Last Thursday the New York Public Library held a debate titled, “The Battle Over Books“. It was video webcast live, unfortunately they screwed up and forget to disable the password protection on the stream, so you couldn’t get in until the end. They now have an audio only quicktime stream on the website. Or you can download here via bittorrent.

The participants included:

• Allan Alder – Association of American Publishers
• David Drummond – Google
• Lawrence Lessig – Stanford Law School and Creative Commons
• Nick Taylor – The Authors Guild

While it is an entertaining listen (once the NYPL guy at the beginning shuts up) it is at the same time very frustrating. The majority of the debate hovers above the issue that the opposing sides disagree on the terms of Fair Use. Is copying an entire book, putting it in a database fair use? Alder and Taylor say no, Drummond and Lessig say yes.

However, while terms of Fair Use is a big issue, it becomes clear from the debate that the fundamental issue is that Copyright law is broken. It may have worked alright with the protection of physical objects, but it does not map cleanly to the digital world. Lessig alludes to this on multiple occasions and outside the debate has at least attempted to suggest alternative solutions.

We finally got new accounts set up at Citizens Bank. So far, in comparison to TD Banknorth, I am pleased as punch.

Online banking goodies:

• Giving accounts nicknames like, “Joint Checking”
• Schedule transfers for any future date
• Can view ALL transactions, not just the last 60 days
• Can change your username
• Can export your transactions in CSV

ATM goodies:

• ATM’s were made during this decade
• Pen’s are available
• ATM’s (and branch) within walking distance of home and work

Goodbye SIS FirstMass Banknorth TD Banknorth

What is incredible about Google is that they can initiate a project and make it public, before I can even make a blog post about a vague idea I have. The following blog post has been in my unpublished blogs bin for weeks now. Today, Google opened Google Base. It’s been talked about for a week or two now, but it is actually closer to what I’ve been dreaming about than the rumors led me to believe. It still has a long way to go. Most importantly the need for a public API… which I’m sure will be available soon. I most excited that Google Base will spur other similar projects. On with the dusty old blog post:

For many months now, maybe I even have a blog post about it, I’ve been wanting a web application that would basically be Filemaker for the web, combined with Wiki like collaboration and versioning. Everyone I’ve tried to explain this to looks at me funny. Either because it is just a stupid idea, or because people don’t see the brilliance of the concept. I think I’ve finally convinced Seth it is a good idea, but he has his own brilliant ideas to spend his non-existent free time on.

Somewhat encouraging is that there seem to be a couple projects circling the idea, but don’t quite get what I’m after.

What am I after? How about an example. Imagine you want to build a collaborative dictionary where anyone could add new entries, or edit existing entries. You could take the Wiktionary approach by using pure wiki software. This has the benefit of ease of collaboration and every edit is saved so you can revert vandalism etc. However, what if you wanted to have a clean xml version of the data so that you could use the dictionary from other outside applications? Each entry is just a big blog. Pulling out the distinct elements (word, definition, pronunciation, etc.) is not clean.

The alternative implementation is an Urban Dictionary route. Building a custom application from scratch. The downside to this approach is that there is a bunch of coding infrastructure that must be done. In addition, making the app have flexible access control and extensive versioning make the coding much more complicated.

My proposed solution is a web app that allows a user, through a web browser, to create a new database, define columns, types etc. (basically PHPmyAdmin). Then define access control roles (ex. anyone can add a new entry, or edit old entries) with all revisions saved. Finally they can define views/layouts. So they can provide a HTML template and a stripped down XML view.

Other possible uses?:

• Television and Radio schedules
• An open collaborative Internet Movie Database or CD database.
• Database of geo-locations
• Events calendar
• A plain old Wiki
• To-do lists

No programming required. Obviously it is a very complicated application, but all the pieces exist on their own. Just need to put the following projects in a blender:

• WikiDB
• MediaWiki
• phpMyAdmin
• base.google.com
• WikiCalc
• Ning

Audible today announced Wordcast. (website, press release) It’s been rumored for a long time but finally here. Or is it, I don’t see how to actually enroll.

The Wall Street Journal article, “Building an Online Library, One Volume at a Time“, has more details on the Internet Archive’s book digitization project, inlcluding a few more photos of the scanner which apparently costs $20,000 to $40,000 each. Still looking forward to the day when every library has one and suddenly we can make a real dent in the digitization process.

Sweet. Beyond TV 4 was finally released today. I’m most interested in the support for DivX encoding and decoding. My tuner doesn’t support DivX encoding, so suddenly I feel like I should have gotten a beefier processor.

The support for recording FM radio may also be handy now that I live somewhere that can get a decent public radio FM signal.

I made 30 cents on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk before the site got Slashdotted and all the simple tasks got used up. I was identifying photos of shop fronts in Boston. It gives you a page with a business name, an address, and 5 pictures. Your task is to select the photo that matches the business address. In only one case was the actual business name present. All the others either were businesses in a big building with no store front, or there was just no photo that matched at all. This is just one example of uses for Mechanical Turk. It is an interesting idea… one that we were actually discussing after the Berkman luncheon the other day. It could actually be used to build a seed database for Artificial intelligence systems to use, which Mako says MIT is working on.

One interesting thing that I came across in the photos themselves is the vehicle that was used to take the store front photos (see photo). It appears to be nothing more than an SUV with a video camera on top. The photos are used in Amazon’s A9 map. I find them useless in most cases. The photos are head-on and very tight which gives you a very limited view of the building. They really should taking the photo at an angle and with a wider angle lens. All that trouble they’ve gone through, you’d think they’d try to do it right.

Corin and I, at the last minute decided to go see John Hogdman’s, “Little Gray Book Series” at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline.

Hodgman has had pieces on This American Life, is the author of, The Areas of My Expertise, 700 Hobo Names which are being drawn and submitted to Flickr.

Last nights performance was titled, “You Can Go Home Again (Or, At Least, to Brookline)”. There were lots of insider Brookline jokes but it was still a fun time.