Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• What exactly is "User Generated Content"?

  There's an interesting discussion going on over at CenterNetworks , with Allen calling out Mike Arrington and co. for giving Digg the award for "best user-generated content". Allen says that Digg doesn't belong in that category (which he includes Wikipedia, your blog, and Flickr), but rather as a "UGC aggregator". Obviously, this is all semantics, but I think saying that there's no "content" being generated on Digg, del.icio.us and similar sites misses the point a little. Digg does more than aggregate content - it also filters and ranks the content. As Steve Gillmor would say, there's a lot of attention metadata generated by the users of the site. It is this "content" which separates Digg from being indistinguishable from a set of links, and I would argue that there's a lot of value in that information. Some of the discussion there also focused around the amount of effort put into the generation of content. For example, one commenter... Posted Jan 22 2008, 04:02 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Web 2.0, Business, Blogging, Social Behavior

• Friday Fun: Best DUI Ever

  With New Year's Eve approaching, I want to implore everyone to be careful... or at least practice your dancing and alphabet in reverse. "Remarkable, I've never actually seen anyone do that." Classic. Posted Dec 28 2007, 12:07 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Things that amuse me, Social Behavior, Friday Fun

• Aloha, Mahalo.com

  I found this arrangement in my feed reader mildly amusing this morning: Fred Wilson's post on Mahalo.com directly above a post by Brad Feld entitled "The Computer Should Be Doing the Work for Us". (They are unrelated entries). Mahalo.com is, of course, a people-powered search engine that Jason Calacanis publicly unveiled yesterday (no longer "Project X"). I'll be honest: when I first saw that Jason announced a "people-powered search engine", I was underwhelmed. But the more I think about it, he may really be on to something. If you listen to CalacanisCast or read his blog, you'll know Jason has more than a slight obsession with Wikipedia. I'm certainly not the only one who noticed that Mahalo pages resemble Wikipedia entries more than they do Google results. And according to Dan Farber : Calacanis compared Mahalo to Wikipedia, which he said sucked in the first few years and then took off in year four or five. In the first few years, Mahalo will get to 25,000 search terms and then go into... Posted May 31 2007, 10:46 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Web 2.0, Innovation, Google, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Social Behavior, NextNY

• I Don't Get Twitter

  I am really struggling to find value in Twitter, and I'm certainly not the only one staying out of the Twitter lovefest. It is mildly interesting from a technical perspective but doesn't really add much to what I can do today. (Not to mention it's been down and/or slow under the load lately). Perhaps the only real draw is that "everyone" is on there - but we all know love for social networks can be fleeting (see, e.g., Friendster, Facebook). As Yogi classically put it , "nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded." At this point, yet another network doesn't excite me. What would excite me? Aggregation of my networks, identities and connections. I guess I'm really just looking for the Trillian of social networks. (There are people out there trying to do this, but I haven't found any that seem to do it really well. Feel free to leave a link if you know of or run one of these sites). Of course, we all know what this is really about . Damn cats... Posted Mar 22 2007, 12:01 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Rants, Things that amuse me, Web 2.0, Social Behavior, Facebook

• More on the Music Industry's Slow Death

  This letter from a former customer further illustrates how the music industry is alienating its customers. While I would like to say I responded with something witty, I must admit to being completely flummoxed. There I sat, a loyal music fan who has shelled out actual money to a business that is supposed to be having financial problems, and the best they can do is tell me to wander the streets of Seattle looking for different internet providers who might allow me to download the music that I have already paid for, music that I have spent the better part of three house trying to listen to, and which is still unusable?” As I said before, sometimes piracy isn't about getting it for free . Given the choice of paying for crippled digital music in two months or downloading free, unrestricted music today, is it really any surprise that they choose the latter? You have record companies paying major labels for airtime, but putting arguably their best promotional vehicle out of business by jacking... Posted Mar 22 2007, 07:48 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Intellectual Property, Rants, Music, Copyright, Law, Audio, Social Behavior, DRM

• Streamburst offers innovative DRM for video

  I've already discussed the German music store using watermarks to discourage piracy , and now it seems another service is applying the same principle to video . Instead of handcuffing viewers who want to view films they purchase on multiple devices and otherwise use content legitimately in ways DRM blocks - Streamburst takes two steps to prevent movie piracy. The first is that every film begins with a 5 second display of the name of the person who purchased that copy, as it appears on their credit card. The second step is that Streamburst eliminates an undetectable but unique series of bits from each copy of a file downloaded. That idea is that the psychological barrier of being named will stop many people from illegally distributing the files and those whom it doesn’t stop can be identified by the unique series of bits stripped from whatever copies make it into illegal file sharing networks. These techniques are just as effective at preventing the bad guys as "real" DRM (that is, they... Posted Feb 28 2007, 01:46 PM by Tim with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Security, Innovation, Video, Social Behavior, DRM

• Wisdom

  There is an important distinction between factual information and understanding how to apply it in context ( via Matthew ). Data is "the sun rises at 5:12 AM" Information is "the sun rises from the East, at 5:12 AM" Knowledge is "If you're lost in the woods without a compass, follow the direction of the sun to find your direction" Finally, wisdom is "Don't get lost in the woods" Posted Jan 25 2007, 04:40 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Innovation, Business, Social Behavior

• Safety through Chaos

  There is a theory that strict laws encourage anti-social behavior . Ultimately, these strict laws do the opposite of what they were intended to do, because they allow us to rationalize away responsibility. Along those lines, a Dutch town has eliminated nearly all traffic lights ( via Jeff ) and seen a decrease in the number of fatal accidents. "It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want. But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk. As Brian commented , this is all about relying on personal accountability instead of explicit control measures. When someone else considers the risk and creates the rules, we get lazy about the risk analysis and management process. It doesn't help that these are familiar risks, and we tend to underestimate these types of risks . Posted Jan 10 2007, 03:17 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Security, Social Behavior

• Do strict laws encourage anti-social behavior?

  Mowab writes : [T]he idea, generally, is that you encourage community and cooperation by removing the safeguards that would keep you safe if you’re antisocial or don’t try to cooperate. What’s interesting is the corollary argument that social safeguards actually encourage antisocial behavior; they assume such behavior is going to occur, they plan for it, they legitimize it, and therefore ensure it will exist. Does this mean that the more we regulate or try to make our world safer, the more we’ll actually be making our world more chaotic, and less safe? A very interesting premise that I generally agree with. Strict rules, in many ways, serve as a way to rationalize away responsibility. The people don't feel a need to protect each other because there are laws that will protect us. It's similar to the idea that people are more likely to help out if no one else is around. If you're the only one capable of rescuing someone, you are probably going to feel a greater personal... Posted Dec 30 2004, 11:08 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Intellectual Property, Rants, Security, Law, Social Behavior