David Warlick has created word clouds based on the words Andrew Keen and I use in our debate in the WSJ. Pretty interesting. For me, the stand out result is that I use the word “amateur” far more than Andrew “Cult of the Amateur” Keen does.

I had a stimulating dinner conversation with someone who works for an institution that preserves the work of a well-known choreographer. (I’m being a bit cagey because I may not be representing this person’s views accurately.) The institution licenses productions very carefully and is stringent in insisting that every element of the productions be authentic, i.e., be as the work was originally produced. Predictably, I wondered why the institution didn’t loosen up. The choreographer would have more influence because her (or his — caginess!) works would be more frequently performed. After all, if the Beethoven Institute insisted that all performances must be on original instruments, using exactly the same pacing, intonations, sonic dynamics, etc., as Beethoven intended, our culture would be far poorer because we’d hear much less Beethoven and many fewer creative interpretations of his works. In fact, Beethoven would have copyrighted himself right out of culture.

But, replied my dinner companion, it’s different with the work of a great choreographer. The work consists of the details of music, costume, lighting and gesture. The gap between composition and performance is smaller than with a musical score; in fact, there is no gap.

I am not convinced. Nor am I not unconvinced. I think I think that the magic of metadata could let us have our cake and dance it too: the association could authenticate those performances that met its criteria, while freely (liberally, if not for free) permitting non-canonical performances. I don’t know the status of Gilbert and Sullivan’s copyrights, but the D’Olyly Carte group performs a similar metadata function: There are many productions of Gilbert and Sullivan works — a couple of weeks ago, we saw a delightful Mikado that updated lyrics with references to Dick Cheney’s little list — but if you want to see an authentic version, you go to D’Oyly Carte.

But, much as a I like metadata, I’m not confident that I understand the dimensions of the issues in copyrighting something that seems to fall between a score and a performance. [Tags: copyright copyleft choreography dance arts mikado]

Andy Carvin (in a tweet) points to the Wikipedia entry on the phrase “Viewers like you.” All part of the Web’s dismantling (and reassembling) of the traditional notion of topics.

[Tags: wikipedia npr andy_carvin ]

I just published a new issue of my free newsletter. The main article is, entirely by coincidence, about ebooks and libraries — a coincidence because Amazon just announced Kindle, its ebook hardware.

The main article is a response to Anthony Grafton’s recent article in the New Yorker that tries to de-hype claims about the future of libraries.

By the way, Everything Is Miscellaneous is available for Kindle.

Also by the way, I just got a link from Urs Gasser to a recent conference on the future of books. [Tags: books ebooks kindle amazon libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Terrific post by Stu Henshall about what sounds like a fantastic talk by Dave Snowden (whose blog is here) at KMWorld. Dave combines the broad and deep with the incisive and the practical. Yikes! (Don’t miss the four posts from Dave that Stu points to as “must reads.”) [Tags: dave_snowden stu_henshall kmworld ]

If you’re interested in the future of books and libraries, and if you’re in Cambridge MA on Tuesday, you should come to the Berkman Center at 12:30 to hear Aaron Swartz talk about the Open Library project, which is gathering a global, open and free list of every book it can find out about. It’s also attempting to help with the problem that books exist at multiple levels of abstraction: There’s Hamlet, editions of Hamlet, Hamlet in anthologies, Hamlet in translation, books based on Hamlet, etc. This is an important and fascinating project.

We serve lunch. Please RSVP. See you there…or on the webcast. (Details) [Tags: open_library aaron_swartz libraries ]

Here’s Alan Watts talking to IBM (1 2), probably in the early 1970s, although I’m just guessing. Very Alan Wattsian, very Sixties yet contemporary, and very enjoyable. Here’s a bite:

“But nature itself is clouds, is water, is the outline of continents, is mountains, is bilogical existences. And all of them wiggle. And wiggly things are to human consciousness a little bit of a nuisance, because we want to figure it out.”

(Thanks to Steven Kruyswijk for the link.) [Tags: alan_watts]

I started poking around at Madame Levy’s quilt gingerly. As luck would have it, the first link I followed was to Arcade Fire - Neon Bible live in an elevator. As I kept poking, I found more and more. As Frank Paynter, who pointed this site out to me puts it, this is curation. It is indeed curation as art. [Tags: madame_levy curation art]

According to the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences’ governing body has proposed an open access policy according to which faculty members would make their research available for free either on a university site or on their own site. This would be in addition to publishing in academic journals, some of which charge $20,000 a year for a subscription. It’d be an opt-out program. The Harvard Crimson has a good editorial supporting it.

Yay! Locking research up in for-pay journals slows the pace of knowledge. The peer review system — one important way ideas are vetted — does not require the existing print publication system. Harvard’s move will not only make more information more widely available, it may help nudge the system itself into a form that better serves our species’ interests: As more schools adopt open access programs, researchers will have an increasing disincentive not to lock their work up.

I’m actually not sure how this will work, especially with regard to its being opt-out. If I’ve just had an article accepted by The Journal of Hydroponic Pediatrics. do I then also submit it to the Harvard open access server? If so, in what sense is that opt out?

Obviously, I’m also interested in what sort of metadata and aggregation facilities Harvard will supply to make these articles easily findable.

But what pleasant questions to contemplate! [Tags: open_access harvard publishing copyright a2k]

James Vasile, who just gave a Berkman lunch-time talk, distributed a copy of a brief paper, “unlick the Rock,:” which is not yet up on the Web. In it, James suggests that we separate radio into its two functions: DJs who figure out what to play, and the delivery mechanism. Someone should create a plug-in (or sump’in) that lets everyone create playlists using simple HTML, and lets everyone listen to those playlists by scouring multiple sources for the music. So, if you have a copy on your disk, it’ll play that. If there’s an online distributor that has it available, great. If you have to buy it from iTunes, then it’ll let you. Or maybe you have a small p2p network of friends who are sharing music.

Interesting. It’d at least make it difficult to find someone to sue. And the publishers might make some money out of it. And, from my provincial point of view, it’d be a nice case of separating the metadata from the data…. [Tags: james_vasile internet_radio]