical challenges described in the previous section, social issues have (or will) surface as mashups become more popular.

One of the biggest social issues facing mashup developers is the tradeoff between the protection of intellectual property and consumer privacy versus fair use and the free flow of information.

Unwitting content providers (targets of screen scraping), and even content providers who expose APIs to facilitate data retrieval might determine that their content is being used in a manner that they do not approve of.

The mashup Web application genre is still in its infancy, with hobbyist developers who produce many mashups in their spare time.

These developers might not be cognizant of (or concerned with) issues such as security. Additionally, content providers are only beginning to see the value in providing APIs for machine-based content access, and many do not consider them a core business focus.

This combination can yield poor software quality, as priorities such as testing and quality assurance take the backseat to proof-of-concept and innovation.

The community as a whole will have to work together to assemble open standards and reusable toolkits in order to facilitate mature software development processes.

Before mashups can make the transition from cool toys to sophisticated applications, much work will have to go into distilling robust standards, protocols, models, and toolkits.

For this to happen, major software development industry leaders, content providers, and entrepreneurs will have to find value in mashups, which means viable business models.

API providers will need to determine whether or not to charge for their content, and if so, how (for example, by subscription or by per-use). Perhaps they will provide varying levels of quality of service.

Some marketplace providers, such as eBay or Amazon, might find that the free use of their APIs increases product movement.

Mashup developers might look for an ad-based revenue model, or perhaps build interesting mashup applications with the goal of being acquired.

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End of Part 2⁣

Part 1: Mashups: What Are They? Mashup Genres And Technologies - Part 1

Originally written by Duane Merrill and first published on MasterNewMedia, as “Mashups: What Are They? Technical And Social Challenges — Part 2”

Robin Good

Mashups: What Are They? Technical And Social Challenges — Part 2 was originally published in MasterNewMedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The combination of data modelling technologies stemming from the Semantic Web domain and the maturation of loosely coupled, service-oriented, platform-agnostic communication protocols is finally providing the infrastructure needed to start developing applications that can leverage and integrate the massive amount of information that is available on the Web.

As mashup applications gain higher visibility, it will be interesting to see how the genre impacts social issues such as fair use and intellectual property, as well as other application domains that integrate data across organizational boundaries, such as grid computing and business-to-business workflow management.

For a deeper-dive into mashup development, stay tuned for the launching of a new series of tutorials on developerWorks that will teach you how to construct your own mashups.

In fact, the series will even teach you how to use Semantic Web technology and ontologies to enable others to create their own mashups.

This introductory article explores:

a) What it means to be a mashup,

b) The different classes of popular mashups constructed today, and

c) The enabling technologies that mashup developers leverage to create their applications. Additionally, you’ll see many of the emerging technical and social challenges that mashup developers face.

1. Mashups: The New Breed of Web App
2. Introduction
3. Mashup Genres
4. Related Technologies

Mashups: The New Breed of Web App

by Duane Merrill

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⁣
Introduction

A new breed of web-based data integration applications is sprouting up all across the Internet.

Colloquially termed mashups, their popularity stems from the emphasis on interactive user participation and the monster-of-Frankenstein-like manner in which they aggregate and stitch together third-party data.

The sprouting metaphor is a reasonable one; a mashup Web site is characterized by the way in which it spreads roots across the Web, drawing upon content and functionality retrieved from data sources that lay outside of its organizational boundaries.

This vague data-integration definition of a mashup certainly isn’t a rigorous one.

A good insight as to what makes a mashup is to look at the etymology of the term: it was borrowed from the pop music scene, where a mashup is a new song that is mixed from the vocal and instrumental tracks from two different source songs (usually belonging to different genres).

Like these “bastard pop” songs, a mashup is an unusual or innovative composition of content (often from unrelated data sources), made for human (rather than computerized) consumption.

So, what might a mashup look like? The ChicagoCrime.org Web site is a great intuitive example of what’s called a mapping mashup.

One of the first mashups to gain widespread popularity in the press, the Web site mashes crime data from the Chicago Police Department’s online database with cartography from Google Maps.

Users can interact with the mashup site such as instructing it to graphically display a map containing pushpins that reveal the details of all recent burglary crimes in South Chicago. The concept and the presentation are simple, and the composition of crime and map data is visually powerful.

In this first part of this report the focus is on Mashup genres, as I’ll guide you to survey the popular genres of mashups, including mapping mashups. Also in this part, Related Technologies overviews the technology landscape that relates to the construction and operation of mashups.

In the yet-to-be-published second part of this report, I will cover Technical and Social challenges affecting mashups.

Mashup Genres

In this section, I give a brief survey of the prominent mashup genres.

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Mapping Mashups

In this age of information technology, humans are collecting a prodigious amount of data about things and activities, both of which are wont to be annotated with locations.

All of these diverse data sets that contain location data are just screaming to be presented graphically using maps. One of the big catalysts for the advent of mashups was Google’s introduction of its Google Maps API.

This opened the floodgates, allowing Web developers (plus hobbyists, tinkerers, and others) to mash all sorts of data (everything from nuclear disasters to Boston’s CowParade cows) onto maps. Not to be left out, APIs from Microsoft (Virtual Earth), Yahoo (Yahoo Maps), and AOL (MapQuest) shortly followed.

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Video and Photo Mashups

The emergence of photo hosting and social networking sites like Flickr with APIs that expose photo sharing has led to a variety of interesting mashups.

Because these content providers have metadata associated with the images they host (such as who took the picture, what it is a picture of, where and when it was taken, and more), mashups designers can mash photos with other information that can be associated with the metadata.

For example, a mashup might analyze song or poetry lyrics and create a mosaic or collage of relevant photos or display social networking graphs based on common photo metadata (subject, timestamp, and other metadata).

Yet another example might take as input a Web site (such as a news site like CNN) and render the text in photos by matching tagged photos to words from the news.

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Search and Shopping Mashups

Search and shopping mashups have existed long before the term mashup was coined.

Before the days of Web APIs, comparative shopping tools such as BizRate, PriceGrabber, MySimon, and Google’s Froogle used combinations of business-to-business (b2b) technologies or screen-scraping to aggregate comparative price data.

To facilitate mashups and other interesting Web applications, consumer marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon have released APIs for programmatically accessing their content.

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News Mashups

News sources (such as the New York Times, the BBC, or Reuters) have used syndication technologies like RSS and Atom (described in the next section) since 2002 to disseminate news feeds related to various topics.

Syndication feed mashups can aggregate a user’s feeds and present them over the Web, creating a personalized newspaper that caters to the reader’s particular interests.

An example is Diggdot.us, which combines feeds from the techie-oriented news sources Digg.com, Slashdot.org, and Del.icio.us.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Related Technologies

This section gives an overview of the technologies that are facilitating the development of mashups. For further information about any of these technologies, consult the Resources section at the end of this article.

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The Architecture

A mashup application is architecturally comprised of three different participants that are logically and physically disjoint (they are likely separated by both network and organizational boundaries):

1) API/content providers,

2) The mashup site, and

3) The client’s Web browser.

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- The API/Content Providers

These are the (sometimes unwitting) providers of the content being mashed. In the ChicagoCrime.org mashup example, the providers are Google and the Chicago Police Department.

To facilitate data retrieval, providers often expose their content through Web protocols such as REST, Web Services, and RSS/Atom (described below).

However, many interesting potential data sources do not (yet) conveniently expose APIs.

Mashups that extract content from sites like Wikipedia, TV Guide, and virtually all government and public domain Web sites do so by a technique known as screen scraping.

In this context, screen scraping connotes the process by which a tool attempts to extract information from the content provider by attempting to parse the provider’s Web pages, which were originally intended for human consumption.

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· The Mashup Site

This is where the mashup is hosted. Interestingly enough, just because this is where the mashup logic resides, it is not necessarily where it is executed.

On the one hand, mashups Can be implemented similarly to traditional Web applications using server-side dynamic content generation technologies like Java servlets, CGI, PHP or ASP.

Alternatively, mashed content can be generated directly within the client’s browser through client-side scripting (that is, JavaScript) or applets. This client-side logic is often the combination of code directly embedded in the mashup’s Web pages as well as scripting API libraries or applets (furnished by the content providers) referenced by these Web pages.

Mashups using this approach can be termed rich internet applications (RIAs), meaning that they are very oriented towards the interactive user experience. (Rich internet applications are one hallmark of what’s now being termed “Web 2.0”, the next generation of services available on the World Wide Web.)

The benefits of client-side mashing include less overhead on behalf of the mashup server (data can be retrieved directly from the content provider) and a more seamless user experience (pages can request updates for portions of their content without having to refresh the entire page). The Google Maps API is intended for access through browser-side JavaScript and is an example of client-side technology.

Often, mashups use a combination of both server and client-side logic to achieve their data aggregation.

Many mashup applications use data that is supplied directly to them by their user base, making (at least) one of the data sets local.

Additionally, performing complex queries on multiple-sourced data (such as “Show me the average purchase price for real estate bought by actors who have co-starred in movies with Kevin Bacon”) requires computation that would be infeasible to perform within the client’s Web browser.

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· The Client’s Web Browser.

This is where the application is rendered graphically and where user interaction takes place. As described above, mashups often use client-side logic to assemble and compose the mashed content.

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Ajax

There is some dispute over whether the term Ajax is an acronym or not (some would have it represent “Asynchronous JavaScript + XML”). Regardless, Ajax is a Web application model rather than a specific technology. It comprises several technologies focused around the asynchronous loading and presentation of content:

· XHTML and CSS for style presentation

· The Document Object Model (DOM) API exposed by the browser for dynamic display and interaction

· Asynchronous data exchange, typically of XML data

· Browser-side scripting, primarily JavaScript

When used together, the goal of these technologies is to create a smooth, cohesive Web experience for the user by exchanging small amounts of data with the content servers rather than reloading and re-rendering the entire page after some user action.

You can construct Ajax engines for mashups from various Ajax toolkits and libraries (such as Sajax or Zimbra), usually implemented in JavaScript. The Google Maps API includes a proprietary Ajax engine, and the effect it has on the user experience is powerful: it behaves like a truly local application in that there are no scrollbars to manipulate or translation arrows that force page reloads.

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Web protocols: SOAP and REST

Both SOAP and REST are platform-neutral protocols for communicating with remote services.

As part of the service-oriented architecture paradigm, clients can use SOAP and REST to interact with remote services without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation: the functionality of a service is completely conveyed by the description of the messages that it requests and responds with.

SOAP is a fundamental technology of the Web Services paradigm. Originally an acronym for Simple Object Access Protocol, SOAP has been re-termed Services-Oriented Access Protocol (or just SOAP) because its focus has shifted from object-based systems towards the interoperability of message exchange.

There are two key components of the SOAP specification. The first is the use of an XML message format for platform-agnostic encoding, and the second is the message structure, which consists of a header and a body.

The header is used to exchange contextual information that is not specific to the application payload (the body), such as authentication information. The SOAP message body encapsulates the application-specific payload.

SOAP APIs for Web services are described by WSDL documents, which themselves describe what operations a service exposes, the format for the messages that it accepts (using XML Schema), and how to address it.

SOAP messages are typically conveyed over HTTP transport, although other transports (such as JMS or e-mail) are equally viable.

REST is an acronym for Representational State Transfer, a technique of Web-based communication using just HTTP and XML. Its simplicity and lack of rigorous profiles set it apart from SOAP and lend to its attractiveness.

Unlike the typical verb-based interfaces that you find in modern programming languages (which are composed of diverse methods such as getEmployee(), addEmployee(), listEmployees(), and more), REST fundamentally supports only a few operations (that is POST, GET, PUT, DELETE) that are applicable to all pieces of information.

The emphasis in REST is on the pieces of information themselves, called resources.

For example, a resource record for an employee is identified by a URI, retrieved through a GET operation, updated by a PUT operation, and so on. In this way, REST is similar to the document-literal style of SOAP services.

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Screen Scraping

As mentioned earlier, the lack of APIs from content providers often forces mashups developers to resort to screen scraping in order to retrieve the information they seek to mash.

Scraping is the process of using software tools to parse and analyze content that was originally written for human consumption in order to extract semantic data structures representative of that information that can be used and manipulated programmatically.

A handful of mashups use screen scraping technology for data acquisition, especially when pulling data from the public sector.

For example, real-estate mapping mashups can mash for sale or rental listings with maps from a cartography provider with scraped “comp” data obtained from the county records office.

Another mashup project that scrapes data is XMLTV, a collection of tools that aggregates TV listings from all over the world.

Screen scraping is often considered an inelegant solution and for good reasons.

It has two primary inherent drawbacks.

1. The first is that, unlike APIs with interfaces, scraping has no specific programmatic contract between content provider and content-consumer. Scrapers must design their tools around a model of the source content and hope that the provider consistently adheres to this model of presentation.

Websites have a tendency to overhaul their look and feel periodically to remain fresh and stylish, which imparts severe maintenance headaches on behalf of the scrapers because their tools are likely to fail.

2. The second issue is the lack of sophisticated, re-usable screen-scraping toolkit software, colloquially known as scrAPIs. The dearth of such APIs and toolkits is largely due to the extremely application-specific needs of each individual scraping tool.

This leads to large development overheads as designers are forced to reverse-engineer content, develop data models, parse, and aggregate raw data from the provider’s site.

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Semantic Web and RDF

The inelegant aspects of screen scraping are directly traceable to the fact that content created for human consumption does not make good content for automated machine consumption.

Enter the Semantic Web, which is the vision that the existing Web can be augmented to supplement the content designed for humans with equivalent machine-readable information. In the context of the Semantic Web, the term information is different from data; data becomes information when it conveys meaning (that is, it is understandable).

The Semantic Web has the goal of creating Web infrastructure that augments data with metadata to give it meaning, thus making it suitable for automation, integration, reasoning, and re-use.

The W3C family of specifications, collectively known as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) serves the purpose of providing methodologies to establish syntactic structures that describe data.

XML in itself is not sufficient; it is too arbitrary in that you can code it in many ways to describe the same piece of data. RDF-Schema adds to RDF’s ability to encode concepts in a machine-readable way.

Once data objects can be described in a data model, RDF provides for the construction of relationships between data objects through subject-predicate-object triples (“subject S has relationship R with object O”).

The combination of data model and graph of relationships allows for the creation of ontologies, which are hierarchical structures of knowledge that can be searched and formally reasoned about.

For example, you might define a model in which a “carnivore-type” as a subclass of “animal-type” with the constraint that it “eats” other “animal-type”, and create two instances of it: one populated with data concerning cheetahs and polar bears and their habitats, another concerning gazelles and penguins and their respective habitats.

Inference engines might then “mash” these separate model instances and the reason that cheetahs might prey on gazelles but not penguins.

RDF data is quickly finding adoption in a variety of domains, including social networking applications (such as FOAF — Friend of a Friend) and syndication (such as RSS, which I describe next).

In addition, RDF software technology and components are beginning to reach a level of maturity, especially in the areas of RDF query languages (such as RDQL and SPARQL) and programmatic frameworks and inference engines (such as Jena and Redland).

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RSS and ATOM

RSS is a family of XML-based syndication formats. In this context, syndication implies that a Web site that wants to distribute content creates an RSS document and registers the document with an RSS publisher.

An RSS-enabled client can then check the publisher’s feed for new content and react to it in an appropriate manner.

RSS has been adopted to syndicate a wide variety of content, ranging from news articles and headlines, changelogs for CVS check-ins or wiki pages, project updates, and even audiovisual data such as radio programs. Version 1.0 is RDF-based, but the most recent, version 2.0, is not.

Atom is a newer but similar syndication protocol. It is a proposed standard at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and seeks to maintain better metadata than RSS, provide better and more rigorous documentation, and incorporate the notion of constructs for common data representation.

These syndication technologies are great for mashups that aggregate event-based or update-driven content, such as news and weblog aggregators.

End of Part 1

In the second, upcoming part: Mashups: What Are They? Technical And Social Challenges — Part 2

Originally written by Duane Merrill and first published on MasterNewMedia on Thursday, August 9 2007, as “Mashups: What Are They? Mashup Genres And Technologies - Part 1”

Robin Good

Mashups: What Are They? Mashup Genres And Technologies - Part 1 was originally published in MasterNewMedia on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.