ARTS & FARCES internet

Matt Richtel, writing for the New York Times, reports that multiple monitors on a desktop are apparently the latest fashion accessory in the office. “For multiscreen multitaskers, a single monitor can seem as outdated as dial-up internet,” writes Richtel.

Really? I’ve been using a 15-inch laptop—and its native screen—(most recently a mid-2009 MacBook Pro) for the last 20 years or more. I’m plenty productive. When I was writing full time I could easily manage 5,000 words a day. Now I’m supposed to buy that it takes three 17-inch monitors to edit a blog about Facebook.

One of the things that caught my eye in Richtel’s piece was his citation of James A. Anderson, a professor of communications at the University of Utah. He authored a study—commissioned with US$50,000 by NEC—finding “productivity among people working on editing tasks was higher with two monitors than with one.” Anderson, who uses three monitors himself, tells Richtel, “more monitors cut down on toggling time among windows on a single screen, which can save about 10 seconds for every five minutes of work.”

If you’re working on something in only five minute bits, what are you really getting done? Is this a generational thing? I’ll cop to being an old, but I need much more than five minutes just to reflect on something I’ve just read.

I remember being ecstatic when I added a large monitor to my Mac SE, but I’ve been working productively on a 15-inch laptop for years.

My friend Jerry Daniels (also an old) tweets that he’s of the same, minimalist mindset: I got rid of everything and got an 11” MacBook Air for $999. No desk. Use recliner and my lap. SO much less.”

Is there something to this multi-monitor business, or is it a marketing attempt to goose unnecessary consumption?

The New York Times’ CMS Group has released ice.js, a track changes implementation for anything that is “contenteditable.” It requires jQuery for now. Features include multi-user editing tracking and the ability to reject changes.

I hate to write in the browser, but sometimes it’s a necessity and Ice looks like it may be worth a gander.

A demo is available.

The US versions of vastly overreaching anti-piracy legislation—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the Senate—were rightly put down through concerted and coordinated effort on the internet. That the same fate didn’t befall the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) plum amazes me, but maybe we’ll be collectively more intelligent the next time it comes around.

But SOPA and PIPA look like they were created by pikers that took bad dictation from the entertainment cartel compared to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (.pdf; 36Kb) (ACTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) currently being hammered out by the members of the global copyright cartel themselves.

These are much more serious because they’re treaties and outside the reach of our elected representatives. Three years ago, the Obama administration issued a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request denial (.pdf; 444Kb) to Knowledge Ecology International, declaring the contents of the proposed international treaty a national security secret. The previous Bush administration similarly rejected an equivalent FOIA request (.pdf; 108Kb) from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). It’s apparently okay to have a national security secret drafted by the entertainment cartel and shared with Australia, Canada, the 27 member countries of the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Switzerland but not with the American citizenry.

If that’s not bad enough, because it’s being crafted as a treaty, no congressional approval is required. Public Knowledge calls it policy laundering:

“The greatest concern over ACTA is that it purports to ratchet up protections for IP rights holders without even the barest measures to preserve either the balance in IP law or due process rights of citizens. Without going through any pre-existing avenues of legal change—whether domestic or international—this treaty may be considered an act of ‘policy laundering.’ That is, the use of an international treaty to justify the passage of controversial legislation within one’s own country.”

Last month, Kader Arif, the European Parliament’s special rapporteur for the treaty quit, saying the European Parliament and civil society organizations had been excluded from the “masquerade.” Shortly before that, Helena Drnovsek-Zorko, the Slovenian signatory to the treaty, publicly disowned it and the Polish government suspended ratification after politicians protested wearing Guy Fawkes masks. In the US, more than 75 law professors sent an open letter to President Obama criticizing the secrecy surrounding the treaty.

In the wake of Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) filing, it would appear some percentage of the net woke up to the weak value proposition offered by the corporate content aggregators. And if you want to see just how useless Google has become, search for “Facebook IPO filing.” The returns are filled with a lot of opinionating about the filing, but the filing itself doesn’t appear until midway through Google’s second page. That’s pitiful. Looking for an alternative? Take a look at duckduckgo. The same search query is even less useful, but it’s like Google was before it went off the tracks. If you want truly meaningful search results, we’ll need some updated version of the earliest days of distributed search.

So, now that Facebook is on the verge of going public we’re suddenly hand-wringingly worried about the commons in the form of the open web. “If Facebook’s IPO filing does anything besides mint a lot of millionaires, it will be to shine a rather unsettling light on a fact most of us would rather not acknowledge: The web as we know it is rather like our polar ice caps: under severe, long-term attack by forces of our own creation,” writes John Battelle in the lede for his “It’s not whether Google’s threatened. It’s asking ourselves: What commons do we wish for?”

That should be laughable—Battelle’s article carries a whopping 23 web bugs (or, more commonly “beacons”) that phone home about everything you do on the alleged commons of the open web. Instead it’s accurate (web bugs or no)—and just so very sad.

Battelle is correct when he notes that the open internet is shrinking as more and more people flock to walled gardens like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Apple’s iTunes Store, and all the rest. But it’s been happening for a long time, and hopefully will come around again just like the AOL, Geocities, and MySpace cycles before this one. Like I said, hopefully.

Battelle is also correct when he posits that Google has given up on the open web and is somewhat desperately trying to rebuild its success.

He goes on to make really important points about the no gatekeeping, neutrality, and interoperability being the foundation of the open web, and his is an important read. Even if he does go off into the deep weeds of hypocrisy with “no preset rules about how data is used. If one site collects information from or about a user of its site, that site has the right to do other things with that data, assuming, again, that it’s doing things that benefit all parties concerned.” Really? Just how do your 23 web bugs benefit all parties concerned, John?

More interesting to my eye is Dave Winer trying to clue his friend Robert Scoble into what most of us learned several years ago: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” Apparently Scoble didn’t get the memo. Winer, gamely, tried again.

The earliest articulated reference I remember is from a Metafilter discussion of the Digg 4.0 redesign. (Ed note: If there’s an earlier reference, please enlighten me by reporting an error.) Lots of us were thinking about what Winer historically calls “locked trunks” (last item) for a long time before that, but that clear, simple soundbite is what stuck.

Last Thursday, Apple introduced its first education initiative in quite a long while. The iTunes Store has been expanded to include a textbook section. And iTunes U has migrated into app form.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson—among the largest educational publishers—have all agreed to provide textbooks in Apple’s new iBooks 2.0 format at individual price points of US$15 or less. Schools can bulk-license iBook titles, distributing redemption codes to individual students that can then be individually redeemed through the iTunes Store.

But the big news is Apple’s 1.0 release of its iBooks Author app for its Mac platform.

iBooks Author is an ebook authoring application that allows an individual to create interactive ebooks that contain virtually any form of media—static or interactive. Apple’s iBooks ebooks on its iPad (with iBooks 2.0; and only the iPad is currently supported) can now come to life with sections that are watched, listened to, interacted with, and yes, even read. With iBooks 2.0, readers can easily highlight text, make bookmarks, and take notes. The notes can later be retrieved as virtual 3 x 5 notecards.

Available exclusively through Apple’s App Store, iBooks Author is offered at no charge. And it’s incredibly rich while being quite easy to use—especially for a version 1.0 release. Drag-and-drop virtually anything into the application—text (formatted text from Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages), images, video, Keynote presentations, and raw HTML—and it’s handled automatically. Best of all, if you’re familiar with Apple’s iWork suite—Keynote, Numbers, and Pages—you already pretty much know how to use iBooks Author.

Templates are included for six media-rich textbook formats (Basic, Contemporary, Modern Type, Classic, Editorial, and Craft), but surprisingly there are no provided templates for relatively simple books. And building a template from scratch looks like it’s quite a bit more difficult than it should be. Almost certainly future versions of the product will contain additional templates for different publication types—magazines, newspapers, novels, and everything else. As will some sort of collaborative workflow. Right now, it’s a great tool for an individual, but most publications don’t get made that way.

That’s the good news.