Michael Skube, a professor of journalism, writes a column bewailing the low quality of reporting in the blogosphere:
Bloggers now are everywhere among us, and no one asks if we don’t need more full-throated advocacy on the Internet. The blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined.
And to think most bloggers are doing all this on the side. “No man but a blockhead,” the stubbornly sensible Samuel Johnson said, “ever wrote but for money.” Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers — Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post — are insistent partisans in political debate. Some reject the label “journalist,” associating it with what they contemptuously call MSM (mainstream media); just as many, if not more, consider themselves a new kind of “citizen journalist” dedicated to broader democratization.
Marshall, who’s got a whole site devoted to investigative reporting, emailed Skube and learned that Skube doesn’t actually read Marshall’s blog. Apparently, an editor suggesting added Marshall’s name, and Skube agreed without bothering to learn much of anything about Marshall or his site. And Matt points out that neither he nor Sullivan are blogging “for free.”
Which makes this awfully rich:
Such a story demanded time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance. It’s not something one does as a hobby. The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life.
We could definitely use some of that. I’m looking forward to the LA Times op-ed about how the mainstream bloviating business is inadequate because it can’t match the blogosphere’s rigorous peer-review process.
Hat tip: Yglesias
Over at Open Market, Brad Walters has a great post on libertarian communalism:
there are those who accuse libertarians of hating community and society. But families are the essence of communalism. They are often authoritarian and communistic, yet libertarians love their families as much as anyone else. Likewise, I had a great time this weekend, and had no problem ceding some authority to my friend (the owner of the house) and to the collective.
The distinction between classical liberals and contemporary liberals does not center on disdaining or appreciating communalism. Any sane person recognizes that there are benefits to association. It’s a question of scale and it’s a question of voluntary versus compulsory association. The State is horrible at the idea of community because a) the association is involuntary, and b) the scale is far too massive for the personal connection inherent in smaller groups, like families and travel buddies.
In June I argued that free software is one example of the sort of voluntary communalism Walters identifies here.
As is typical, Julian makes a point I’ve been trying to make for a while, only it sounds a lot more eloquent when he says it. In reply to Brian Doherty’s argument that those who decry commercialism while using the products of capitalism are somehow hypocritical, Julian says:
Certainly very few Burners would last a week in the Nevada desert without many of the products of commerce, but it just doesn’t follow that the desire for a temporary commercial-free zone is therefore somehow hypocritical or steeped in “performative contradiction.” It is perfectly coherent to be a thoroughgoing free-marketeer, to appreciate how deftly the price system harnessed the self-love of thousands of individuals, from lumberjacks and miners to carpenters and plumbers, in order to produce your local church—and yet still prefer that Starbucks refrain from opening up shop in the narthex. Having bought prophylactics at the corner deli in the evening does not forbid you from taking umbrage if your lover leaves a fifty on the nightstand the following morning. The most ardent capitalist will want a few spaces where she can feel confident that her neighbor’s friendliness is not the opening gambit in a pitch to sell her a T-shirt, even if she was happy to buy the one she’s wearing. We are entitled to happily engage the butcher, the brewer, and the baker on the basis of our respective self-loves while hoping for a little benevolence from our brothers, our bowling buddies, and our Burners.
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Today, the Well Connected Project of the Center for Public Integrity is excited to launch an issue portal jointly with Congresspedia. This issue portal is a wiki, like Wikipedia, creating a collection of articles on telecom, media and technology policy, in a single location. Anyone can read, write and edit these articles.
This issue portal builds on the great telecom and technology reporting done by the members of the Well Connected Project staff. This venture into collaborative journalism is a first for our project. It adds a new element to our investigative journalism endeavor. First of all, we have the Media Tracker, a free database of more than five million records that tells you who owns the media where you live by typing in you ZIP code. If we win our lawsuit against the FCC, we’ll also include company-specific broadband information in the Media Tracker.
Second, our blog features dozens of quick-turnaround stories on the hottest topics in telecom and media policy. Recent stories have broken news on the battle over 700 Megahertz, on the lobbying over the proposed XM-Sirius satellite radio merger, and also over copyright controls on electronic devices. We also do investigative reports – like this one about Sam Zell, the new owner of Tribune Co. – that build on the data that is freely available in Media Tracker.
Now, with the addition of this Congresspedia wiki, our project aims to incorporate citizen-journalism on key public policy issues near and dear to the blogosphere. These are issues like Broadband availability, Digital copyright, Digital television, Regulating media content, and Spectrum are at the core of what techies care about in Washington. We hope you will add others articles, too. In fact, I’ve already started my own wish list: articles about Patent overhaul legislation, Media ownership, the Universal Service Fund, and Video franchising. Our reporters can summarize these issues and debates, but so can you.
Take a crack at them!
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Every once in a while I connect with my inner geek and read through Slashdot. I often see some interesting arguments by people that understand technical issues. However, this comment, made in response to news that Apple purchased the rights to the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), provoked me:
The real lesson here is that the idea that the developers should pool their copyrights into one person is flawed. That person can then cash out. The get all the profits for everyone else’s work. The other developers lose out on both getting a piece of the pie if they would have wanted that, and they lose out in the moral sense in that if they didn’t want their code to suddenly become part of a closed source project, they have no say in it anymore.
It seems to me that nothing wrong occurred when Apple purchased this code. CUPS, which is used for printing by many Linux distributions and in the Mac OS X, was an open source project created by Michael Sweet. Sweet presumably owned the copyright to the code, so the code was legally his to sell. Sweet should be rewarded for his labor — throw him a buck or two in the tip cup!
But wait…what about the other developers that contributed code to CUPS? Or — forget the tip cup, did Sweet profit from the entire give-a-penny, take-a-penny tray? Have no fear, as CUPS will continue to be an open-source project under a GPL2/LGPL2 license. So there’s no downside and no moral turpitude — developers that chose to contribute code will still see that code available as free software, and can take and add to it as they wish.
What seems to burn the Slashdot commenter is the fact that there’s an upside. Someone actually made money! It’s a shame that when a technology creator/owner like Sweet gets his reward, and doesn’t infringe on the rights of others to do so, he still draws fire. Oh well, in a world where people often materialistically prize money above all, there are also those who wrongly lust over other people’s money.
Via Luis, I don’t know if there’s a specific policy angle, but this talk by Eben Moglen at Google is interesting:
The really interesting thing about this talk, from my perspective, is that it illustrates the extent to which the free software community is driven by informal norms and the power of reputation. Moglen’s basic argument is that Google’s image in the free software community is important to its long-term success as a company, and that it is therefore in Google’s self-interest to voluntarily give back code over and above what the GPL requires as a way to build social capital.
I’m not sure if this argument is right, but if it is, I think it suggests why the hand-wringing over the specific terms of GPL v3 are probably overblown. The GPL is as much a social contract as a legal document. Going to court is an important backstop for its terms, but the primary enforcement mechanism are pressures from the hacker community. This is why hackers cared so much about making an example of Novell when it signed the patent agreement with Microsoft: they want to make sure that companies that violate the spirit of the GPL pay a high price. When the primary enforcement mechanisms are social rather than legal, the exact legal terms aren’t that important: if you behave in a way that’s contrary to the spirit of the GPL, you’ll have the same problems Novell did, regardless of what the letter of the license says.
By the same token, it is likely to be in Google’s interest to give non-essential code back to the free software community even though the GPL doesn’t specifically require them to as a way of building the social capital within the free software community. As the free software community grows, the exact terms of free software licenses may become less and less important as a robust set of social norms emerge that pressure companies far more effectively than a legal document possibly could.
Tim’s latest TechKnowledge article explains why why libertarians should celebrate free software, and cautions that we shouldn’t let lefty-sounding ideals about “community” negatively cloud our perception of the GPL and free and open source software. He’s right, even if knee-jerk reactions may be otherwise – but allow me to expand the discussion. What happens when government celebrates free software, such that voluntary cooperation becomes co-opted by public policy?
Libertarians who embrace free software will (or should!) be against government programs favoring it. However, when some free software proponents adopt rhetoric calling government to their cause, it’s not enough (unfortunately) to just make the libertarian case against regulatory intervention. We must also make the deep-dive into analyzing the merits of pro-intervention platitudes.
A discussion on the merits may well require determining whether free software really does offer certain advantages, or if the new version of the dominant license governing free and open source software — the GPL — may have legal or administerability problems with its upcoming version 3.
Analyzing free software in order to debunk advocacy in favor of government preferences for free software could be seen as being against free software itself. But it’s not necessarily so, and it wasn’t meant to be the case when my colleagues at ACT and I took a deep-dive analysis into a report chock full o’ interventionist advocacy.
A European Commission report calls for a new industrial policy to ignite report advocated government programs (a la Airbus) based on free and open source software. ACT analyzed the report with a series of blog posts reviewing each section. We found that the report’s analysis favoring Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) wasn’t adequately supported by the data. Moreover, by advocating interventionist public policies the report’s recommendations may harm, not help, Europe’s overall ICT sector. We did this not to attack FLOSS per se, but to oppose interventionist policies on behalf of FLOSS.
The report makes no attempt to disguise its purpose: convince European policymakers to favor FLOSS in their procurement decisions and other programs. Section 9 of the study—Trends, Scenarios and Public Policy Strategies—suggests a number of public policy programs to promote FLOSS, some interesting but all interventionist:
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In the latest issue of TechKnowledge, I explain why free software should give libertarians a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.
And over at Ars, I analyze Google’s network neutrality position and argue that Congress should take a wait-and-see posture on the issue.
I was afraid the latter column would get a hostile reaction from the Ars readership, but the response at the Ars forums has been fairly positive.
Tom Lee suggests that I’m over-stating my case with regard to the innovativeness of free software:
But I don’t think this lack of originality is due to any inherent flaw in open-source contributors or the organizational model they employ. I think it’s simply a question of capital — open source projects typically haven’t got any. The vast majority of applications benefit from network effects that arise when their userbase becomes large enough: suddenly it’s easier to find someone to play against online, or the documentation is better, or you can exchange files in the same format that your friend uses. It’s relatively easy for open-source projects to achieve the necessary level of market interest when dealing with highly technical users and applications, as Tim’s examples demonstrate — there are accepted techniques (e.g. the RFC process, making frequent commits to the project) and media outlets (e.g. listservs, usenet) that can confer legitimacy and generate interest without an investment.
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Here’s the other specific criticism of peer production you’ll find in Carr’s critique of peer production:
But for all its breadth and popularity, Wikipedia is a deeply flawed product. Individual articles are often poorly written and badly organized, and the encyclopedia as a whole is unbalanced, skewed toward popular culture and fads. It’s hardly elitist to point out that something’s wrong with an encyclopedia when its entry on the Flintstones is twice as long as its entry on Homer.
Carr doesn’t even have the basic facts right here. To start with, the Flintstones entry, at some 5672 words, is actually only about 50 percent longer than the Homer entry, with around 3822 words. But more to the point, the entry on homer includes links to entries on the Homeric Question (1577 words), Ancient accounts of Homer (1183 words), Homeric scholarship (4799 words), Homeric Greek (582 words), and The Historicity of the Illiad (1720 words). If my math is right, that’s 13,683 words, more than double the number of words in the Flintstone’s article. (The Flintstone’s article doesn’t appear to be divided up into sub-sections as the Homer article is, although there are entries on Flintstones-related topics, such as the characters in the show and the actors who played them. But on the other hand, there are also lengthy entries on The Iliad, The Odyssey, The geography of the Odyssey, and The Trojan War.
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