writing

Will blog for cash (and even for free)

Actually I am sceptical to the idea of making money from blogging. In a previous post on the Blogburst I reported about the downsides of commercial feeds (they eat your broadband, usually you dont get more readers, and payment is virtually nil). Obviously there are the exceptions to the rule. In the same way as Madonna makes money from selling records is an exception from the thousands (hundreds of thousands?) who never will.

Dont get me wrong – I am not against money per se. I just dont believe that I will make money directly from my blog. Despite this, I found this news interesting.

Scoopt, the world’s first commercial citizen journalism photography agency, has just launched ScooptWords to help bloggers sell their content to newspapers and magazines. Within the Scoopt interface, you can easily add a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license to your blog right alongside a Scoopt commercial badge. Use the CC license to tell people how your work can be used non-commercially; use the ScooptWords badge to let editors know that your writing can be purchased for commercial use. There’s so much great blog content being created every day — it’ll be very exciting to see how it helps change the way newspapers and magazines are created.

(via Creative Commons)

The attempts to create commercial forms of citizen journalism are fascinating to watch. Again we see the new social uses of media threatening the established business models. Blogs will not kill print media but they will force print media news to adapt to a new reality.  As usual in situations such as these there will be commercial winners and losers.

Posted on by mklang

Writing Disruptive Technology

Finally done. I handed in my edited thesis to my supervisor today. The work spans 268 pages split up into 1769 paragraphs, 9953 lines. Which became 101 956 words. It includes 7 tables and 2 figures, not including the cartoon in the acknowledgements.

Since I have already survived two seminars on the work with revisions after each now my supervisor will read the work again and I will be able to make minor changes after his comments.

From the brilliant Jorge Cham – PhdComics

Then its summer – not a lot happens then. With any luck I will avoid reading my thesis. Just let it be until the begining of August. Then the work is off to the printers and upon its return a copy of the work is nailed to the university notice board along with information about the public defence which will be in September (one of the days: 25th, 26th or 27th still undecided…). If I pass & survive my defence then I am well and truely finished with this project.

The title of my thesis is “Disruptive Technology” and it has the subtitle “Effects of Technology Regulation on Democracy” if you want to read the latest version download it here.

Posted on by mklang

Starcups, Starbucks & Trademarks

While on a short coffee break from the exciting world of thesis writing I saw this sign on the coffee place next to the place where I was having coffee.

Starcups Coffee? Its amazing that Starbucks would let such a thing survive… There seems to be a site registered online but it keeps timing out. Thanks to google image search here is a better image of the Starcups logo and next to it the Starbucks logo.

So what do you think? Trademark infringement? Which is the copy and which is the original? If you know anything about this please comment. And if you happen to be in Göteborg on Plantagegatan then I can recommend Cafe con Leche next door to Starcups…

Posted on by mklang

thou shall not plagiarize

Tomorrow I am giving another of my “thou shall not plagiarize” lectures to masters students. While I like giving this lecture since it gives an opportunity to get discussions going on the limitations between using other peoples work and stealing – I am sometimes concerned that the lecture may instead turn into “thou shall not get caught”

OK so I understand that the students don’t want to get caught , they are nervous and unsure about where the borders go. But there is still a nasty undercurrent of howto copy without getting caught in the questions many students ask.

Its very similar to the students who are very concerned about the number of pages an assignment must be without understanding the reason for this number or that the reader actually want content on the pages.

So the day begins with explaining plagiarism, references, writing etiquette and legal positions. Then after a short lunchbreak its off to grade two final essays…

TGIF.

Posted on by mklang

For the bibliography

After procrastinating and reading them online for the better part of a year I bought them. They have now arrived:

 

Jorge Cham’s brilliant comic strip about PhD studies have been collected in the two albums “Piled Higher and Deeper: A graduate student comic strip collection” and “Piled Higher and Deeper Chapter 2: Life is tough and then you graduate” They are an absolute necessary part of the required reading for PhD students (or those considering the path). With great sections like “What is…the thesis?“, “Grad Motivation Graphs“, “Newton’s Three Laws of Graduation” and “Writing” the strip captures what writing a dissertation can be like.

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Inside-out

The sun is shining and there is a cool (almost cold) wind. Today is the day for Göteborgsvarvet which is a half-marathon race around Göteborg. It began at 3pm and now I could hear the crowds cheering the first runners pass by the office
where I am sitting, shades pulled down writing about the legal position of technical standards in Sweden. I think I would prefer to be running…

Maybe not. I know I would prefer to be outside sitting at a cafe watching the runners…

Posted on by mklang

The Covers

So which cover do you prefer? To vote just add a comment.

Background: When I came close to the end of writing my PhD thesis I began to think about the cover design for the book. Realising I needed help I blogged this on 12/4. In addition I mailed a few people. The information appeared (amongst other places) on Boing Boing, Lessig, Foreword, Patrik’s sprawl, Perfekta Tomrummet, Free the Mind and Cyberlaw.

Here are the results

Entry 1

Entry 2

Entry 3

Entry 4

Entry 5

Entry 6

Entry 7

Entry 8

Entry 9

Entry 10

Entry 11

Entry 12

Entry 13

Entry 14

Entry 15

Entry 16

Posted on by mklang

bye bye blogburst

This news (below) gives me the push I needed to quit blogburst. The idea of syndication in this way interested me in that it might increase my readership but it annoyed me as it made me think about my readers. In other words the question of what my readers would think occurred to me. I did not change the content of my work in any way. But the appearance of the question in my mind was enough to annoy me.

A writer wants to be read. This is the reason I signed up to the blogburst service. This may have been a bad idea. Posts from Living the Scientific Life and Bitch Ph.D. present some valid arguments for not joining such syndication services.

The blogburst license states that bloggers who sign up agree to:

… a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to reproduce, distribute, make derivative works of, perform, display, disclose, and otherwise dispose of the Work (and derivative works thereof) for the purposes ofâ?¦

When I read this I first thought that this could not be wrong. My thinking was that increasing the reach of my writing would be a good thing. But as Bitch Ph.D. explains this is flawed thinking in a couple of ways.

First: If material is published somewhere through blogburst it is very unlikely that the eventual reader will click through to my blog. Therefore I add to the value of someone elseâ??s work without increasing the popularity of my own.

Second: Since the pictures remain on my local server the popularity of my work somewhere else means that my bandwidth is supporting this popularity. Economically this does not effect me too much as blog on the university resources but the principle is that I pay in work and technology and do not get much (or anything in return).

Posted on by mklang

Law & Internet Cultures

I reviewed Kathy Bowrey’s Law & Internet Cultures, Cambridge University Press for Web Journal of Current Legal Issues. Bowrey’s book is a very good piece of research and writing. Here is the punchline of my review:

This is not a book for someone looking for a quick answer or a legal ruling. It is not a howto book. It is a book for large groups of academics, activists, businessmen, lobbyists politicians and technologists who want to understand more about how the Internet as a sociotechnical system works. It is a book for anyone who wants to think and discuss the role of the Internet in society today.

Once again we see an example of how Australian legal authors are rising to the challenge to define Internet culture and legislation. The view from the antipodes is not particularly different or odd so as to be outside the interest of Internet scholars but rather refreshing, like familiar stories told with a different flavour. Even those who have heard them before will take something new with them from reading this book. ([2006] 2 Web JCLI).

In other words. Buy it or borrow it – its a great read. For more on Bowrey’s research take a look at her web site: Chickenfish.cc/copy.

Posted on by mklang

Define disaster?

What is a disaster and how does it compare to a catastrophe or a tragedy? A few months ago I began thinking about this. I wanted to use this as part of a future lecture on the effects of technology (and probably an advanced form of procrastination). The basic idea is that most of us have short memories. We trust technology implicitly and we see the failure of technology as a brief, unfortunate anomaly.

While writing about the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident these thoughts came back and I began to dig for a suitable list of man-made disasters. The man-made is an easy criterion since all technology is man-made (this is a specie-ist argument where I am brutally discounting tools made by animals and aliens). But what other criteria should be involved when attempting to demonstrate the failures of technology and their connection to trust?

  • War is a disaster but it is for the most part intentional.
  • The slow erosion of the ozone layer may be a disaster but â?? do we include it?
  • How does one differentiate between extinction and natural selection in relation to the disaster?
  • What about â??naturalâ?? disasters which have been triggered or aggravated by technology?

Therefore for the purpose of a lecture on trust in technology events can have disastrous consequences without being disasters.

Feel free to add comments on this! To be continuedâ?¦

Posted on by mklang