News

Data-viz for the text of Anda’s Game

John did a wicked-cool set of data-visualizations of the text of my story Anda's Game: "I picked terms for the trees that were relevant to the themes of the story - gold, for in-game items and Fahrenheit, which is a clan in the story."

Guardian column: Peter Mandelson is putting the Analogue Economy first

My latest Guardian column looks at Peter Mandelson's new "Digital Economy Bill," a sweeping piece of proposed British legislation that would give Mandelson broad powers to act as the Pirate-Finder General, with the implausible aim of reducing UK file-sharing by 70 percent in one year.

Mandelson argues that Britain's Digital Economy will be based on the contrafactual premise of a steady decrease in computer speed, drive capacity, technical competence, network versatility and network ubiquity. Of course, the real digital economy is in those British companies that figure out how to thrive whether or not copying occurs – companies that use networks to reduce their costs, reach larger customer bases, and provide services whose demand and profitability grow with network use, companies such as Last.fm or Moo.com.

These companies' businesses are inconceivable without the net, but they also risk being collateral damage in Mandelson's war on the British internet. Just increasing the liability for copyright infringement (and creating a duty to police user-submitted files for infringement) could bankrupt either company overnight. How would Moo sell business cards with your personal photos on them if they could be sued into oblivion should those photos turn out to infringe copyright?

Mandelson is standing up for the Analogue Economy, the economy premised on the no-longer-technically-true idea that copying is hard. Companies based on the outdated notion of inherent difficulty of copying must change or they will die. Because copying isn't hard. Copying isn't going to get harder. This moment, right now, 2009, this is as hard as copying will be for the rest of recorded history. Next year, copying will be easier. And the year after that. And the year after that.

Why does Mandelson favour the Analogue Economy over the Digital?

To Go Boldly, WITH A LITTLE HELP plan on Starship Sofa podcast

The lovely folks at the Starship Sofa podcast recorded audio versions of my recent short story To Go Boldly (published in The New Space Opera 2), as well as the Publishers Weekly article describing my forthcoming short story collection With a Little Help.

MP3 Link

Wide-randing interview with the Command Line podcast

Last week I sat down for an interview with the excellent Command Line podcast at Philcon and recorded a long talk on sundry subjects ranging from politics to creativity to all my forthcoming projects.

MP3 Link

How Wikipedia uses facts-about-facts to do the impossible

My latest Make: column, "Shortcut to Omniscience," talks about the cognitive shift that Wikipedians undergo in order to collaboratively write an encyclopedia, and how that kind of fundamental, subtle change enables networked groups of people to do things that were previously considered impossible.

Here's the thing about expertise: it's hard to define. It may be
possible for a small group of relatively homogenous people to agree on
who is and isn't an expert, but getting millions of people to do so is
practically impossible. The Britannica uses a learned editorial board to
decide who will write its entries and who will review them.

Wikipedia turns this on its head by saying, essentially, *Anyone can
write our entries but those entries should consist of material cited
from reliable sources.* While the Britannica says, *These facts are
true*, Wikipedia says, *It is true that these facts were reported by
these sources*. The Britannica contains facts, Wikipedia contains facts
about facts.

Shortcut to Omniscience

Makers, the DRM-free audiobook

The audiobook of my latest novel, Makers has been published by Random House Audio, strictly in DRM-free formats over the net (this means that Apple won't carry it in the iTunes store, even though Audible was willing to carry it without DRM).

The reading is by Bernadette Dunne, a very talented actor. I just listened to this for the first time yesterday and I was blown away by Dunne's reading. I'm a huge audiobook nut, and I'm incredibly glad to have professional audiobook adaptations of my books from Random House -- and doubly grateful to them for supporting my commitment to DRM-free distribution. When you buy this book, you own it. The "terms of service" are "Don't violate copyright law," not "By buying this audiobook, you agree that we get to come over and kick you in the ass."

Makers, read by Bernadette Dunne

MP3 Sample

Buy Makers Audiobook on Borders

Audio from Harvard Books MAKERS signing

Here's the audio from my reading last week at the Harvard Bookstore, along with Q&A.

MP3 Link

My wife kicks ass

Congrats to my wife Alice, on winning four British Interactive Media Awards! What a clever spouse -- I'm a lucky, lucky man..

MAKERS tour ends this weekend at Philcon near Philadelphia

This weekend, I'll be wrapping up my US/Canada tour for Makers, my new novel, with a weekend at Philcon, near Philadelphia. I'll be signing books, doing a reading, giving a speech, and appearing on several panels. Hope to see you there!

Important note: I had previously announced a couple of readings tomorrow at the Philadelphia Free Library. It turns out that these are not open to the public (they're for school groups, which no one told me until last night). Sorry about this, folks.

Philcon: Nov 20-22
The Crowne Plaza Hotel, Cherry Hill, NJ

US/Canada Tour

http://www.boingboing.net/thumbs/makersthumb.jpg

Interview with The Link (Concordia)

Ginger Coons did a great interview with me last week for Concordia's paper The Link. Good meaty policy questions ahoy!

Enhanced Driver’s Licenses are being adopted in order to comply with newly-created American regulations on what constitutes an acceptable document for crossing the border. Doctorow did not view this as a sensible excuse.

“If all the other G20 nations were jumping off western democracy and landing in a boiling pit of fascism, would you jump with them? That’s not a basis for good governance.”

But it was not all doom-and-gloom from the sometimes-dystopian writer. Doctorow revealed that he had hope for the future of information policy.

“I would like to see a kind of information bill of rights that mirrored the UN Declaration of Human Rights and that was widely accepted as kind of rote by people, where you didn't have to explain why privacy is important or why neutral networks are important,” said Doctorow, who has pushed for Internet activity to be free from censorship or surveillance by Internet providers or governments. “I think if we got that, everything else would become easier.”

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