OLDaily

Cluetrain at 20
Doc Searls, Doc Searls Weblog, 2019/03/27

The Cluetrain Manifesto was an influential document when it came out 20 years ago. It proclaimed such things as "markets are conversations". I was one of the signatories when it was first released. There's a lot of discussion about what Cluetrain means, but my attention focused on a remark about how it spread. Searls says, "we didn’t do it by mass media methods. We did it by hacker’s methods. We wrote something we thought was good and put it out for review. Lots of people agreed that it was good and word spread from there." That's not exactly true. It was promoted by the Wall Street Journal and became a book. If you or I write Cluetrain, it sits there dead and unnoticed. But if the writer has connections with mass media, it becomes a mass phenomenon. That's what happened with Cluetrain.

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Story time with e-books 'not as helpful' as print books
BBC News, 2019/03/27

On CBC as I type this they're interviewing Geoffrey Hinton, who is talking about real science. Meanwhile, this ridiculous article describes the results of "studying 37 pairs of parents and toddlers." The study "found that with e-books parents ended up focusing more on the technology, including, for example, telling children not to push buttons or change the volume... electronic book enhancements were likely to be 'interfering with parents' ability to engage in parent-guided conversation' during reading." As one commenter says, "Another meaningless flawed study that suggests what the researchers decided it would at the outset.

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I was wrong about networks
George Siemens, LinkedIn, 2019/03/27

I'm not sure what to make of this article. It feels like he is having his 'groups versus networks' moment. He writes, "Networks are ephemeral. Systems exist to preserve. Systems exist as predictive agents. It's hard to control people in networks - they have too much agency, they can do what they want. The lack of controlability makes it difficult to achieve intended outcomes in networks. When agents want a clear outcome, they turn to systems. Systems preserve power." He still likes networks. But he concludes, "all connections and networks occur within a system. The system sets the rules for connection forming and for action capabilities available to individuals. And the system always wins."

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A Dark Day for the Web: EU Parliament Approves Damaging Copyright Rules
Timothy Vollmer, Creative Commons, 2019/03/27

According to the article, the law "will require nearly all for-profit web platforms to get a license for every user upload or otherwise install content filters and censor content... Article 11 also passed, which would force news aggregators to pay publishers for linking to their stories."  I will not be paying anyone any linking fees, so if you have a problem with that, let me know now. Also, I will not be charging any linking fees, so run wild. What I wonder is whether academic journals will start paying each other for citations, and whether newspapers will start paying the people they write about. That would seem consistent to me.

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