Information Week’s Internet Evolution’s just published my latest article, “Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform, or Destroy Your Favorite Medium” — a noodle on the factors that led to the demise of newspapers, the transformation of music, and the potential destruction of big budget movies and mass-market publishing (and what can be done about the last one):

Big-budget movies (BBMs) require a lot of capital and rely on studios controlling the rate and nature of distribution of the finished product. If you’re going to recoup your $300 million box-office turd, you need to move a hell of a lot of DVDs, TV licenses, foreign exhibition, Happy Meal toys, and assorted “secondary” revenues.

Let’s be realistic here: Nothing anyone does is going to make it harder to get movies when you want them, where you want them, and at whatever price you feel you should pay for them (including free). And the harder you crack down on Internet movie-downloading, the more attractive you make buying pirate DVDs from criminals on the street — a virtually zero-risk transaction that directly displaces DVD purchases.

What’s more, no one has yet successfully crowdsourced a movie that looks and feels like a BBM. There are lots of fabulous 9-minute YouTube Inc. videos, and plenty of lovely and promising machinima flicks, but no one’s yet built the kind of purely escapist, high-production-value feature that we flock to the cinema to see every summer.

Now, maybe film studios can do what Magnolia Pictures is doing — distributing day-and-date releases to satellite, pay-per-view, cinema, DVD, and foreign film outlets — and recapture a lot of the money that is squirting between the fingers of the tightly clenched release-window fist. But if it’s not enough, commercially motivated BBMs might simply die.

Note that movies as a genre won’t vanish. There’s plenty to love about 9-minute YouTubes and the quirky features that come out of indie production houses. There’s never been a time when more moving pictures were being produced and viewed than today. Many of these things are economic propositions, and many are not — they’re a lot more like stage shows than they are like films. They cost less to produce, they reach smaller, more targetted audiences, and they represent an admirable diversity of voice and point of view. But they’re not Big, Culturally Relevant Media in the way that a real classic BBM can be.

Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform, or Destroy Your Favorite Medium

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been working with Thomas “cmdln” Gideon (host of the fabulously nerdy Command Line podcast) on a free software project for writers called “Flashbake.” This is a set of Python scripts that check your hot files for changes every 15 minutes, and checks in any changed files to a local git repository. Git is a free “source control” program used by programmers to track changes to source-code, but it works equally well on any text file. If you write in a text-editor like I do, then Flashbake can keep track of your changes for you as you go.

I was prompted to do this after discussions with several digital archivists who complained that, prior to the computerized era, writers produced a series complete drafts on the way to publications, complete with erasures, annotations, and so on. These are archival gold, since they illuminate the creative process in a way that often reveals the hidden stories behind the books we care about. By contrast, many writers produce only a single (or a few) digital files that are modified right up to publication time, without any real systematic records of the interim states between the first bit of composition and the final draft.

Enter Flashbake. Every 15 minutes, Flashbake looks at any files that you ask it to check (I have it looking at all my fiction-in-progress, my todo list, my file of useful bits of information, and the completed electronic versions of my recent books), and records any changes made since the last check, annotating them with the current timezone on the system-clock, the weather in that timezone as fetched from Google, and the last three headlines with your by-line under them in your blog’s RSS feed (I’ve been characterizing this as “Where am I, what’s it like there, and what am I thinking about?”). It also records your computer’s uptime. For a future version, I think it’d be fun to have the most recent three songs played by your music player.

The effect of this is to thoroughly — exhaustively — annotate the entire creative process, almost down to the keystroke level. Want to know what day you wrote a particular passage? Flashbake can tell you. Want to know what passage you wrote on a given day? That too. Plus, keeping track of my todo.txt file means that I get a searchable database of all the todo items I’ve ever used, with timestamps for their appearance and erasure.

Additionally, since git repositories are made to replicate, you can publish some or all of your projects to the public web or to a private site. I’m hoping that my publisher will use a public git repo to check out the most recent versions of my in-print books every time they go back to press for a new edition, and use the built-in compare (“diff”) function to find all the typos I’ve fixed since the last edition.

It’s all pretty nerdy, I admit. But if you’re running some kind of Unix variant (I use Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, but this’d probably do fine on a Mac with OS X, too) and you want to give it a whirl, Thomas has made all the scripts available as free software. He’s working on a new version now with plugin support, which is exciting!

Cory wanted the version to carry prompts, snapshots of where he was at the time an automated commit occurred and what he was thinking. I quickly sketched out a Python script to pull the contextual information he wanted and started hacking together a shell script to drive git, using the Python script’s output for the commit comment when a cron job invoked the shell wrapper.

I added my own idea to the project, borrowing from continuous integration build systems the idea of a quiet period. I could easily imagine Cory actively working on a story, saving continually and a commit happening mechanically in the midst of that writing being less useful than if the script could find a quiet time to commit. This enhancement prompted me to ditch my shell script wrapper and pull that logic all into Python.

Flashbake

(Thanks, Thomas!)

My latest Guardian column is up — it’s a fantasy alternative to Lord Carter’s recommendations for the Internet in the Digital Britain report, one in which the best evidence on building a digital nation is deployed:

If the objective here is to secure Britain’s digital future, the most important thing we can do with DRM is avoid it. After all, DRM’s most notable effect on the market is to undermine competition by making companies that produce add-ons to popular products liable to lawsuits because they have to break the DRM to do so. Britain today has a booming economy in small firms that refill and resell printer cartridges – interoperating without permission. But the software equivalent – making DRMed music and games play on new hardware, for example – is prohibited by law.

Giving the whip hand to incumbents is no way to safeguard an innovative future.

Digital Britain report: Why Lord Carter should get real