As a web developer and internet addict, I've always been a huge fan of the things Google does for its users. From App Engine to Chrome to Gmail to Android, your company has released innovative products that I use and enjoy every day. With net neutrality, Google has always been a champion for the rights of the user. You have always defended the internet as an open space for innovation and the free spread of information. Your company has been one of the few heavyweights that used its immense power in D.C. for preserving the benefits of the information revolution, not just for padding your bottom line.

 

So, when I read the report that you had been working with Verizon to effectively end net neutrality, it didn't seem to be consistent with your past actions. I was willing to believe that this is just someone misconstruing the facts, until I read a report by Bloomberg that suggested the negotiations were only focused on the mobile space. That you supported net neutrality on landline connections, but felt different rules applied over the air.

 

This is simply unacceptable. As I'm sure you know from the massive success of Android (a platform I just switched to after selling my iPhone to buy an HTC Aria), we will all be using mobile to connect to the internet in the near future. Mobile is the new landline, and deserves the same protection. Once again, it seems more consistent with your company policy to believe that you do realize this, that all of this hype comes from simple misunderstandings. That said, the risk to the internet as a whole is too great to not write this letter. We are on the cusp of losing basic freedoms that have become essential over the last 20 years. The openness of the internet that permitted the rise of startups like yourself stands to be destroyed by a congress that doesn't understand the issue and telecom companies that want to take advantage of that. You've previously demonstrated that you stand on the right side of that conflict. Please, stay there. Don't be evil.

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So, I guess I wrote a little piece for my friend James Patrick Schmidt's blog, #life (http://www.hashtaglife.com). You all should read it. I bet there are more people reading that blog than this one though.
 

The project I talk about there has yet to be released. It's a small Chrome extension that's a LOT of fun. I've still got a few bugs to work out and features to correct. When it's done, you can be sure it'll be open sourced in some way or another  too.

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Copyright is bringing me down. Last week, I made the decision to take all the photos in my Flickr stream and set them to a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license. Now, why would I do that when every photo class I have ever been enrolled in involves at least one point where the professor tells you to protect your rights through full copyright?

Because copyright is killing our culture. Because I want the next generation of photographers to have inspiration and hope. And, most importantly, because I don’t want to be a hypocrite.

Copyright was never intended to be used the way big content companies are using it today. To use a quote from Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture (a wonderful book that I hope anyone reading this post will take the time to read):

“If ‘piracy’ means using the creative property of others without their permission – if ‘if value, then right’ is true – then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy”

The Disney corporation forgets that Steamboat Willie is based on the vaudeville Steamboat Bill Jr., and is more of a remixing of that work than an original work on its own. The recording industry forgets its special terms it has for music licenses on radio amount to piracy. Photographers should realize that in most cases, the improper use of their photos that I’ve seen some people get so upset about, fall in about the same lines.

Here’s a story that happened to me and helped me realize the pointlessness of intense copyright enforcement. Imagine someone’s personal blog uses a photo you took to illustrate a story they wrote. That is your photograph out of the context of its original meaning. You get upset, and start writing a cease and desist. Before you send it, you realize two things. One: there is no commercial gain this person is getting from publishing your photo. This is not Gizmodo, it’s not the New York Times. Two: by sending this C&D, the only thing you’re effectively doing is stopping distribution of the photo, putting this person at a disadvantage without gaining anything yourself.

So, by sending this letter, you’re preventing people from seeing a creative work that you made without any actual benefit. How does this make sense? Sending this type of C&D is the most damaging and ridiculous thing you could possibly do. You get zero exposure, zero money and zero longevity just because you don’t think the person is worthy to use your photography.

Now, imagine an emerging artist wants to use your photo in a collage or mashup for their personal site. They don’t plan on selling the work, just using it to further their own experience as an artist. Most photographers I know, when they see their photo being used in this type of context without their permission, would send a C&D (or at least complain about it on Twitter). Meanwhile, a Girl Talk album sits on their iPod and they don’t even give it a second thought. This is the exact same thing. For everyone crying out “wait, Girl Talk’s 30 second samples are fair use and your situation isn’t”, I’d like to point out that fair use, as a concept, is so murky that even the US Copyright Office says that:

“The distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission.” (http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html)

So, it’s up to us to define exactly what fair use is. It’s our responsibility to make sure that someone can use one of our photos as desktop wallpaper without us pretending we’re lawyers and sending angry emails. It’s our right to get paid, yes, but it’s our responsibility to make sure that the people we’re asking for money from actually, you know, have it.

Let’s be sensible about copyright and not let the dissemination of our works be stopped because someone’s afraid of a lawyer. Let’s realize that when we post our favorite photo from James Nachtwey on our blog, we’re just as guilty as the people we send C&Ds to.

Go and put a Creative Commons license on your works. It’s easy. Go to this website and pick the license that is the most appropriate for you. Get your name out there, let people see your work. And when a company wants to use it, get paid. If you don’t get paid, that’s when you send the C&D. But let other artists like you have a little bit of leeway.

Post-script: Free Culture can be freely downloaded here. It’s an incredible book that shows exactly how dangerous the permission-based culture we’re turning into is.

Edit: I'd like to add another anecdote I just remembered. One of my sister's friends was playing a show at a coffeehouse in town. She's sort of a singer-songwriter kind of person. Halfway through playing a cover of a Lady Gaga song, someone working at the coffeehouse came up and told her to stop because it was a copyrighted work. Do we want this type of locked-down creativity to define our culture?

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I think I've made it pretty clear that I really am not okay with the closed nature of the Apple model. I could go into the many reasons the App Store bothers me, but really, what's the point? In the end, I always have to admit that The Steve and Co. makes amazingly well designed products that fill a niche no one ever really knew existed. So, what's a person to do if they want to experience the next paradigm of computing? The answer: Probably not buy an iPed.

The iPed is actually called the Eken M003, but you wouldn't know that from the packaging. The device attempts to mimic the iPad box as much as possible, minus one crucial detail:

Yes, that's "iPed" not "iPod". While it comes with a good amount of pre-installed software, you won't want to keep that on there for long. A pirated version of Documents to Go, a beta of Skype for Android and a questionable music player aren't worth the amazingly sluggish performance. In fact, the default firmware on the device is pretty much unusable. The first thing anyone should do with the iPed is grab the custom Slatedroid firmware here, customize it to run with the M003 instead of the M001 (instructions on the same forum, but I'll post a detailed how-to later) and reflash the firmware. Slatedroid is a little bit buggy and very much stripped down, but at least it gives you a massive performance boost compared to the default Eken ROM. Here's the device's home screen on the refreshed firmware:

Once the device is running Slatedroid, everything is perfectly usable. I installed NewsRob, a great feed reader with Google Reader sync, and a few other apps to get started. Now, about installing apps. Google licenses the Android Market and custom firmwares like this one rarely have it installed. So, instead, expect to get intimately familiar with the art of .apk installs. For the Android beginner, installing .apk files means downloading packages onto a SD card, then installing them on your device using the Apk Manager program. I used to own a Dell Axim X5 that ran a very old version of what is now Windows Mobile, widely regarded to be one of the clunky-ist OSs around. Installing apps on that 2003 device was actually much easier than on the iPed. This is a major headache, but an inevitable one. Hackers are working on getting the market running on the Eken, but so far have had almost no luck. I'm just hoping they figure it out sooner rather than later.

If you don't feel like going through the epic headache that is .apk installs, it comes with an app simply called "App Store" that also happens to be terrible. Also, most of the apps are in Chinese. Have fun with that.

Setting up email is incredibly easy. Just type in your Gmail address and Android will take care of the rest. In most Android phones, the OS has deep Google account integration; sadly, this is missing on the Eken. I'd love to be able to access my contacts, calendar and Google Talk accounts, but that functionality just isn't there. Once again, we have to rely on the firmware hackers to make this a reality.

Browsing is actually a nice experience. It's a little bit slower than my iPhone, but the screen real-estate more than makes up for that. The only real hindrance in the browsing experience is the resistive screen. With the Eken it's 2002 all over again and you'll have to use a stylus if you want to type. The best approach to browsing is to create a home page for yourself with all your most visited links. Other than that little hindrance, the Android browser is a good one. Some slowdowns occur when Google tries to make suggestions as you type in a URL, but if you use the aforementioned homepage, that won't be too horrible for you.

Battery life is somewhat abysmal. I left it on idle overnight on a full charge and it had 15% when I woke up the next morning. So, when you're not using it, make sure to keep it off. I'd expect to get around 3 hours of usage out of this under normal circumstances, but this is a very unscientific estimate. When I get a feel for battery usage, I'll update this post. The one thing I do know for sure about the battery is that it runs VERY hot. Like, crotch-burningly hot. Be careful you don't keep your iPed next to a stack of papers, or it might go from inexpensive iPad knockoff to very expensive house insurance claim.

I'm planning on using the Eken M003 mostly for casual web browsing, email checking and Google Reader-ing. For the 850 RMB (roughly US$125) I paid for it, I'm actually pretty satisfied. The fact that there's a pretty lively hacker community around the Eken at slatedroid.com makes me confident that it'll be at least somewhat supported with future versions of Android. There's talk of Eken releasing a 2.1 update sometime in July too, but that seems like wishful thinking to me. 

This is not a magical and revolutionary device. It's made of plastic, it has a very finicky resistive screen and getting apps onto it feels like 2003. It isn't an iPad. It is open source. It also might give Johnny Ive a heart attack if he ever saw it. With that in mind, I'm planning on opening it up soon and doing a tear-down-slash-battery-mod. So keep an eye open for that. Right now, I'm just happy to have this KIRF-y iPad for what it is.

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Adobe is watching you. Maybe not you in particular, but someone like you. That’s what Ginna Baldassarre, project manager of the Production Premium Creative Suite package told me and the rest of the RJI Interaction Desgin contest winners during a presentation at Adobe’s San Francisco office last week. Specifically, they’re watching the average user’s workflow. CS is something I’ve used for years, before it was even called that. I learned Photoshop on version seven; my high school newspaper was created in InDesign 2.

One of the first things I found about using Adobe’s software is that the narrow feature set I was using was part of a much broader spectrum of uses for the software. As CS became more popular, even Adobe realized that people were using their products for entirely different things than they were originally designed for. Case in point: Photoshop now has 3D animation features. Flash, which now serves a large majority of the video on the web, didn’t even have its own video codec within the player until version six. With an almost infinite number of use cases out there, everyone has been figuring out their own particular way to manage the way they work.

I find that a lot of people are married to their workflow. Or lack thereof. My photos are all over the place on my hard drives, and the only way I can ever find them is to search by date, usually going through about a week’s worth of photos before I find what I’m looking for. I’ve tried to use Bridge, Photo Mechanic, even just batch renaming images to get rid of the default filenames. I never stick to anything.

But, when I write code, everything’s different. I have all of my projects stored in the Sites directory of my Mac. I can easily navigate to a folder named “img” and expect to find images I’m using for my site. Same with CSS. The reason for this is convenience. When I’m writing code, if everything’s in the same place, the code becomes infinitely more portable and easier to write. There’s a tangible benefit to refining my workflow, because it influences the work itself.

This is why Adobe wants to look over your shoulder. The web has changed in the last few years to the point where the organization of data is often more important than the data itself. Twitter would not be nearly as successful without an API to access it from your smartphone. Google Reader would be worthless without the organization of data into RSS feeds. From the demonstrations I saw, Adobe seems to be focusing not only on streamline a user’s workflow, but providing incentives for users to adopt smarter ways of working. And that means metadata.

Metadata makes journalists lives easier. As we move into a more multimedia-centric world, there are fewer stories that are told entirely through text. Broadcasters, newspapers and radio stations all have a vast archive of stories that can’t be easily read by the code that makes up webapps and search engines. The integration between Adobe’s Story and Premiere represents one of the more interesting ways of gathering this data. Scenes are described in Story and any characters, (or in journalists’ case, sources) notes or dialogue are tied to that scene. When the footage has been shot, you can associate that file with the scene, keeping the metadata and the video itself together. You can even use Premiere to transcribe the audio. Not only can you then look up what sources have been in what pieces, but you can also allow your users to do the same online.

Say there’s a seemingly unknown citizen suddenly announcing his or her candidacy for mayor. Maybe a TV station’s reporters interviewed the person a few years back as a source on a completely separate story. If users could access this video through searches on the metadata, stations would likely see a huge increase in engagement, as older news could be queued up instantly as it becomes relevant to a user. It’s the Wikipedia phenomenon: One story leads to another, which leads to another and suddenly you’ve spent an hour on the site and you’re reading something with almost no relation to what you came there for. The viewer is more educated, and the site gets more impressions for ads.

That’s not even scratching the surface of what metadata can do. If an independent site wants to aggregate news to compare all the mayoral candidates’ positions, that metadata can be used to return relevant stories from the news outlet. The site could use an algorithm to search the transcript stored in the metadata and use key phrases to determine his or her position on an issue. So, from what might have been a view-and-forget story comes this whole new ecosystem of data and information.

If news organizations embrace a workflow that leads to the creation of more relevant metadata, they might discover a whole new world of relevance. Why rely on Google News to aggregate stories when a paper or TV station can work with other partners to provide much more relevant and long-lasting content through access to this type of information? Of course, this would have to be done through some sort of open API (which is an entirely different post for another day), but having the information is the first step in something much bigger. Adobe isn’t just helping you by providing better workflow tools; they’re helping the Internet as a whole. Journalists get paid, developers get data and the world is a better place. And maybe I’ll eventually be able to find my photos.

As always, I’d love comments. What’s your workflow? Does it involve metadata? Does the open web frighten and intimidate you? Posting is easy! Just click on the comments link below.

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