Monthly Archive for November, 2008

50 Cent suing Taco Bell for trademark infringement

Published on November 21, 2008 in Culture and advertising. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Bahaha! According to this AP article,

The squabble is over a fake letter sent out by Taco Bell Corp. asking 50 Cent to change his name for one day to 79 Cent, 89 Cent or 99 Cent to help publicize its value menu.

Michael Masnick of Techdirt describes Taco Bell’s letter as an open letter, which seems to lump this activity in with a nascent trend of for-profit corporations adopting “dot org” strategies and messages. Open letters strike me as a tool used by the “little guy” (consumers, activists, public interest organizations) to open up an assault on a more powerful entity; receiving any kind of response from the target is basically a victory. Here, Taco Bell has co-opted a strategy more often used to bring about a public good — instead successfully using it to bring about a private good (awareness and profits for itself). They inverted the typical power structure too — in this odd situation, a huge corporation used an open letter to pick on an individual rapper.


(Photo of 50 Cent Wheelie Bin by David Jones under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-Noncommercial License.)

Extrapolations aside, this whole episode is plainly hilarious.

Notes from “Citizen Journalism” CC Salon in SF

Published on November 20, 2008 in Events and San Francisco. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Last night, I played some tunes at Shine and heard from some folks working at the intersection of technology and participatory journalism.

From Wikinews, we heard from Volunteer Coordinator Cary Bass and Wikinews volunteer Jon Davis. Wikinews articles are written by volunteers and are only published after meeting a set of guidelines: copyright (or “not infringing anyone’s copyrights,” most likely), newsworthiness, verifiability, neutral point of view, and style. Wikinews has done some breaking stories with original reporting, and has a particular advantage in being able to continuously update a breaking story as it unfolds.

Bass and Davis stressed that ultimately, they need more users. If you’re interested in participatory journalism, consider contributing some time and effort to Wikinews. It seems like you could get a lot of eyeballs for your investment — articles are indexed by Google News and the organization is instantly recognizable thanks to the tie to Wikipedia.

Here are some brief, somewhat disjointed notes about Wikinews:

  • Wikinews has implemented “flagged revisions,” (an effort to mitigate the effects of article vandalism and preserve quality) where the public version of a page is one that was vetted by a trusted editor.
  • Wikinews has a “newsroom,” where contributors can go to see what articles are being developed and may need help. A lot of work gets done through the IRC chatroom.
  • Story writers can use any photo available in the Wikimedia Commons.
  • Wikinews rarely exercises fair use when looking for photos/images to add to a story.
  • Wikinews articles have no bylines. (This seems like a factor in their low participation rate — if Wikinews could develop some kind of joint byline system, where writers are credited on the basis of how much of their contribution makes it to the final article, I think they may see more people signing up to write.)
  • Wikinews articles are licensed with an attribution requirement only — share alike is NOT required.

We also heard from an interesting non-profit funded startup called Spot.us. David Cohn, a journalist and geek, won the Knight News Challenge — a contest/grant given to develop community-focused news and information projects, services, and programs. His idea was to create a site to promote community-funded journalism. Note that the product is not necessarily community-written journalism, a distinction that I think is rather important.

So, Spot.us strikes me as pretty cool. Citizens can submit “tips,” which are leads to stories developing in their community. Freelance, professional journalists can submit “pitches,” either in response to tips or of their own conception, that introduce the idea and boundaries of a potential story. Users can then fund the story with donations, creating the resources and incentive for the freelance journalist to investigate and write.

Crowdfunding is not exactly a new idea, but Spot.us is doing something really interesting — for the first six weeks, Spot.us tries to sell the exclusive rights to the produced story to a local news organization. If Spot.us makes a sale, it pays the original crowdfunders back. Also, six weeks after an article is produced, it is Creative Commons-licensed, giving the public the right to make use of the work.

Cohn believes that by having the articles Creative Commons-licensed, the end product is a public good — the public “owns” the end product. But Cohn also noted that Spot.us is partially an experiment to answer the question: “Is journalism a public good?” Will the public be interested in funding journalism in order to gain a benefit from it? Having come from a journalism background, I think it’s an interesting question to be asking now.

Also, Spot.us is built on Ruby on Rails and is open-source.

I’m playing music at tonight’s CC Salon in SF

Published on November 19, 2008 in Events, San Francisco and Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Edit: My notes on the CC Salon are here.


Goofing off at a CC Salon last year.

Judging from the Upcoming.org page, this CC Salon looks like it’ll be well-attended. If you’re in town, join for drinks, music, and some presentations on citizen journalism from Wikinews (community-written news) and Spot.us (community-funded reporting). It starts at 7pm!

World of Warcraft Miniatures Game Unboxing!

Published on November 19, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I have, at various times, been a player of World of Warcraft, and more frequently, a avid fan of the rich game universe. Sure, Blizzard produces well-designed, balanced games. But they’ve also led the pack in creating strong characters and epic plot arcs that exemplify the gaming-as-storytelling function that makes certain games and game universes far more compelling than movies, music, and television. I haven’t been an active WoW player in awhile, but I’ve kept an eye out for some of the geeky licensed junk that I find fun; for example, I collected some of the cards from the collectible card game and my fianceé bought me a book of WoW art.

I heard about the World of Warcraft Miniatures Game months ago, forgot about it, then got really excited when I saw a wall full of miniatures at the local GameStop. So my fianceé and I picked up a WoW Minis Core Set Starter from Gamescape in San Francisco. Here are photos of the unboxing:

My fiancée and I have played two games so far with the starter set characters and have really enjoyed it. (The rulebook is here if you’re interested in such details.) The characters have only a few action options per turn, so the gameplay isn’t too overwhelming. However, having the miniatures move around on the game board adds real richness, with ranged and melee attacks, line of sight, and minor terrain bonuses. Combat is resolved by rolling variable numbers of 10-sided dice — and die rolling in games is always fun.

The game also features a sharp “clock” system that makes good use of the rotating bases beneath the figures. Actions cost “ticks,” which determine the next time the character acts — bigger actions (more damage, stronger effects) generally cost more “ticks,” which may result in your opponent getting a chance to act before you do. I figure that players familiar with World of Warcraft will appreciate the strong correlation to the video game’s combat mechanics.

If I could make the time, I’d be interested in playing casually against others and maybe even in some kind of organized play… But my main fear is that the game will grow unbalanced. There are “boosters” available (for $15.00, natch) to give players more miniature characters and action cards — and like collectible card games, some miniatures are more rare than others. In my experience, this can lead to a “race to the rare,” where the game ceases to revolve around ingenuity and luck and instead transforms into shelling out the dough to obtain benefits that are made artificially scarce. On the other hand, I think that most modern organized play is based on draft rounds where choice and strategy still matters and the role of rarity is diminished.

Otherwise, for mass-produced plastic, the miniatures are surprisingly detailed, brightly colored, and well-scaled. Even off the board, I’m enjoying having a little row of recognizable characters to glance at near my desk at home.

Apple ratcheting up content protection

Published on November 18, 2008 in Apple and Technology. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

I’ve been growing annoyed with Apple, thanks to some of the decisions they’ve made in the name of business development. It seems that they’ve made another deal with the devil in order to get HD content into the iTunes Music Store — David Chartier writes in the Ars Technica “Infinte Loop” journal that the new MacBooks won’t allow you to play HD movies out to non-HDCP compliant hardware.


(Photo of Detalle de la conexión al MacBook by iBuffet under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

What does this mean? Well, High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) is an insidious form of DRM that prevents video sources from transmitting to non-compliant receivers. Conventionally speaking, it was designed so that new generations of disc players would only output to HDCP-compliant TVs and projectors — and not a DVR, computer, or general-purpose recording device.

To my limited knowledge, it works by encrypting the video coming out of the device’s port, then having the devices “know” what’s on the other end of the cable. If the player doesn’t “recognize” the device that’s displaying the movie, then the player stops*. (In the screenshot in the Ars article, the MacBook error message tells the user: “This movie cannot be played because a display that is not authorized to play protected movies is connected.”)

It’s extremely vexing to see Apple implementing DRM on its display ports — and it’s pushing me even further away from choosing an Apple laptop as my next computer.

* Depending on the devices being used, the player may instead simply lower the quality of the image, completely ignoring your hard-earned dollars of investment in “high definition.”