Books Category Archive
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February 16, 2008

DAEMON

18:19 UTC » Books - Games - Network Technology

A few weeks ago, Stewart Brand emailed me asked if I was still playing World of Warcraft and if I had read DAEMON. I was still playing World of Warcraft and hadn't read DAEMON. A few days later, thanks to Amazon, I was reading DAEMON.

Years ago, I remember thinking about Multi User Dungeons (MUDs) and how much they affected people in the real world. I knew people who were obsessed with MUDs, the first Multi-User Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). I was obsessed. (I think the first time I ever appeared in Wired was in 1993 when Howard Rheingold with Kevin Kelly wrote about MUDs and mentioned my obsession.) In MUDs, people got married, people got divorced, people lost their jobs, people shared ideas... The MUDs I played touched the real world through all of the people in the game.

Unlike the World of Warcraft and more like Second Life, MUDs allowed players to create rooms, monsters and objects. When you entered a MUD, it was like entering the collective intelligence of all of the people who played the game. There were quests that were designed by people using their knowledge of Real Life™. Playing in their worlds was like walking through their brains. These worlds merged and collided as people from everywhere collaborated in creating MUDs of various themes with various objectives.

At some point in the evolution of MMORPGs, MUDs forked and we ended up with most of the people who liked creating objects and worlds in places like Second Life where, while you CAN make games, most of what happens is world creation. The "gamers" ended up in games like World of Warcraft where the game play aspect has been honed to a fine art, but the player content creation aspect has been completely lost. (Although most of the developers are former obsessive players.)

What I envisioned back when I was playing and hacking MUDs more was that if you turned the world a bit inside out and imagined that YOU were the MUD, the people who played your game were like little pawns or interfaces for you in the real world. They inputted content and created worlds and taught you about the real world. They promoted you to their friends. They played obsessively increasing experience points and commitment to the game so that they would forever feed you and keep you alive. They would set up servers and pay for hosting just to feed their obsession and protect their investment. If you became extremely popular, a group of your players would spawn a new MUD with your DNA-code and there would be another one of you.

The hardcore players would hack your open source code and keep you evolving. The Wizards would educate and add character to each instance of your code. The players would be your footprint in Real Life™.

When most of the gamers moved to corporation owned closed source games designed by a team of developers, I stopped having this dream. The games were no longer "alive" in the same way I had envisioned them evolving.

After reading DAEMON, this dream is back. Leinad Zeraus depicts a world where a collosall computer daemon designed by a genius MMO designer begins to take over the world after his death. In many ways, the vision is similar to the vision I had, but the author adds a macabre twist and many many more orders of scale to make this one of the most inspiring books I've read in a long time. The author is "an independent systems consultant to Fortune 100 companies. He has designed enterprise software for the defense, finance and entertainment industries." He uses his experience to make the book extremely believable and realistic and still mind-blowing.

It was super fun to read and is a book I'd recommend to any who loves the Net and gaming. I'd also recommend it to anyone who doesn't. It's a great book to learn about the importance of understanding all of this - before it's too late.

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January 26, 2008

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother

08:56 UTC » Books

When I was in London, Cory gave me a copy of his new book Little Brother. I read it mostly on the plane and while traveling through London, Hong Kong, Macao and Tokyo airport security. The book is about a future where there is a terrorist attack on San Francisco and DHS in the US gets overzealous and starts abusing their power. The hero of the story is a teenage hacker who decides to declare war on the DHS and take back his civil liberties.

It's a great story about teenagers, net culture, security, activism and politics and was a lot of fun to read. It references a lot of real-life stuff like XBox hacks and ARGs and is classic Cory.

Anyway, it should be coming out soon and I would recommend it to people who like that kind of stuff as well as recommend recommending it to people who still think that fighting terrorism the way we currently are makes any sense at all.

It's also pretty good timing considering the upcoming election in case there is any doubt on which way Americans should vote on security vs civil rights issue.

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April 2, 2007

The Future of Web 2.0 - The Sharing Economy

13:29 UTC » Books - Creative Commons

Web20Mirai Cover-1
Impress, a Japanese publisher, just released a Mook (magazine/book) called The Future of Web 2.0 - The Sharing Economy based on presentations at the Digital Garage New Context Conference last year in Tokyo. The book is in Japanese. There are excerpts from presentations by Mitchell Baker, John Buckman, Tantek Çelik, David Isenberg, Lawrence Lessig, Jun Murai, Hiroyuki Nakano and Cory Ondrejka. I've got some words in it including a translation of my DBA thesis proposal. (I really do need to work on this more...)

A really cool thing about this is that Impress has decided to release this mook under CC BY-NC (v 2.1 Japan). They have also made a PDF versions of each section available for download simultaneously under the same license on their site.

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August 8, 2006

BookMooch

05:46 UTC » Books - Sharing Economy

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May 30, 2006

Dialog - Ryu Murakami X Joichi Ito

12:31 UTC » Books - Japanese Culture - Japanese Politics - Joi's Diary

Ryu Murakami (WP) and I spent the last nine months or so meeting occasionally to chat about Japanese culture, politics, media and the economy. Creative Garage and Diamond Shuppan transcribed our conversation and published it as a book. (You can buy it on Amazon.co.jp.) The book came out last week and climbed to #6 on the Amazon.co.jp book rankings and is slowly settling back down. (It's #14 at the time of this posting.) That was pretty exhilarating. Having said that, Ryu Murakami is "the name" on the book. Anyway, thanks to everyone who helped on the book and especially to Ryu.

The book is in Japanese and currently we have no plans to translate it.

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November 9, 2005

Dan on the cover of Aera

12:16 UTC » Books - Media and Journalism

Danaera
Holy we the audience Batman! Dan's on the cover of Aera. Aera is probably Japan's biggest news magazine. Congratulations Dan! Although I will take credit for giving a copy of the book to Mr. Hattori at Asahi, many thanks to Asahi for getting Dan's book out in Japanese and giving him great coverage here. Seeing Dan on the cover of Aera really made my day. Maybe Japan's not that bad after all.

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October 17, 2005

Used tape

11:25 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Books - Intellectual Property

I remember someone telling me a story about the delivery of the first copy of MS DOS to Japan. (I don't know if this story is true, but it's a good story.) The shipment contained a copy of DOS on paper tape and a blank roll of tape. They taxed just the blank one because the one with DOS on it was "used".

So... Does this make Amazon.com a "used comment salesman" and Six Apart a seller of "new comment space"?

I'm of course mostly joking, but I think this represents two completely different views on the "media" business. You can sell the blank media or "used media". Either the comments are the product or the ability to create comments is the product. This is what separates the professional world from the amateur world... But good amateur can exceed crappy professional in quality. Production and distribution are becoming lower cost, and two opposed views of the world are colliding harder. Clearly, clever people have managed to arbitrage/manage both of these models, but they surely produce very different types of laws, processes and world-views.

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August 10, 2005

Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life

09:15 UTC » Books - Japanese Culture - Wireless and Mobile

0262090392.01. Aa240 Sclzzz
My sister, the smarter half of the Ito family duo is an expert on Japanese youth culture and mobile culture. Her book just came out from MIT Press. I've been running around in a scatterbrained fashion all my life trying to reach into academia. She has been immersed in academic rigor but has been reaching out to the public from the inside. Recently, we've begun to cross paths more and more. This book is another step in bridging our worlds.

Anyway, I'm totally biased and very proud of my sister, but you should still take my recommendation and buy this book. ;-) (Or at least download the introduction.)

Mizuko Ito
Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life

The book I edited with Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda is out from MIT Press and available on amazon.com. Click here for a pdf of a draft of the introduction.

The book is an edited collection of social and cultural studies of keitai (mobile phone) and pager use over the past decade or so in Japan. We included our own research as well as research by a variety of mostly Japanese scholars whose work we translated from Japanese.

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July 20, 2005

Poor Harry Potter...

22:03 UTC » Books - Heckling

The new Harry Potter books has been pirated and posted online in 24 hours and there is a video of man spoiling the ending for people standing in line to buy the book.

via Boing Boing and MetaFilter

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July 12, 2005

New Harry Potter embargoed in Canada

23:20 UTC » Books

Raincoast Books
Raincoast Books Obtains Injunction Against Early Disclosure and Reviews of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

[...]

Madam Justice Gill of the Supreme Court of British Columbia granted to Raincoast Books Distribution Ltd., Bloomsbury Plc and JK Rowling, a John/Jane Doe injunction against the copying or disclosing of all or any part of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince or any information derived therefrom including without limitation the story, plot or characters of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to any person prior to 12:01 a.m. local time on July 16th...

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO ALL HARRY POTTER FANS

[...]

We know that many children and adults around the world cannot wait to read the new book, but we urge anyone who may have bought a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at The Real Canadian Superstore, 3000 Lougheed Highway, Coquitlam, British Columbia on Thursday July, 7, 2005, where it was temporarily placed on sale early or who have otherwise obtained it before July 16th 2005, to return their copies to Raincoast Books for just a few more days to preserve the excitement for all Harry Potter fans alike...

I wonder how they are going to embargo the Internet...

UPDATE: FLickr photoset of librarian processing Half-Blood Prince.

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May 22, 2005

Dinner with Karel van Wolferen

09:08 UTC » Books - Japanese Policy - Joi's Diary

Vanwolferen
The night before last I had dinner with Karel van Wolferen at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan. This was a very appropriate place to meet. Karel van Wolferen is the author of The Enigma of Japanese Power. Although it was written in 1990, it remains one of the best books in understanding the way the Japanese government works. I recommended this book in addition to Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons as two essential books in understanding the dilemma the Japanese face today. Karel said that, in a way, Dogs and Demons is a followup book to The Engima of Japanese Power. We both agreed that Japan has changed a great deal since he wrote the book, but that most of the basic arguments in his book are still valid today. Japan still lacks one of the fundamental requirements of a healthy government - political accountability. We both agreed that people don't understand how the Japanese system works, including the Japanese.

Although Karel is a professor at the University of Amsterdam, he spends a great deal of time in Japan, writing for various publications, debating Japanese politicians and working very hard to try to help Japan. He had read some things that I had written and I was happy to have Karel say I was a "kindred spirit."

We discussed the history of postwar Japan and how Japan had missed an opportunity to build a more functional democracy because of the focus on fighting communism driven in large part by the American occupation. The US Occupation helped fund the conservative "Liberal Democratic Party" which co-opted or crushed most of the so-called "left-wing" liberal groups that were trying to emerge. A particularly unfortunate victim of this effort was the The Japan Teachers Union. Many teachers in postwar Japan felt a great deal of guilt for having taught children Imperialist warmongering based on the right-wing central government produced texts of the time. There was a strong desire among teachers to turn this guilt into something constructive. The Teachers Union confronted the LDP and the Ministry of Education and pushed for decentralization of education and fought against textbook censorship. The conservatives attacked them and marginalized them, effectively crushing the effort. In light of the recent discussion on Japanese historical revisionism and the festering right-wing, it is really a pity that this movement was crushed since it could have become a positive movement to help face the facts of Japanese Imperialist history. (The union still exists, but is taking a much more moderate stance on reform.)

We talked about the Internet and Wikipedia and how facts and history are being collectively created online. One interesting problem that he has is that many people spell his name as "von Wolferen" instead of "van Wolferen". Even editors of major newspapers consistently "correct" the spelling and change it to "von". It has gotten so bad that there are more results for the wrong spelling than the correct one on Google. It's funny to imagine people who are so sure of their spelling that they would change the spelling of someone's name without checking.

We promised to keep in touch and try to collaborate in the future.

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April 15, 2005

All Marketers Are Liars

12:27 UTC » Books - Marketing

Liarspic2-1
Seth Godin sent me a a copy of his new book, All Marketers Are Liars. It's excellent. As usual, it's very provocative and typical Seth Godin. In a way, it's like Cluetrain Manifesto written by someone who speak Madison Avenuese. He writes about how people buy products because of stories and how these stories fit into their worldview. The products and people behind the stories have to be authentic, but people pay for these stories. These stories sell the products, not facts about the products. Most of these stories are not completely true. It reminds me of my Moleskine notebook which has a story that I know isn't really true, but I love the story. My Macintosh is also the same. I know Apple is suing a blogger and has DRM all over iTunes, but for some reason, I still believe the story that they're on my side. (For now.) He also writes about the end of the advertising "message" and that you can't control the story. You don't know where your customer will touch your product/company and get their first impression. Every part of your company has to be authentic and resonate with the story.

The book reminds me of Don't Think of an Elephants by George Lakoff which is about how the Republican Party is successful at telling their story because it fits the frame / worldview of their voters.

Interestingly, Seth is telling a pretty strong story that I believe doesn't fit the worldview of many of the marketers he is talking to. I hope they believe his story. ;-)

He has a blog about the book called Liar's Blog for the book.

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December 24, 2004

Amazon's tail was a bit shorter

07:24 UTC » Books

Chris updates some figures from his original article where he had written that "57% of Amazon's book sales are of books not available in stores". He writes in an update, "I've now spoken to Jeff Bezos (and others) about this. He doesn't have a hard figure for the percentage of sales of products not available offline, but reckons that it's closer to 25-30%. That would put it in line with Netflix's and Rhapsody's figures." There is an interesting discussion going on in the comments as well.

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December 22, 2004

The Long Tail the book and the blog

22:01 UTC » Books

Chris Anderson is writing a book about The Long Tail which started as one of my favorite articles that he wrote for Wired. He has also started a blog about the Long Tail. The original article is online at Wired.

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December 14, 2004

Google adding major libraries to database

16:46 UTC » Books - Intellectual Property - Search

New York Times
Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database

By JOHN MARKOFF and EDWARD WYATT

Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections.

Muninn
Harvard Pilot Project with Google

I just got a university-wide email regarding a pilot project that Harvard is starting with Google. It looks like Google will also be joining with other universities in this project, which will begin the work of digitizing, and in the case of public domain works providing public access to, the contents of the Harvard library system.

Sounds good. Now if only we can figure out a way to get more of the books, particularly those which are out of print, into the public domain.

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October 10, 2004

Will the tail wag?

02:42 UTC » Books - Creative Commons - Music

So the big question for me after reading Chris Anderson's excellent article, The Long Tail is... Will there always be producers and consumers of music and other content, or does the amateur revolution really take off and completely blur the consumer and the producer of content? Will amateur and nearly free Creative Commons style content become the primary content that people consume? Will most consumers create content as well? In other words, will the long tail wag? I've heard many theories about this and it is probably different for text, audio, photos and video, but I think this is an important question.

And in case you haven't noticed, it's clearly now a discovery problem, not a delivery problem.

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October 8, 2004

Google Print

19:16 UTC » Books - Search

Google
What is Google Print?

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Since a lot of the world's information isn't yet online, we're helping to get it there. Google Print puts the content of books where you can find it most easily; right in Google search results.

To use Google Print, just do searches on Google as you normally would. Whenever a book contains content that matches your search terms, we'll show links to that book in your search results. Click on the book title and you'll go to a "content page," where you can see the page containing your search terms and other information about the book. You can also search for other topics within the book. Click on the "Buy this Book" link and you'll go straight to a bookstore selling the book online.
If you're a book publisher and you'd like to have your books included in Google search results, look into the Google Print program for publishers.

Holy shit. Watch out Amazon, here they come!

via danah

UPDATE: It appears that people have known about this since last year and it has been on and off in test mode, but the official announcement was Oct 6th.

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October 7, 2004

The Long Tail

13:33 UTC » Books - Marketing - Movies - Music

Fantastic article in Wired by Chris Anderson titled The Long Tail. You MUST read it. Physical distribution limits the number of titles of books, music, DVDs that can be stocked. He explains that online sales show that the market size of stuff below the break even threshold for physical distribution is often larger than the market for the "hits" that make it into stores. He calls this "The Long Tail". We can essentially double the market for most content by figuring out ways to help people find the stuff they are looking for in the long tail and deliver it online.

He also makes another important point about pricing. The iTunes 99 cents is too expensive. It's based on a calculation to protect CD distribution. He suggests that the price should be based on how much your time is worth. In other words, at what price is it not worth your time to find, download and tag a track from a file sharing network. He thinks that maybe this number is around 20 cents for a college student.

I absolutely agree with his analysis and it's great that he's got so many figures and facts to support the argument.

UPDATE: POP STARS? NEIN DANKE! -
In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people...
written by Momus in 1991 is very relevant to this discussion. Thanks Boris.

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August 7, 2004

NPR summer reading series interview

09:54 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Books

I did an interview for NPR's summer reading series where we are supposed to talk about books to read over the summer. I ended up talking mostly about blogs. ;-) It's about a month old.

What do YOU recommend we read this summer?

UPDATE: Here are my notes on Orientalism by Edward Said, thoughts after reading Science In Action by Bruno Latour, and my short review of We the Media by Dan Gillmor.

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August 5, 2004

IM from Markoff re We The Media review

09:49 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Books - Heckling - Humor

"The New York Times is my blog" Markoff just IMed me with this funny comment from Slashdot about Dan Gillmor's We the Media. I would have gotten more defensive if it weren't so funny.
markoffimwtm
Anyway, keep laughing Markoff. Just you wait and see. ;-)

Yes... I did photoshop out the end of his AIM nickname.

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August 4, 2004

Creative Commons We the Media ready for download

11:41 UTC » Books - Creative Commons - Media and Journalism

Dan Gillmor's , We the Media was published under a Creative Commons license. You can download the entire book in PDF format on the O'Reilly page. It's an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License.

Excellent!

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August 2, 2004

We the Media hits the shelves

17:01 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Books - Media and Journalism

wtmthumb
Dan Gillmor's We the Media has hit the selves. O'Reilly, the publisher, has created a blog for it. I just posted my review on Amazon.com...

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July 28, 2004

Freely downloadable Free Culture going into third printing

08:25 UTC » Books - Creative Commons

CC Weblog
Lessig's free book still racking in the sales

Stanford Magazine carries a story this month about our chairman and co-founder Lawrence Lessig's book which has just entered its third printing. This is interesting because the book is freely available online for download (under a Creative Commons license), and has been downloaded about 180,000 times. On the one hand an author can give away free content for folks to remake into audio books, translations, and other formats, and the author still gets paid through traditional book sales. Amazing how that works, and works so well sometimes. [via Copyfight]

It will be very difficult to "prove" that the Creative Common license and the freely downloadable aspect of Free Culture improved sales, but the book is selling and making it freely available has clearly not STOPPED sales. I wonder if it is possible to show that making books available for free electronically increases the sale of real books? I wonder if there are particular genres where this holds more true...

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July 25, 2004

Dive Into Python the book

08:34 UTC » Books - Software

Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python is now available as a printed book. This is the best tutorial for my favorite programming language. I wrote more about the book when Mark announced it back in September of last year.

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July 12, 2004

AKMA and Jitterbug Perfume

22:52 UTC » Books - Joi's Diary

I was chatting with AKMA the other day about my thumb. He's had thumb problems, and my thumb hurts. Ever since he got his hernia operation and my post about his Hernia operation became the top result on Google for a search of hernia operation, we've had this mutual medical support bond. (It's not #1 now, but still on the top page.)

Anyway, we were talking about thumbs, and that reminded me about Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins. Then I remembered that I liked Jitterbug Perfume better. AKMA said that he didn't have enough silliness in his life. (I can't really image that is true, but if a Reverend says he needs more silliness, it must be serious.) So I decided to send him the two books. Although I didn't remember the stories very clearly, I clearly remember they were both very silly and fun.

I had forgotten that Jitterbug Perfume and probably Tom Robbins in general tended to be a bit snarky about Christianity. I'd never read them from the perspective of a Reverend before. AKMA seems to have taken it in stride, but it's interesting how you can overlook things that suddenly become snarky in context. I feel like someone who had been laughing at a joke that isn't very funny for some of my friends.

This stream of consciousness Amazon.com impulse buy story was very helpful during my NPR reading series interview when they asked if I ever ready any fiction.

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July 10, 2004

Jet lagged, but Flashed Forward

03:06 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Books - Creative Commons - Joi's Diary

I arrived last night, made the mistake of eating a cheeseburger before bed and didn't sleep much and felt REALLY BAD this morning.

I crawled onto stage at Flash Forward this morning feeling very scattered and weak, but thanks to a strong topic and lots of funny movies to keep people awake, I was able to struggle through my talk. I talked about Creative Commons, Intellectual Property and the future of marketing. I channeled lots of Lessig and Godin. We did a Q&A session afterwards and I really enjoyed talking to the Flash community. Flash and Creative Commons makes SO MUCH SENSE together. The conference is extremely well organized and cool. I got to meet Stewart McBride and Lynda Weinman who really run a class act. Looking forward to figuring out some way to work with them on something...

After that, I went over to NPR and did a short interview about what I read. Blogs of course. ;-) I think the 20 min or so will be edited down to 3 min so I'm not sure what's going to end up in the interview, but I'll post a link once I know when it's going to air.

So no more public speaking until Apsen next week. Time to relax...

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July 8, 2004

If you're reading this, according to NPR you are "no one"

10:32 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Books - Media and Journalism

Scripting News
"No one was listening," said the NPR...

"No one was listening," said the NPR announcer, as she introduced the guy who posted the note on Tuesday morning about the new Edwards decals on the Kerry campaign plane. No one was listening, except for the people who were.

Clearly no one reads blogs...

I'm going to be doing a Summer Reading Series interview for NPR this week. I should list all of the blogs people should read this summer. ;-)

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June 20, 2004

Ray Bradbury's Bizarre Complaint

15:22 UTC » Books - Movies

Dan Gillmor
Ray Bradbury's Bizarre Complaint

Ray Bradbury is one of the great science fiction writers. But in his advancing years he's also acting in a fairly petty manner.

The author of the brilliant novel "Fahrenheit 451" is claiming to anyone who'll listen (AP) that Michael Moore has somehow committed an act of intellectual theft by naming his new movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" without asking permission.

Don't you hate it when your favorite writers do, write or say stupid things?

This reminds me of the horror of reading Orson Scott Card's homophobic essay, "Homosexual "Marriage" and Civilization".

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May 17, 2004

We, the Media by Dan Gillmor

23:52 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Books - Emergent Democracy

Just finished reading the Galley Proof of We, the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People by Dan Gillmor. O'Reilly is the publisher and it should be coming out mid-July. The book will be published under a Creative Commons license and you will be able to download it free for non-commercial use.

Dan is one of the few professional journalists that really understands the impact of blogs and other new technologies on journalism. It's amazing how many professional journalists I know pooh pooh blogs and keep on chugging like nothing is changing. We, the Media is a excellent book that should be enlightening and humbling for professional journalists. It is also a great guide for us little "j" journalists about what the possibilities are as well as what the difficulties will be. Anyway, it's an amazingly important book for anyone interested in journalism and democracy. It goes well with Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture and Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs.

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May 9, 2004

Orientalism by Edward W. Said

17:53 UTC » Books - Global Politics - Warblogging

edwardsaidorientalismJust finished reading the famous introduction to Orientalism by Edward Said. Said was a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University and was a well known Palestinian scholar who died in September of last year. Orientalism was written in 1978, but probably continues to become more relevant.

Basically, he argues that the whole notion of the "Orient" or "Orientalism" is a body of culture, academic work and politics that tries to identify the East as "them" in terms that have evolved through Western imperialism. He makes the point that even work that doesn't appear immediately political had political impact and was part of the larger process of the development of Orientalism. Reading it brings back memories of Trader Vic's and pictures from British Museum exhibits of "Headpiece from dead savage."

He points out some important issues which ties into the racism as stereotype discussion we had about Lost In Translation. The simplistic stereotypes and the images of the the East leads to a kind of fascination with the Orient, but also creates a false sense of understanding and fake academics upon which many ignorant, racist and imperialistic political decisions are made.

A version of the introduction is available on The Guardian Unlimited Books web site so I'll give you a few quotes from there.

Continue reading "Orientalism by Edward W. Said"

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March 27, 2004

Fixed in translation

20:42 UTC » Books - Information and Media - Japanese Politics

My current friend and former nemesis, Hiroo Yamagata and I were on a panel with Larry Lessig last week. He casually mentioned that he had decided to translate Das Kapital into Japanese. He is one of the best translators in Japan and has translated Lessig, Leary, Krugman and many others. Anyway, he said that all of the existing translations were related to the Japanese communist party in some way and were edited and filtered. For instance, violence and other things were omitted. He remembered someone in college who argued Marx with him based on a faulty translation and in retrospect, this pissed him off. He decided to make a more accurate translation. Hiroo is kind of a weirdo, but it's because of people like him that some things that are lost in translation actually get fixed. Blatant censorship is pretty scary, but this reminded me how dangerous intentional mistranslations can be as well.

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Reading "Free Culture"

13:04 UTC » Books - Creative Commons

AKMA
Let’s Start Something

Anyone feel like recording a chapter of Lawrence Lessig’s new book?

What a great idea! Maybe someone can make some music for it too. Anyway, I better read the book first. ;-p

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"Free Culture" is

10:59 UTC » Books - Creative Commons - Intellectual Property - Internet Policy

Lawrence Lessig
“Free Culture” is

Thanks to the lessons explained by others (Cory), and the courage of a great publisher (Penguin), Free Culture launches today with a free online version of the book, licensed under a Creative Commons license. You can get the book here, though at the moment, only the bittorrent version is apparently up. Later today, there will be a direct download available from the Free Culture site, and from the Amazon site.

Sorry, a bit late in blogging this...

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March 17, 2004

Three birds with one stone - what a deal!

17:09 UTC » Books - Creative Commons

Larry needs to get rid of these books, you REALLY need to read this book, Creative Commons needs the money. Do the right thing. If you haven't read Future of Ideas, donate to CC now and get a copy of Larry's last book now.

Lawrence Lessig
As I just said, I’ve got a new book coming out in about ten days. To clear the shelves, and to thank blog readers, I’ve got a few hardcover copies of my last book, The Future of Ideas, that I’ll happily send to anyone who makes a contribution of at least $5 to Creative Commons. To qualify for this special offer, either click on the PayPal logo, or send a check to Creative Commons at 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Palo Alto, CA 94305. If you’d like the book defaced with my signature, then send an email after you order to llynch at stanford.edu.

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March 4, 2004

Just in Tokyo released under CC license

20:25 UTC » Books - Creative Commons - Japanese Culture

Justin Hall's guide to Tokyo, "Just in Tokyo" has just been released under a Creative Commons license. It's great for people who want to just dive into Tokyo.

Thanks Justin!

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