Allow me to take this opportunity to warmly welcome myself to Amateur Hour ;)

By way of introduction, I thought I'd repost a couple of recent entries from my own blog on the topic of amateurism, new media and digital culture. Here's the first one.

Translated from scrawled notes, this is my version of what transpired at Charles Leadbeater's seminar at QUT a few weeks back. What I've jotted down here are the main points on the role of users in innovation and the emerging category of the ProAm which Leadbeater thinks is a growing force in the cultural economy.

Users as Innovators
In closed innovation models, consumption is the end point of a process of innovation that originates in the mind of a (special, creative) author. Consumers are passive except in exercising their right to choose among options, and to accept or reject the innovations present in those options.

In open innovation, consumption and use is an essential part of the innovation process, not the end point of it. In fact, the purpose of an invention or innovation is defined not by the inventor, but by its use in networked communities.

Services should be understood, not as predetermined routines, but as scripts, with users of the services as co-influential actors who rewrite the scripts as much as they follow them.

The more radical the innovation, the greater uncertainty about its purpose, function and use, and therefore the great the role of users in establishing its significance. (examples: the world wide web; mobile phones).

Disruptive innovation begins at the margins, driven by experimental consumers and enabled by small companies who need to do something other than sell more of the same to the same markets. These marginal and experimental markets are made up of critical audiences who operate in subcultural economies of cultural value.

The ProAm Economy

ProAms are amateurs who are as knowledgeable, skilled, emotionally invested and resourced in particular pursuits as professionals, but who don't derive their main income from these amateur pursuits. [I think that sociologists call this category "serious leisure" - unpaid work that is done for reasons of self-actualisation and lifelong learning, as well as for status]

This emerging category derives from the contemporary importance of knowledge-based consumption as a major source of cultural capital, and the greater importance of cultural capital as against class or geography within developed, networked societies.

The work/leisure divide is far too simplistic, but neither is it meaningless - a better approach is to consider gradations of intensity of the relationship between subjectivity, work and leisure pursuits. Charles proposed a continuum from professional through post-, pre-, and semi-professional all the way to dabbler at the weakest end.

I think we might complicate this further in looking at particular pursuits where the professional-amateur divide has been more or less blurred in modernity already ( photography, music) and those which have only really been achievable by professionals (full-scale chemistry and physics) or that have never been professions (stamp collecting).

Questions dealt with some of the issues around the unrewarded nature of user innovation, and the underground nature of much user participation which might nevertheless help to drive commercial innovation forward.

Microsoft has just settled a lawsuit over Digital Rights Management technologies for $440 Million. It's telling and ironic on multiple fronts. Microsoft had stolen intellectual property from InterTrust and used that technology in it's music products.

"Licensing InterTrust's patent portfolio reaffirms Microsoft's commitment to the importance of intellectual property rights as well as our commitment to our customers to stand behind our products in these emerging technology areas," explained Marshall Phelps, deputy general counsel and corporate vice president of intellectual property at Microsoft.

To be clear - Microsoft really, really cares about intellectual property, as least as long as it's something that they can charge money for. If it's something that has the potential to cost them money, well, that's something else completely.

I'm just going to cop to stealing this straight from boingboing.net without appologies:

The sloganator was a GOP-provided webtool that would generate custom Bush-Cheney posters. Pranksters used it to generate their own ironic slogans, until it was shut down. This Flash blob is a montage of some of the funniest. 1.7MB Flash link (Thanks, Jason!)

As William Gibson said in Neuromancer - "the street finds it's own uses for things"

The Oregonian has a profile on Christopher Frankonis, much better known as b!X - who's Portland Communique is the ne plus ultra of amateur journalism. I've known b!X through quite a few years of correspondence under many guises, President b!X of GeekForce.org, the One True b!X, the rootless cosmopolitan and others.

His Portland communique has overtaken all of his other efforts for the past couple years as he has been a one man local news source, attending everything from council meetings to protest marches and reporting on everything. Generally in amazing detail with a sense of humor and also outrage at politics as usual.

In fact, what some fans love about b!X (who, when he could afford cable, watched C-Span and the NASA channel incessantly) is his painstakingly thorough coverage of meetings and hearings that would hardly warrant two paragraphs in most newspapers -- what City Commissioner Erik Sten, a faithful "Portland Communique" reader ("Everybody at City Hall reads b!X"), calls the "tidbits of news you don't get other places."

Indeed, b!X speaks of his site, which recently recorded its 50,000th visitor, "not as a replacement but as an adjunct to the coverage that's available."

This kind of localized reporting of minutia is the sort of thing that newspapers (remember them?) used to do before they became nationwide ad distribution mechanisms but while it has tremendous value, it is a value that is very hard to "monetize" (to use a much reviled, dotbomb-era phrase).

What amazes many who visit the site is the fact that b!X has no job. Initially, "Portland Communique" began as exercise for b!X to get to know Portland better. He had lived here longer than he had lived anywhere since his childhood in upstate New York, and b!X, long active online (his name is a truncation of his Internet handle, "baby-X"), imagined that writing a weblog about city happenings would be the best way to force himself to learn about his new home.

An informed and engaged citizenry is something b!X feels passionate about. He has posted a sign that says "Vote or Die" in his apartment window, which faces traffic-heavy Southeast Division Street.

As he started to get out more, haunting City Hall or dropping in on Portland Business Alliance breakfast forums, he kept expecting someone to say, "What are you doing here? You can't be here." But no one did. Soon, b!X, who had never considered being a reporter, began devoting all his time to reporting and writing for "Portland Communique."

For the past few months, b!X has lived off money his parents saved for his college tuition. He spent one year at Purchase College of the State University of New York before dropping out. Writing "Portland Communique," he says, has been a far more useful education.

But that money will soon dry up. This month, b!X is hosting a pledge drive on "Portland Communique," asking readers for donations to keep the site running. (Leonard cops to giving $50 -- anonymously -- "I don't want him to lighten up on me.") Still, b!X has had his phone and Internet service cut off in the past, causing a temporary blackout of the site.

Jayson Blair can get a novel deal for his abuse of journalism that brought the New York Times to it's knees. It's a sad damned thing that b!X can't manage to pay the bills in doing what journalists are supposed to be doing. Then again, his story would make a pretty good novel.

The quote on b!X's cafepress shop (where he is selling not just t-shirts, but printed copies of everything he's published on the communique and out of print public-domain documents from Portland's past, sums thing up:

"The Portland Communique represents a remarkable experiment in local civic journalism. For one year, Christopher Frankonis (a.k.a. The One True b!X), closely followed and commented on Portland's local political scene. This was no half-hearted effort. In that short year, he became an expected presence at civic events, a public character, a known truth seeker. In considerable numbers, citizens and policy makers turned to his blog to track local issues. The Portland Communique built an important and alternative niche for information about local issues at the very moment when these issues were being ignored by entertainment focused local television news, and when print media was engaging more in source journalism than investigative journalism. For urban scholars, the Portland Communique should be recognized as a groundbreaking effort to reconnect citizens to local issues."

- Charles Heying, Professor of Urban Studies, Portland State University

The Pripyat ghost town journal that I wrote about at the beginning of the month is back with quite a few new photos of post-apocolyptic Russia.

Daniel Okrent's "The Privileges of Opinion, the Obligations of Fact" editorial in the New York Times should be required reading for anyone who reads opinion writing (and especially those who chose to quote from it to support their own opinions.

But who is to say what is factually accurate? Or whether a quotation is misrepresented? Or whether facts are used or misused in such a fashion as to render a columnist's opinion unfair? Or even whether fairness has anything to do with opinion in the first place? Can you imagine one of the Sunday morning television screamfests instituting a corrections policy?

In the consciously cynical words of a retired Times editor, speaking for all the hard-news types who find most commentary to be frippery, "How can you expect fairness from columnists when they make up all that stuff anyway?"

Of course they don't make the stuff up (at least the good ones don't). But many do use their material in ways that veer sharply from conventional journalistic practice. The opinion writer chooses which facts to present, and which to withhold. He can paint individuals he likes as paragons, and those he disdains as scoundrels. The more scurrilous practitioners rely on indirection and innuendo, nestling together in a bed of lush sophistry. I sometimes think opinion columns ought to carry a warning: "The following is solely the opinion of the author, supported by data I alone have chosen to include. Live with it." Opinion is inherently unfair.

I haven't written anything about Howard Stern and the ClearChannel/FCC cabal that seem to be trying to throw him off the air for airing his opinions of George Bush. But this is an important story, perhaps the most important story of the recent past - more important that 9/11 and Iraq? Time will tell. Congress decided by one vote that privately owned satellite networks should be exempt from FCC indecency regulation.

Jeff Jarvis has been all over this story at BuzzMachine and today's update pretty much covers the whole story, which seems to be turning into a perfect storm of right-wing reactionaries, monopoly media, and an ill-informed population. Howard claims that the FCC is deciding when to fine him for indecency so as to limit the impact on the presidential race, congress is going to change the size of the fines by an order of magnitude to make sure the FCC can silence anyone they want, whenever they want. I have no interest in Howard Stert, but I'm able to change the channel if I don't want to listen to him.

The coolest thing about amateur content is some of the amazing stories that come out of the oddest places.
Pripyat ghost town (1970-1986) is a short journal of woman who has made a habit out of motorcycle trips into the heart of the Chernoble dead zone. Or what she calls "a story about town where one can ride fast, with no stoplights, no police, no danger to hit some cage or some dog.."

Her dad is a nuclear physicist who studies the dead zone and with the right precautions (staying in the middle of the roads, using a geiger counter when entering buildings) he's more worried about her riding her 1100cc Kawasaki in 6th gear than her radiation exposure.

This is what a nuclear holocaust looks like. Haunting.

Making audio CDs from ogg vorbis (and really, why would you want MP3 if you can have ogg?) is a bit of a techy proceedure if you want to do it with completely free tools. Ashampoo is a $29 extractor, burner, converter and editor that happily (and automatically) converts between audio, ogg, MP3, etc. files. Highly rated, though I haven't used it (yet).

Telltale Weekly is releasing professionally recorded audiobooks in MP3 and ogg vorbis formats using bitpass micropayments system. They're doing everything right - paying artists, reusing the public domain, low-cost and not anti-customer digital right management systems. If they can't make a go of this, it's proof that the democratization of media, importance of fair use and customer trust and all the rest are just pipe dreams. I'm gonna make an audio cd of some stuff to listen to in traffic. How sweet would it be if they could get their hands on some of the old radio series from the 30s and 40s. I'd LOVE to listen to The Shadow in the car as audiobooks. Surely the rights to that stuff could be had at a reasonable price?

Telltale Weekly seeks to record, produce, and sell performances of at least 50 public domain texts a year, with the intention of releasing them under the Creative Commons Attribution License five years or a hundred thousand sales after their first appearance here, whichever comes first. Your purchases help us to build and/or contribute to a free audio equivalent of Project Gutenberg. Read More

Quality Recordings by Compensated Artists
To do each text justice, Telltale Weekly is committed to using professional-grade equipment and experienced actors, and pays for both (in addition to bandwidth and royalty fees) by charging as little as 25 cents per story, much of which goes to the artists. Read More

BitPass and Micropayments
The BitPass payment solution is based on the founding belief that the most important criterion is ease of use. Using Bitpass, Telltale Weekly can offer audiobooks for as little as twenty-five cents each in a system that makes purchasing as easy as surfing the web, with no software downloads or installations required. Read More

DRM-Free MP3 and Ogg Vorbis Audio
In additon to the popular MP3 format, all texts at Telltale Weekly are available in the Ogg Vorbis open, free audio compression standard (.ogg). Telltale Weekly will also voluntarily donate a portion of every Ogg Vorbis purchase to the Xiph.org Foundation (creators of the standard). And after paying for a recording, you can listen to it however and wherever you want for personal use, so every MP3 and Ogg Vorbis download is DRM free. Burn away. Read More

Brother Dana is opining about the high cost of software in the computer purchase world and the possibility of lots more commudity PCs sharing one set of expensive software (ditch that Microsoft Office Dana, I've not bothered installing Office on my new(ish) laptop (Windows XP) or tower (Windows 2000) and am hapily sharing the documents I need using OpenOffice 1.1).

My buddy Brice noted last week the oddness of intellectual property costs exceeding hardware costs:

$12.84 Price of a Portable CD Player at WalMart
$13.80 Price of a Britney Spears CD at WalMart

Is this a statement about:

How Walmart exploits child labor overseas?

Or

How the RIAA exploits children in the US?

Niether. Its just a reality of the current world economy. The real question is who will be able to hold thier price longer

February 24th is the date for coordinated civil disobedience of RIAA's inflexibility in copyright and reuse.

DJ Danger Mouse created a remix of Jay-Z's the Black Album and the Beatles White Album, and called it the Grey Album. Jay-Z's record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Ablum specifically to encourage remixes like this one. But despite praise from music fans and major media outlets like Rolling Stone ("an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time") and the Boston Globe (which called it the "most creatively captivating" album of the year), EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White Ablum.

Danger Mouse’s album is one of the most "respectful" and undeniably positive examples of sampling; it honors both the Beatles and Jay-Z. Yet the lawyers and bureaucrats at EMI have shown zero flexibility and not a glimmer of interest in the artistic significance of this work. And without a clearly defined right to sample (e.g. compulsory licensing), the five major record labels will continue to use copyright in a reactionary and narrowly self-interested manner that limits and erodes creativity. Their actions are also self-defeating: good new music is being created that people want to buy, but the major labels are so obsessed with hoarding their copyrights that they are literally turning customers away.

This isn't about piracy, it's about creativity and artistic re-invention. We would all be much poorer if classical music's centuries old tradition of "variations on a theme" were shackled in the same manner.