parker higgins

It’s no surprise that the major traditional publishers are afraid of e-books. Like record labels and movie studios before them, publishers have seen the spectre of disruptive technology on the horizon and have dug in their heels. Where they’ve accepted e-books they’ve done so half-heartedly, neutralizing the benefits of the new medium with opaque DRM schemes that emulate the limitations of print books as closely as possible. As Clay Shirky puts it:

I wrote much of the April Fool’s Day edition of EFF’s EFFector newsletter, which we sent out to our subscribers yesterday. (Some of the stories there were submitted by my colleagues, and the brilliant lead story in particular is nearly entirely Maira‘s creation.) As far as I can recall, it’s the first intentionally funny writing I’ve done since Buckley’s Student Voice backpage in 2005-2006.

There’s no denying the creepy factor in “Girls Around Me“, the iPhone app that until yesterday displayed the public Facebook data of women checking in nearby on Foursquare. The creepiness was obvious enough that Foursquare pulled the app’s API access, rendering the service mostly useless. But in doing so, they’ve addressed a symptom, and not the underlying disease.

There’s a common saying in jazz that it’s not about the notes you play, but the notes you don’t play.¹

I’m sort of a QR code anti-hipster: I was into them before they were uncool. I actually think they’re a really nifty encoding that’s easy to read and write with the right tools, and useful for a handful of situations. But they’re so widely misused in marketing that most people never get to see one used properly.

Tim Carmody’s Wired opinion piece about Wikipedia, Windows, and the Britannica is the best piece of commentary to come out of the vaunted encyclopedia’s announcement this week that they’re discontinuing their print edition to focus on their online product.

I’ve been thinking a lot about two different kinds of tokens lately. One is a fare token, which I’ve been thinking about as it relates to public transit and locational privacy. Another is a currency token, which has come up in the last few weeks as I’m reading Debt by David Graeber. Obviously there’s some overlap there, but thinking about the ways in which they differ has been really interesting, and there’s enough weird history of each to fill a Thomas Pynchon novel.

Two sets of mobile app privacy stories have broken into the mainstream press this month. The first half of the month was dominated by “addressbook-gate”, where Path (and then, it turns out, many other iOS applications) were found to be uploading and storing users’ phone contact lists to their servers.

I’m a sucker for stories that are tied to places I know. When I first read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, I was only glancingly familiar with most of the Bay Area settings for the different scenes. Now I spend time every day in the Mission, where most of the action takes place, and have a much better feel for the character of the location.

It’s hard to ignore successes in middleman elimination like Radiohead’s In Rainbows, NiN’s Ghosts I-IV, Louis C.K.’s Shameless and the Double Fine Adventure. But they’re not immune to criticism either. Sure, it works for them — the argument goes — but they’re already famous. And the legacy players have always served (at least) two roles; while the Internet may beat them for distribution, it’s not as good for discovery.