keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

UPDATED BELOW . If I knew how to block out this site on Jan. 18 in protest against SOPA and PIPA, two bills currently in the U.S. Congress that claim to be against internet piracy, I would do it. I am not in favour of piracy, though I have major issues with what media conglomerates have done to distort copyright laws world wide. The problem I have with these bills is that they are too vague and too broad. While they may become a U.S. law, it will affect internet users and site owners beyond U.S. borders. As a commenter on Boing Boing (dark for the day) said, in order to stop piracy, we're going to outlaw the sea. There is a lot of rhetoric on both sides of the issue, but I recommend this article in The Globe and Mail for a clear-eyed look at what the internet community is upset about. There is also this comment to the article, which talks about the lack of due process: "A website (of a corporation, individual, what-have-you) is considered guilty as soon as they are a...

Clay Shirky is one of the most perceptive people I'm aware of when it comes to analyzing the changing media landscape. He doesn't blog often, but when he does, it's something that is widely linked to and discussed. His latest entry is about how complex systems are unable to react to changing environments in any way except to collapse. Basing his piece on The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter, Shirky says: "Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some. "The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societi...

I previously wrote about my curiosity over the changing media landscape here . I've already mentioned Clay Shirky for his article on how journalism is changing, and his book Here Comes Everybody . Now, here's a very recent talk from him that does a beautiful job of nailing down exactly how media have changed since the advent of the printing press. While I'm not into video games, it occurs to me that the only area of the animation industry that's taking advantage of changes, where users can respond to content and can organize themselves around content, is gaming. TV and feature films are still operating with the 20th century broadcast model, while something like World of Warcraft is allowing users to form their own societies and teams within an animated world. While I don't think that a classical approach to storytelling, where stories are created by one set of people and delivered to another, is going to disappear, I wonder if the TV and feature model is susta...

(Updated with new links at the bottom.) I've been reading a lot of interesting books in the last year, all of them about the economic shift that's resulting from the web. This shift started before the economic downturn, but the downturn is accelerating it in various ways. For the record, the books include Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe , Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky , The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki , Remix by Lawrence Lessig and What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis . All of these books are about aspects of the web that have fundamentally changed how the economy functions. The first three talk about how improved communication allow for people to organize themselves or find information in ways that were not efficient in the past. Remix is about how digital tools allow us to use existing media as raw material for new expressions. What Would Google Do examines Google's business model and seeks to apply it to other industries. Jeff Jarvis feels that we...