And just like Wikipedia, and Britannica, it's introducing a few new ways to create content.

There is 'moderated collaboration,' for instance. Which sounds a lot like the concept behind the edit pages of Wikipedia. probably less edit wars, since the author has to approve the changes for them to go live. Brave authors could however permit edits without approval. The really daring ones will be able to link their entries with advertising to earn some income via AdSense. I can see that feature alone quickly tarnish the value of this wiki as marketers rush in.

Maybe this is Google2 -- a move to create a parallel search engine that pretends to be a wiki.

Check the wiki-slayer here.

Brightmail, a vendor of e-mail filters and anti-spam applications warned that close to 5 million spam "attacks" or "bursts" occurred in June 2002 and that spam has mushroomed 450 percent since June 2001. This pace continued unabated well into the beginning of 2004 when the introduction of spam filters began to take effect. PC World concurs.

Between one half and three quarters of all e-mail messages are spam or UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email) - unsolicited and intrusive commercial ads, mostly concerned with sex, scams, get rich quick schemes, financial services and products, and health articles of dubious provenance. The messages are sent from spoofed or fake e-mail addresses. Some spammers hack into unsecured servers - mainly in China and Korea - to relay their missives anonymously.

Starting in 2003, malicious hackers began using spam to install malware - such as viruses, adware, spyware, and Trojans - on the unprotected personal computers of less savvy users. They thus transform these computers into "zombies", organize them into spam-spewing "bots" (networks), and sell access to them to criminals on penumbral boards and forums all over the Net.

Spam is an industry. Mass e-mailers maintain lists of e-mail addresses, often "harvested" by spamware bots - specialized computer applications - from Web sites. These lists are rented out or sold to marketers who use bulk mail services. They come cheap - c. $100 for 10 million addresses. Bulk mailers provide servers and bandwidth, charging c. $300 per million messages sent.

As spam recipients become more inured, ISPs less tolerant, and both more litigious - spammers multiply their efforts in order to maintain the same response rate. Spam works. It is not universally unwanted - which makes it tricky to outlaw. It elicits between 0.1 and 1 percent in positive follow ups, depending on the message. Many messages now include HTML, JavaScript, and ActiveX coding and thus resemble (or actually contain) viruses and Trojans.

Jupiter Media Matrix predicted in 2001 that the number of spam messages annually received by a typical Internet user will double to 1400 and spending on legitimate e-mail marketing will reach $9.4 billion by 2006 - compared to $1 billion in 2001. Forrester Research pegs the number at $4.8 billion in 2003.

More than 2.3-5 billion spam messages are sent daily. eMarketer puts the figures a lot lower at 76 billion messages in 2002. By 2006, daily spam output will soar to c. 15 billion missives, says Radicati Group. Jupiter projects a more modest 268 billion annual messages this year (2005). An average communication costs the spammer 0.00032 cents.

PC World quotes the European Union as pegging the bandwidth costs of spam worldwide in 2002 at $8-10 billion annually. Other damages include server crashes, time spent purging unwanted messages, lower productivity, aggravation, and increased cost of Internet access.

Inevitably, the spam industry gave rise to an anti-spam industry. According to a Radicati Group report titled "Anti-virus, anti-spam, and content filtering market trends 2002-2006", anti-spam revenues were projected to exceed $88 million in 2002 - and more than double by 2006. List blockers, report and complaint generators, advocacy groups, registers of known spammers, and spam filters all proliferate. The Wall Street Journal reported in its June 25, 2002 issue about a resurgence of anti-spam startups financed by eager venture capital.

ISPs are bent on preventing abuse - reported by victims - by expunging the accounts of spammers. But the latter simply switch ISPs or sign on with free services like Hotmail and Yahoo! Barriers to entry are getting lower by the day as the costs of hardware, software, and communications plummet.

The use of e-mail and broadband connections by the general population is spreading. Hundreds of thousands of technologically-savvy operators have joined the market in the last five years, as the dotcom bubble burst. Still, Steve Linford of the UK-based Spamhaus.org insists that most spam emanates from c. 80 large operators.

Now, according to Jupiter Media, ISPs and portals are poised to begin to charge advertisers in a tier-based system, replete with premium services. Writing back in 1998, Bill Gates described a solution also espoused by Esther Dyson, chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

"As I first described in my book 'The Road Ahead' in 1995, I expect that eventually you'll be paid to read unsolicited e-mail. You'll tell your e-mail program to discard all unsolicited messages that don't offer an amount of money that you'll choose. If you open a paid message and discover it's from a long-lost friend or somebody else who has a legitimate reason to contact you, you'll be able to cancel the payment. Otherwise, you'll be paid for your time."

Subscribers may not be appreciative of the joint ventures between gatekeepers and inbox clutterers. Moreover, dominant ISPs, such as AT&T and PSINet have recurrently been accused of knowingly collaborating with spammers. ISPs rely on the data traffic that spam generates for their revenues in an ever-harsher business environment.

The Financial Times and others described how WorldCom refuses to ban the sale of spamware over its network, claiming that it does not regulate content. When "pink" (the color of canned spam) contracts came to light, the implicated ISPs blame the whole affair on rogue employees.

PC World begs to differ:

"Ronnie Scelson, a self-described spammer who signed such a contract with PSInet, (says) that backbone providers are more than happy to do business with bulk e-mailers. 'I've signed up with the biggest 50 carriers two or three times', says Scelson ... The Louisiana-based spammer claims to send 84 million commercial e-mail messages a day over his three 45-megabit-per-second DS3 circuits. 'If you were getting $40,000 a month for each circuit', Scelson asks, 'would you want to shut me down?'"

The line between permission-based or "opt-in" e-mail marketing and spam is getting thinner by the day. Some list resellers guarantee the consensual nature of their wares. According to the Direct Marketing Association's guidelines, quoted by PC World, not responding to an unsolicited e-mail amounts to "opting-in" - a marketing strategy known as "opting out". Most experts, though, strongly urge spam victims not to respond to spammers, lest their e-mail address is confirmed.

But spam is crossing technological boundaries. Japan has just legislated against wireless SMS spam targeted at hapless mobile phone users. Many states in the USA as well as the European parliament have followed suit. Ideas regarding a "do not spam" list akin to the "do not call" list in telemarketing have been floated. Mobile phone users will place their phone numbers on the list to avoid receiving UCE (spam). Email subscribers enjoy the benefits of a similar list under the CAN-Spam Act of 2003.

Expensive and slow connections make mobile phone spam and spim (instant messaging spam) particularly resented. Still, according to Britain's Mobile Channel, a mobile advertising company quoted by "The Economist", SMS advertising - a novelty - attracts a 10-20 percent response rate - compared to direct mail's 1-3 percent.

Net identification systems - like Microsoft's Passport and the one proposed by Liberty Alliance - will make it even easier for marketers to target prospects.

The reaction to spam can be described only as mass hysteria. Reporting someone as a spammer - even when he is not - has become a favorite pastime of vengeful, self-appointed, vigilante "cyber-cops". Perfectly legitimate, opt-in, email marketing businesses and discussion forums often find themselves in one or more black lists - their reputation and business ruined.

In January 2002, CMGI-owned Yesmail was awarded a temporary restraining order against MAPS - Mail Abuse Prevention System - forbidding it to place the reputable e-mail marketer on its Real-time Blackhole list. The case was settled out of court.

Harris Interactive, a large online opinion polling company, sued not only MAPS, but ISPs who blocked its email messages when it found itself included in MAPS' Blackhole. Their CEO accused one of their competitors for the allegations that led to Harris' inclusion in the list.

Coupled with other pernicious phenomena - such as viruses, Trojans, and spyware - the very foundation of the Internet as a fun, relatively safe, mode of communication and data acquisition is at stake.

Spammers, it emerges, have their own organizations. NOIC - the National Organization of Internet Commerce threatened to post to its Web site the e-mail addresses of millions of AOL members. AOL has aggressive anti-spamming policies. "AOL is blocking bulk email because it wants the advertising revenues for itself (by selling pop-up ads)" the president of NOIC, Damien Melle, complained to CNET.

Spam is a classic "free rider" problem. For any given individual, the cost of blocking a spammer far outweighs the benefits. It is cheaper and easier to hit the "delete" key. Individuals, therefore, prefer to let others do the job and enjoy the outcome - the public good of a spam-free Internet. They cannot be left out of the benefits of such an aftermath - public goods are, by definition, "non-excludable". Nor is a public good diminished by a growing number of "non-rival" users.

Such a situation resembles a market failure and requires government intervention through legislation and enforcement. The FTC - the US Federal Trade Commission - has taken legal action against more than 100 spammers for promoting scams and fraudulent goods and services.

"Project Mailbox" is an anti-spam collaboration between American law enforcement agencies and the private sector. Non government organizations have entered the fray, as have lobbying groups, such as CAUCE - the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail.

But, a few recent anti-spam and anti-spyware Acts notwithstanding, Congress is curiously reluctant to enact stringent laws against spam. Reasons cited are free speech, limits on state powers to regulate commerce, avoiding unfair restrictions on trade, and the interests of small business. The courts equivocate as well. In some cases - e.g., Missouri vs. American Blast Fax - US courts found "that the provision prohibiting the sending of unsolicited advertisements is unconstitutional".

According to Spamlaws.com,  the 107th Congress, for instance, discussed these laws but never enacted them:

Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2001 (H.R. 95), Wireless Telephone Spam Protection Act (H.R. 113), Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 (H.R. 718), Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 (H.R. 1017), Who Is E-Mailing Our Kids Act (H.R. 1846), Protect Children From E-Mail Smut Act of 2001 (H.R.  2472), Netizens Protection Act of 2001 (H.R. 3146), "CAN SPAM" Act of 2001 (S. 630).

Anti-spam laws fared no better in the 106th Congress. Some of the states have picked up the slack. Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

The situation is no better across the pond. The European parliament decided in 2001 to allow each member country to enact its own spam laws, thus avoiding a continent-wide directive and directly confronting the communications ministers of the union. Paradoxically, it also decided, in March 2002, to restrict SMS spam. Confusion clearly reigns. Finally, in May 2002, it adopted strong anti-spam provisions as part of a Directive on Data Protection.

Responding to this unfavorable legal environment, spam is relocating to developing countries, such as Malaysia, Nepal, and Nigeria. In a May 2005 report, the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) warned that these countries lack the technical know-how and financial resources (let alone the will) to combat spam. Their users, anyhow deprived of bandwidth, endure, as a result, a less reliable service and an intermittent access to the Internet;

"Spam is a much more serious issue in developing countries...as it is a heavy drain on resources that are scarcer and costlier in developing countries than elsewhere" - writes the report's author, Suresh Ramasubramanian, an OECD advisor and postmaster for Outblaze.com.

ISPs, spam monitoring services, and governments in the rich industrialized world react by placing entire countries - such as Macedonia and Costa Rica - on black lists and, thus denying access to their users en bloc.

International collaboration against the looming destruction of the Internet by crime organizations is budding. The FTC had just announced that it will work with its counterparts abroad to cut zombie computers off the network. A welcome step - but about three years late. Spammers the world over are still six steps ahead and are having the upper hand.

Copyright Notice

This material is copyrighted. Free, unrestricted use is allowed on a non commercial basis.
The author's name and a link to this Website must be incorporated in any reproduction of the material for any use and by any means.

The Internet Cycle

The Internet - A Medium or a Message?

The Solow Paradox

The Internet in Countries in Transition

The Revolt of the Poor - Intellectual Property Rights

How to Write a Business Plan

Decision Support Systems

The Demise of the Dinosaur PTTs

The Professions of the Future

Knowledge and Power

Much speculation exists as to what new science and technology may result from these lines of research. Nanotechnology can be seen as an extension of existing sciences into the nanoscale, or as a recasting of existing sciences using a newer, more modern term. Two main approaches are used in nanotechnology. In the "bottom-up" approach, materials and devices are built from molecular components which assemble themselves chemically by principles of molecular recognition. In the "top-down" approach, nano-objects are constructed from larger entities without atomic-level control. The impetus for nanotechnology comes from a renewed interest in colloidal science, coupled with a new generation of analytical tools such as the atomic force microscope (AFM), and the scanning tunneling microscope (STM).

Combined with refined processes such as electron beam lithography and molecular beam epitaxy, these instruments allow the deliberate manipulation of nanostructures, and led to the observation of novel phenomena.

Examples of nanotechnology in modern use are the manufacture of polymers based on molecular structure, and the design of computer chip layouts based on surface science. Despite the great promise of numerous nanotechnologies such as quantum dots and nanotubes, real commercial applications have mainly used the advantages of colloidal nanoparticles in bulk form, such as suntan lotion, cosmetics, protective coatings, and stain resistant clothing. Modern synthetic chemistry has reached the point where it is possible to prepare small molecules to almost any structure. These methods are used today to produce a wide variety of useful chemicals such as pharmaceuticals or commercial polymers.

This ability raises the question of extending this kind of control to the next-larger level, seeking methods to assemble these single molecules into supramolecular assemblies consisting of many molecules arranged in a well defined manner. These approaches utilize the concepts of molecular self-assembly and/or supramolecular chemistry to automatically arrange themselves into some useful conformation through a bottom-up approach.

The concept of molecular recognition is especially important: molecules can be designed so that a specific conformation or arrangement is favored due to non-covalent intermolecular forces. The Watson-Crick base-pairing rules are a direct result of this, as is the specificity of an enzyme being targeted to a single substrate, or the specific folding of the protein itself. Thus, two or more components can be designed to be complementary and mutually attractive so that they make a more complex and useful whole.

O conteúdo criado coletivamente e descentralizado já foi questionado pelo seus erros, mas poucas pessoas questionam os erros da produção centralizada e profissional.

Há uns dois anos atrás, a revista Nature fez uma pesquisa comparando os mesmos tópicos na Britannica e na Wikipedia. A surpresa (para alguns) é que a quantidade de erros nas duas eram equivalentes. Eu atribuo isso ao fato de que na mesma proporção que tem as mais diversas pessoas escrevendo, existem as mais diversas pessoas corrigindo. Leigos e profissionais se misturam para lapidar a informação da melhor forma.

Outro exemplo de erro nos meios mais tradicionais foi o recente caso da Globonews. Eles anunciaram que um avião havia caído, mas logo depois a informação se mostrou equivocada. Esse pequeno tempo, em torno de 30 minutos, foi o suficiente para que vários outros meios de comunicação também dessem a falsa notícia.

O efeito viral que se vê nos blogs também existe nas televisões e jornais. Uma fonte confiável gera conteúdo para outros, ganhando ou perdendo prestígio com isso. O modo de se produzir informação continua o mesmo, só mudou a gestão.

O aumento da velocidade da internet e das capacidades de armazenamento derrubaram o monopólio sobre o meio de comunicação. Antes dependia-se de um jornal impresso, uma revista, um livro, um canal de televisão ou emissora de rádio para se transmitir a notícia. O custo para se levar a mensagem para o público era alto e as empresas gerenciavam isso.

Hoje, qualquer pessoa com acesso a internet consegue transmitir informação. Só falta aumentar a penetração no público para deixar a informação ainda mais livre.

Transmita a sua opinião e depois leia:
Ajude a sustentar a Wikipedia
Altos e baixos dos serviços da internet
Você sabe o que é nomofobia?

Wikipedia is in this position now where it's "educating" people with content that may or may not be correct, consistent, or properly peer reviewed.

At first I used to think, "What harm could the free flow of information do?", well it can do a lot, here's why.

Vandalism: This can be anything, from edits that blank the page or replace it with "penis penis penis penis penis" (those are usually fixed quickly), to hard to spot things, like going in and altering an only mildly popular article with some misleading information, like if you mention in the Fidel Castro article that he once visited Yankee Stadium to watch a game being an avid fan of theirs, or more silly but not as lasting stuff, like editing an infobox about George Washington to proclaim that he was the first man on the moon and came in peace for all mankind, or changing scientific equations that most people won't be able to understand to know they are wrong anyway.

Consensus: This doesn't necessarily mean fact, it's just if I think that my edit is right, and an administrator comes along and changes it, it goes to a review council where other administrators decide who's edit stays, and it won't be mine, but there was consensus.

Edit wars: This happens on contentious articles like "Christianity" or "Homosexuality", where a Christian might come along and radically alter the article to suggest homosexuality as a disease that can be cured, I come along and change it back, we bounce it back and forth, until someone runs to an administrator, and depending on what the administrator believes (not which one of you is correct), one of you will be banned.

NPOV: Neutral point of view, meaning they'll neutralize the input of anyone with a point of view that isn't theirs, honestly, how can you write an article on something you don't have any strong feelings about?

Lack of peer review: If anyone can edit the article on Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and some chain smoking hick in Alabama with 14 cats is an administrator, some junk can creep it's way in.

Corporate and government manipulation: Microsoft, Apple, the NSA, Wal-Mart, and ExxonMobile, all with an image problem, are among the many that self edit their own articles to make themselves sound better on Wikipedia.

Unverifiable Credentials: I have a PHD in [insert subject here], it must be so because I put it on my user page....how will you ever know?

Pointless articles: Wikipedia is a dumping ground for useless articles about every variety of Pokemon there's ever been and one time villains from a Super Mario game 20 years ago.

So what good HAS Wikipedia done?

Well, it's spawned Uncyclopedia which was supposedly a parody, but I find to be wildly more accurate than Wikipedia, for example see their article about Wikipedia and then theres the Wiki-Wiki software that is under a free software license for anyone to build a standards compliant website out of, even if they have little or no working knowledge of web markup languages, relegating those horrible WYSIWYG editors like Microsoft Fartpage to history.

About Wikipedia though, you can skim it over to get a basic feel for the content, or link to an article that's basically correct, but nothing you see on it is reliable or trustworthy enough to trust your jewels to it for acedemic reports, get Brittanica or Comptons or something.

Businessweek has called it "an early skirmish in what's likely to become a protracted war over how and where media content is published online." Who knows, one day they may involved in one.

The "AP way," as Jeff Jarvis called it, may go down as trying to establish a top-down business approach in a bottom-up world. Or to put it another way, trying to force 'monetization' through the funnel of 'syndication.'

It's an odd time to try to lock down content and charge for it. I recently tried out Encyclopedia Britannica (and interviewed Tom Panelas) and came to the conclusion that instead of trying to set up snipers on the ramparts of the walled garden, Britannica has basically decided to create a new type of walled garden --leaving the keys to the entrance under the mat, so to speak. If a 240-year company can recognize the value in collaboration not confrontation, a 'younger' content repository like AP could surely follow suit.

If they don't want to take a leaf from the page of Britannica, how about this experiment by David Balter of BzzAgent? He's simultaneously selling and giving away (free download) a book called Word of Mouth Manual Volume II.

"Crazy like a fox, that Balter," says Todd Defren, whose blog PR Squared is one of the venues selected to allow those free downloads.

"Protection is no strategy for the future," says Jarvis.

"Content wants to lose the handcuffs," says little old me.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

At the onset of the first entry, Rousseau is described unequivocally as a "French philosopher." In the second entry, Rousseau is first described through his contributions to philosophy, literature, and music. The beginning of the biography section of that second entry contains a clear, straightforward, and useful statement about Rousseau's citizenship. As this Wikipedia entry explains, and is clear in Rousseau's work, the well-known French-speaking thinker considered himself a citizen of Geneva throughout his life (which ended during the Old Swiss Confederacy, before Geneva became a Canton of Switzerland). While Rousseau's connections to France are clearly mentioned, nowhere in the body of this Wikipedia article is Rousseau himself called "French." The article has been classified in diverse Wikipedia categories which do contain the word "French," but this association is fairly indirect. Though it may sound like the same thing, there's a huge difference between putting Rousseau in a list of "French philosophers" or "French memoirists" and describing Rousseau as a "French philosopher." In fact, Rousseau is also listed among "Swiss educationists" and "Swiss music theorists." These classifications aren't  inaccurate as classifications. They wouldn't be very precise as descriptions.

As a dual Swiss/Canadian citizen myself, I easily react to this type of imprecision, especially in formal contexts.

The Encyclopædia Britannica carries quite a bit of prestige and one would expect such issues as citizenship to be treated with caution. Seeing Rousseau mentioned in the "On This Day" bulletin, I accessed the Britannica entry on Rousseau via a single click. The first word of this entry was "French," which did seem quite inappropriate, to me. In fact, I hoped that the rest of the entry would contain an explanation of this choice. Maybe I had missed the fact that Rousseau became a naturalized French citizen, at some point. Or maybe they just mean "French-speaker." Or the descriptor was meant as a connection to philosophical trends associated with France...

Nope! Nothing like that.

Instead, a narrative on Rousseau's life with lots of anecdotes, a few links to other entries, and some "peacock terms." But no explanation of what is meant by "French philosopher." This isn't about accuracy as an absolute. The description could be accurate if it had been explained. But it wasn't. Oh, there are some mentions of Rousseau's "rights as a citizen" of Geneva, in connection with The Social Contract. But these statements are rather confusing, especially in the artificial context of an encyclopedia entry.

The Britannica entry was written by the late British economist Maurice Cranston. Given the fact that Cranston died in 1993, one is led to believe that the Britannica entry on Rousseau has been left unmodified in the past 15 years. The Wikipedia version has been modified hundreds of time in the last year. Now, many of these modifications were probably trivial, some are likely to have been inappropriate, and (without looking at the details of the changes) there's no guarantee that the current version is the best possible one. The point here isn't about the rate of change. It's about the opportunities for modifying an encyclopedia entry. One would think that, during the last fifteen years, the brilliant people at Britannica may have had the time to include a clarification as to Rousseau's citizenship. In fact, one might expect that a good deal of research on Rousseau's work has happened in the meantime and it would make sense to say that the Britannica entry on the scholar could integrate some elements of that research.

Notice that I'm not, in fact, talking about factual accuracy as an abstract concept. I'm referring to the effects of encyclopedia entries on people's understanding. In my mind, the Wikipedia entry on Jean-Jacques Rousseau makes it easy for readers to exercise their critical thinking. The Britannica entry on the same person makes it sound as though everything which could be said about Jean-Jacques Rousseau can be contained in a single narrative.

My guess is, Rousseau and his «Encyclopédistes» friends would probably prefer Wikipedia over Britannica.

But that's just a guess.

In the mythology generated by capitalism to pacify the masses, the myth of intellectual property stands out. It goes like this: if the rights to intellectual property were not defined and enforced, commercial entrepreneurs would not have taken on the risks associated with publishing books, recording records, and preparing multimedia products. As a result, creative people will have suffered because they will have found no way to make their works accessible to the public. Ultimately, it is the public which pays the price of piracy, goes the refrain.

But this is factually untrue. In the USA there is a very limited group of authors who actually live by their pen. Only select musicians eke out a living from their noisy vocation (most of them rock stars who own their labels - George Michael had to fight Sony to do just that) and very few actors come close to deriving subsistence level income from their profession. All these can no longer be thought of as mostly creative people. Forced to defend their intellectual property rights and the interests of Big Money, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Schwarzenegger and Grisham are businessmen at least as much as they are artists.

Economically and rationally, we should expect that the costlier a work of art is to produce and the narrower its market - the more emphasized its intellectual property rights.

Consider a publishing house.

A book which costs 20,000 euros to produce with a potential audience of 1000 purchasers (certain academic texts are like this) - would have to be priced at a a minimum of 50 euros to recoup only the direct costs. If illegally copied (thereby shrinking the potential market as some people will prefer to buy the cheaper illegal copies) - its price would have to go up prohibitively to recoup costs, thus driving out potential buyers. The story is different if a book costs 5,000 euros to produce and is priced at 10 euros a copy with a potential readership of 1,000,000 readers. Piracy (illegal copying) should in this case be more readily tolerated as a marginal phenomenon.

This is the theory. But the facts are tellingly different. The less the cost of production (brought down by digital technologies) - the fiercer the battle against piracy. The bigger the market - the more pressure is applied to clamp down on samizdat entrepreneurs.

Governments, from China to Macedonia, are introducing intellectual property laws (under pressure from rich world countries) and enforcing them belatedly. But where one factory is closed on shore (as has been the case in mainland China) - two sprout off shore (as is the case in Hong Kong and in Bulgaria).

But this defies logic: the market today is global, the costs of production are lower (with the exception of the music and film industries), the marketing channels more numerous (half of the income of movie studios emanates from video cassette sales), the speedy recouping of the investment virtually guaranteed. Moreover, piracy thrives in very poor markets in which the population would anyhow not have paid the legal price. The illegal product is inferior to the legal copy (it comes with no literature, warranties or support). So why should the big manufacturers, publishing houses, record companies, software companies and fashion houses worry?

The answer lurks in history. Intellectual property is a relatively new notion. In the near past, no one considered knowledge or the fruits of creativity (art, design) as "patentable", or as someone's "property". The artist was but a mere channel through which divine grace flowed. Texts, discoveries, inventions, works of art and music, designs - all belonged to the community and could be replicated freely. True, the chosen ones, the conduits, were honoured but were rarely financially rewarded. They were commissioned to produce their works of art and were salaried, in most cases. Only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution were the embryonic precursors of intellectual property introduced but they were still limited to industrial designs and processes, mainly as embedded in machinery. The patent was born. The more massive the market, the more sophisticated the sales and marketing techniques, the bigger the financial stakes - the larger loomed the issue of intellectual property. It spread from machinery to designs, processes, books, newspapers, any printed matter, works of art and music, films (which, at their beginning were not considered art), software, software embedded in hardware, processes, business methods, and even unto genetic material.

Intellectual property rights - despite their noble title - are less about the intellect and more about property. This is Big Money: the markets in intellectual property outweigh the total industrial production in the world. The aim is to secure a monopoly on a specific work. This is an especially grave matter in academic publishing where small- circulation magazines do not allow their content to be quoted or published even for non-commercial purposes. The monopolists of knowledge and intellectual products cannot allow competition anywhere in the world - because theirs is a world market. A pirate in Skopje is in direct competition with Bill Gates. When he sells a pirated Microsoft product - he is depriving Microsoft not only of its income, but of a client (=future income), of its monopolistic status (cheap copies can be smuggled into other markets), and of its competition-deterring image (a major monopoly preserving asset). This is a threat which Microsoft cannot tolerate. Hence its efforts to eradicate piracy - successful in China and an utter failure in legally-relaxed Russia.

But what Microsoft fails to understand is that the problem lies with its pricing policy - not with the pirates. When faced with a global marketplace, a company can adopt one of two policies: either to adjust the price of its products to a world average of purchasing power - or to use discretionary differential pricing (as pharmaceutical companies were forced to do in Brazil and South Africa). A Macedonian with an average monthly income of 160 USD clearly cannot afford to buy the Encyclopaedia Encarta Deluxe. In America, 50 USD is the income generated in 4 hours of an average job. In Macedonian terms, therefore, the Encarta is 20 times more expensive. Either the price should be lowered in the Macedonian market - or an average world price should be fixed which will reflect an average global purchasing power.

Something must be done about it not only from the economic point of view. Intellectual products are very price sensitive and highly elastic. Lower prices will be more than compensated for by a much higher sales volume. There is no other way to explain the pirate industries: evidently, at the right price a lot of people are willing to buy these products. High prices are an implicit trade-off favouring small, elite, select, rich world clientele. This raises a moral issue: are the children of Macedonia less worthy of education and access to the latest in human knowledge and creation?

Two developments threaten the future of intellectual property rights. One is the Internet. Academics, fed up with the monopolistic practices of professional publications - already publish on the web in big numbers. I published a few book on the Internet and they can be freely downloaded by anyone who has a computer or a modem. The full text of electronic magazines, trade journals, billboards, professional publications, and thousands of books is available online. Hackers even made sites available from which it is possible to download whole software and multimedia products. It is very easy and cheap to publish on the Internet, the barriers to entry are virtually nil. Web pages are hosted free of charge, and authoring and publishing software tools are incorporated in most word processors and browser applications. As the Internet acquires more impressive sound and video capabilities it will proceed to threaten the monopoly of the record companies, the movie studios and so on.

The second development is also technological. The oft-vindicated Moore's law predicts the doubling of computer memory capacity every 18 months. But memory is only one aspect of computing power. Another is the rapid simultaneous advance on all technological fronts. Miniaturization and concurrent empowerment by software tools have made it possible for individuals to emulate much larger scale organizations successfully. A single person, sitting at home with 5000 USD worth of equipment can fully compete with the best products of the best printing houses anywhere. CD-ROMs can be written on, stamped and copied in house. A complete music studio with the latest in digital technology has been condensed to the dimensions of a single chip. This will lead to personal publishing, personal music recording, and the to the digitization of plastic art. But this is only one side of the story.

The relative advantage of the intellectual property corporation does not consist exclusively in its technological prowess. Rather it lies in its vast pool of capital, its marketing clout, market positioning, sales organization, and distribution network.

Nowadays, anyone can print a visually impressive book, using the above-mentioned cheap equipment. But in an age of information glut, it is the marketing, the media campaign, the distribution, and the sales that determine the economic outcome.

This advantage, however, is also being eroded.

First, there is a psychological shift, a reaction to the commercialization of intellect and spirit. Creative people are repelled by what they regard as an oligarchic establishment of institutionalized, lowest common denominator art and they are fighting back.

Secondly, the Internet is a huge (200 million people), truly cosmopolitan market, with its own marketing channels freely available to all. Even by default, with a minimum investment, the likelihood of being seen by surprisingly large numbers of consumers is high.

I published one book the traditional way - and another on the Internet. In 50 months, I have received 6500 written responses regarding my electronic book. Well over 500,000 people read it (my Link Exchange meter registered c. 2,000,000 impressions since November 1998). It is a textbook (in psychopathology) - and 500,000 readers is a lot for this kind of publication. I am so satisfied that I am not sure that I will ever consider a traditional publisher again. Indeed, my last book was published in the very same way.

The demise of intellectual property has lately become abundantly clear. The old intellectual property industries are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their monopolies (patents, trademarks, copyright) and their cost advantages in manufacturing and marketing.

But they are faced with three inexorable processes which are likely to render their efforts vain:

The Newspaper Packaging

Print newspapers offer package deals of cheap content subsidized by advertising. In other words, the advertisers pay for content formation and generation and the reader has no choice but be exposed to commercial messages as he or she studies the content.

This model - adopted earlier by radio and television - rules the internet now and will rule the wireless internet in the future. Content will be made available free of all pecuniary charges. The consumer will pay by providing his personal data (demographic data, consumption patterns and preferences and so on) and by being exposed to advertising. Subscription based models are bound to fail.

Thus, content creators will benefit only by sharing in the advertising cake. They will find it increasingly difficult to implement the old models of royalties paid for access or of ownership of intellectual property.

Disintermediation

A lot of ink has been spilt regarding this important trend. The removal of layers of brokering and intermediation - mainly on the manufacturing and marketing levels - is a historic development (though the continuation of a long term trend).

Consider music for instance. Streaming audio on the internet or downloadable MP3 files will render the CD obsolete. The internet also provides a venue for the marketing of niche products and reduces the barriers to entry previously imposed by the need to engage in costly marketing ("branding") campaigns and manufacturing activities.

This trend is also likely to restore the balance between artist and the commercial exploiters of his product. The very definition of "artist" will expand to include all creative people. One will seek to distinguish oneself, to "brand" oneself and to auction off one's services, ideas, products, designs, experience, etc. This is a return to pre-industrial times when artisans ruled the economic scene. Work stability will vanish and work mobility will increase in a landscape of shifting allegiances, head hunting, remote collaboration and similar labour market trends.

Market Fragmentation

In a fragmented market with a myriad of mutually exclusive market niches, consumer preferences and marketing and sales channels - economies of scale in manufacturing and distribution are meaningless. Narrowcasting replaces broadcasting, mass customization replaces mass production, a network of shifting affiliations replaces the rigid owned-branch system. The decentralized, intrapreneurship-based corporation is a late response to these trends. The mega-corporation of the future is more likely to act as a collective of start-ups than as a homogeneous, uniform (and, to conspiracy theorists, sinister) juggernaut it once was.

Also Read

Contracting for Transition

The Case of the Compressed Image

The Content Downloader's Profile

The Future of Electronic Publishing

The Fall and Fall of the P-Zine

The Internet and the Library

Germany's Copyright Levy

Revolt of the Scholars

The Kidnapping of Content

The Disintermediation of Content

The first volume is titled The Great Conversation and is not a literary classic like the others, but a preface to the series written by the editors. It's very much a critique of modern education, faulting it for neglecting classical literature--and more importantly, good literature--and instead trying to co-opt children into early career paths:

Since the pupil is not committed to the occupation, the proposition that the occupation that are to be studied are those which are indicated by the needs and interests of the pupil at the time is alarming. Between the ages of six and fourteen I wanted, in rapid succession, to be an iceman (a now extinct occupation), a "motorman" on the horse cars (also extinct), a fireman, a postman, a policeman, a professional baseball player, and a missionary. The notion that what my teachers should have done was to offer me study of these occupations as the fancy for each of them took me is so startling (12-13)...

You should see all the sour faces people make and noises they sound when I tell them I study Latin in college. Their response is always, what are you going to use that for? I never know how to answer, and usually apologize. It's as if somehow, to be educated in academia, is a waste of time. I'm sorry, but most of the branches of higher education are nothing more than trade school. This is fine, but not at the extent of marginalizing the liberal arts.

On June 3rd 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica announced their new vision for their online encyclopedia. Though many comments have centered around how Britannica has collapsed under the pressure of WIkipedia's fame, I don't believe this movement towards a more expansive reference tool is equivalent to the Wikipedia model. Taken from their announcement post:

These efforts not only will improve the scope and quality of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but they’ll also allow expert contributors and readers to supplement this content with their own. The result will be a place with broader and more relevant coverage for information seekers and a welcoming community for scholars, experts, and lay contributors.

One of the main fears, that countless voices echo, is that Wikipedia is unverified drivel created by vandals and impish recluses.  The more immediate truth is that Wikipedia has grown from a volatile collection of obscure popular culture facts to a burgeoning model of how dynamic information creation can be. The community of editors have brokered for more control over substantial articles and have reduced the opportunities for article vandalism to a near minimal concern. But yet many educators pan its possibilities by citing the established comfort of traditional resources. Then this change was introduced.

The interesting thing is that Britannica isn't suggesting that they jettison their core of scholarly knowledge and replace it with "Joe Public's" views on the British monarchy. Instead they are inviting scholars and experts in the field to contribute to their content and supplement the communal resource with their own work. From what I could ascertain from the original announcement, lay users would have contribution rights to a connected aspect of the "core" knowledge base. This means that they most probably wouldn't be able to edit the main entries but would possibly have their own work and commentary be associated with related topics. Though this may not seem like a lucrative endeavor, the ability to have your work be dispersed into the scholarly community could help new authors gain a foothold into their academic endeavors via this new peer review outlet.

The one thing that concerns me is that under the proposed model there is the possibility that each user could be editing existing content, which then becomes a new piece of content separate from the original in some manner. The concept of thousands of slightly altered versions of one piece of information seems rather unnerving to me. Hopefully they can iron out these types of concepts before the full release.

For another model similar to this you may want to check out an earlier posting entitled:

Knol's Fair in Love and Wiki's

Resting on four words, Transparency, Community, Quality and Privacy, it's a very different experience. There's an odd but enticing feature --in the area where you expect to see paid ads-- that allows you to add a URL to the search results. Results are not very accurate, but these are early days.

Wikia Search lets you register a "social profile" adding the social network ingredient to search. "Search requires a strong social and community focus," they say, and they are building it through collaboration --much like Wikipedia. Worth watching.

The new policy was announced via a set of two posts in the Britannica blog. The posts make it very clear that Britannica is not embracing the wiki model to any significant degree. The role of the Britannica staff in policing its content will remain: "We are not abdicating our responsibility as publishers or burying it under the now-fashionable 'wisdom of the crowds.'" The majority of its content will continue to be generated by experts and subjected to editing. The experts and editors, in Britannica's view, "can make astute judgments that cut through the cacophony of competing and often confusing viewpoints." This willingness to interject expert judgement is what will ostensibly continue to separate it from Wikipedia, which is accused of settling, "for something bland and less informative, what is sometimes termed a 'neutral point of view.'" (link)

Are models inspired by reference books (encyclopedias, dictionaries, phonebooks, atlases...) still relevant in the context of almost-ubiquitous Internet access?

I don't have an answer but questions such as these send me on streams of thought. I like thought streaming.

One stream of thought relates to a discussion I've had with fellow Yulblogger Martin Lessard about "trust in sources." IIRC, Lessard was talking more specifically about individuals but I tend to react the same way about "source credibility" whether the source is a single human being, an institution, or a piece of writing. Typically, my reaction is a knee-jerk one: "No information is to be trusted, regardless of the source. Critical thinking and the scientific method both imply that we should apply the same rigorous analysis to any piece of information, regardless of the alleged source." But this reasoned stance of mine is confronted with the reality of people (including myself and other vocal proponents of critical thinking) acting, at least occasionally, as if we did "trust" sources differentially.

I still think that this trusty attitude toward some sources needs to be challenged in contexts which give a lot of significance to information validity. Conversely, maybe there's value in trust because information doesn't always have to be that valid and because it's often more expedient to trust some sources than to "apply the same rigorous analysis to information coming from any source."

I also think that there are different forms of trust. From a strong version which relates to faith, all the way to a weak version, tantamount to suspension of disbelief. It's not just a question of degree as there are different origins for source-trust, from positive prior experiences with a given source to the hierarchical dimensions of social status.

A basic point, here, might be that "trust in source" is contextual, nuanced, changing, constructed... relative.

Second stream of thought: popular reference books. I'm still afraid of groupthink, but there's something deep about some well-known references.

Just learnt, through the most recent issue of Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access newsletter, some news about French reference book editor Larousse (now part of Hachette, which is owned by Lagardère) making a move toward Open Access. Through their Larousse.fr site, Larousse is not only making some of its content available for open access but it's adding some user-contributed content to its site. As an Open Access enthusiast, I do find the OA angle interesting. But the user-content angle leads me in another direction having to do with reference books.

What may not be well-known outside of Francophone contexts is that Larousse is pretty much a "household name" in many French-speaking homes. Larousse dictionaries have been commonly used in schools and they have been selling quite well through much of the editor's history. Not to mention that some specialized reference books published by Larousse, are quite unique.

To make this more personal: I pretty much grew up on Larousse dictionaries. In my mind, Larousse dictionaries were typically less "stuffy" and more encyclopedic in approach than other well-known French dictionaries. Not only did Larousse's flagship Petit Larousse illustré contain numerous images, but some aspect of its supplementary content, including Latin expressions and proverbs, were very useful and convenient. At the same time, Larousse's fairly extensive line of reference books could retain some of the prestige afforded its stuffier and less encyclopedic counterparts in the French reference book market. Perhaps because I never enjoyed stuffiness, I pretty much associated my view of erudition with Larousse dictionaries. Through a significant portion of my childhood, I spent countless hours reading disparate pieces of Larousse dictionaries. Just for fun.

So, for me, freely accessing and potentially contributing to Larousse feels strange. Can't help but think of our battered household copies of Petit Larousse illustré. It's a bit as if a comics enthusiast were not only given access to a set of Marvel or DC comics but could also go on the drawing board. I've never been "into" comics but I could recognize my childhood self as a dictionary nerd.

There's a clear connection in my mind between my Larousse-enhanced childhood memories and my attitude toward using Wikipedia. Sure, Petit Larousse was edited in a "closed" environment, by a committee. But there was a sense of discovery with Petit Larousse that I later found with CD-ROM and online encyclopedias. I used a few of these, over the years, and I eventually stuck with Wikipedia for much of this encyclopedic fun. Like probably many others, I've spent some pleasant hours browsing through Wikipedia, creating in my head a more complex picture of the world.

Which is not to say that I perceive Larousse as creating a new Wikipedia. Describing the Larousse.fr move toward open access and user-contributed content, the Independent mostly compares Larousse with Wikipedia. In fact, a Larousse representative seems to have made some specific statements about trying to compete with Wikipedia. Yet, the new Larousse.fr site is significantly different from Wikipedia.

As Suber says, Larousse's attempt is closer to Google's knols than to Wikipedia. In contrast with the Wikipedia model but as in Google's knol model, content contributed by users on the Larousse site preserves an explicit sense of authorship. According to the demo video for Larousse.fr, some specific features have been implemented on the site to help users gather around specific topics. Something similar has happened informally with some Wikipedians, but the Larousse site makes these features rather obvious and, as some would say, "user-friendly." After all, while many people do contribute to Wikipedia, some groups of editors function more like tight-knit communities or aficionados than like amorphous groups of casual users. One interesting detail about the Larousse model is that user-contributed and Larousse contents run in parallel to one another. There are bridges in terms of related articles, but the distinction seems clear. Despite my tendency to wait for prestige structures to "just collapse, already," I happen to think this model is sensible in the context of well-known reference books. Larousse is "reliable, dependable, trusty." Like comfort food. Or like any number of items sold in commercials with an old-time feel.

So, "Wikipedia the model" is quite different from the Larousse model but both Wikipedia and Petit Larousse can be used in similar ways.

Another stream of thought, here, revolves around the venerable institution known as Encyclopædia Britannica. Britannica recently made it possible for bloggers (and other people publishing textual content online) to apply for an account giving them access to the complete online content of the encyclopedia. With this access comes the possibility to make specific articles available to our readers via simple linking, in a move reminiscent of the Financial Times model.

Since I received my "blogger accreditation to Britannica content," I did browse some article on Britannica.com. I receive Britannica's "On This Day" newsletter of historical events in my inbox daily and it did lead me to some intriguing entries. I did "happen" on some interesting content and I even used Britannica links on my main blog as well as in some forum posts for a course I teach online.

But, I must say, Britannica.com is just "not doing it for me."

For one thing, the site is cluttered and cumbersome. Content is displayed in small chunks, extra content is almost dominant, links to related items are often confusing and, more sadly, many articles just don't have enough content to make visits satisfying or worthwhile. Not to mention that it is quite difficult to link to a specific part of the content as the site doesn't use page anchors in a standard way.

To be honest, I was enthusiastic when I first read about Britannica.com's blogger access. Perhaps because of the (small) thrill of getting "privileged" access to protected content, I thought I might find the site useful. But time and again, I had to resort to Wikipedia. Wikipedia, like an old Larousse dictionary, is dependable. Besides, I trust my sense of judgement to not be too affect by inaccurate or invalid information.

One aspect of my deception with Britannica relates to the fact that, when I write things online, I use links as a way to give readers more information, to help them exercise critical thinking, to get them thinking about some concepts and issues, and/or to play with some potential ambiguity. In all of those cases, I want to link to a resource which is straightforward, easy to access, easy to share, clear, and "open toward the rest of the world."

Britannica is not it. Despite all its "credibility" and perceived prestige, Britannica.com isn't providing me with the kind of service I'm looking for. I don't need a reference book in the traditional sense. I need something to give to other people.

After waxing nostalgic about Larousse and ranting about Britannica, I realize how funny some of this may seem, from the outside. In fact, given the structure of the Larousse.fr site, I already think that I won't find it much more useful than Britannica for my needs and I'll surely resort to Wikipedia, yet again.

But, at least, it's all given me the opportunity to stream some thoughts about reference books. Yes, I'm enough of a knowledge geek to enjoy it.

Here's a nice little article from Britannica about knowledge supposedly independent of particular experiences. They have a feature that you can share full articles with readers once you're signed in:

a priori knowledge

El liberalismo estándar difundido en la red ha querido convertir el debate sobre el Estado en un panorama maniqueo de absolutos morales. Según la nueva Vulgata liberal -en realidad, un refrito de tendencias americanas fusionadas al calor de la revolución conservadora-, la historia económica viene a ser un combate entre una iniciativa privada angélica, responsable de la creación de riqueza, y un Estado que tiende siempre a abarcarla y asfixiarla. Este esquema sentimental obvia por lo general análisis más complejos sobre la naturaleza de los Estados y distinciones como la que hace Fukuyama entre strength y scope, y se inventa una especie de capitalismo taoísta según el cual los mercados se expanden y se mantienen no ya mediante manos invisibles sino por la Divina Providencia. Lejos de plantearse los imprescindibles trade-offs, asume la misma actitud 100% que las impugnaciones del sistema procedentes de la izquierda radical.

En el mundo real, fuera de la "batalla de las ideas", las categorías empleadas en el discurso ideológico pierden sus nítidos contornos, y el análisis ha de tener en cuenta gradaciones y abandonar la escenificación de un férreo moralismo. Por supuesto, no existe tal cosa como una economía liberal o una economía socialista puras, sino economías mixtas en diversos grados. Y si, idealmente, los mercados tienden a funcionar mejor cuanto menos interfiere el poder estatal, es preciso reconocer que su existencia no se debe a una necesidad metafísica, y que su despliegue suele adquirir la forma de procesos e incluso decisiones intrínsecamente políticos. Hasta el punto de que muy a menudo es difícil dilucidar donde acaba lo político y donde empieza lo económico, Estado y Mercado.

El mercado común mediterráneo auspiciado por el dominio romano -la primera globalización- no se materializó hasta que Roma hubo eliminado a sus competidores, singularmente Cartago, ni hasta que Pompeyo y César hubieron acabado con la piratería merced a flotas que, por supuesto, no se reunieron espontáneamente. La segunda globalización, la decretada por la Royal Navy en los mares decimonónicos, dependía de un sistema geopolítico emanado de las Guerras Napoleónicas, que a su vez habían comenzado a decantarse seguramente unas décadas antes, en la Guerra de los Siete Años. Como el lector recordará, este conflicto enfrentó a Inglaterra y Francia en el continente -donde la subvencionada Prusia cargó con la parte principal de la lucha- y en las colonias ultramarinas. Aunque los contemporáneos, en general, no lo apreciaran, este último fue el teatro verdaderamente decisivo: Francia fue expulsada del Canadá y su presencia en Norteamérica se desvaneció con la cesión de la Luisiana a España. Además, los británicos obtuvieron una ventaja en la India que aprovecharían en las décadas siguientes. La guerra marcó el camino de la decadencia francesa y de una hegemonía británica basada en el dominio de los mares. En el último cuarto del siglo XVIII, la independencia de los Estados Unidos pareció interrumpir la tendencia, que, si embargo, se confirmó en el Primero de Junio, Abukir y Trafalgar, las batallas que decidieron realmente el curso de las Guerras Napoleónicas.

Es tentador, por tanto, considerar la Guerra de los Siete Años y las Guerras Napoleónicas -la fase final de la Segunda Guerra de los Cien Años- como momentos decisivos en la génesis de la Gran Divergencia, el proceso por el que Europa Occidental pasó del mundo malthusiano del Antiguo Régimen al orden capitalista-liberal que nos es familiar. ¿Por qué se impuso Inglaterra, la potencia liberal, a Francia, el Estado simbólico del absolutismo centralista? Podemos arriesgarnos a resumir un análisis muy complejo -hacia 1750, Francia cuadruplicaba en población a Inglaterra y Gales, y estaba presente en el Caribe, Norteamérica y la India además de ser el árbitro de la geopolítica continental- con una fórmula sencilla: Inglaterra era un Estado más eficiente. Niall Ferguson:

It was a victory based on naval superiority. But this in turn was possible only because Britain had one crucial advantage over France: the ability to borrow money. More than a third of all Britain's war expenditure was financed by loans. The institutions copied form the Dutch in the time of William III had now come into their own, allowing Pitt's government to spread the cost of war by selling low-interest bonds to the investing public. The French, by contrast, were reduced to begging or stealing.

A su vez, la credibilidad del Estado británico se fundamentaba en una fiscalidad nacional unificada y racionalizada. Tim Blanning:

The 'Second Hundred Years War' was not won at Quebec or Tafalgar or Waterloo, or even on the playing fields of Eton, but in the Treasury in London. (...)

Just because the political nation controlled public expenditure, and just because so many of its members benefitted from it, Parliament was that much more willing to give its consent to new or enhanced taxation. Moreover, in its direct form, it was taxation that was both national and local: national in the sense that it was applied equally to all parts of the kingdom, local in the sense that it was assesed and collected by representatives of those who paid it -the landowners.

Direct taxation -the land tax and taxes on other forms of personal wealth or indicators of status- was not, however, the most important form of revenue, for it yielded only about 42 per cent of the total during the Nine Years War, 38 per cent during the War of Spanish Succession, and went on falling to 18 per cent in the 1780s. Even the introduction of the income tax in 1799 did not raise the share to more than a third. The main burden was carried by customs and excise. After 1660, responsibility for their collection was shifted from private tax-farmers to public officials, bureaucratically controlled. The advantages of indirect taxation were twofold. First, although it bore heaviest on the poor, because it was a tax on consumption, the fact that it was paid at the port of entry or in the manufactory and was incorporated in the price meant that it was relatively invisible. Secondly, it allowed the state to benefit from the expansion of commerce, through customs dues, and from the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century, as excisable commodities such as tea, sugar and tobacco passed down the social scale to become the necessities of the masses. (...) This expansion was accompanied by professionalization. As John Brewer has written: 'Dependent upon a complex system of measurements and book-keeping, organised as a rigorous hierarchy based on experience and ability, and subject to strict discipline from its central office, the English Excise more closely approximated to Max Weber's idea of bureaucracy than any other government agency in eighteenth-century Europe.'

In short, the fiscal system that evolved in England in the course of the seventeenth century was universal, bureaucratic, professional and public.

Como ya vimos en el caso del derecho y las instituciones, la representación de una Francia borbónica monolítica, centralista y omnicomprensiva, de un scope casi ilimitado, enmascara la realidad de su limitada fuerza. Por contra, el Estado británico fue capaz de canalizar una cantidad ingente de recursos sin renunciar a su cultura de la soberanía, la iniciativa y la libertad individuales. Una cultura que se extendió por el globo gracias a la vitalidad y fortaleza de la nación política construida sobre ella.

At one time I would have admired Jacobs for his gargantuan quest and his tenacity in completing it. I might have envied his newly acquired knowledge of so much history, science, and assorted facts on tens of thousands of subjects. If I were single and had lots of time on my hands I might have considered trying to do something similar (though I would never have shelled out the money to buy a set of encyclopedias for the purpose).

But I got married. And we didn't have the difficulties that A.J. and his wife Julie did with conceiving a child. We started trying in 1991 (the year we bought our own Encyclopaedia Britannica set for our future children to use for school reports), and our first son was born in March 1992. When we bought the encyclopedias, I did have some vague intentions of doing some self-study on topics of interest. But instead I enrolled in an MBA program and spent the next six years reading textbooks (besides getting on-the-job training as a mother, and holding down a full-time job).

I did find out that one thing A.J. and I have in common (besides a fascination with knowledge and the temptation to let other people know how much we know) is our favorite word game, Boggle. This is discussed under F for Fibonacci, because the scoring system for Boggle is based on the Fibonacci sequence. I've loved Boggle since I first discovered it while staying overnight at someone's house as a college student. I'm not sure if I had ever given much thought to the scoring system, though. It's the words I love, not the numbers I rack up finding them.

Jacobs does have an engaging writing style, which is perhaps why I got as far as I did (plus I hate to quit on a book). For instance, here is how he describes his tendency toward pessimism:

In general, I don't just see the glass as half empty, I see the glass as half empty and the water as teeming with microbes and the rim as smudged and the liquid as evaporating quickly.

Perhaps I would have enjoyed this book more if the random ramblings about A.J.'s reading had included more information on subjects I cared about. I don't know if the factoids A.J. pulled from the lives of influential men such as Descartes (who liked cross-eyed women) and Mussolini (who married the daughter of his father's widowed mistress) were what really interested him or just what he thought would interest readers of his book. Perhaps I'm less interested in trivia than I thought I was.

I admit that I did jump to the last entry in the book (the entire book is arranged alphabetically, as he read his way through the encyclopedia, picking out interesting bits and often interspersing them with anecdotes from his own life) before returning it to the library, to see whether there was a grand conclusion. There wasn't. But he was now an expectant father. So somewhere between P and Z, Julie finally got pregnant.

Renaissance Guy got me interested in Jacobs' books, both this one and The Year of Living Biblically. Our library doesn't carry the latter book, and I'm not inclined to buy it. But if it does show up on the library's shelves, I'll check it out. And as I have read the Bible cover to cover (unlike the encyclopedia), I may find that one more interesting.

In June 2002, Jeff Harrow, in his influential and eponymous "Harrow Technology Report", analyzed the economics of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). These are 3-D games which take place in comprehensively and minutely constructed environments - a medieval kingdom being the favorite. "Gamers" use action figures known as avatars to represent themselves. These animated figurines walk, talk, emote, and are surprisingly versatile.

Harrow quoted this passage from Internetnews.com regarding Sony's (actually, Verant's) "EverQuest". It is a massive MMORPG (now with a sequel) with almost half a million users - each paying c. $13 a month:

"(Norrath, EverQuest's ersatz world is) ... the 77th largest economy in the [real] world!  [It] has a gross national product per capita of $2,266, making its economy larger than either the Chinese or Indian economy and roughly comparable to Russia's economy."

In his above quoted paper, "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier", Professor Edward Castronova, from California State University at Fullerton, notes that:

"The nominal hourly wage (in Norrath) is about USD 3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of Norrath's currency is traded on exchange markets at USD 0.0107, higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to many."

Players - in contravention of the game's rules until recently - also trade in EverQuest paraphernalia and characters offline. The online auction Web site, eBay, is flooded with them and people pay real money - sometimes up to a thousand dollars - for avatars and their possessions. Auxiliary and surrogate industries sprang around EverQuest and its ilk. There are, for instance, "macroing" programs that emulate the actions of a real-life player - a no-no.

Nor is EverQuest the largest. World of Warcraft from Blizzard Entertainment has 1.5 million subscribers. The Korean MMORPG "Lineage" boasts a staggering 2.5 million subscribers. "The Matrix Online", released by Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment and Sega Corporation in 2004-5, may surpass these figures due to its association with the film franchise - though Star War Galaxies, for instance, failed to leverage its cinematic brand.

The economies of these immersive faux realms suffer from very real woes, though. In its May 28, 2002 issue, "The New Yorker" recounted the story of Britannia, one of the nether kingdoms of the Internet:

"The kingdom, which is stuck somewhere between the sixth and the twelfth centuries, has a single unit of currency, a gold piece that looks a little like a biscuit. A network of servers is supposed to keep track of all the gold, just as it keeps track of everything else on the island, but in late 1997 bands of counterfeiters found a bug that allowed them to reproduce gold pieces more or less at will.

The fantastic wealth they produced for themselves was, of course, entirely imaginary, and yet it led, in textbook fashion, to hyperinflation. At the worst point in the crisis, Britannia's monetary system virtually collapsed, and players all over the kingdom were reduced to bartering."

Britannia - run by Ultima Online - has 250,000 "denizens", each charged c. $10 a month. An average Britannian spends 13 hours a week in the simulated demesne. For many, this constitutes their main social interaction. Psychologists warn against the addictive qualities of this recreation.

Others regard these diversions as colossal - though inadvertent - social experiments. If so, they bode ill - they are all infested with virtual crime, counterfeiting, hoarding, xenophobia, racism, and all manner of perversions.

Subscriptions are not the only mode of payment. Early multi-user dungeons (MUD) - another type of MMORPG - used to charge by the hour. Some users were said to run bills of hundreds of dollars a month.

MMORPG's require massive upfront investments. It costs c. $20 million to develop a game, not including later content development and technical support. Consequently, hitherto, such games constitute a tiny fraction of the booming video and PC gaming businesses. With combined annual revenues of c. $9 billion in 2001, these trades are 10 percent bigger than the film industry - and half as lucrative as the home video market. They are fast closing on music retail sales.

As games become graphically-lavish  and more interactive, their popularity will increase. Offline and online single-player and multi-player video gaming may be converging. Both Sony and Microsoft Internet-enable their game consoles. The currently clandestine universe of geeks and eccentrics - online, multi-player, games - may yet become a mass phenomena.

Moreover, MMORPG can be greatly enhanced - and expensive downtime greatly reduced - with distributed computing - the sharing of idle resources worldwide to perform calculations within ad hoc self-assembling computer networks. Such collaboration forms the core of, arguably, the new architecture of the Internet known as "The Grid". Companies such as IBM and Butterfly are already developing the requisite technologies.

According to an IBM-Butterfly press release:

"The Butterfly Grid T could enable online video game providers to support a massive number of players (a few millions) (simultaneously) within the same game by allocating computing resources to the most populated areas and most popular games."

The differences between video games and other forms of entertainment may be eroding. Hollywood films are actually a form of MMORPG's - simultaneously watched by thousands worldwide. Video games are interactive - while movies are passive but even this distinction may fall prey to Web films and interactive TV.

As real-life actors and pop idols are - ever so gradually - replaced by electronic avatars, video games will come to occupy the driver seat in a host of hitherto disparate industries. Movies may first be released as video games - rather than conversely. Original music written for the games will be published as "sound tracks".

Gamers will move seamlessly from their PDA to their PC, to their home cinema system, and back to their Interactive TV. Game consoles - already computational marvels - may finally succeed where PC's failed: to transform the face of entertainment.

Jeff Harrow aptly concludes:

" ... History teaches me that games tend to drive the mass adoption of technologies that then become commonplace and find their way into 'business'.  Examples include color monitors, higher-resolution and hardware-accelerated graphics, sound cards, and more. And in the case of these MMORPG games, I believe that they will eventually morph into effective virtual business venues for meetings, trade shows, and more. Don't ignore what's behind (and ahead for) these 'games', just because they're games..."

Also Read

The Madness of Playing Games

Notes on the Economics of Game Theory

co|ro|ner
s.m.inv.
ES ingl. in Gran Bretagna e negli Stati Uniti, pubblico ufficiale che indaga sui decessi ritenuti sospetti e dovuti a cause violente (dal De Mauro online)

La Britannica scrive:

coroner

a public official whose principal duty in modern times is to inquire, with the help of a jury, into any death that appears to be unnatural.

The office originated in England and was first referred to as custos placitorum (Latin: “keeper of the pleas”) in the Articles of Eyre of 1194, although there is some evidence that it may have existed earlier. The name was originally “crowner,” or “coronator,” derived from the Latin corona, meaning “crown.” The coroner, elected by the freeholders of the county, was charged with safeguarding the king’s property and served as a check on the powerful office of the sheriff in the royal interest.

Legislation in the 19th century eliminated the vestiges of the coroner’s early powers, many of which were already obsolete. The Coroners Amendment Act of 1926 further limited his duties to conducting an inquest into deaths occurring within his district by violent or unnatural means or from some unknown cause, or into the death of a person in prison or under circumstances that require an inquest in accord with other legislation. The act also set up the qualifications for holding the office, requiring that a coroner be a barrister, solicitor, or legally qualified medical practitioner. In practice, persons possessing both legal and medical qualifications have been appointed.

In Canada all coroners are appointed by a provincial order in council, signed by the lieutenant governor. As a judge of a court of record, the coroner is not liable in civil action for anything done by him in his judicial capacity if he acts indiscreetly or erroneously.

In the United States the office is usually elective, but in some states it may be appointive. About half the states have a coroner’s system; in some of the others the sheriff or the justice of the peace performs his functions, while in still others the coroner’s office has been replaced by a medical examiner. Roughly one-third of U.S. states use both the coroner and medical-examiner systems. In a few states the coroner’s staff is composed of persons skilled in pathology, toxicology, and chemistry.

In some U.S. states coroners must be pathologists, but in others a layman may be authorized as coroner, with the power to employ a physician to conduct the autopsy. In most states the coroner has the power to issue a warrant for the arrest of persons who may have caused the death of another by criminal means and possesses all the powers of a magistrate to hear testimony.

Fonte: Fonte: "coroner." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 18 May. 2008 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/138338/coroner>.

Pay for access sites block links to specific pages when referenced online, as did Britannica before. So if I have a subscription to Britannica and link to an article, everyone following that link must also have a subscription to Britannica or they can't see the link. That made sense back when every content provider on the Web dreamed of getting millions of consumers to sign up “just because” they had to buy the same content for real money in the real world.

The model moved to where content providers like Britannica must tease us with some content, so we'll know the rest of the content is worth the money. Porn sites, of course, led the way with the tease business model, in more ways than one. But it's good to see smart companies like Britannica and major newspapers make their content more available.

I've applied for my Britannica access. You'll know if this works if you start seeing regularal links to Britannica. And then you'll be able to make a better decision of Britannica Online makes sense for you.

The more fascinating point the Post elaborates on here is that people are progressively becoming too impatient for truth of any other kind.  The inference here is that all questions are now expected to be ready reference ones.  There's a great example in the article of how even the simplest reference interview can be too trying for the attention span of some of our patrons.  We may have a problem here.

A.J. Jacobs has taken on a new task in his book "The Know-It-All". Before, he has lived an entire year following the teachings of the Bible, but now he is reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z. This is a unique and interesting idea for a book, but whether or not it’s a good idea, remains to be seen.

"The Know-It-All" is comedic view on the information and irony in the Encyclopedia Britannica. A.J. Jacobs is reading the entire collection all the way through and is taking the reader with him on this astronomical foot. He gives a brief description of about two to three dozen words per letter, and makes a satirical or ironic comment on each. He also takes the reader through his personal problems as he reads the collection of words, like his desperation to have a child, world issues, and his funny stories of how he tries to show off his newfound knowledge.

While being funny, "The Know-It-All" is also educational. He gives out information that the reader can store as "Information I never knew, and never wanted to know." He discusses the disgusting facts of animals and foreign customs. However, he does give useful knowledge like the longest word in the English dictionary, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. His ironic outlook on life and ways of living it is hysterical and keeps the reader coming back for more. It's hilariously addicting.

Although "The Know-It-All" is addicting and funny, it can be long winded and seems like it might be better if it were shorter. The writing style never changes throughout the book which can put the reader in a slum wondering if the book will ever get anywhere, with the resounding answer "no." The book does not change much at all throughout the book and can be very hard to push through at times. However, there is a plot to the book that amazingly keeps the reader reading. The great aspect of this book is that it is okay to skip parts of it. With every section between a paragraph and a couple pages in length, skipping a few sections is perfectly acceptable.

A.J. Jacobs also takes the reader through his attempt to show off his knowledge through trial and error. Jacobs is already a socially awkward person as it is, and trying to show off some interesting, yet nerdy, facts does not help his case. At first he sounds snotty or condescending, but learns how to approach the subject with a general introduction, and then narrow it to what he wants. With the loving support of his family, Jacobs is able to learn from his errors and make his conversations more interesting. However many errors Jacobs makes, he still does make the occasional error that makes him seem like a jerk, but it’s all in good fun. It is always funny to see how Jacobs continuously makes a fool out of himself.

Personally, my favorite point of the book was not intended to be an ironic comment, but a passing observation. Jacobs says “Oh and then there’s that little apocalypse hanging over our head: it looks like we’re going to war with Iraq, and God knows what’s going to happen.” I love this quote because its irony was not intended. Obviously, the war with Iraq is not going as well as expected, and his hesitation and concern about the outcome before it even happens is humorous.

A.J. Jacobs’s book “The Know-It-All” is a fabulous idea, and despite its slow points, is a great book. Those who want to read a funny, ironic, but educated piece of material, this book is for you.