This is the second, more detailed part of the readings, studies, lessons, articles and essays I have found online about the theory and analysis of the web. The first part was relatively small, I admit, but I hope this list will keep you reading for some time.

Copyright and the Commons

Free Culture [Lawrence Lessig] : A discussion on the current laws of copyright and their implication to innovation and exchange of ideas.

Free for All [Peter Wayner] : An introduction the cyberculture of linux and its results in free software development.

The Right to Read [Richard M. Stallman] : A political, ideological essay on SPA (Software Publisher’s Association).

Hacker Crackdown [Bruce Sterling] : The history of hacker subculture during the 1990s. Cory Doctorow made an audiobook of it, which I edited for better listening. You can download it here [torrent].

The wealth of Networks: How social production transforms market and Freedom [Yochai Benkler] : A look at the economical aspects of networks, property and the commons.

Communications Infrastructure Regulation and the Distribution of Control Over Content [Yochai Benkler] : With the argument, that current infrastructures of communication and distribution have a negative impact on individual autonomy and public, Benkler suggests a new model.

For more texts of Yochai Benkler, visit his homepage benkler.org.

Open University Seminars

Network security lesson : A Master’s level lesson on networks. How they function and therefore how can they be protected.

Information on the Web : An introductory lesson, teaching tactics to find what you are looking for online. As I said, introductory.

Sociological studies of virtual worlds

My tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World [Julian Dibbell] : A sort of ethnographic study on the social life of the LambdaMoo virtual world, which thrived in the early 1990s. If you have read Sherry Turkle’s “Life on the Screen“, you get the picture.

The Online World [Odd de Presno] : The structure of the online world and how to take advantage of your time and effort in it. Pretty basic.

Network Theory & Social Networks

Scale Free Networks [Albert Laszlo Barabasi] : A very good essay to understand the basics of scale free networks and how the internet is interconnected.

Taming Complexity [Albert Laszlo Barabasi] : Like “Scale Free Networks”, an introductory approach to the subject.

The physics of the Web [Albert Laszlo Barabasi] : The structure and dynamics of the Internet.

These three essays of Barabasi can give a very good overview of the way the web is connected, the role of hubs, the importance of linkage, etc. I really like his work and I definetely suggest his book “Linked” on the same thematology [not free to download].

That sneaky exponential [David Reed] : Why participation in social networks counts. The next step after Metcalfe’s Law is Reed’s Law. Very insightful and very good argumented.

The augmented social Network: building identity and trust into the next-generation internet [Ken Jordan, Jan Hauser, Steven Forster] : The six degrees of seperation seem just too many. “This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complementary capabilities across social networks.”

Virtual Interactive Communication: A bicultural Surve [Dave Ambrose] : A theoretical study on Web 2.0 and social networks such as Facebook.

Attention economy of the Web

Propaganda [Edward Bernays] : To understand how attentiveness of the collective mind works, the strategies of propaganda are certainly the foundations.

The economy of attention [Georg Franck] : A very good essay on the attention economy, from an expert of the subject.

Attention and Participation in the social Web [Jiannis Sotiropoulos] : Narcissistically enough, this is my master thesis on the attention economy of the social web. Network theory, sociology, mass psychology and emergent behavior are used in this study. I always welcome your feedback. The thesis is also in wiki format.

Software vs. Hardware

There is no software [Friedrich Kittler] : A complex, but very interesting point of view, why there are no software but only hardware.

On the implementation of Knowledge - towards a theory of hardware [Friedrich Kittler] : Once again why the relationship between hardware and software remain a paradox.
More works of Friedrich Kittler. His writings are very theoretical and provocative, but always interesting to read. Some texts are in German.

We are all aware with Creative Commons. Flickr photos are under CC licences, web designs are licensed, blog posts have some rights reserved and even some wikis have licenses on them. Purpose of Creative Commons is to promote sharing of information and substitute the restrictions of current copyright laws.

Creators have several good reasons to publish their work under a Creative Commons license, but there are some negative implications of Creative Commons, that we don’t observe at first sight.

From new technologies emerge new restrictions

When new technologies emerge, new ways of protecting our work come long.

Before Copyright.
Marshall McLuhan said about copyright laws that

the invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public - a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. (from the medium is the massage).

Copyright.
So, before the absolute expansion of the Web, there was copyright. For an artist to put his/her work out to the public wasn’t as easy as it is today. There were no computers to produce cheap, quality work; there was no Web with its wide public.
Artists needed someone who would finance the whole production process. And even when they did find someone and although “all rights reserved” applied the moment a work was created, sometimes artist didn’t really care. The purpose wasn’t to protect their intellectual property, the purpose was artistic expression. So copyright protected the ones caring and run obsolete in any other case.

Creative Commons.
The explosion of the Web changed the scene. Production and publication were very easy and very fast. So was copying and distributing. Awareness of self-expression rose. Every producer - regardless what he/she produced - wanted to protect his work. This needed to be done in an obvious (the web is huge) and fast (the works produced are numerous) way. So Creative Commons emerged.

According to wikipedia’s description

Creative commons is a non-profit organization, which provides several free licenses for the owners to use when releasing their work on the Web.

The value of Creative Commons

• Free flow of information; It is true, that the minute you create a work, it is immediately copyrighted with an “all rights reserved” license. This means, that you are the sole owner controlling who may copy, adapt, redistribute, publish etc.
  Since this perspective can be very restrictive to sharing and providing information, Creative Commons comes as a new parameter, promoting innovation and free flow of information.Creative Commons, under that perspective, combines a moral with a legal objective (although it has been argued, that the moral objective of Creative Commons is of lesser priority - at least in comparison to the Free Software Movement).

• Choice; Creative Commons provides a wide variety of licenses. There are 4 major licenses, which can be mixed, producing 16 possible combinations.

• Ease of use; Licensing your work in Creative Commons is easy. Very easy. In one step you choose your license and in the next your work has “some rights reserved”.

Criticism on Creative Commons

Over time, Creative Commons has been considerably criticized.

• It has been argued, that the legal code of the CC licenses has additional information, that people don’t read - they stick only to the Commons Deed.
• There are still several misconceptions about Creative Commons and licensing in general.
• It has even been argumented, that Creative Commons is completely pointless - although I would not go that far.

The public’s sense of ownership

For me the value of Creative Commons is undisputable. The public is too vast and the need for the protection of intellectual property is very important. Creative Commons gave developers the option to keep their work more open, than traditional, standard copyright laws do.

But the ease of use and the wide popularity of Creative Commons has also increased the awareness of the our sense of ownership. Suddenly, everything we produce - may it be a funny 5minute sketch, a blog post, a program or a whole book - is subjected to licensing.
Why do we put everything under a Creative Commons license?

• Maybe we believe, that our work might some day achieve a great financial value and we don’t want to miss the opportunity.
• Or we believe, that the web is full of malevolent individuals wanting to take advantage of our work and republish and their own identity.

I don’t want to argument why or why not one should put his/her work under a license, this is a personal decision. But just let me point out, that

• giving something for free does not necessarily mean not having any gain
• if the web were full of copyists and thieves, it probably wouldn’t be that successful.

I am not putting my work under any license, firstly because I don’t mind if someone copies my content. Secondly, I have a lot to gain from the online community and maybe that’s my way of giving something back.

After all if we only take and don’t give something back we will end up exhausting the free resources as Garrett Hardin’s theory of “the tragedy of the Commons” explains.

Do you have your work under a Creative Commons License? Why or why not? I’m really interested in your opinions.

An interesting discussion started yesterday, if digg (and all similar networks) is a user generated content site.
Allen Stern argues, that

With Digg, you find a good piece of content, and then submit a link to that story on Digg. That’s it. The Digg submitter submits 250 characters to describe the story but 97.85% of the time, the submitter is pulling the description from your story.

Therefore the content of the submission is actually a link (disregarding the short description). If we compare Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit with Youtube and Wikipedia, User Generated Content has a completely different meaning.
So Allen considers digg a UGC aggregator.

On the other hand Josh Catone, relies on Wikipedia’s definition of UGC to say that:

Stern’s objection to Digg being a user generated content site seems to focus around the word “content” — as Stern argues, much of the submitted content is unorginal. But the comments on Digg, no matter how useless some might find them, are original media content provided by the users for publication on Digg — which is enough to fit the Wikipedia definition, at least (and this is why we might say the comments section on any media site are an example of user generated content).

Surely YouTube and Wikipedia are traditional UGC sites, but Digg is also one. At least it is “…a user something site”.

The eye of the beholder

Most of the comments in both posts agree with A. Stern, that Digg is not a UGC site. As I remarked in Stern’s post, I believe, that the definition is in the eyes of the beholder.

• You can say that the content OF Digg is generated by its users. Which is true. Everything you see on the digg site is uploaded by users. So it is a UGC site.

• But you can also say that the content ON Digg is actually the links pointing to the actual source. Which is also true. You cannot judge a post just by the short description on digg, you need to go to the actual source. So it is not a UGC site.

Emerging subjects

1. Semantics: as Sean Tierney and Tim Marman commented, the debate is based on the fine term of content. A similar debate could be started about blogging. If you have a link-blog (comments enabled and all the blog stuff), is your content generated by you, the user?
2. Hypertext: Roland Barthes has argued (and that in the late 60s), that “the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.“ Which means, that the reader is the one who will actually combine all the hyperlinks/citations used in a text in order to comprehend the text as a whole. Content is all the links/references used in a text. Under that perspective, maybe digg is indeed a UGC site. The hyperlinked nature of the web constitutes almost every writting, user generated. You just have to follow the links.

Update 23.01.2008:

My question is: if digg is not a user generated site, why does google link to its content?

While some academic circles do not agree with the tactic of internet research, the Internation Journal of Internet Research Ethics has elevated it into a study. It was a logical step to be made since,

with the emergence of Internet use as a research locale and tool throughout the 1990s, researchers from disparate disciplines, ranging from the social sciences to humanities to the sciences, have found a new fertile ground for research opportunities that differ greatly from their traditional biomedical counterparts. As such, “populations,” locales, and spaces that had no corresponding physical environment became a focal point, or site of research activity.

But don’t be intimidated; it’s not a philosophical approach of the matters. The IJIRE doesn’t publish only theoretical, but also practical articles, where case studies of online research are embraced.
The Journal covers a broad variety of questions, which rise out of the practice of internet research:

How is informed consent obtained? Is this really human subjects work? How do diverse methodological approaches result in distinctive ethical conflicts – and, possibly, distinctive ethical resolutions? What about privacy? How do researchers collaborating across diverse ethical and legal domains recognize and resolve ethical issues in ways that recognize and incorporate often markedly different ethical understandings? What about research on minors?

The constant transformation of the web along with the emergence of social networks provide constructive ground for analysis in the fields of privacy, ownership, legal issues, authorial ethics and anonymity.

Some of the subjects discussed in this semesters’ issue are:

• Ethical Approaches to Robotic Data Gathering in Academic Research

• Data as Representation: Beyond Anonymity in e-Research Ethics

• Creating a Web of Attribution in the Feminist Blogosphere

The journal is free to download and open to submissions.

Forgive me for using the Pownce buzz to get attention to this post, but I think IJIRE is really worth it.

Micha, thanks for the link!

Blogging has enabled every John, Dick and Mary (I’m a John by the way) to write his/her personal thoughts, ideas or ambitions. Depending on the quality of the material some blogs get more readers, while others are lost in the sea.
There are many ways to improve the traffic of your blog, but in the end it always comes down to quality content. But quality content implies only the body of the text; how it is formulated, expressed, written.
What most of us usually forget to take into consideration is, that the structure of the content is also a fundamental key of the content itself.

3 Sad facts about web-content and how to overcome them

1. Sad Fact:
web-readers don’t actually read your content (sorry, but it’s true), they scan it. Many eyetracking researches have been conducted and all of them conclude, that online people scan the text by following an F-pattern. This means headline and sidebar get the most attention on a site.
Solution:
Chunking. A chunk may be a small paragraph, a bulleted list, a graphic, anything that will act as a landmark.

2. Sad Fact:
you may think of it as text, but it’s really hypertext. This means, that your text is from definition non-linear. Readers may click a link in the middle of your text and stop reading it.
Solution:
Coherence; each chunk of your text should make sense on its own.

3. Sad Fact:
chunking may bring attention to the text itself, and not to its subject. Images, banners, ads are ignored by the readers. Actually, they do not only ignore the graphics, they ignore the content all together.
Solution:
Use graphics, boldface, capitals, etc sparingly. Choose wisely, which part of the text you want to emphasize. Don’t emphasize the whole body!

Start a Meme

Can you imagine the difference between web-structured text and print text?

My first post ever was about social representations. A more or less scientifical approach on the subject; absolutely impossible for web-content. Today I edited the post and made it more web-friendly (as far as it was possible). So if you want to see the difference check out my very first post.

The readability and consequently the traffic of your blog will increase drastically, if you just pay attention to the structure of your posts.
To test this, find an old post of yours, which you think it could improve. Do the improvements you think necessary, without deleting your original post and trackback to this post here. I’ll make a list of all the posts, which improved their readability.

Additional Resources on the subject

• the writings of usability guru Jakob Nielsen.

• Imnakoya brings some interesting observation on the subject.

• Writing for effective web pages is aa post with some insightful points. (although I disagree with a couple of them).

• I have also written a short essay on the subject, which you can download here (pdf).
• and a site to check the readability of your  content

Corry Doctorow, published a couple of days ago a series of podcasts, where he narrates Bruce Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown. He writes:

Since last June, I’ve been podcasting a weekly reading from Bruce Sterling’s 1992 classic journalistic history of the founding of the online civil liberties movement, The Hacker Crackdown, which chronicles the events that led to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer. Hacker Crackdown was the first book I ever read electronically, the first piece of “literary freeware” I ever met. It’s a fantastic book and it was a fantastic read.

If you want to download each podcast seperately (with the comments of Corry at the beginning), you can do it at ‘Podcast of Bruce Sterling’s HACKER CRACKDOWN has concluded‘.

I took the liberty to download them all and edit them, removing the introductory talk of Corry. After Sensoz’s proposal, I have put the whole mp3 file in a public torrent so that everyone can download it.

You can download the edited version here.

I haven’t listened to the whole book until now, but it is surely a great read (listen). I must say, though, that Corry’s comments are sometimes also worth listening.

I read an interesting post from Andy Chiles about a ‘lecturer banning students from using google and wikipedia“.

Anyone who has been a student in the wiki age, knows that citing wikipedia (or any non-authoritative work) is a tabu.

Professor Tara Brabazon, after noticing that student research mostly relies on the first results in a search query, said:

Too many students don’t use their own brains enough. We need to bring back the important values of research and analysis.

Additionally, the professor commented:

I want students to sit down and read. It’s not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels. Both are fine but I want them to have both, not one or the other, not a cheap solution.

I find it to be a very interesting subject, for two reasons:

• The lecturer supports that the students do not practice their interpretative skills, when citing the results of search engines. So what students do is just reconstruct the online sources. But couldn’t they do the same with analog books?

• The lecture doesn’t say anything about the trustworthiness of the sources. After the debate raised by the new Google Knol platform, I’m really curious if authoritative articles are also banned, or is it just collaborative works that are considered superficial.

But all in all, i find her remarks correct.

• She bans digital information, so that the students will also learn the analog process.

I want students to sit down and read. It’s not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels. Both are fine but I want them to have both, not one or the other, not a cheap solution.

It is a process, that I find necessary in any type of research. It just widens the field of research and opinions.

• Using only websites and search engine results as a reference to a work, will probably provide an incomplete view of a subject.
  It is also a method, that most students are very well accustomed to. It’s time to try something new.

But I disagree with the view, that digitisation is to blame for students not using their brain anymore. If indeed students don’t use their brain, the problem is bad use of digitisation. The web provides a huge variety of resources and discussions. In fact the (social) web is a much more interactive medium than any book. If interaction is used correctly, it has the potential to provide better results than any single book.

Do you find the professor’s methodology of banning online resources productive? Should students be allowed to use online information?