Podcasting was supposed to be controlled by the little guy

The Internet and Podcasting was supposed to create a widely level playing ground. Anybody with an ability to record and produce digital audio or video could set up shop as a podcaster. Armed with a small set of digital media production tools, and a web site, one could produce their own equivalent to a radio program, air their own ideas, and stand on their own virtual soapbox and tell the world whatever is on their mind. The iTunes service makes it real easy at the consumer end of the spectrum. Inside iTunes you have access to a vast directory of podcasts, in addition to the audio books or music or TV shows that you can buy through the iTunes Music Store. It's a wonderful world, but what if Apple decides they don't like your content?

Apple's flip-floppy stance on sex Podcasts continues: Discusses Apple's problem with SEX. Maybe thinking differently stops when you get into the bedroom?

When iTunes sprouted the ability to automatically collect podcasts, Steven Jobs apparently said: that pretty much every topic was fair game except "you know, we're not—we're not allowing any pornography." ... except, in practice the iTunes Music Store has been indexing some sex-oriented shows, making the producers label them with an "EXPLICIT" tag. Except, as the article linked above discusses, some producers of EXPLICIT shows have had their shows summarily dropped from the iTunes Music Store.

Of course, once dropped from the music store the listenership to the shows drops precipitously.

I hadn't realized this but the iTunes service probably redistributes the podcast's RSS feed rather than directly subscribing to it. By having iTunes redistribute the RSS feed, they are able to determine the popularity of different feeds. But at the same time that leaves the podcasters, and the listeners, in a lurch should Apple decide to drop some podcast from their directory.

So, at issue is the ability for one entity to determine what we can or cannot watch or listen to.

In this case it is Apple. Through selecting what appears in the iTunes Music Store podcast directory, they determine the content we can easily listen to. Yes, we can eaily browse web sites and directly subscribe to the feed published by the web site. In iTunes when one finds a podcast RSS feed they can get the URL of the feed and using a choice in the Advanced menu make a subscription to that feed. But, in reality, how many people do so? Isn't it a lot easier to click on the music store, browse to the podcast section, and search around in there?

It's not just Apple that has this role. For example when Google decides to drop a web site from its search engine that site generally sees traffic fall dramatically. On my web site statistics over half the traffic comes through search results in Google.

There are certain services that act as gatekeepers. If these services decide to not list some web site, then nobody will know about it. If Apple doesn't list your podcast in the music store, how will people hear of you? Similarly if Google doesn't list you in their directory, then how will people hear of you?

Okay, there are alternative avenues .. there are other search engines besides Google, and there are other podcast directories besides iTunes. However the fact is that the vast majority of traffic goes through Google for general search results, and through iTunes for podcasting.

The Internet was supposed to create a level playing field where everybody has the ability to open up a web site and publish to a global audience. This picture is outside the control of Big Media and Big Corporations, supposedly. As individuals we can decide to spend the $5 per month for a website hosting fee, and set up a web site. No Big Corporation is involved in approving our web site, and it's very liberating for the little guy to have such an ability to speak to the world.

But we have Big Corporations, the like of Apple and Google, deciding who is listed in the commonly used directories and search engines. It is they who are determining what we can or cannot read or listen to.

Today the Prudes are telling them to go after SEX-related web sites. Okay, you probably can't find a lot of people who would defend the SEX-related web sites. But there's that story which sprung from WW II, first they went after the Jews and I am not a Jew so I didn't speak up, etc, until finally they came after me and there was nobody left to speak up for me.

In the U.S. freedom of speach is a core principle.

This picture is one of ... you can shout all you want, but if nobody can hear you then all you'll do is get a hoarse throat and zero effect.

The last thought I want to discuss is the Dirty Old Mens Association International. Quit giggling, it is a real organization with a very interesting set of ideals. The concept is that there is great beauty in the feminine form and one should be free to, if not obligated to, enjoy that beauty wherever and whenever you find it. The site features pictures of naked women, but I challenge you to call it pornography. Artists throughout the ages have depicted naked women in their art, and that's the tradition followed on this site. Celebrating beauty through the feminine form.

A few days ago on their front page was a notice how DOMAI was no longer able to accept payments through PayPal. This is because PayPal's acceptable use agreement prohibits payments for nudity. Okay, fine, here again we have a large corporation deciding what is fit and appropriate for others to view. Interestingly at the same time eBay, PayPal's corporate parent, has a large section of sex-related merchandise listed for sale.

There is a huge difference between the typical images in the sex/porn industry, and the images on the DOMAI web site as well as the high-art images that also pictorialize nude women.

Does nudity automatically mean SEX? No! Nudity can very well be an enjoyment and appreciation for beauty. But the typical images from the sex/porn industry are not geared to appreciate beauty, but instead seem intended to inspire raunch and even a degradation of women.

The laws seem to convey an idea that nudity does mean SEX. But clearly that's not the case. And in any case does discussion of SEX automatically mean that something bad is going to happen?

Utopia? Maybe...

I just listened to an National Public Radio piece that presents one mans concept of utopia. Namely, individuals or small scale organizations working on small scale work projects.

The guy is a University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, also happens to oversee a blog, a music label and a microbrewery. He's written a book An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths, which I haven't read. But I am living what he's talking about, so with that let me write a few things.

In the NPR piece the situation is described thusly.

Up until the Industrial Revolution humans did most things on a small scale. A few people running a farm, or running a mill, etc. These were very human scaled organizations, he claims.

Then the Industrial Revolution happened and suddenly the scale of organizations had to expand dramatically. A cost effective factory for that time was huge, and employed thousands of people. To go along with it was the rise of huge corporations.

But, today, technology has come full circle to being able to enable individuals to work on small scale organizations.

An example is what I do with my web sites. I have a "day job" in a large corporation, but I also am a web site publisher and earn a tidy side income at that. Additionally I see a way to totally divorce myself from the large corporation, and instead operate several small operations each of which would provide part of my income.

In the interview they gave some more examples.

For example all the people making a living (partial or not) via sales through eBay.COM. He exemplified eBay as a wave of future business style. Another example was someone making custom guitars at home, and he uses eMachineShop.com for parts production.

The way eBay makes their money is through taking advantage of others doing what they want to do. This is drastically different from the large corporate style organization, where the organization exists to tell thousands of people what to do. There are dozens of companies making money through enabling others to do what they want. Google, for example, makes a lot of money from individuals like me who run AdSense advertising on their web sites.

I think, though, he's selling a bit of a pipe dream.

These individuals making their small organizations are riding on the back of some very large organizations. An individual selling stuff through eBay is absolutely dependant on eBay, as well as the package delivery industry (FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc). These are all very large companies who operate in the top-down style of telling their employees what to do.

Let's take another example. Suppose you have a great salsa recipe and you want to make and sell salsa. Go to any farmers market and you'll find several people living a similar dream. It's relatively simple, you need to pass health inspections, be able to operate a healthy kitchen and production facility, find FDA certified packaging, get a FDA certified label made showing the ingredients, etc. One could launch a salsa business with a small group of people, and then go to farmers markets or local Whole Foods stores to sell your product. If you keep working at it, you might eventually have national distribution and so on.

But, let's get back to the beginning. Where does your packaging come from? Are you going to make the packaging, or are you going to buy that? How big is the company who makes the packaging? Where do you buy the ingredients? The local farmer, or from an agribusiness?

What I'm getting at is that this utopia Glenn Reynolds holds out in front of us won't be there for all of us. Some of us will have to work in large organizations like UPS so that others of us can run our humanely-sized home businesses. And that's probably okay, because not everybody is inspired to do this. Many people seem content to go to work and be told what to do with their lives. If that's what they want to do, then more power to them.

U.S. Spies plan massive data sweep of Internet

There's this current story about massive snooping into telephone conversations by the NSA. The NSA and CIA and other spy agencies are supposed to turn their efforts on targets outside the U.S. but under Bush Administration edict they've been working inside the U.S., in opposition to U.S. law. Yes, the President has been breaking the law.

The conduct of the U.S. Administration is that this is not a war on Terror, but instead a war on Personal Freedom.

Consider: US plans massive data sweep Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far? (Christian Science Monitor, February 09, 2006)

The article describes a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE), a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio.

The project it describes is very similar to the process of search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, Technorati, etc. It's to scoop up a vast amount of data from the Internet and to draw out extra information from it. The technical phrase is "data mining" which is a practice of taking one data source, and putting it to a different use. Data mining is widely performed in businesses.

For example credit card companies perform data mining to detect fraudulent use of credit cards. e.g. they might look for your card being used to make an abnormally large purchase, or a purchase made far from your normal area of activity. And if they see it, they could give you a phone call saying "we noticed suspicious activity, did you make purchase X on date Y".

So long as the ADVISE system is collecting publicly available data, is there a problem?

The difference here between the government activity and what, e.g. Google, would do with it is: The government is looking for "terrorists", and the government has people with guns who are known to use those guns to kill people.

The problem with the government's hunt for terrorists, is they've got a rather loose definition and they make mistakes. For example in the Extraordinary Rendition stories, one was a German tourist who the U.S. agents identified as Al Qaeda linked, they kidnapped him, flew him to Afghanistan, tortured him for months, eventually realized they mistakenly identified him, and dropped him off penniless in Kosovo. And for loose definitions of terrorism, we can think of the people arrested for "ecoterrorism" where they are taking their protests of e.g. logging activities to doing property damage and whatnot. Sure, commiting property damage is illegal and they should be punished, but labeling them as terrorists is going too far.

In other words, I think it's legal to collect data that's publicly available (e.g. published on a web site) and to make secondary uses of it. If it's good enough for Google or Technorati, then it's good enough for the U.S. Government. But there needs to be oversight and measurement to ensure they don't overstep themselves.

For example, what if they made a deal with Google or other search engines to capture some of the private search query data which the search engines have on hand. That is, each time you make a search engine query, the company running your preferred search engine receives your IP address, your web browser, your operating system, etc, along with the query terms. If you've registered with the search engine (e.g. signed into your "mail" account) then the search engine can know exactly who you are.

Now, that's private data which the search engine collects. One way they use it is to further tailor your search results based on past queries you've made. But what if they began handing that data over to the government, which the government would than incorporate into this ADVISE system?

Would you get a knock on the door just because you had a hankering to learn about terrorists and did a lot of google searches about activities done by terrorists? Or you wanted to see for yourself just how easy (or not) it is to get information on making nuclear bombs?

I want to close by reminding the reader of the Total Information Awareness system. TIA is/was a Department of Defense project to that acted as an umbrella over several inter-related projects, some of which would use data mining techniques of the kind described in the CS Monitor article. While a couple minor TIA projects were shut down, it's clear the bulk of them went forward, and that the intent of the Government for several years has been to create a technologically advanced system that can effectively track every action and look for "dangerous" patterns.

The TIA existed before the September 11, 2001 events which "changed everything". The TIA existed before the Bush administration. This is just an ongoing desire by government agencies to vastly step up their capabilities to spy on everyone.