How Not To Blog

1. If the packaging doesn't mention that it's an illegal copy, then it's not. Really, pirate, what's the difference anyway?

2. Pirating is a social process. No one group or entity can take responsibility for it. The media companies are just as responsible as us pirates.

3. Pirates are self-organizing. Like our products, we can be in many places at the same time without diminishing our value.

4. As long as market forces are on our side there will be work for pirates. This is our mandate and is as good as any. The people have spoken, and they want cheap media.

5. A distribution network can't grow forever. Eventually, some parts of the network will die. Allowing those parts to expire, like retiring old ways of thinking, contributes to the vitality and evolution of the network. Here, the pirate also has the advantage.

6. Piratism can only die when the big media companies remove the barriers to pirating. Otherwise, pirates have no need to organize. Fortunately, this isn't going to happen.

7. Without technology, pirating would cease to exist. Excessive rigidity and formality regarding technology only serve to impede the consumer process and keep pirates busy.

8. There will always be a black market in film and music. Big media can either learn to profit from it, or exhaust themselves trying to fight it. Which leads us to our last law...

9. The survival rate of diverse, decentralized clans is higher than that of rigid, centralized clans. This also means that big media will die out before pirates do. After which time we'll just call ourselves something else.

Copyright 2005 HowNotToPirate

StumbleUpon is a potentially very useful browsing tool for internet discovery. As they explain:

StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers have liked. Unlike search engines or static directories, this allows for a true "democracy of the web" ? all SU members have a say as to whether a page should be passed on.

Services like these are wonderful. We need more kinds like this to help people filter out "other". I'm always thinking about how very immense and pervasive the internet will be in the near future. I don't even think we'll refer to it as the internet, but "space". Kind of like artifical light back in the day, except now it's intelligent and networked.

However, there's one big problem with how StumbleUpon determines whether or not a user would be interested in a website. After registering, they want you to pick out 500 or so topics so that they can group you in with others who more or less picked the same topics.

This isn't social network-thinking, if that's their intention. This is like the difference between a Match.com and a Friendster.com. In the former, I'm choosing the qualities I want out of a list you have given me. In the social network model, you are analyzing my unique social environment and then analyzing which unknown others I can connect to.

All StumbleUpon has to do is allow me to import my list of favorite websites / web locations (from Furl or delicious, even), look at others with similar bookmarks, and simply tell me what most others have that I don't (and then drill down that list). I could even do it manually, looking at the list of others' who share my bookmarks on delicious, but it would take too long.

Slate has an article about fake DVDs in China's bustling metropolis.

One of the expats at our table had amassed 200. Another, 400. All looked at me funny when I asked whether anyone had any moral or legal qualms about this. Later, in Beijing, when I asked the same question of a business-school professor, the head of a trade organization, and two CEOs?the sorts of serious people, who, in the U.S., might become apoplectic about, say, file-sharing?I saw the same quizzical look, with one of the CEOs adding that having to spend more than $2 for a DVD or $10 for Windows XP was an outrage. At Sasha's, the expats explained that buying real DVDs wasn't an option, especially for the Chinese, because real DVDs cost 10 times more and weren't even available. (The TV producer claimed she knew of a store that carried them, but the others disputed this.) Fake DVDs, moreover, often were real DVDs: The same factories that produced and shipped real ones during the day produced and shipped fake ones at night.

The writer also makes a point that I do in my previous article, Microsoft has a really good deal for Chinese poor, in that some of the damages from "lost sales" would never have been sales to begin with.

I guess I'm not the only one who loves pirated media.

Zniff (beta) seems like a very promising new concept in search.

What is does is aggregate the the 1.5 million or so bookmarks from users on its Spurl service, then provide searchers with results that Spurl thinks is most relevant. Or something like that.

It also allows you to view and compare results from Yahoo.

This is also an interesting method to deal with the increasing amount of spam in search results (hello, Google?). That is, until the spammers overwhelm the regular users.

I'm not the only one who thought about the increasing volume of RSS feeds.

Geeking with Greg writes "A relevance rank for news and weblogs"

There's an article over at Online Journalism Review that talks about Yahoo news' use of RSS.

It gets interesting towards the end in the "Taking RSS to the masses" section

"If you look at how we've integrated RSS into Yahoo News, we're not actually using those three letters very much," Gatz said. "So you look at it, and it says what would you like to add to your political news, here are some political blogs. Would you like to add CNN or MSNBC onto your news page? The fact that it happens in XML or RSS isn't the important thing. Most of the users don't want to have to figure that out."