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Do LOLCats help fight censorship? The surprising answer is that yes they do.

This year’s Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism was a feast for media nerds like me. Former CBC reporter and producer Sue Gardner, now executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, made more insightful comments about the future of media, journalism and the way the web is changing our relationship with information than I can recount here. But one comment on the resiliency of the web in adressing would be censors of widely adopted social media platforms really stuck out for me.

Reflecting on the usefulness of Twitter to the Iranian election protests last June, Sue Gardner said (with my added emphasis and links):

Things like Twitter are really hard to censor because they are tools that lots of people use for lots of different reasons. There’s a guy named Ethan Zuckerman, who is a fellow at the Berkman Institute at MIT and he calls this the “cute cat theory.”

So the theory is that if millions of ordinary people use a tool like Flickr, or YouTube, or Twitter, or Facebook, or whatever – and they use it to share cute pictures of cats, or their grandchildren, or party invitations, or snapshots, or whatever – and meanwhile a few activists also use that same tool for other purposes, to share “information that wants to be free,” that people want to suppress: that makes censorship really difficult.

What happens is that if you try and shut down the tool that people are using to share cute pictures of cats they will freak out, right?  Because they want to share the pictures of the cats.

So what that means is that the pictures of the cat lovers provide cover for tools that are also used for, frankly, more important purposes such as for sharing information that would otherwise be suppressed. So the utility, the sort of general broad utility, of something like twitter makes it much much harder to censor.

Unsurprisingly, I’d recommend that you listen to the entire hour long 2009 Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism, and while you’re at it, subscribe to the CBC Ideas podcast where I found this gem among many others. Lastly, a hat tip to the I can has cheezburger network, including the infamous FAIL Blog, for their enormous lack of FAIL.

This week I noticed an opportunity to perform a little experiment on the traffic generated by relevant links in the comments of Paul Krugman’s Friday column in the New York Times.

The article in question was “The  Joy of Sachs,” a critique of the record quarterly profits posted last week by Goldman Sachs, even while the continuing, endless economic decline surrounds them on all sides. Goldman Sachs is  a Wall Street giant whose successful senior executives regularly pass through the revolving door into the US Treasury Department. Yep, the foxes are running the hen house.

Or as Krugman puts it:

Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.

I’ve been watching Goldman Sachs closely lately. I want to know how these guys are gaming the system to come out on top no matter what market they operate in.  So moments after the article was posted at 10:00 MT on Thursday night (12:00 AM ET or Friday morning in New York) I posted this comment inviting other readers to look at two other relevant pieces I recently shared on twitter providing some background on Goldman Sachs.

For more in depth analysis of Goldman Sachs’ slimy business practices I recommend:

1. Matt Taibbi’s “Vampire Squid” take on Goldman Sachs in the latest Rolling Stone: http://bit.ly/hwCbZ

2. CBC’s 30 minute interview with Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston on Goldman Sachs & Gov’t. Here’s the MP3: http://bit.ly/ZzLFm

It was the first comment posted on the op-ed. Four days and 279 NYT “recommends” later my comment was the 13th most recommended comment and on the first page. Admittedly, both the Taibbi and Johnston pieces are excellent, but I am still surprised by the results of the web traffic experiment.

I used the bit.ly URL shortener for each link. With 40 clicks on the Taibbi piece and 52 clicks on the David Cay Johnston interview to start with, I was impressed to see a huge spike in traffic.

With gems like this delicious line – “the world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”  – my link to Matt Taibbi’s Goldman Sachs piece received 1324 clicks on Friday and 271 and 74 clicks on Saturday and Sunday respectively.

My direct link to CBC’s The Current Podcast episode with  David Cay Johnston, a hidden gem from Canada’s public broadcaster received tons of traffic too, even after I described it as a “30 minute interview.”  After 768 clicks on Friday the podcast received 199 and 205 on Saturday and Sunday.

Four days later my quick comment with two relevant backgrounder pieces have generated over 3,000 clicks between to the two shortened URLs.

There’s a lesson here. Curating, saving and sharing relevant, valuable links in the comments of very popular websites can generate impressive traffic.  Traffic that leads away from the New York Times’ website. This is a big change.

It’s like I encouraged readers to put  down the newspaper to read a magazine and listen to the radio.  But the Times‘ does benefit from my traffic draining, eyeball diverting links. Creating a community that encourages users to link to background information maintains their reputation as the place to get information; the “paper” of record, even if there are no dead trees involved.

In the end, I’m just happy to do what I can to expose Goldman’s business practices and help the Times readers call “bullshit” on the Wall Street orthodoxy that deserves at least part of the blame for the near-total economic meltdown.

Today we learned that CTV will broadcast 60 hours of tomorrow’s Michael Jackson memorial over 10 of its channels.  While reading their press release loudly proclaiming the “super-simulcast,” I cringed with horror. Has anyone turned on a TV in the last week, flipped through the channels, and not had Michael Jackson’s ridiculously tragic life invade their living room?

It gets better.

After a long and nauseating “Save Local TV” campaign by CTV and CanWest (and the even more disgusting counter campaign by the cable and satellite companies – I’m looking at you Shaw and Rogers) today the CRTC decided to bailout the broadcasters to the tune of $100 million for the 2009-10 broadcast year.

Saying the absolutely most ridiculous thing possible, CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein, Q.C. pronounced that “we have taken steps to ensure that broadcasters … continue to provide Canadians with programming that reflects their needs and interests.”

von Finckenstein will surely soon declare that up is down,  black is white and that money grows on trees. The CRTC is requesting that you submit your comments by August 10, 2009, by filling out the online form.

On the bright side, Ben Mulroney and dead Michael Jackson have real chemistry together.  (as noted by  @robertmcbean)

I love the media. I love reading articles, watching clips, commenting on the stories I care about and sharing them with others.

I grew up reading The Leader Post and The Globe and Mail, listening to CBC Radio at breakfast and oscillating between the 6:00 nightly newscasts on CTV, Global and CBC.  After graduating from university,  I worked for a local Calgary magazine called Calgary Living and spent the last 2.5 years in the sausage factory netherworld between public relations and the news media at CNW Group – formerly Canada News Wire – the largest behind the scenes distributor of news releases and other assorted multimedia in Canada.

Over the last several years, my lifelong fascination with all things media began to intersect with another obsession of mine: the Internet.

I first logged on at my father’s office 15 years ago as a wide-eyed 12 year old boy, immediately recognizing how powerful it was.  I could instantly gain access to information on virtually any topic I desired.  I was an early, unashamed Internet addict, spending long hours at my parents’ offices after work hours until we finally got connected at home.

When I downloaded my first MP3 in 1996, I knew a fundamental shift was underway.  Before long I was a full blown copyright criminal; an accomplished music pirate with several thousand songs shared over a personal FTP server on my parents’ cable modem before I was even old enough to drive a car.  I was the first kid in high school to get a CD burner, because what good was all that music if you had to sit in front of your computer to hear it?  I even wrote a few ridiculous articles about burning CDs for MP3.com, (I lied about my age) when it was still the biggest aggregator of music piracy know-how on the net.

Before long, I fundamentally changed the way I consumed content. No longer hampered by the size of my allowance or my summer earnings, I became an aficionado of music.  I discovered bands I never would have come across were I relegated solely to to listening to radio stations and watching Much Music, (I remember when they actually played music videos most of the time).

I was empowered.  The cat was out of the bag. The toothpaste was out of the tube. I was never going back to the old way of doing things.

As it turns out, neither was anyone else. Napster, KaZaa and a litany of other defunct peer-to-peer (P2P) applications eventually gave rise to the mighty torrent.  The content expanded to anything that could be digitized. Books, TV shows, and  full movies, even perfect DVD copies, were suddenly up for grabs.

I remember a close friend’s glee when he downloaded every Beatles song, (studio recordings, b-sides and bootlegs) in one click in 2004.  Five years later, he still has all his favorites on his iPod.

Of course, the exponential growth of computer power, the Internet and the increase in the price-performance of digital technology (e.x. my cell phone is ten times more powerful than a computer purchased for $1000 10 years ago) was the great facilitator of this process.  It created opportunities for revolutionary technologies like the iPod.

The existing archaic copyright laws were no match for the world’s largest copying machine.

It took a while, but the open Internet I watched swallow the record industry as a teenager finally did the same with the media I grew up with. CanWest Global , the owners of The Leader Post and Global television, continues to teeter on the abyss of bankruptcy. CTVglobemedia, (owners of The Globe and Mail) isn’t faring well either. CBC, our publicly funded national broadcaster,  is facing similarly tough times eventhough advertising revenue is only a component of their bottom line.

Advertising, as the pillar of the broadcast media business model, is crumbling.

Over the last few years, I’ve watched the same Internet P2P technology take over the world of news.  Twitter is now my personal social newswire feed. I follow friends and leaders that share interesting content and share the best nuggets of content I find from all my sources with my own friends and followers across several social media platforms. Furthermore, I find myself taking pictures with the intention of sharing them and feeling inspired to write knowing that someone will actually read what I have to say.  The network of bloggers, professional journalists, academics, and new media professionals I follow provide me with a unique perspective that takes great effort to curate effectively. I use RSS, podcasts, blogs, twitter, along with many of the traditional media sources and networks to stay plugged in to the information world I’ve organized for myself.  Through these methods, I dramatically reduced the amount of advertising I am exposed to daily.

For the record, I am not against copyright laws. But I do think that the Internet and the democratization of technology are helping us recognize that laws of the 20th Century were overly skewed in one direction.

I  believe we need to work to strike the appropriate balance between user-rights and the rights of the content creator. We need professional journalists, musicians, actors, authors, artists, inventors, coders and engineers to have a resilient, vibrant democracy. To have these professionals, we need to find a way to ensure they are paid for their hard work and the intellectual property they produce. Yet, after I began studying copyright more carefully in the last year of my political science degree, I quickly recognized that all culture is derivative, in that it builds on previous work. We are all truly standing standing on the shoulders of giants. Furthermore, all of humanity’s future intellectual pursuits will continue to be derived from an understanding of the research and works created by others in the past.

Our system needs to balance the extremes of  “everything is free for the taking!” and “everything idea you see, hear or use is going to cost you!” to ensure we can pay the creators while leaving their content open to be used to create derivative works.

It is in this spirit that recommend my friend Duncan Kinney’s recent article “How hacker investors could save the media.” I love articles like this one that examine how the media must reinvent itself on the open web. Finding new, effective business models is crucial to ensuring we can continue to pay for the  journalists and media professionals necessary to hold the powerful accountable.  Duncan starts from the premise that these organizations must innovate or go extinct and derives a sensible investment strategy for these lumbering behemoths. While web 2.0 is  important and I am optimistic about our ability to open up government and hold our leaders accountable through technological innovation, Duncan rightly points out that in the interim large media organizations are still important because they “have the clout to get access, a legacy of fact-checking and the money to afford lawyers.”  I agree with him, these are not unimportant details.

If you want to learn more about these issues I highly recommend that you read Michael Geist’s blog, listen to TVO’s Search Engine and read anything you can get your hands on by Lawrence Lessig. And while you’re at it, go check out creativecommons.org

One thing is is certain. The toothpaste is out of the inter-tubes and we can’t put it back in.

Clay Shirky on these newfangled interwebs and how they are changing the world.

Lawrence Lessig never ceases to amaze me. After discovering and reading Lessig’s Free Culture in my final year of year of university, (2004, for anyone wondering) I knew his relevance would extend long into the future. The topics he tackled in Free Culture were visionary and foretold the necessity of redefining copyright law, lest all children be made into “criminals.”

Five years later, Dr. Lessig’s in-depth examination of intellectual property seems even more relevant as the  forces of technological change continue their rapid transformation of our culture via the new mediums through which it is created and defined. And we’ve reached several breaking points. The extension of our centuries-old, “read-only,” top-down broadcasting, advertising supported media is now completely at odds with the growth of the Internet, the “read-write” culture and the democratization of the process of content creation. The legal and political battles being waged between the content industries and the public are really only a symptom of the real disease: the death of information scarcity. It would improper to raise the specter of “information scarcity” without pointing to Clay Shirky hammering on the plight of the “traditional” media: “For any business where scarcity of information was the principle selling point, that business is in trouble.“ 

But legal considerations aide, a recent Lessig talk I listened to pointed to an amazing example of how empowered the general public is to participate in the “read-write” web culture. Kutiman is a band that makes music without playing any instruments. They crowdsource their music by remixing performances that individuals have uploaded to YouTube – many that are very talented singers and musicians – to create something new, and dare I say, better. Tapping into the global talent pool, they created a series of masterpieces.  Here are two of my favorites: 

Kutiman – I’m New 

Kutiman – Babylon Band

While I’ve made reference to Eclectic Method in previous posts I thought their new “Tarantino Mixtape” is a great example of why copyrighted content should not be exempted or excluded from this new “read-write” ecology in the web’s remix culture. As an aside, I cannot foresee Quentin’s feathers getting too ruffled about this mashup … movie studio & music industry lawyers on the other hand… 

Eclectic Method – The Tarantino Mixtape

When any teenager with a $1000 computer can appropriate any video they like and mash it up with any other video and of piece of music they want without regard for copyright, licensing fees or royalties, the sheer volume of content produced will continue to overwhelm the guardians of the “read-only” content industry and ensure the growth and resilience of the “read-write” culture.

The Huffington Post’s Paul Dailing casts a hilarious critical gaze on the “Death of Newspapers” meme that pervades twitter and the “blogosphere” in How to Become a “Death of Newspapers” Blogger

The Toronto Star surveys the lay of the land in Canadian broadcasting after huge cuts to the CBC this week and the potential of more cuts at the private broadcasters in TV tumult on the Canadian dial

NPR and WNYC’s “On the Media” looks at the JP Neufeld, a Concordia University student in Montreal who stopped a an act of school violence before it happened, 3000 miles away in the UK: The Long Arm of the Law

The Atlantic’s The Quiet Coup is a devastating examination of the role and influence of the finance and banking sectors over the entire American political process. 

Ian Brodie, Harper’s former chief of staff , asserts that evidence doesn’t matter when making public policy via Macleans.ca

The Totalitarian Temptation and all that is an examination of the tendency towards totalitarian belief systems on both the left and right. I loved it, but I care about this sort of stuff. Link to  http://crookedtimber.org/ via @MikeSoron