It would be impossible to miss the excitement over Google's Chrome, though I would assume we would wait to actually see the product, first, before wetting our pants.

Yes, Google entering the browser marketplace is news, but some of the things I've been reading are, well, frankly asinine. For instance, Computerworld breathlessly writes, Google's Chrome aims to kill Windows, make Web the OS of choice. A bit hard, wouldn't you say, when Chrome requires Windows just to be able to run?

Let's kill off Windows with our Web OS.

Cool.

...later...

Well, Windows is dead.

That's great! 

*pause* 

Uh, where's Chrome?

Well, you see...

Do we also need to remember our concerns about Google? You know, the whole privacy thing? Or are we a modern day bunch of Pavlovian dogs, trained to drool on cue whenever Google is involved?

There are issues associated with this browser, babes. First of all, as great as it is that Google is using Webkit for its infrastructure, it's also coming out with its own JavaScript engine. My first question is: is Google going to conform to standards? Or is it going to go its own little way, and just assume we'll tag along? Then there's the issue of the engine being multi-threaded—and here I thought Photoshop was going to be the only pig on my system.

My concerns aren't just related to JS. As I read somewhere—who knows where—we can now see why Google is footing the bill for Ian Hickson to head up the HTML5 effort. However, now that Google is "one of the browser competitors", how will this change the dynamic in all these standards groups? I'm not going to necessarily give HTML5 over to Google to define to its own Chrome standards. I imagine that some of the browser companies would feel the same.

And about those privacy concerns...exactly what kind of information is Google going to be collecting about us as we use the damn thing?

Frankly, I'm all for anything that weakens the abysmally tenacious hold IE6 and IE7 have on desktops, but I'm not sure yet another player in the field is what we need. Especially a player who, frankly, exhibits many of the same tendencies towards arrogance, as well as interest in complete dominance, as the company they supposedly "hate". I can understand Google's impatience with the other browser companies—but Google also has a tendency to act impulsively, and leave the rest of us to pick up the pieces.

As for web applications taking over the world, we're just now starting to hit against issues of broadband caps, not to mention the problems we've had with centralized services recently. Does Twitter ring a bell with you folks? How about Amazon's S3? GMail? In the last month, we've seen outages at a considerable number of centralized web services, and we haven't even started putting our critical operations into "the cloud".

Do you really want your business to hit a stand still because you've lost your internet connection, hit a broadband cap, or "the cloud" is not playing nicely at the moment? Seriously?

Look, yes. Get interested, yes. Peer around under the hood, and take it for a spin, most definitely yes. But get a grip--the web world as we know it hasn't suddenly come to an end just because Google has decided it wants to play the browser game, too.

---

Downloaded. Installed. Works fast. Chrome doesn't work on the Mac. Thanks to WebKit it does support XHTML and SVG. However, I've hit an odd rendering error for this page, which I don't get with my nightly WebKit download.

---

Matt Cutts did respond to privacy concerns about Chrome, though I wish he wouldn't categorize these concerns as being the paranoid ramblings of conspiracy theorists.

Printer friendly version

There's pile-ons, and then there's pile-ons. Just when the people who owned Techmeme tried to generate a controlled burst of activity related to Loren Feldman, Shel Israel, and some stupid puppet (actually covered by the Guardian as news, to the ever lasting embarrassment of the British), the real story was going on elsewhere, and not a hint of it anywhere to be seen. It was only when both Rafe and Seth posted on the recent BoingBoing/Violet Blue thing that I became aware of the latest fooflah.

BoingBoing no longer loves Violet Blue and has unpublished several posts related to her. Considering that Violet Blue seems, at least to me, to be a "BoingBoing" kind of gal— equal parts sex and narcissism—I was rather surprised to see such behavior from a "freedom" loving rag mag like BoingBoing. Surprised, but not so much that I would do more than read the Boing Boing post and then move on.

What stopped me and caught me long enough to read more and even comment here was what Teresa Nielsen Hayden wrote in the post at Boing Boing:

Bottom line is that those posts (not "more than 100 posts," as erroneously claimed elsewhere) were removed from public view a year ago. Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. It's our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn't attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There's a big difference between that and censorship.

(emph. mine)

I really dislike the all too frequence happenings of, "I know something awful about this person, but am above providing all the details", sort of smug self-satisfied innuendo, which serves not only to generate attention, in a carefully controlled way, but also to leave it to the reader's fevered imagination as to the heinous nature of the act committed to deserve such disapprobation. If you're going to condemn publicly do so explicitly, cleanly, so that the other party at least has a fighting chance to defend themselves. Not this air-kiss-slap that passes too often as honorable behavior in Silicon Valley.

behaved in a way... What did Violet, that bad girl, do? Did she sleep with an entire Catholic School boy's choir? Knowing BoingBoing, the crew would look on this with favor. Maybe she kicks kittens. She does wear spikey shoes...does she kick kittens?

Perhaps Violet Blue secretly voted for George Bush. That might be enough, but how would the BoingBoing crew find out, unless Violet Blue got drunk on lemon drops and spilled the beans.

However, I should have remembered who the parties involved are with this little contretemps. According to several comments, the issue could be related to the fact that Violet Blue had trademarked her name, and then sued a porn star for using it. Who Violet Blew, indeed.

Oh. My. God. The infamy of the act. If this is true, then of course what else could the Boing Boing crew do but wash the Blue dust from their hands and disavow all knowledge of Violet. After all, a person who sues to protect their name is only one step away from supporting the AP. Or worse...the RIAA.

Living in Missouri, where we don't understand these things, I have to think there is more to this than Violet Blue suing to protect her name. However, all we're left with is the words, hanging over all, the Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. Petty words that demonstrate that perhaps being unpublished by an organization like Boing Boing is an actual testament for your character, rather than against.

Two grown men fighting over a puppet, unpublished posts, and the quarrels of the rich and famous...and all we had for entertainment in Missouri this last week was a flood.

update

I would be remiss if I didn't point out one of the worthwhile comments made in the Israel/Feldman puppet fiasco. It was from a site called Hacking Cough, authored by Chris Edwards, who wrote:

Feldman called the puppet "more real": a classic bit of legerdemain. Israel was very real during the whole spat. He was angry. He was upset. He wanted to get even. Faced with what Feldman was doing to him, what would you want to do? Social media's advice: be real, be honest.

But nobody believed the advice. The sensible advice to Israel was to bottle it up, act nice. And that probably would have worked. Had Israel gritted his teeth and pretended that he really loved the puppet, he would probably have come out of the whole episode more famous and better off. In other words, ignore Naked Conversations: Be inauthentic. You can't blog or tweet your way out of a crisis any more than you can knit your way out of a burning building.

In other words, ignore Naked Conversations: be inauthentic. Very astute observation.

Printer friendly version

Some people are still "waiting" on the AP to deliver a definitive guide to what can or cannot be copied of the AP material without risk of a DMCA notice. We really don't need to wait, nor do we need anything from the AP. We have copyright laws in this country, and they include the concept of "fair use", which we can continue to use as guide for our own writing.

People do need to look at how they quote and use other's work. If you feel that your use is justified and covered under Fair Use provisions, than full speed ahead and damn the consequences. You may be served a DMCA; you may not. Receiving one is not a judgment, and you won't be pulled into jail. In fact, you don't even have to respond by pulling the material if you really feel you're on the side of the law.

I wouldn't necessarily expect that you would get legal help, though. This environment tends to favor the noisy and the known. If you're neither, chances are you'll be on your own if you get a DMCA. That doesn't mean you shouldn't feel free to quote others, or to use AP material. It just means that you have to accept the consequences of your actions when you publish online, and use other's material.

As for the AP's DMCA notices being supposedly based on title and lede/lead, alone, whereby the lede is the first few sentences of the story, I think we were misdirected into focusing on the content of each individual quote, rather than the context of all the quotes, combined.

AP licenses entire stories, but it also licenses a feed of AP news items reflecting just the title and lede of the story. You can see an example of licensed material at the Huffington Post. Notice that the copyrighted material in this context is not limited to an individual story, but to the grouping of titles and ledes for several different stories.

People have been making an assumption that the AP is upset that people are quoting one title, and one lede. We've ignored the hints given in relation to Drudge Retort that it was a pattern of posting, of quoting multiple titles and multiple ledes over time that ultimately resulted in the AP issuing the DMCA.

If we consider that the ledes are only 30 or 50 words, it seems unreasonable for the AP to resort to the DMCA. However, if something like the Drudge Retort duplicates 3, or 5, or more of these syndicated story titles and ledes, what the site is doing is actually "copying" what amounts to 10, 30, 30% or more of the AP copyrighted material— not a few words of an individual story, as first discussed.

If the AP charges a site like the Huffington Post to publish this syndicated set of titles/ledes at the site, and something like the Drudge Retort is duplicating a significant number from this set, using virtually the same titles and lede wording, without adding additional commentary, the Drudge Retort could very well be violating the AP's copyright, and doing so in such a way as to cause financial harm to the AP.

The issue really is, and the AP stressed this, copy and paste publication. If you copy and past the title and the lede, add no commentary, you're not adding value to what you're publishing. You're just duplicating the content. There's nothing wrong with pulling out an individual quote from a story you like and publishing it by itself. However, if your publication falls into a pattern that is very similar or even equivalent to an individual or group's copyrighted publication of the same, don't expect to get all huffy because you only publish a few words from each story.

We shouldn't extrapolate from the AP to something like delicious or the Planets (RDF, Drupal, Intertwingly, and others), because they're not the same. I don't know of anyone that licenses their syndication feed and would feel financial harm if this syndicated feed was republished with a group of others. The purpose of the Planets is to give exposure to individual publications/people who do not get exposure from being part of a major news source, like the AP. However, taking our syndicated feed and republishing it in its entirety at another site, which then runs ads that benefit the second site is a different story. In fact, if we decry the existence of "splogs" we should find ourselves on the side of the AP, if we're being intellectually honest.

Now, some would say that the AP really will go after us if we only publish one title and one lede. Please forgive if I doubt any such thing would happen. Commonsense would dictate this, if nothing else. And commonsense is what we should be using when it comes to copyright and fair use.

I'm really not defending the AP so much as I am disappointed at how quickly people are willing to pile-on when the right stereotypes are triggered. We see the AP, big company, the Drudge Retort, small publication, and we become effectively blind—to both reason and fairness. More disturbingly, we become ripe for manipulation from those who care little for the consequences of the event, as long as the attention keeps flowing. The AP can protect itself, but the same cannot be said of every target of the pile-on effect.

Printer friendly version

I have this insanely perverse urge not to download Firefox until Wednesday. To get up in the dead of night, tip-toe to my machine and hit the download button when the date is safely the 18th; cackling in glee at the thought that I, I, am the sole hold out--the traitor, the ingrate, the rebel.

What will happen, instead, is I'll forget about it and sometime later tonight when I'm online, reading or writing or both, the automate update wizard will pop up and tell me there's a new version of Firefox. I'll click the button for the upgrade, and probably won't think twice about it.

My moment of rebellion will have passed, immersed in other things.

Printer friendly version