All Things to All People

This send-up of the latest Windows 7 advertisements takes the logic of user-generated content to its even goofier logical conclusion.

Party Animal

This online video promoting the new Microsoft operating system presents a bizarre multiracial and multigenerational gathering oriented about supposedly fun and spontaneous hosting experiences that you can have in your neighborhood to share your love for proprietary software and IT tutorials.

The A-List of E-Gov

Given the four-figure price tag for registering for this week's summit on Government 2.0, there should be some pretty swanky t-shirts and other swag for conference attendees. Clearly, in budget hard times, this isn't a conference designed primarily for public servants in the government sector. Instead, it is a summit intended for software and hardware manufacturers to help them position themselves for profitable contracting with the new administration.

During the Bush administration, I attended a few high-priced conferences like these as a speaker, when the excitement was all about serious games rather than social networking and the buzzwords had to do with simulation, training, and efficiency rather than access, transparency, and reform.

It's a star line-up that includes Obama's Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, who has been praised for facilitating the use of open API technologies to make information in government databases more usable by the public and has been criticized for doing little to check the influence of Google and its subsidiary YouTube in the digital rhetoric of the White House. Federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra will also be taking the stage, who also began his government IT start close to the beltway in Virginia. Kundra is slated to discuss possible ways that privacy and security could be compromised by the open data initiatives that he champions, and Chopra will be discussing schemes for cooperation facilitated by the transfer of principles of the "digital commonwealth" to those for the "digital nation."

Former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta will also speak; Podesta served as the transition chief for the Obama administration and was the public face of the website Change.gov and the putative author of many mass e-mails received by those who visited Obama sites. Podesta will be speaking about public diplomacy online.

Speaking of public diplomacy, a notable late drop from the roster is British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who is also a blogger and YouTube personality as part of his online efforts at public diplomacy. Perhaps his office was engaged with the scandal involving the Megrahi affair and thought it was wise to stay home in the UK.

There are certainly plenty of Google executives who will be taking the podium at Government 2.0, which include ICANN Chairman of the Board Vinton Cerf, co-creator of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet, who continues to wield authority in how major networks are administered.

This O'Reilly sponsored event also contains some odd choices, such as researcher Mark Drapeau, who I've criticized in the past for his odd entomology meets militarism view of the online world.

Not everyone is a starry-eyed enthusiast, Drapeau included, however. Clay Shirky, author of an important paper on power laws and inequality online, who has also cast doubt on the utopian promise of the semantic web, given its syllogistic structures, is scheduled to speak. But it is hard to miss the corporate hype of the conference's sponsorship arrangements, in which "diamond," "platinum," "gold," and "silver" sponsors vie for attention for their magnanimity.

Good government public interest groups provide some window dressing for the occasion, but much like town hall movements in urban areas during the previous century, these groups champion the civic values of mainstream establishment America rather than the activist politics of domestic digital rights groups or international NGOs that is devoted to fundamentally rethinking the relationship between direct and representative democracy in this country.

My main problem with this summit is that Web 2.0 is supposed to take on the functions of government somehow by fiat. There seems to be no legislative vision to this conference, where all the attention is on the star power of the executive branch. I contend that Web 2.0 will offer little more than more sophisticated mechanisms for polling to foster a digital homeostasis that basically uses social computing to protect the status quo. Congressional legislation, if not a Constitutional amendment, would be required to make more substantive changes to voting, commenting, petitioning, redistricting, and deliberating.

O'Reilly appeals to communitarian impulses on the Web by calling on programmers to "lend your hands" and "lend your coding skills" to Gov 2.0 efforts. But his call do "Do It Ourselves" implicitly champions a kind of libertarianism that disengages rather than engages with existing structures of power. Although the idea of "citizen action" is opposed to "vending machine government" by O'Reilly, I might argue that little more than what he calls "shaking the vending machine" will be fostered if legislators aren't part of the narrative.

The Bigger Picture

There is an interesting article in the British Journal of Photography about how large digital archives of stock photographs are moving the entire market away from the signature shots of the famous auteurs that used to dominate the visual landscape from magazine covers to dorm room walls.


The commoditisation of stock photography through microstock images is threatening photography, says Corbis' chief executive officer Gary Shenk, as the number two picture library unveils a new initiative to profit from 50 million images in the prestigious Sygma archives.

In the past five years, microstock has grown exponentially, and the financial crisis has pushed even more photo buyers towards this budget end of the market. Last year, Getty Images, the leader in microstock through its iStockphoto operation, announced that the division's revenues would more than double to $262 million in 2012. This would account for close to 25% of the image giant's revenues.

At the same time, highly idiosyncratic images from only marginally professional photographers are having a heyday in the blogosphere, as bad family portraits get circulated in a culture of "lame hunting" rather than "cool hunting."

Thanks to Frank Evers for the link!

The Rhetoric of Overload

The authors of The Social Life of Information caution against the cynical use of a diagnosis of "information overload" as a way to justify presenting fewer user choices or a narrowed channel that transmits less information of the kind dictated by corporate interests. It is interesting to see how the rhetoric of information overload functions in this advertisement for Bing.com and how different this ad is from the rhetoric of Apple's 1984 ad, which seems to caution against overly homogenized sources of data.

I'll admit to trying out Bing for problem solving with a few sample searches and seeing that it did actually do a better job of getting answers for complex questions like "How do you get to the Bronx from JFK?" than its Mountain-View based rival. But -- much like a younger child -- it didn't know basic facts about relatedness that Google already knows, for example that "Liz Losh" and "Elizabeth Losh" are the same person. (This split personality was actually something that I used to exploit, before Google exposed my secret life as a digital rights activist and blogger to my academic colleagues.)

David Weinberger in a posting on "Bing, Google . . . and Kayak" points out that looking up "Bing" on Google and "Google" on Bing is a somewhat disingenous rhetorical exercise.

Dualing Demos

I wouldn't be earning my keep as a digital rhetorician, if I didn't say anything about two demos of new technologies that are getting lots of attention on YouTube in recent days.

One comes from the gigantic videogame expo E3 and shows what seems to be an amazing controller-free game experience being developed by Microsoft's Project Natal. Using movement tracking, facial recognition, and voice recognition technologies, players can interact with game characters and scenarios with much less instrumental mediation, although the Minority Report style interface may create a bizarre sense of phantom tangibility.



Of course, I'm always fascinated with how Microsoft and other corporate giants in computational media represent the domestic space of suburban whiteness and nuclear family dynamics and love to see these living room scenes inevitably parodied by Sarcastic Gamer on YouTube.



Peter Molyneux may have less stage presence than some high-tech spokespeople who speak to both large live audiences and a larger Internet public, but his argument for emotional connection between man and machine is a feature of many such talks. Of course, the Playstation 3 demo was all about the controller and exploited mixed reality situations more.

The other demo that everyone seems to be talking about is the demo for Google Wave, which relies much more on live performance than the canned videos that stage the Microsoft event. As someone who studies digital rhetoric, I certainly thought that it merited the hour-plus time that it took, since it showed the ultimate product representing what Siva Vaidhyanathan has called "the Googlization of Everything." I was also interested to see references to many of the social costs to civil society in the era of social network sites, as the spokespeople joked about "flame wars" and hurt feelings about feelings of social exclusion created by posting artifacts from leisure activities that were only shared initially by a select few.



Although the demo highlights possibilities for identity management, as users surf through Orkut, Twitter, documents, games, and maps, the integration of work and play creates many possibilities for rhetorical gaffes. Compositionists seem to be most interested in the software's contextual spell checker, and the fact that the company also promotes a "quote generator" for beginning essays.

Wikipedia Journalism

I've written before about the problem of what I call "Facebook journalism" and the fact that many newspaper reporters may be putting the print media in even greater jeopardy by relying on Internet surfing rather than talking to their actual subjects in person, so that newspapers become less likely to do investigative reporting than some online sources.

Now Ian Bogost has pointed out an article called "Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote," which seems to show how what could be called "Wikipedia journalism" could distort the historical record. After French composer Mauricel Jarre died, twenty-two-year-old Shane Fitzgerald seeded Jarre's Wikipedia entry, with a sappy false quotation that would be tempting for hack obituary writers to cite: "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear." Sure enough, a number of newspapers, including The Guardian, printed the quotation in their coverage of Jarre's death and didn't uncover the true source until Fitzgerald himself announced his deception. This kind of exploit could be even more destabilizing to truth claims the more that recursion comes into play, since a false Wikipedia fact could be cited in a newspaper story, and then the newspaper story could be used to source the so-called fact.

Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote's lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.

And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.

In "Wikipedia, Obits and Faking" a writer for the Washington post argues that this tendancy to not list sources is part of the obituary genre's emphasis on fluent narrative:

Colleagues of mine at the obit desk feel too much attribution ruins the flow of the story. At what point to readers want a good uninterrupted tale, and at what point do they need to know where the information is coming from?

Fitzgerald explains in an opinion piece in Irish Times how he hit upon the idea of an improvised research project while faced with "the arduous task of writing yet another essay on social science’s current fad – globalisation."

Ironically, the Wikipedia entry of Jarre's son Jean Michel Jarre is now slated for a radical revision to redres other kinds of sloppiness in the information presented about the junior Jarre's life and work as a composer. Fitzgerald himself has been added to Wikipedia, although the site's editors are apparently already considering deletion of his entry.

Meanwhile Microsoft is trying to challenge Wikipedia's dominance in market share.

Gotcha

In the Internet era, April 1 has a lot more cultural significance now that it has become associated with a set of rhetorical conventions involving pranks from large software corporations in which they tout parodic new products.



Introducing Opera Face Gestures is a comical look at a mixed reality browsing system driven by funny faces. If one attempts to download the software, one is told that the program is already installed and that one should hook up one's web camera and start making idiotic expressions as instructed in the step-by-step guide.

This joke might not be as funny to disabled people who are hopeful that such technologies could be improved to serve their needs.

At Google, Introducing CADIE takes the reader to a howlingly bad home page with dorky music, chaotic imagery, and cretinous animations. Much like the World's Worst Website that I write about in the Virtualpolitik book it serves as an inverse exemplar to demonstrate what not to do in web design. (The also have a similarly moronic CADIE YouTube channel.)

It's worth noting that the blog postings for CADIE on the page mention a Dr. Norvig, who is now director of Google research. Norvig achieved a certain amount of fame in digital rhetoric circles several years ago with his hilarious Gettysburg PowerPoint presentation. (Norvig allowed for an image from this imaginary slideware presentation by President Lincoln to be reproduced in the "Hacking Aristotle: What is Digital Rhetoric?" chapter of the Virtualpolitik book.)

The CADIE system itself is billed as a next-gen semantic web application that uses artificial intelligence technologies to emulate user-generated content

For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.

Since then progress has been rapid, and tonight we're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions. It's an exciting moment that we're determined to build upon by coming to understand more fully what CADIE's emergence might mean, for Google and for our users. So although CADIE technology will be rolled out with the caution befitting any advance of this magnitude, in the months to come users can expect to notice her influence on various google.com properties. Earlier today, for instance, CADIE deduced from a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web a set of online design principles from which she derived this intriguing homepage.

The gag continues on several other Google applications. There is a CADIE Google Maps page, for example with highlights from the Google geospatial universe emphasize. But the fake application that has been creating the most consternation is the Gmail Autopilot that supposedly analyzes the text of the user's e-mail and generates responses automatically to messages in one's inbox. Even a few somewhat gullible writing program administrators fell for it but later correctly identified it as an updated form of ars dictaminis for the digital era.

The more Gmail messages Autopilot can sample, the better. With fewer than 100 messages, there may not be enough data to calibrate Autopilot effectively. You can adjust tone, typo propensity, and preferred punctuation from the Autopilot tab under Settings.

Several humorous samples of how such a system would work (or not work) are also provided.

Google also promises to provide an ELIZA-style chatbot for live chat as well. Of course, pranksters had to take the idea to its farthest possible logical conclusion:

What happens if a sender and recipient both have Autopilot on?

Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot's responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest.

Google presents the reductio ad absurdum of Geert Lovink's Zero Comments in which web users not only stop reading but stop writing as well, as they hand over the Internet to their corporate caretakers.

Microsoft probably thinks the day is no laughing matter as they try to hunt down the creators of the Conficker Worm set to cause mayhem today.

Update: Ian Bogost points out that Microsoft did get into the April Fool's game with its supposed new Xbox game, Alpine Legend. And those on YouTube also got into the act.

Tone Deaf

These YouTube videos lampoon the end results of the Microsoft SongSmith program, the inferior competitor to Apple's GarageBand, in which users provide the vocal track and the software tries to provide appropriate accompaniment.

The Telegraph points out the comical results in "Microsoft SongSmith: Flawed music software produces comedy gold." This official video shows the Microsoft magic in action.

Thanks to Garnet Hertz for the link.

I Told You, I Am Doing Digital Inclusion

François Bar gave a talk today at UC Irvine about a recently launched five-year study funded by the Gates Foundation on Investigating the Impact of Public Access to Information & Communication Technology. It's a team that also includes a number of faculty members at the University of Washington, including Beth Kolko, who establishes her globalization credentials with a faculty page that opens with a Google map of her talks and projects around the world.

A Bar explained, many of the deliberative processes involved in designing the methodology of the study have encouraged stakeholders to question the basic definitions of terms like "public," "access," and "information technologies." Members of these transnational multilingual teams have apparently been successful at getting funders to put aside their pre-existing first-world biases that privilege personal computing and assume that public access in places like cybercafés and telecentres is necessarily 1) inferior and 2) temporary. (For more about grassroots telecentre communities, Bar recommends checking out telecentre.org.)

Although the initial aims of the IPAI assessment were to look at how computer centers in libraries might foster economic and educational development, the group has noted that there are many ways that the "impact" of computational technologies with distributed networks can be measured in areas that encompass civic engagement, the preservation of language and culture, the development of democracy and transparent government, and even child care and that qualitative as well as quantitative research methods need to be applied.

They also are examining many sites of heterogeneous use that include -- in the case of Bangladesh -- mobile technologies that are maintained by female repair people and local solutions such as floating libraries that go from village to village. In that country many computer centers segregate women and men in the temporal and physical space with special hours for women or machines of a designated color signifying gender on a particular side of the room. In this case, claimed Bar, restricting access actually fosters it, since many women in Bangladesh would not use such technologies at all without prohibitions on socially forbidden contacts with men in place.

After hearing about the national mania for Mister and Miss Facebook contests in Chile from Pablo Manriquez, it was interesting to hear about the success of what might be called a more promiscuous attitude about social computing in the Zeitgeist of the country. While the puritannical United States expends money and human resources policing the computers at libraries and schools with minders and screening software that often forbids access to YouTube, games, social network sites, and anything perceived as excessively "adult" or subversive, it seems that Chilean public libraries have realized the counterproductive effects of gateway technologies and laws and restrictions on youth access to the Internet and entertainment applications.

The research group's ipai wiki documents their experiences thus far in three countries: Bangladesh, Chile, and Lithuania. Images like the photograph above were taken at sessions for "information ecology mapping" in which local people explained how they might get information about important subjects like family health or agriculture. Interviewers are also studying the role of "infomediaries" who may input data into the machines for those without direct access or sufficient technical or alphabetical literacy. According to Bar, the project may also take researchers to Brazil, Botswana, Egypt, and the Philippines, as the scope expands.

As Bar notes, "rules matter." In the case of the Brazilian government, for a long time official federal telecenters barred access to the popular social network site Orkut, because these online activities were seen as mere leisure, at odds with their politically approved ideologies of labor and production. However, according to Bar, Brazil also offers many kinds of public access with many types of rules that include community centers funded by Italian labor unions and free and open source sites promoted by Gilberto Gil. During the question-and-answer session, Bar reminded those present that specific forms of sponsorship can also produce more guarded responses from informants who are fearful of seeming to work against the aims of philanthropic funders by telling researchers that they are taking part in online practices that aren't being promoted by a given public access site. For example, Bar said one young person playing an online game was particularly reluctant to explain what he was doing to a member of the study team. Finally, he used what he thought would be a verbal formulation that would legitimate his game play: "I'm doing digital inclusion."

The Wider View

Yes, like many who study digital rhetoric, I have seen the eye-popping TED talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas about "collective memories," in which he shows a demo of Photosynth to the marveling crowd. Perhaps the most dramatic image from the presentation of what is now a Microsoft product was the moment in which he zoomed and panned around a 3-D rendering of the front façade of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris composed of photographs from tourists who had posted their images on Flickr.

For "The Moment" CNN urged those who were in attendance at the Obama inauguration to upload their photographs of the event so that the software could do its magic. Unfortunately, many of the views have far too few photographs contributed to the database to make for a compelling virtual reality experience, although it is striking to get a sense of how many heads back one could be from the swearing in if you were on the Washington Mall.

(Check out Chuck Tryon's essay on "Documentary, Collective Memory, and the Inauguration"'for a number of links about how the event was to be memorialized.)

Selling the Sizzle Not the Steak

There's been a lot of news about new music distribution models this month. Google announced a fully developed mp3 search functionality for Chinese customers. (Screenshots are here, since the site itself seems to be down.) As the Wall Street Journal explains in "Google Aims to Crack China with Music Push," the corporation is trying to gain market share from the more popular Baidu search engine in a venture that would be capitalized by ad revenue and would promise to promote "legal" downloading with the cooperative Top100.cn music vendor.
At the same time Microsoft and Federated Media are touting the launch of CrowdFire in the United States to figure out an economic model for skimming profit from fan culture in a post-song-sale music marketing era. CrowdFire describes itself as a "celebration of live music" that is "built by you." It claims that its platform is designed for "uploading, sharing, and producing" music, as well as for "mixing, mashing, and melding." All around San Francisco, billboards trumpet the first event, OutsideLands in Golden Gate Park.
See John Battelle for more.

View Changes

As an example of sustained close reading that would make any rhetorical scholar proud, check out Steven Poole's "Virtually on parity," which methodically tracks changes made to a corporate PR document that was intended to dispel myths and make comprehensible "Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista." Given the joking equivalence of "bug" and "feature" in geek culture, as this cartoon shows, even the present title may still be unfortunate.

Fire Sale

That's right. You are looking at a slide by someone who does not know how to use PowerPoint, someone who has accidentally stretched out the map of the United States in ways never imagined by either pro or con Mercator projection geographers, merely because the creator of this presentation did not know how to turn off or work around Microsoft's terrible defaults for document design.

To give you still more confidence in the current administration's understanding of the importance of the word "communication," I have to point out that this slide came from the FCC presentation to Congress, when the controversial chair Kevin Martin appeared before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet to explain how -- in the recent 700 MHZ auction -- an important national resource had been divvied up among corporate speculators.

Although Martin painted a rosy picture of this virtual territory-grab, one of the commissioners, Michael Copps, disagreed.

But in important respects, as I warned when we launched our rules, we end up with the same old, same old. The nation’s two largest wireless carriers—who are also the nation’s two leading wireline voice and DSL providers—won roughly 85% of the licenses, as measured by value.

One of the more obvious "losers" in the bidding that day was Google, which didn't pick up any spectrum licenses. On the Google Public Policy Blog, corporate reps described the "cone of silence" procedures involved in the recent sale of parts of the telcom spectrum, but they also declared success by driving up bidding to reach the $4.6 billion reserve price that would trigger the "open applications" and "open handsets" license conditions.

Recently, I speculated about whether or not "open is the new organic," when thinking about how proprietary software giants like Microsoft have become converts to suddenly trendy openness advocacy. Check out "Our commitment to open broadband platforms" from Google for more.

The Belly of the Beast

Redmond, Washington is probably best known in digital studies circles as the corporate home of proprietary software giant Microsoft, although companies like Boeing and Nintendo are also important in the region. Unlike Seattle, where this photograph was shot, the urban landscape of Redmond seems made up of mini-malls, industrial parks, and planned communities. We did stroll around one noteworthy Microsoft complex, which was meticulously landscaped around an artificial river and seemed more architecturally purposeful than the rest with its orientation around a two-story chalet style eatery.

My host, Professor Michael Aristidou (pictured above) teaches courses on fuzzy logic and quaternions at DigiPen, which had invited me to I give a talk about "games with publics." Quarternions are apparently non-commutative sets of numbers that are particularly useful for calculations involving three-dimensional rotations, which can be very important in computer animation and produce superior results in comparison to better known methods, such as matrices and vectors. Particularly now that procedural animation has become so important for lifelike effects and other kinds of interactive content, such as Crayon Physics, with which my household is currently obsessed, it's strange to see that even lay people with better than average numeracy have so little knowledge of these kinds of mathematical operations.

I went through a talk about game design and player subversion that emphasized five kinds of game audiences.

1) collaboration audiences (games, which can be single player as well as multiplayer -- that reward cooperation as well as competition in a reputation economy that is internal to the game)

2) elaboration audiences (games that inspire machinima, mods, and the production of new digital media in a reputation economy that may be external to the game)

3) opportunistic audiences (games that encourage users to share information about the game world, walk-throughs, cheat codes, etc.)

4) regulatory audiences (games that shock or awe legislators or members of the mainstream media who often condemn or laud games they have never played)

5) mixed reality audiences (games that lead to situated action in real-life cities or other public places and encourage exploration of the player's identity rather than that of a fictional character)

The slides for my talk are here, and the links to clips and websites I showed are here.

Dear Steve Letter

Today, in "Microsoft Presses Yahoo to Take $44 Billion Deal," National Public Radio compared the rancorous communications between the two software companies to e-mails send without reflection by an enraged computer user. Apparently Microsoft is preparing for the possibility that what was planned as a friendly merger might become a hostile takeover, because the Redmond, Washington corporate giant thinks the number two search engine, which is now a far second to Google, is overvaluing the company unreasonably. In retaliation, Yahoo has posted "Yahoo's Board of Directors Responds to Latest Microsoft Letter" to its website, which is literally a "Dear Steve" letter rejecting the Microsoft's bid in language that bears little resemblance to corporate discourse. At one point, the letter gets quite personal with its recipient: "Moreover, Steve, you personally attended two of these meetings and could have advanced discussions in any way you saw fit."

Of course, as a rhetorician, I'm also interested in the generic disclaimer that is appended to the Yahoo message. This disclaimer about "Forward-Looking Statements" is particularly rhetorically rich, much like the rapid-fire caveats that follow televised pharmaceutical ads:

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties concerning Yahoo!'s projected financial performance as well as Yahoo!'s strategic and operational plans. Actual results may differ materially from the results projected. The potential risks and uncertainties include, among others, the implementation and results of the Company's ongoing strategic initiatives; the Company's ability to compete with new or existing competitors; reduction in spending by, or loss of, marketing services customers; the demand by customers for the Company's premium services; acceptance by users of new products and services; risks related to joint ventures and the integration of acquisitions; risks related to the Company's international operations; failure to manage growth and diversification; adverse results in litigation, including intellectual property infringement claims; the Company's ability to protect its intellectual property and the value of its brands; dependence on senior management and other key personnel; dependence on third parties for technology, services, content and distribution; general economic conditions and changes in economic conditions; and risks and uncertainties arising in connection with Microsoft's unsolicited proposal to acquire the Company, including the loss of key employees who pursue other employment opportunities due to concerns as to their employment security, increased difficulty for the Company in executing its strategic plan and pursuing other strategic opportunities, and the possibility of significant costs of defense, indemnification and liability resulting from stockholder litigation. More information about potential factors that could affect the Company's business and financial results is included under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2007, which is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and available at the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. All information in this press release is as of April 7, 2008, unless otherwise noted, and Yahoo! does not intend, and undertakes no duty, to update or otherwise revise the information contained in this press release.

Yahoo's blog, in constrast, says little -- even implicitly -- about the struggle between the two technology companies.

Is "Open" the New "Organic"?

Perhaps the biggest regulatory story of the week was covered by The New York Times in "Reversing Loss, Microsoft Wins Open-Format Designation." Apparently the software giant known for its proprietary code has actually passed a contentious international test of legitimacy to claim to be an "open" and therefore government-friendly and sustainable format. Despite winning the designation, the following countries expressed opposition: Brazil, Canada, China, Cuba, Ecuador, India, Iran, New Zealand, South Africa and Venezuela. Like the designation "organic," political influence can certainly play a role.

Mr. Gates Goes to Washington

There are many areas with which I would tend to disagree with Bill Gates. But with the current anti-immigration sentiments of legislators, his testimony today before the House Committee on Science and Technology to argue for more H1-B visas for skilled foreign workers in the area of computer science reflects a pragmatic understanding of the global job market. Gates argues that the U.S. has many incentives to keep Ph.D.s who are foreign nationals inside the country, in light of the national diversity represented in today's computer science departments and corporate R&D programs.

Against Gates' argument, the Programmers Guild has an energetic digital rhetoric presence, which includes an anti-immigration blog and a YouTube channel. The latter outlet includes a whistle-blower video about unethical job advertisement practices in the technology sector to satisfy PERM requirements with "fake ads."

The X Files

Looking at listserv traffic at my university, it is interesting to see the number of postings about students who submit unreadable files in .docx or .pptx formats.

Not surprisingly, faculty members at my campus have been reluctant to embrace either Vista or the newer versions of Microsoft Office with the "x" extension. This "go-slow" approach among faculty has less to do with the generational divide or a contempt for early adopters than it does with the advice that we are getting from our own technical staff, who want us to stay with machines as long as possible that network, file-share, and function without a laundry list of problems. (I sent a horrible Vista Vaio back to the store this summer.) However, thousands of students are being sent to campus this year by proud parents who have provided them with shiny new Vista laptops, which is creating havoc. Sending someone an unreadable attachment is always a social faux pas, but students aren't always socially self-aware enough to see this. While their instructors are ticked off that they haven't thought to save in a backwards-compatible format, students probably see their professors as out-of-touch when they make the saner technological choice. In other words, these "upgrades" have a profound effect on the social contracts that have been facilitated by things that emphasize openness rather than status consciousness like the TCP/IP handshake.

Of course, many say, why accept files from students at all, particularly since their computers are often contaminated with nasty viruses? I like hard copy as much as the next prissy pedagogue, but it's hard to tell students that they can't turn a paper in electronically when they are helping their families evacuate from the recent California wild fires.

Book Club

Yesterday I had a productive trip to the British Library to interview senior librarians Aly Conteth and Neil Fitzgerald. I had come to the UK to update an article that was published years ago in Literary and Linguistic Computing for the upcoming Virtualpolitik book from MIT Press. Rather than approach the subject from the perspective of uncritical publicizing of new technology in mainstream journalism, as articles like "Behind the scenes: The British Library and digitisation" do, I tried to ask probing questions about the cryptohistory of Britain's digital library efforts that included failures and lessons learned. To their credit, my hosts were very forthright and even allowed me to observe and photograph the digitization process in action. As they point out the Internet makes a "nonsense of national copyright regimes," but in their current joint effort with Microsoft, they are aiming for an ambitious twenty-five million pages or about a hundred thousand items that will be in accord with U.K. copyright rules with the aim of fostering educational use at all levels. They were careful to distinguish themselves from Google Book Search and emphasized their commitment to open standards and more egalitarian partnership models with corporate behemoths. I was, of course, leery of the way that Microsoft is publicizing its new (and flawed) operating system Vista through the initiative, but BL librarians argued that there were many systems involved in the entire process.

We also discussed the often invisible labor policies involved in digitization efforts. As they pointed out, the conversion of "physical to digital" with the imaging machine is only a small part of a process that involves quality assurance, delivery systems, and metadata schemes to create meaningful informational resources. They speculated about best practices for creating a "more robust workflow" around the replication process that would facilitate resource discovery, the connection of electronic resources together, and the importance of benefit for targeted groups to satisfy the requirements of their funding bodies. In particular, the British Library still struggles with a mandate not to digitize using monies from "core funding" that dates back to the beginnings of digitization. The lack of national strategies or frameworks also continues to be an issue.

Conteth had a lot of interesting things to say about the huge Burney Collection of newspapers from 1603-1817. In late October, the library plans to offer U.S. and U.K. readers Internet access through the library portals of institutions of higher education. He pointed out that in archiving newspapers now, it is sometimes more practical to skip the intermediate step of ironing and photographing the print version and merely keep the digital file that represents the text, images, and layout made for production purposes. He also talked about the perils of outsourcing some of the labor of newspaper metadata to India, where even the best English-speaking operators may not recognize common English place names.

Fitzgerald sketched out some of the library's other partnerships. This timeline from the European Library is designed to clarify multiple projects and acronyms. They also discussed the International Dunhuang Project to bring together physically dispersed 100,000 manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artifacts from the Silk Road that can be reunited through the digital interface.

Perhaps some of the library's greatest challenges involve copyright issues, particularly for the BL's substantial sound library. Conteth and Fitzgerald described how anything with potential commercial value, including the soundtrack to an awards show, may not be considered an archivable text or historical record. Jazz oral histories or the recordings of a sound researcher in Uganda may be uncontroversial at the moment, but record companies keep rights to many tracks with their future remix value in mind.

Finally, I asked them for their thoughts on the high-tech sci-fi future of their national library. Apparently plans for a hypothetical outpost have been discussed not very seriously. In contrast, the library is already using social media with its own gadget for iGoogle and pages on Facebook that includes one for entrepreneurial and networking efforts and an online book club on the popular social networking site. Librarians sounded more dubious about having users participate more actively in generating metadata for its digital collections, although the possibility of a non-Wikipedia-type model with an authentication scheme -- perhaps modeled on their use of smartcards at present -- might lead them to reconsider, given the potential value of user-generated content to understaffed libraries. I also learned that the British Library has licensed its sound library of the calls of extinct animals as ring tones for cellular telephones. (I actually heard one of these ring tones on the train before it went under the English channel.)

While I was there I also visited Sacred, an exposition about holy texts from interrelated Judeo-Christian-Islamic faith traditions. In addition to the books in glass cases, the installation also used several computer terminals to facilitate viewer comments, access to background materials in a hypertext catalog, and interaction with the proprietary "Turning the Pages" technology.