Podcasting and Second Life

Just two quick comments that have very little, substantively, to do with either topic:

1. I’m going to start podcasting. It’s about time. I don’t know if the podcasting will be hosted on this blog, but it will have to do with topics on legal aid cases I’m working on. I always wish there were more “legal topics” podcasts out there, or just more and more resources on specific problems, that are searchable and accessible. It’s time to put my money where my mouth is, and start adding to the legal aid content out there.
2. I just got a new laptop. Pretty robust. Good graphics card, 1 GB RAM, etc. But Second Life still runs so slowly on it. Second Life didn’t run on my old PC, and my Powerbook doesn’t quite cut it either. This is a problem with user acquisition that they’re going to have to solve. Until then, I’m going to look around for another community as a backup.
3. Did you ever notice how whenever you say you have two things to say, it always ends up being at least three?

Boston Crime Map

Just a neat little sumptin-sumption: A Google maps mash-up with the locations of all the Boston murders for 2007.

Looks like they also use Drupal for their CMS. From the same guys as the Universal Hub blog.

Wikipedia to Seek Proof of Credentials – But Why?

Wikipedia to seek proof of credentials – Yahoo! News

But anonymity is also considered one of the main forces behind Wikipedia’s astonishing growth, to nearly 1.7 million articles in English and millions more in dozens of other languages. Wales has said he is an “anti-credentialist” — because anonymity puts a reader’s attention on the substance of what people have written rather than who they are.

Wales said Wednesday that belief is unchanged. But, he said, if people want to claim expertise on Wikipedia, they ought to be prompted to prove it. If they don’t want to give their real names, they shouldn’t be allowed to tout credentials. Had that policy been in place, Wales said, Jordan probably would not have gotten away with claiming a Ph.D. in religion.

This is, whether purposeful or not, a cue taken from Citizendium.

But for a different reason. Honesty and credibility, somewhat paradoxically, is encouraged through anonymity because anonymity means that you aren’t liable for what you think is right and you’re more likely to contribute *anything* rather than your *best*.

This is why blogging is more widespread than essay-writing for magazines. When people blog, they are trying to write things they believe or would stand by in a casual conversation, but they don’t want to be held to the same standard they’d be held by if they were writing for, say, the New Yorker.

Furthermore, the lack of a login requirement and an attribution makes it real easy for me to just hop on and fix something or add something or make a new page. I don’t have to go through any embarrassing

On the other hand Citizendium looks to attribution for credibility and honesty. I wonder if this will discourage participation in the opposite way that anonymity encourages it on Wikipedia.

Practical Difficulties with Creative Commons Licensing

I don’t think that, statistically speaking, I’m a complete idiot, but I’ve just spent the past 20 minutes trying to figure out how to put some text on a video displaying a Creative Commons license. This post doesn’t criticize the Creative Commons scheme at all, it just says, “I wish they made their web site easier to use for me–and maybe for other newbies.”

First of all, when you click on the easy-to-find “License Your Work” link, you are brought to a license wizard. But the “more info” links are confusing. For example, if you are choosing whether to allow commercial uses of your work, the “more info” is written for a “Noncommercial” license–which allows commercial uses, with the author’s permission. So does “Noncommercial” allow commercial use? I don’t know.

The same for the “Allow modifications of your work.” The default radio button selects “Yes,” but the “more info” link is about “No derivative works”–which is confusing.

OK, so I figure I want an Attribution-Noncommercial license for video. So I get a page that gives me some icons/buttons and some HTML to cut and paste. But how do you cut and paste an icon or HTML into a video? Isn’t there some text I can put on the first or last screen? No. I only have stuff I can put on a web site. But if I’m going to upload this up onto YouTube?

And on YouTube… There’s no clear link telling me about what my rights are when I upload a video to YouTube. As the creator, I have the copyright. But do I give it up to YouTube when I upload it there? They’re pretty clear about what happens if your copyright is violated by someone else uploading to YouTube, but they should be more helpful in letting me know how my rights are protected when I upload my stuff.

At this point, the only thing I definitely know how to do is to put the “(c) 2007″ on my video. I think that I can also put:

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/; or, (b) send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

But I’m not entirely clear about this. I think it should be clearer.

My first major idiot moment of the day is when I leave my keys and lock myself out of my apartment every morning. This morning, that will be the second major idiot moment of my day.

Update: A lot of my questions are answered in the FAQ. But I think that they’re fairly obvious questions, and I shouldn’t have to search so long for it.

Also, I decided to try the CC Publisher application to publish my video – but the link takes me to a 403 Forbidden page. (02/28/07 19:56 EST)

And, just for the record, here’s the video of Yei, South Sudan (with the copyright and the unfortunately illegible (because of resolution issues) CC statement).

The Right to Protest–Second Life and World of Warcraft

I was thinking about this brilliant post of mine, where I pretty much said nothing of value, and wondered what virtulegal issues actually arise on Second Life, and whether other MMORPGs like World of Warcraft would have similar issues.

I mean, one major difference is that Second Life, well, has “people,” whereas WoW has, well, gnomes. In Second Life, people live in houses and have jobs and sit around and drink coffee and have sex. WoW–well, has gnomes. And they kill monsters. And go on quests for magic weapons.

So, where there is no specific object for “life” in Second Life–no quests, no XP, no magic weapons to find–maybe there’s more room and time for free minds to start thinking about their rights. (The “quest,” if any, in Second Life is to make money, buy cool things, and have lots of sex. Just like IRL, right?) It’s like Second Lifers are bourgeoisie, and the WoWers are serfs locked into meaningless toil, unable to afford the luxury to think about rights.

WoW is more of a game, where arbitrary rules are accepted. (Think if football was controlled by common law, and not by code.) You either follow the rules, or you don’t succeed in the game. What “rights” beyond that could you need?

I suppose there is the process, IRL, of “support”–bug fixes, code improvements, server uptime, game tweaks. And this is basically what the SLLA is asking for–an IRL improvement, external to the VR game life. This is what spawned the old-time protests on EverQuest and Ultima Online (though the Ultima Online protest about inflation was actually quite an interesting one, deserving a New Yorker article).

But last year, there was a WoW protest where a bunch of warriors gathered en masse to protest deficiencies in how the warrior classification was configured. By virtue of the numbers of characters on-line, in a single location, the servers had trouble handling the load. WoW ended up suspending the accounts of those who participated. Talk about protest and suppression!

I should really get back to reading Evidence… So I’ll finish this later, and try to wrap up my wandering thoughts.

(For full disclosure, I have a character on WoW, and, yes, he is a gnome. But a damn fine one. With lots of magic weapons.)

Virtual Terrorism – the Second Life Liberation Army

From the web site of the Second Life Liberation Army :

The Second Life Liberation Army (SLLA) was formed as the ‘in-world’ military wing of a national liberation movement within Second Life. The movement contends that univeral suffrage is a right that should be established within Second Life immediately. As Linden Labs is functioning as an authoritarian government the only appropriate response is to fight. To this end the political movement has dissolved itself and handed over interim power to the SLLA Army council headed by it Chief of Staff. When the SLLA succeeds in its aims it will disband and hand power back to the political wing of the movement. For the time being all military decisions will be taken by the SLLA Chief of Staff and implemented by SLLA fighters.

The SLLA has been exploding “push guns” or virtual bomb blasts that temporarily cloud over the screen so that you can’t see your avatars or anything around them.

From a story on this from the AFP, one of their major demands is for Second Life’s developer, Linden Labs, to go public and allow users to buy shares of stock–claiming this as a “basic right” of Second Lifers.

Is rebellion the same as terrorism? How about on Second Life, where violence has been technologically curbed? In the absence of courts, in a virtual world controlled by a private company, how can virtual citizens demand their rights, especially if they’re in a minority?

Apparently, there was an attempt to establish courts–the Second Life Superior Court–but I haven’t been following this enough to see if there has been anything established.  The blog post linked above is over a year old, and it’s the only mention of it from a Google search, so maybe it’s defunct.

Citizendium – A Wikipedia Rival

Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, has launched a pilot site to rival Wikipedia: Citizendium:

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a “citizens’ compendium of everything,” is an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.

Sounds look a good idea–but they’re late in the game, late on the meme. It just reminds me of so many examples in technology where “better” just doesn’t win. Mac lost to PC. Friendster lost to MySpace. Et cetera.

The beauty of Wikipedia is ease of participation–anyone can do it. But to use Citizendium, I *have* to register with my name and seek the approval of a “gentle” guide? I just don’t think they can achieve the growth that will drive it off the ground the same was as PCs and MySpace. Wikipedia wins because of its growth–I have a better chance of finding at least *something* there that I can’t find in an encyclopedia.

Maybe Citizendium should just grab all the Wikipedia content and use that as their base. It’s like using a public domain dictionary and adding all your new words to it or fixing the old definitions. That way, they have the size and content, and they can work at their slow growth rate to complete their content in quality.

I remember that Nupedia (the Wikipedia predecessor) had an editorial process involved–but they were just trying to streamline articles for releases. And they ditched this for the anti-editor process involved with Wikipedia.

I’m not a total nay-sayer. I think that CZ could become a valid rival. But it serves a different purpose than Wikipedia. Wikipedia is like having access to the “crowd”–like being able to talk to friends, friends of friends, etc.–whereas CZ will be more like being able to e-mail a professor who may have a response. With the former, I will probably get an answer, but I don’t know how correct, but if I ask enough I’ll probably get something close enough to correct. For the latter, I might not get a response, but I know the response will be right. This makes a great opportunity for a meta engine that searches CZ first and fills the gaps with Wikipedia.

See CZ’s thoughts on this Big Question on their blog.

MMORPG Power-Leveling and Rules in Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds, Real Profits has a blog entry on the rush of older players on MMORPGs and their impact on their virtual “economies.”

Older players, who have less time than younger ones, “power level” or buy time from services who will play their characters to increase their character levels:

The process typically involves two players from the power-leveling service working together, with one player using an existing high-level character while the other one uses the client account. As the C/Net story notes, power-leveling is controversial because it violates the terms of service of many games (which prohibit the sharing of account logins) and is frowned upon by many gamers.

These type of violations usually are ferreted out by other players–some of them dedicated vigilantes on personal quests to find these “farmers.” (“Farmers” also refers to players who only play to find special items and gold, which they then sell for real dollars IRL (“in the real world.”)

There are no rules on these behaviors. The rule that power-levelers are violating is that they give their usernames and passwords to third-parties for them to level their characters.

So there is no law governing this behavior, but there is community and culture which derides it. Where there is no written law, this sounds like law to me. And with a statutory mechanism (violation by giving away a username and a password) of prosecuting this behavior, users and their characters can be “deported” by their credit card numbers, names, and addresses.

Techdirt: Should Judges Cite Wikipedia?

Techdirt: Should Judges Cite Wikipedia?

In fact, the article notes that one case was later overturned when a higher court had problems with the lower court’s use of Wikipedia — though, ironically, to make their point, they too cited Wikipedia (though, they focused on the site’s disclaimers, which are just as editable as any other page so present the same problem the lower court supposedly had in citing them). It appears that most judges that cite Wikipedia do so on mostly unimportant matters, to fill in details or explanations on issues that are not central to the decision-making.

This issue could be helped by using the Harvard suggestion for citing Wikipedia. The Harvard citation format requires one to cite to the time in the article’s history that you are citing. By clicking on the history tab at the top of an article, one may then navigate to the actual text that the clerk has cited. (Also, maybe it shouldn’t be that “judges” are citing Wikipedia, as much as their law clerks are.)

The deeper issue is that encylopedic knowledge is harder to find and less trustworthy than it used to be–back when we had no other “better” option. Other than Wikipedia, my best bets are Encarta or Britannica (both of which charge for usage) or the Columbia Encyclopedia. But none are as exhaustive as Wikipedia.

But for non-essential uses, clerks merely need a source to cite for sub-common knowledge, i.e., knowledge that not everyone knows, but everyone could know if they did a Google search.

People’s knowledge bases are no longer limited to what they have on the tips of their tongues or at the fore of their brains, but common knowledge might also include information one can find from a few minutes selecting links from a Google search result.

Wikipedia Explodes in China

From Slashdot:

“The Chinese have recently been allowed to enjoy the Chinese version of Wikipedia now that the ban has been lifted. And the result is an explosion in use after being banned for a year. From the article, “Activity on nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation’s Chinese Wikipedia site has skyrocketed since its release, which Internet users in China first started reporting on Nov. 10. Since then, the number of new users registering to contribute to the site has exceeded 1,200 a day, up from an average of 300 to 400 prior to the unblocking. The number of new articles posted daily has increased 75% from the week before, with the total now surpassing 100,000, according to the foundation.” No one’s sure how long this will be available to the People’s Republic of China but hopefully the government will recognize that at least a significant part of the populace enjoys a Wikipedia community.”

That’s all.