Recent articles like this one and this news article raise a very important point about file sharing.  Namely, that people like my good self you are interested new internet business models based on file sharing: are asshats.  In particular, we are thieving, stealing asshats.  Without once again dragging up the rhetoric surrounding this debate let me quote noted singer James Blunt:

“The music business is made up of thousands of jobbing musicians, producers, mixers and engineers creating and shaping popular music and culture, but illegal file-sharing is cutting off the income from their work. Without the revenue from established artists, record labels cannot fund emerging musicians.” Quote taken from here.

I do not wish to argue the case here except to say this: What a load of crap.  The music business is made of layers of people who never make real money and hardly any of them actually get paid.  This has turned me off buying any more music from a mindless twat like James Blunt.  Mind you, I never listened to that soppy crap anyway (I hate that song… prefer Weird Al’s version).  This is what annoys me about his statement: as if he cares.  He is a superstar and does not represent musicians in general.  You want to see the people he is talking about?  Go to the places where these emerging artists are?  Well and truly before piracy artists where getting reamed up the pipes by industry.  Long before, LONG BEFORE Lars Ulrich put another million dollars in the bank.  Heres my key point:

Making music for a living is not a right, it’s a privilege.

You know why?  Most people who write songs, paint paintings, write novels make no money.  James Blunts of this world are far and few between (less than 0.0001% I would argue).  Even the people who appear on independent radio stations make little or no money from their art.  Is this because of piracy?  No, it’s because the industry has extremely high barriers to entry and high competition.  In essence, it’s the perfect business model.  You don’t have to create new talent often, just find a hit from the cream of the crop to support all your failures and presto!  You have a business model.  It reminds me of something I read about the death of the midlist… but that’s another post.

So why did file sharing make me who I am?  Almost all of the papers I read to do my PhD were given to me by others, or shared with me.  Programs I needed but couldn’t afford and so on and so on.   I could have done none of this without file sharing.  But that aside, there is a key element in file sharing that made me who I am and it can be summed up by this word: sharing.  The fundamental human trait that those who are successful fail to remember.  Your fans are paying for your mansions, your clothes, your cars and that ridiculous haircut.  They like your music and pay for it to support you.  In droves!  So why are you turning on them?  Don’t you already have enough?  Emerging artists?  If you believe so much that it’s hurting them why not go and find them and help them by introducing them to your friends in the record industry? In 1960 there was a very high barrier to get in, was this because we listened to the radio?  Bullshit!

In closing my argument (if you can call it that) let me add that file sharing isn’t the real issue.  The issue is: finally we may have an opportunity to create balance in an industry that is horribly one-sided and over compensates popular artists more than any other.  This is critically unfair and needs to change.

I recently took a little time out to see District 9.  Now, I am slow when it comes to the latest trends and usually miss things because I am too busy with my head up my ass (or some equivalent).  Usually I don’t recommend movies because my taste is incredibly different than most.  For instance, I liked the Adventures of Ford Fairlane when I was a kid.  I refuse to watch it now because it may suck.  That said, District 9 is a movie you have to see to believe.  The main reason I liked it so much was not really the social commentary or the special effects but this:  I couldn’t guess what would happen next.

I always spoil movies because I make statements like, ‘you know what’s going to happen…’ then add what I think… and it’s usually right.  I’m no genius, it’s just movies are so predictable these days because filmmakers and movie studios are too focused on audiences and familiarity instead.  Other movies like this are: Blue Velvet, Weekend (Godards one) and to a lesser extent the Usual Suspects.   I love a movie that surprises me!

Despite the on-going endorsement of gurus like Seth Godin, I am still very suspicious about the internet’s ability to be a legitmate place of business.  Now, I am not saying that internet business is failure personified… no I am talking about the lack of proactivity in stopping fraud and moreover the scamming of the general public.

A key point of what I am saying can be traced to companies that thrived during the recent Acai berry and Government Grant fiasco.  I have a theory, some people will go into business with the mindset that making money is paramount… at the expense of ‘ethics’.  It can be very easy to make money online, especially if you want to go to jail (or at least it was until recently).    Here’s where I am wondering why business lacks heart… how can we knowingly sell false promises and false hope to people?  Because of the money.  What differentiates such companies from drug dealers?  I can’t think of a thing.

A common excuse you hear is this: Well I am in business to make money and what customers do with the product (or even if IT ACTUALLY WORKS) is not my problem.  I recently bought a batch of DVD’s online believing them to be genuine, alas they weren’t.  What about Ebay?  What a pathethic sham they have for customer service.  Honestly, you get the same automated email when you are robbed by a greedy dangerous powerseller that you do, when somebody sells you a phone that doesn’t work.  And don’t get me started about Paypal.  They are equally as poor and care LESS about customers than Ebay does. They simply don’t care.  Which brings me to my point:

If we are to build ‘successful’ online businesses then we must do so with integrity.   If we plan to sell a service, we must support and completely believe in the product we sell.  The internet holds so much promise, yet we continue to stuff around with important things like customer service.

What can we learn from these things?  Do the opposite of Ebay and Paypal!  Actually be proactive in meeting customer needs.  Be reputable as an online company.  Foster communication, take feedback seriously and most of all: answer your dam emails when they are sent.  We are people, not items on a budget sheet.   You need to help us buy stuff from you, and no matter how much you automate it, you cannot replace human contact.

If you are in online business, please take what I am saying seriously.  Customer service has taken a bashing (especially here in Australia) in the last few years and I for one would love to see a return to better service, better feedback and overall a giant overhaul of 21st Century Business.  After all, it’s the future…. isn’t it?

I think that every now and then that someone comes along who is what we might call a ‘thorny’ character. De Soto, might be put in that class by some people but for me… I admire his practical attitudes and courage, even though I may not agree 100% with his politicals. I would urge you to watch this… there are some interesting points made about global politics and the way in which we can make a difference. That and you can learn about this interesting man.

My faculty is going through a movement.  Yes that kind of movement.  They are looking for ways to get rid of the information systems discipline. This got me thinking… how can we have business without systems?

borrowed from http://rfor.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/hal-400.jpg

The picture above is Hal – the AI from 2001 – A Apace Odyssey.  As a young (at heart) information systems lecturer, I have always felt marginal.  It was like the management and business people knew they needed us, but couldn’t see the point.  The IS (information systems) area has been in steady decline in most regional non-big city areas since about 2002 and indeed with the exception of a few big IS centres, it remains to be seen what the future of IS holds.  As for me, I may be found *coughs* “surplus to requirements”.  What a horrible HR phrase that is!  In short, I might be in line to “get the arse”.

To be “surplus” as I call it, means that you are no longer required, not needed.  Kaput.  I remember when Operations Research died and became IS (actually I don’t – it was relayed to me by retired people) in Australia, and I remember thinking about how I needed to escape the fringe ‘sub-disciplines’ of the business school.  Herein lies the core of my problem, systems are not sub-disciplines.  They are not even fringe, they are core and essentially to business strategy.  It took me a long time to realise that and herein is the issue: the IT enterprise does not have what it takes to make for good business strategy.  IT people generally are not exposed to management strategy until they become managers.   Programmers are not very good leaders… although I have met many that are. I digress.

The re-imagining process

When something fails or goes to the poop factory like IS has, the thing to think about is why?  Why has there been a steady decline?   My view is that people need it, but because technology has so masterfully woven into the discipline by academics they have accidently wedded the discipline to technology.  What a tragic mistake that was.  Why do that?  Technology changes, is superceded and moves on.  IS should be about themes, concepts and meaningful things that are useful in any application.  Not simply a subset of business or IT… but a set of concrete ideas that are useful in many areas.  And herein lies the problem: IS never formed a coherent body of thought outside of technology.   We got as far as the technology acceptance model – they we set up camp at MISQ and realised this is it, we have made it.  The problem?  Our discipline had promise, it had themes, now it’s a bad joke based on old concepts that have been stolen back by management scholars and IT people.  What I am saying here doesn’t even matter because I could argue about why the IS school is miles apart from IT.  I could.  But, if you don’t already understand what I am saying and it’s not obvious then we as scholars have failed.  Yes we have failed, just like e-commerce models from 1998, FAILED! So I have decided to re-imagine systems in my own world and think about what IS means to me.

IS is a core body of ideas centred around information and it’s purposeful use in a wholistic way.  It captures: systems thinking, information flow, data resources and most importantly how to solve problems for humans by humans with technology.   It’s about humanising IT (hat tip: Richard and Tristan).  It’s not software engineering, it’s not information technology, it’s not business process management.  IS, is simply put the human and social and technical systems and how they cohrently form to make wholes and why that is important.  Yes, IS is about people, activity and lastly technology and how the intertwine.   Now let’s throw that away, it’s dead.

What would we have if we could have anything?

Firstly, a set of ideas not tied to technology.  So we have to ditch the word ‘systems’.  It’s BS anyway, and too many people think systems = computers.  I no longer have the energy to point them to Senge, Churchman, Ackoff, Checkland, Mingers, Jackson and many MANY others to prove my point.  You win, it’s your word.   What about the idea of information?  No, this too is too commonly associated with computers.   The core idea is that people solving problems and acting in a strategic way (without the implications of studying strategy from the dominant finance point of view), thus it has an applied pragmatic focus.  The phrase ‘problem solving’ has been stolen by educators so we can’t even use that, people almost always bring up the staircase and that makes me violently ill.  No no –> we need a new concept.  Hmm.

I have it, let’s take the four core concepts and see what we can make:

1. Information flow

2. Systems Thinking

3. Human Activity

4. Problem Solving/Design/etc etc etc etc (probably should be IFSTHAPSEEE)

How about ‘ISHP’ (note: this is a working title perhaps SHIP?).  So that way we could borrow from arts, management, science technology and design science disciplines and NOT have to make it about technology. That way we could study how people form social groups and if they use technology great!  So scholars in this field (ISHP scholars) focus on how systems thinking impacts human activity problem solving and how that in turn impacts on the way information moves around an organisation.  THEN once we have established ISHP as a theoretical framework for analysising and synthesising human problems (not computer ones) and how they solve them we introduce technology as a byword.  That way, we are always relevant and always interesting because we have new and useful ideas all the time about stuff that matters.  You could tell a colleague, ‘ISHP’ do you want to look at how the global economic crisis emerged and what can be done?  Then talk to ISHPs… they know, they know it all, because they know how to synthesise information for forge new interactions with the world and they know how to make NEW knowledge that works.  Oh yeah, ISHP it’s the BOMB.

ISHP Faculty

We could have a faculty with social psychologists, next to education people, next to problem solving experts, next to HR people, next to mad scientists and designers!  Imagine what we could achieve if we put technology into the background and focused on themes.  We could create a transdisiplinary environment of scholars who create new concepts from their disciplines,  it would really work well.   ISHP is a discipline where we focus on key issues to do with people, places and things… from a strategic/systems level NOT from a granular.     In theory, we could not publish in each others journals informing people of new ideas and concepts around social groups, explaining emerging phenomena from a comprehensive ‘systems’ perspective.  We could leave the mining up to the management scholars, accountants, and like-minded disciplinarians.  I want a department where we can collaborate on each others projects to create new ‘meta’ knowledge without those disciplinary constraints.

ISHP the future?

I doubt that, but to survive IS needs to be reimagined.   It’s way too scrugged (a word meaning ‘shotgun’ approach to concepts – blast you in the face with a whole heap of stuff with no depth) at the moment.  Thoughts?

Recently I was handed what is probably the most disturbing news I have heard since someone I know died.  You are ‘surplus to requirements’.  Well, it’s not official yet … it may never be official.  You see, I am part of a Business School that has no place for Information Systems people anymore.  They have told us that they will be ‘discontinuing us’.  Shoving us off, moving us away and so forth.  Is it a crisis or an opportunity?  A failure or the seeds of success?  I can’t tell.  What I do know is that I am thinking dark thoughts and reflecting on what is to date twelve years of my life (two more if you include the year I did at TAFE and in the other university up the road) in the discipline of information systems.  IS is dead IS is DEAD LONG LIVE IS!

Instead of offering a scowl, which I am entitled, I felt I should reflect on the key thing that IS failed to do over the last decade.  It failed to be what other people wanted it to be.  It failed to present coherence because systems thinking is the search for comprehensiveness and complexity which the micro-managing dot finders in management schools are typically trying to find, is not coherent.  This causes this, they say, that causes that they say.  Bullshit, I cry, nevertheless it falls on the hardest of ears.  The sound of my own voice reverberates back to me, ‘We can’t just analyse, we need to ‘synthesise’ because drilling down only works sometimes (Hat tip: Dewey and Rorty).   Why do we need ‘systems’ anyway?  Why do we need ‘systems’ thinking?  What a steaming load, you say, that’s academery of the worst kind.  Looking for comprehensive, complex explainations of things, instead of simple cause and effect (WMD).  Honestly!

Instead of quoting an endless stream of scholars from Europe (Checkland, Ulrich, Jackson, Flood, Mingers, Stacey) and the United States (Ackoff, Churchman, Senge) I will say this: What a shame that Australia is still trying to be like everyone else and ignoring it’s own ecclectism.   In essence these things are now: surplus to requirements.  They don’t fit in the conception of business education anymore, even though I believe they should.  No doubt, we will see the next edition of Harvard Business Review or MIT Sloan waxing lyrical about ‘mobile technologies’ or ‘complex problem solving’ but they won’t be from my neck of the woods because it’s being chopped down!

In ending this short reflection, I am reminded of my own position in the university system and my right to express my feelings about it.  It’s failing.  Badly.  My parting shot is this:  You cannot have business without an understanding of systems, and you cannot have systems without an understanding of business.

I read Techdirt as do thousands of other people and recently they were discussing this ruling.  I am wondering about PR at a time like this when I too have become a victim of managerial-ness where I work (that’s another story).  I would have thought that even though people have strong opinions about downloading music and file sharing that surely it wouldn’t come to this.  What about testing the means?  What about sussing out a process by which to identify lost income?  The latter would support the premise that there is no lost revenue, no way no how.

I find my self agreeing with the post above about legal counsel.  Having watched an organisation I am involved with go through a legal battle of it’s own to take something that is rightfully theres, I have to say without a shadow of a doubt, it’s a long drawn out painful process.  In situations like these nobody wins.  It’s lose-lose.  The PR for the record industry falls through the floor and it does nothing to solve the mutual problem of connecting new fans who are accustomed to file sharing with newer ideas about the businesses.  Yet, in this we have to mindful that as Kuhn told us, when one paradigm shifts and moves, it has to recreate itself to emerge anew!

The record industry, for the sake of it’s own PR needs to find it’s innovation capacity.  Instead of suing everyone and hoping we will eventually retreat to the CD store to buy music again, they need to reframe this issues so the emerging users needs are met.  Otherwise, this situation will continue to plague us for years and it won’t be the last time we hear about such strange behaviour.  To me, the best answer it always a new interpretation, not the same old same old.  Do you have an opinion?

For a while now I have been thinking about the bigger picture.  When I think about the bigger picture I usually think for a long time about things that most people find boring.  Here are two things I have been thinking about recently:

1. Did I imagine most of my life up to this point

2. If 1. is so how much of it is delusion and how much of it could I call ‘reality’.

At this point you may be thinking, what the hell is he talking about?  But bear with me whilst I type this and work out what is I am trying to say.  Let’s elaborate on what a delusion is… no I am not quoting Dawkins.

a mistaken belief

If I believe that what I believe is not true then I am mistaken?  If I am deluded, then I am believing something that is not so.  Yet in most things I have ever done I have found myself believing things that weren’t true simply because it was reasonable for me to do so.  It was the best explanation I had at the time.  I call this, as of now, 10:25pm Australian Eastern Standard Time, the wonder of delusion.  So why is a delusion a wonderful thing.

Two reasons:

1. It is the doorway to another meaning – all delusions if they are followed through to their natural conclusion are often shattered.  This means when my delusions fade or change shape as I perpetually reinterpret them, I recreate myself and thereby determine new beliefs.  These new beliefs, if they ‘anchor in me’ create a new template.  Hopefully it is an improved version of my old belief.   That is, I have learned.  Delusions are strong, and not to be mocked.  But, in starting a sentence with a conjunction I am being serious, you need to challenge your beliefs to see if they are real.   But what of faith?  Faith that is not tested is not faith, it is merely the assumption of faith or a shell of faith.  To have faith means you believe because of something, not blindly ‘my parents told me this,’ your faith may be ancestral, logical (athiest), didactic (fundamentalists) or it could be in the fabled spaghetti monster.  A delusion therefore is the point of entry through which we engage, it is the doorway to something grand.

2. Not all delusions are good and they don’t always lead to better things.  As something can be wonderfully good, or wonderfully bad a delusion can be horribly bad.  Yet, it’s a wonder people believe in things that drive them all the way to harm.  The right thing to do is to understand.  It’s not to make stupid arguments based on rationalism.  No, the answer lies in meaning.  The question is – delusion – why?  Interpretation – why?  I have no idea.   Yet, in all the beauty of the world (and I have seen one of the wonders – the Great Barrier Reef), there is nothing so amazing about delusions.  Whole societies are built around them, fashion is made and sold on the back of delusions, men and women with ‘delusions of grandeur’ romp through out cities becoming successful entrepreneurs.   Delusions drive us, they make us act.  It’s wonderful!

Back to my original statements.  Yes, I have imagined my life up to this point, it’s precisely where I ended up.  Did my imagination include writing this blog post, I doubt it.  Yet, if I could sense the inward forces of delusion, could I harness them in such a way to solve my problems?  Are they the sum total of my problems?  Strategically, in this ‘Dickian’ rant (referring to the late Philip K. Dick not the only kind – take your mind out of the gutter!), what am I saying?  I don’t know.   Reality is not really an elusive idea.  It’s my experience, it’s what happens, it’s phenomena.  What I think about what happens are the delusions, and herein lies the kicker, they urge me to act.  Funny, how the delusions I have, the actions I take are cosmically interlinked to make up the sum total of fraility, insanity and random acts of shouting that is… me.   Yet as I ponder this, I sense my delusional candicacy is well beyond the capacity of myself.    Is God deluding me?   After all, Faith is the evidence of things NOT seen –> but seen somehow.  Sensed?  Felt?  Discerned?  Reasoned?

Evidence is what we want.  Facts.  Facts.  Facts.  The fact is, Holmes might say, the fact is elementary.  It is inductively discerned.  Why, you ponder on the delusions of men and women and you gaze.  A case in point: ambition.  The greatest delusion of them all.  We work so hard, to get promoted, we use people.  It’s a fact of working (there I go again) that you have to sell your soul to get ahead.  If I wanted to research Simulacra (simulations of reality) like I wanted to originally do you think any University on earth would support me?  I wanted to understand the simulations we create in organisations… the routines, the fakeness, the politicalness, without having to resort to drilling down.  No, I wanted to use this bizarre French construction to understand our delusions.   Instead I picked Soft Systems Methodology.  Why?  I can’t even remember!

What matters really?

Children? Career? Money? Housing? Pants?  What matters is what matters because you think it matters.  Are you a conservative voter?  Are you a liberal voter?  Are you a swinger voter… those terms are delusions… designed to get you to BELIEVE something.  Then your faith evidence causes you to act.  You act on it and then you make choices.  Herbert Simon was one smart dude, but he missed a key point about human beings.  They don’t think in linear patterns, they don’t define problems logically, they create answers because they want to solve things they find interesting to solve.   What matters is what matters.  We solve ‘what matters’.

Ambition: The driving force of your death and ultimate loss of legacy

When you die and the maggots come for a meal (unless you are burned) guess what?  People might be sad for a while.  When we buried my wife’s great grandfather there were about six people at his funeral.  Now, he was a nice man but guess what… I don’t remember him all that much.  All I remember is that I got into an argument with my wife right after he died.  To this day I can’t even remember what about!  Ok, I am wondering off track but here’s the point: what legacy?  What purpose? What destiny?  DELUSIONS!  I can’t tell you the amount of people I have met you are in the late 60′s that still don’t understand what life is about.  I don’t know and it’s frustrating.  I thought relegion had an answer… it just gave me more questions.  Too many to answer?

Ambition is the greatest delusion of all. ‘The man’ has you believing that you can work for a living and be happy.  Now, I know of people who work and are happy but they often do not know why.   They work, they live, they die.  There life does have meaning, of course it does.  Go to graveyard, look at the tombstones, the people there are dead.   They once worked their whole lives to get a house, or to feed their family, or to live a life.  You know what, they are dead.  DEAD DEAD DEAD.  The illusion of purpose and meaning has escaped them, they no longer have to wade through the slush pile of delusions looking for the key to unlock the reason for their own existence.  They have found nothing in the grave because they are gone.  Ambition got them to death.  Your job has meaning, it does, it means you’re not yet dead.  When you retire you can sit around thinking about how great it was to have the falsehood of purpose in your brain as you thought about your next promotion.  There comes a time when it stops meaning.  What then?  Another delusion?

Underbelly: A case in point

Of the things I have watched, there can be nothing more brutal and delusional as the gangster life portrayed in Underbelly or the Sopranos.  We can shoot whoever we like, take all the drugs we want, buy prostitutes etc.  It’s delusion.  Old hollywood movies are best at this.  They delude us with a sense of how wonderful life was in the ‘good old days’.  You don’t think people had sex problems back then?  Of course they did, they had a boatload of sex problems!  Hollywood has deluded you into thinking life was simpler back then.  It wasn’t.  It caused a lot of the problems we have today, if you follow the ideals of cause and effect and generative mechanisms.  Each generation created a knock on effect for the next to interpret and act upon.  Beliefs are very powerful things, they appear (to me) to exist.  They are causal.  The effect my actions, create havoc in my life and force me to believe nonsense I know isn’t true.

In ending this, if you read this far, can I say well done.  The mind that produced this is highly flammible and likely to implode, given time.  Maybe I have been reading too much short fiction (Steinbeck, James and Trollope – I should put that book away it’s not helping me) BUT I do feel deluded so… everything’s fine.  Act normal I might notice.

Wow.  I have written 300 obscure rants from many different directions.  As I look back on the last two years I have been at this (I know two years), I can say it’s been worthwhile experience for me.  I usually don’t stick with things long enough to find out whether are worth it or not, and to be honest it’s a bloody miracle I managed to get a PhD!

That said, this has been fun.   There are some amazing things I have learned about writing for different audiences, not using big obscure words, dealing with dickhead flamers and so on.  Yet, the biggest lesson I learned was how to be me.  Just do it.  Is that sense I think:

The internet is more like a flea market than a niche market

I have posted on just about everything over the last two years.  I have to take issue with the idea of posting content for a niche.  I know, this blog hardly breaks any records. But I am proud to say that I have 79 people who read my feed (okay so I know a few of those people) and 170 odd unique visits a day.  When you think about it, that’s a real lot of people.  1126 this month so far as a matter of fact.  Now, when I started I was talking about business mainly, but I found I also wanted to talk about personal development.  So I switched to that.  Then I switched back, then I switched back again!  After about the 150th post I realised what I should have known all along.  I am very different.  I need to be me, or just bugger off.  If I am 170 people interesting, then so be it!   I will be me, and to hell with the Bob’s of this world who don’t like what I write.

So as for the niche?  I don’t have one.  You could frame this blog in such a way that it had a niche market and I could write enough about something to warrant 30 posts or so.  But you know what? My niche is that I want to think about everything.  So here is a list of things that I have talked about so far:

1. Real Estate
2. Problem Solving
3. Creativity
4. Relationships
5. Personal Development
6. Learning
7. Thinking
8. Education
9. Work
10. And a whole lot more

And you will be pleased to know that Google likes these posts the most:

1. It’s OK to Fail (oh the irony)
2. 7 signs of a failing relationship
3. Developing a sense of self-worth
4. 4 Ways to come with cool ideas
5. Living from the heart

Now there is a theme there… living from the heart, knowing your worth and such and such.  But I didn’t set out to write that.  It emerged through my voice as I blogged and blogged and BLOGGED!  Sometimes if you set out to achieve something such as writing a ‘finance’ blog, you may find after the 40th post that you don’t really want to go in that direction anymore.  For God’s sake… CHANGE! There is so much ‘sameness’ in life.  So many things that are normal.  Be the odd one out.  Do something differnet.  Hey, why not THAT’S SUPER!

The future

Should I build a niche?  I don’t think so.  If I did I would feel a cold restriction.  I (and I alone probably!) think that writing should not be bounded.  I am not against genre fiction for example, but it’s sad that so much fiction is ‘horror’ or ‘comedy’ or ‘action’.  Isn’t life a mixture of these things?  I think our writing should earnestly reflect what we do in a meaningful way, it should capture drama, horror and science fiction (ok maybe not this – I am a fan). In the future I will keep going and writing about things that interest me.  It will be rambling, but I am sure in there somewhere will be some coherence!  At least I hope so. To my small amount of readers.   Thank you.  I am very humbled by the fact that you glance at my feeds occassionaly and I am impressed by your discipline and support. 

Okay so I have not weighed into the micro-debate surrounding the new Chris Anderson Book.  You know why… it hasn’t really made me angry enough or pushed me into making comments.  If you are interested there is an excellent analysis of the issue at Techdirt.  This morning as I was navigating my RSS feeds I found an interesting article from Novelr.com.  They had a free link to Scribd hosting the new Chris Andersen book for free… this is what I got:

Am I the only one seeing the irony here? Free! but only in the US. So it’s free 300 million people but for 5.7 Billion it’s unfree. This kind of thing has happened to those out of the States before and it continues to happen. I suppose I could coin the metaphor Free! (with restrictions).

I have been teaching the Long Tail as part of a university course for a while now and was thinking about using this in class too. Now, it’s probably going to cost me a small fortune to ship the book to Australia. I am not complaining I choose to live in the greatest country and state on earth, my choice and hey I love it here.  For those in the US who are smart enough to use this offer by all means should.  I think it’s odd that the statement the book is probably making (haven’t read it can’t comment) is being thwarted here by the very medium it’s proporting supports the production of free material! You know what… to hell with this I am just going to use a proxy server and download it for free anyway.

As a final comment the only thing I can say is what I learned from my students in Information Policy and Governance this semester. The largest consumer of Porn is China… now who has the great firewall? Hmm… no wonder piracy is so rampant with such silly restrictions as these. Now if you will excuse me, I must go download something illegal… just to clear my head.