Jay headed over to Brewster's to check out one of the $100 laptops. Pretty cool.

Here's
an interview that was published last month in OpenP2P.com with Brewster Khale.

"Universal Access To All Human Knowledge" is a motto of Raj Reddy from Carnegie Mellon. I found that if you really actually come to understand that statement, then that statement is possible; technologically possible to take, say, all published materials -- all books, music, video, software, web sites -- that it's actually possible to have universal access to all of that. Some for a fee, and some for free. I found that was a life-changing event for me. That is just an inspiring goal. It's the dream of the Greeks, which they embodied, with the Egyptians, in the Library of Alexandria. The idea of having all knowledge accessible.

But, of course, in the Library of Alexandria's case, you had to actually go to Alexandria. They didn't have the Internet. Well, fortunately, we not only have the storage technology to be able to store all of these materials cost-effectively, but we can make it universally available. So that's been just a fabulous goal that causes me to spring out of bed in the morning.

And it also -- when other people sort of catch on to this idea that we could actually do this -- that it helps straighten the path. You know, life, there're lots of paths that sort of wander around. But I find that having a goal that's that far out, but also doable, it helps me keep my direction, keep our organization's direction. And I'm finding that a lot of other people like that direction, as well.

Here is the full text of the interview in case the link goes bad:

http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2004/01/22/kahle.html

Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive and People's Technology
by Lisa Rein
01/22/2004

Brewster Kahle is the founder and digital librarian for the Internet Archive (IA). He is also on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The IA started out as just that -- a non-profit organization dedicated to taking snap shots of the entire Web every six months, in order to create a searchable archive.

One of the main goals of the Internet Archive is to provide "Universal Access to All Human Knowledge." It sounds like a lofty task, but Brewster is firmly committed to it, and truly believes that it is achievable. Anyone in his presence for five minutes or more is likely to feel the same way, because his enthusiasm is quite contagious.

Brewster started the IA in 1996 with his own money, which he earned from the sale of two separate Internet search programs: WAIS, which was bought by AOL, and Alexa Internet, which was bought by Amazon. He has been spending his own money to keep the institution going for the last six years. Recently, in the summer of 2003, he was fortunate enough to receive some grants and corporate sponsorship.

Newer IA projects include creating an open source movie archive, creating a rooftop-based WiFi network across San Francisco, creating an archive of the 2004 presidential candidates (offering every candidate unlimited storage and bandwidth to serve up video), and creating a non-profit documentary archive.
Let's Start with the Internet Archive

Lisa Rein: What's the story behind the birth of the Internet Archive? How did it start?

Brewster Kahle: The Internet Archive started in 1996, when the Internet had reached critical mass. By 1996, there was enough material on the Internet to show that this thing was the cornerstone for how people are going to be publishing. It is the people's library. People were using the Internet in a major way towards making things available, as well as for finding answers to things. And, of course, the Internet is quite fleeting. The average life of a web page is about 100 days. So if you want to have culture you can count on, you need to be able to refer to things. And if things change out from underneath you all the time, then you're in trouble. So what traditionally has happened is that there are libraries, and libraries collect up out-of-print materials and try to preserve and make open access to materials that aren't necessarily commercially viable at the moment. The Internet Archive is just a library. It just happens to be a library that mostly is composed of bits.

LR: How did you get the funding for it?

BK: The funding for the Internet Archive came originally from the success of selling a couple of Internet companies on the path towards building a library. So the original funding was from me, based on selling one company, WAIS, Inc. which was the first Internet publishing system, to America Online. And then Alexa Internet, which was a company short for "the Library of Alexandria," to try to catalog the Web. So all of these were trying to build towards the library, and these companies were sold to successful companies and so that gave me enough money to kick start the Internet Archive. At this point, it's funded by private foundations, government grants, and in-kind donations from corporations.

LR: So AOL bought WAIS and who bought Alexa?

BK: Amazon bought Alexa.

LR: What are some of the grants? Didn't you get some good grants lately, during the past year?

BK: Oh yes, we've been very fortunate in this phase of the Internet Archive's life. The Sloan Foundation gave us a significant grant towards helping get the materials up and able to be used by researchers all over the world, and the Hewlett Foundation also gave us a sizable grant to bring more digital materials from a lot of non-profit institutions to give them permanent access.

For instance, a lot of organizations create documentaries that maybe are shown once or twice, but they're not permanently available. But their general approach was to have things to be available. So by having a library be able to digitize and host these materials, we hope to bring a lot of non-profit materials up and out onto the Internet so they can be leveraged and used by people all over the world.

Brewster Kahle speaking at the O'Reilly 2003 Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara, CA

LR: How many people work here at the Internet Archive right now?

BK: There are 12 people full-time here at the Internet Archive -- probably 20 if you count, all told. There are a lot of people that come through. We've got a programmer from Norway and a programmer from Iceland here now. We had a programmer from Japan that sort of came through and helped intern and shared the technology that they know and also what we know.

LR: What would you tell somebody that was interested in participating somehow? You're always looking for people to work on projects, right?

BK: We're always looking for help. People are helping in many, many different ways. By curating collections. By keeping good web sites. By making sure that web sites can be archived -- is how thousands of people are helping. But people are also helping curate some of the collections that are here. We have volunteers that are helping with, oh, things like SFLan and some of the technical work that we do. But also, we are growing slowly and we are hiring a few more people -- mostly very technical.

LR: Talk about SFLan a bit.

BK: SFLan is a wireless project that is based around San Francisco. The idea is to experiment using the wireless network to do a rooftop network, to use to use commodity wireless 802.11 WiFi stuff to hop from roof to roof to roof to provide an alternative to DSL and cable for the last mile.

If we can make that both be open and have distributed ownership, then people would own the roadways and they would basically control their network, which is what the Internet really is.

LR: What do you mean by "the last mile," exactly?

BK: Trying to get the last piece from getting from a central location where there might be a fiber that comes to a city, and try to get that distributed so that people in their homes can not only get materials at video speeds, 3-5 megabits per second -- DVD-like speeds -- but also act as servers to make things available to others over the Internet at high speeds.

These are some of the things that are very difficult to do, if not impossible, with the current commercial DSL and cable providers. And we're looking to see how we can not only establish that baseline of video-ready Internet and make it so people can serve video over the Internet, but then, every year, make it better by a factor of two. So the technology follows Moore's Law just like the computer guys do, as opposed to how the telecoms tend to work, which is "here's the same thing, and you'll buy the same thing, and maybe we'll raise the price slightly ..."

LR: And keep paying more for it.

BK: Right.

LR: So you're looking for people with rooftops?

BK: We're looking for people with rooftops. And especially people that can buy a node. A node costs $1,000, and that's a little Linux box with a directional antenna.

LR: Is that a node right there?

BK: This is a node right here (gestures). So this is an SFLan box. This is a directional antenna that points upstream back to a node that's closer to the Net. This is an omni antenna. So anyone who can see this can be on the Internet for free.

And this is a Linux machine that's got a CompactFlash card as its hard drive, and two radios. And you get a wire that comes down into your house, which is the way that power is brought up to this machine. And also, you get bandwidth within your house or office.

There are about 23 of these around San Francisco on rooftops now, and we're actively deploying new software. Cliff Cox up in Oregon is doing a lot of the software development and also hardware development. He's actually the guy that sells these things for $1,000. So Internet Archive's participation is to help fund the project to get it kick-started, and to try to get some active roofs up and running.

LR: How does the Internet Archive decide about implementing new technologies? What's your philosophy about implementing new technologies?

BK: The Internet Archive is extremely pragmatic about new technologies. What we tend to do is look at the least costly, both in the short term and long term. So we are frugal to the core.

We run currently about 700 computers. They're all running Linux. We don't have any dedicated routers. We just use Linux machines. We use the same Linux machine over and over and over and over and over again. Jim Gray's model -- he calls it the "brick model." So we just use Linux machines stacked up, and even though they might be storage machines, or CPU machines, or running as a router, or running as a load balancer, or a database machine -- they're all just the same machine. What we've found is that it allows us to only have one or maybe just two systems administrators being able to scale to many hundreds and, we hope, a few thousand, machines, by having such a simple underlying hardware architecture.

Because we operate on these machines stacked up, we tend to do everything based on clusters. Because our amounts of data are fairly large. We have, oh, several hundred terabytes at this point -- three, four hundred terabytes of materials, and it's growing a lot. So it's difficult to process these if you have to go through just one machine, and a lot of proprietary software is licensed to just be on one machine, or it costs per each.

Open source has the ability that you can go and run it on as many machines as you want. Because we run things and we do data processing and conversions on ten machines or a hundred machines at once, we find that open source is often the most pragmatic, least costly way to roll. We also find that it's easiest for other people to copy our model if we use open source software, so we tend towards using open source software, because we'd like anything that we develop to be actively used by others readily and easily.

LR: How much do you test before going live with new services and things? Do you do a lot of testing?

BK: Do we do a lot of testing? I'd say we do a lot of progressive rollouts. We do testing in-house, but you can only go so far, and then you bring on some number of your users and bring things out. I'd say we're less testing-oriented. We're less service-quality oriented than a lot of places, because we're researching. We're trying to push the edge. So we try to make sure our data is safe, but if there happens to be a hiccup, we are very public about that, and we're looking for help from others to help us resolve these and find them. So I'd say we're not like a commercial company doing lots of in-house testing and rounds and rounds of beta testing, because we only have 12 people to run all of this.

LR: Can you remember a specific situation where the technology could have gone one way or the other, and you decided on a certain way over another way, and why? When there's a fork in the road, what process do you go through to decide which way to go?

BK: Boy, when there're different choices of which way to go, you find that one of the lead motivators in terms of how we decide which way to go is which way people believe it should go. People are always open to testing and pushing back and saying, "Why do you think that's true?" Especially if we've tried going down that road before.

Let's take RAID -- Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks. The idea is to run, say, four disks or eight disks as a cluster of disks so that if one fails, it has the information on the other ones, so that it doesn't fail, so you can replace the disk and be able to keep going. Every few years we think that this is the right thing to do, and every few years, we find, unfortunately, that it is the wrong thing to do.

But it doesn't seem to keep us from trying again. Every so often we think, "Okay, they must have fixed the bugs," and that the software must be more reliable, or the controllers must be more reliable, and we'll go and put some number of machines into this new structure and then watch them for six months to a year to sort of see, "Does it work better or worse than what we were using before?" With RAID, we've found with two major tests of RAID that it's been a loser.

LR: Why? What goes wrong?

BK: We're not exactly sure, but it looks like the RAID controllers are just not debugged very well. The software isn't debugged. The hardware isn't debugged. There are failure modes that fall outside of there. "Oh," (supposedly) "if one disk just goes completely corrupt, then you can replace it and everything's fine." Well, we've found out in the latest Linux release that if two disks just hiccup slightly, then it gives it up for lost and it says, "You lose all your data," and so we've had to spend months then going back and decrypting all of the Linux RAID controller file system to be able to recover all of the data that you can actually recover. So I think it's just bad implementations based on not being able to get the reliability up, based on not having enough test cases.

We go along with Hillis' Law. Danny Hillis was one of the great computer designers of all time, and his approach was to have large numbers of commodity components; that basically, price follows volume. So if things are made in more volume, the price is lower. You can say, "Duh. Obviously." But it's amazing that most people don't follow this. Particularly that the price goes down when there's more of it made. You want to use things that cost less, because you might get more gigabytes per hard drive if you're using commodity components, as opposed to specialty components.

But another corollary of this is that "reliability follows volume." That things that are made in large volume have to be more reliable, at least in the long haul, otherwise the company that's making them would go out of business because they'd have too many failures. Another way of saying that is that Toyotas are more reliable than Ferraris. Even though a Toyota might cost one-tenth as much as a Ferrari, they are probably on the road more often. The coupling of this is that if you want a reliable system, and you want one that doesn't cost that much, go for high volume, if you want it available, reliable, etc. And so we find that technologies that are commodity and made in high volumes work better.

Tomas Krag
Wireless Networks as a Low-Cost, Decentralized Alternative for the Developing World

Informal and wire.less.dk are working to promote the use of wireless technologies (mainly 802.11) in the developing world. We are planning a Wireless Roadshow to teach local technology NGOs how wireless technologies can be used to bring Internet and intranet connectivity to those parts of the world not included in the plans of the commercial telecommunications companies.

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
February 9-12, 2004
San Diego, CA

LR: When you say "commodity," you mean "off the shelf," or COTS products, right?

BK: Yes.

LR: Let's talk a little bit about your philosophy now. Could you discuss what you mean when you talk about "Universal Access To All Human Knowledge?"

BK: "Universal Access To All Human Knowledge" is a motto of Raj Reddy from Carnegie Mellon. I found that if you really actually come to understand that statement, then that statement is possible; technologically possible to take, say, all published materials -- all books, music, video, software, web sites -- that it's actually possible to have universal access to all of that. Some for a fee, and some for free. I found that was a life-changing event for me. That is just an inspiring goal. It's the dream of the Greeks, which they embodied, with the Egyptians, in the Library of Alexandria. The idea of having all knowledge accessible.

But, of course, in the Library of Alexandria's case, you had to actually go to Alexandria. They didn't have the Internet. Well, fortunately, we not only have the storage technology to be able to store all of these materials cost-effectively, but we can make it universally available. So that's been just a fabulous goal that causes me to spring out of bed in the morning.

And it also -- when other people sort of catch on to this idea that we could actually do this -- that it helps straighten the path. You know, life, there're lots of paths that sort of wander around. But I find that having a goal that's that far out, but also doable, it helps me keep my direction, keep our organization's direction. And I'm finding that a lot of other people like that direction, as well.

LR: Do you have an overall philosophy about technology and the direction in which you'd like to see it go?

BK: I don't really have a philosophy about technology. I have a philosophy of what future I want to live in, which is probably more of a social and cultural issue than it really is a technological issue. And socially and culturally, what I want to grow up in -- and have my kids grow up in -- is a wonderful flowering of all sorts of really wild ideas coming from all sorts of people doing diverse and interesting things.

What I'd really like to see is a world where there's no limitations on getting your creative ideas out there. That people have a platform to find their natural audience. Whether their natural audience is one person, themselves, or a hundred people, or a thousand people. Try to make it so the technologies that we develop, and the institutions we develop, make it so that people have an opportunity to flower. To live a satisfying life by providing things to others that they appreciate.

And I think our technologies right now are well-suited to doing this in the information domain. In the information domain, we can go and offer people an ability to publish without the traditional restrictions that came before, and to help, with these search engine technologies, to help them find their natural audiences. And so people out there aren't surrounded by stuff they don't want. That they find that the music recordings they want and the video recordings they want, even though they're made a half a continent away, and there are only a hundred other people that also really like that genre.

LR: What kind of projects are you working on with the Library of Congress?

BK: We've been working with the Library of Congress over the last three or four years to help archive web sites. They've got a mission to record the cultural heritage of the United States -- actually also, Thomas Jefferson gave them, more broadly, "the world." And now that publishing is moving, or a large section of publishing, is moving on to the Internet, we've been working with them as a technology partner. They do the curation, and we do some special crawls.

Our first project with them was the election in the year 2000. The presidential election. And they selected a set of web sites, and we crawled them every day to try to get a historical record, and then the Internet Archive made them available to the world to see and use, to see if it was useful to people.

The Library of Congress is trying to move into the digital realm, and they just got a hundred million dollars from Congress to help do digital preservation, and we hope to be participants as that unfolds. We'll see. But the Library of Congress has got a lot of money -- a 450-to-500-million-dollars-a-year budget. We hope that a growing percentage of that goes towards digital materials, whether working with us or others, than currently, which is I think probably less than one percent.

LR: Earlier you said that one way that people could help was to make their web sites "more archivable," basically. What does that really mean? How would you make your web site easily archivable?

BK: Boy. By being straightforward. I think by keeping things fairly simple. If web sites have sort of straightforward links, then that makes things a lot easier.

LR: What do you mean "straightforward?"

BK: Straightforward URLs. JavaScript that's fairly clear-cut or reused from other places. What we have been really stumped on is sites that need a lot of JavaScript or a lot of programs that are needed to even render the site at all.

Probably one way of finding out is going to archive.org and seeing, "Did we get it right?" the last time. We're continuously updating our tools and trying to make things better. But for instance, we've been having trouble with .swf files, Shockwave and Flash files, from Macromedia. If those files have links to other pages inside of them, we're just not able to find those links, so we can't follow them. We also have trouble rewriting those .swf files so that they point to the Archive's version of the links and not the live Web's. So we're having trouble with certain complicated web sites. What we'd like to see is more straightforward use of pointers, because the hyperlink is one of the great ideas of the Internet.

Lisa Rein is a co-founder of Creative Commons, a video blogger at On Lisa Rein's Radar, and a singer-songwriter-musican at lisarein.com.

Today was "talk like a pirate day." The Internet Archive obliged, and dressed like pirates too.

From left to right: me, Molly, Astrid

The Library of Alexandria ("BibAlex.") (sorry, "eg" url doesn't seem to work right now) in Egypt is working with the Internet Archive to build its own bookmobile.

Here is a little movie of Ashley Rindsberg, Internet Archive Bookmobilist, about his upcoming voyage to Egypt to build a "Library of Alexandria Bookmobile."

Ashley will be blogging in this category from Egypt starting this Wednesday on (after he gets situated in Egypt) and going for the next two weeks while he sets things up over there.

Some independent film makers will be going over there with him to film the process for a movie they're making. (More on this soon!)

Ashley the Bookmobilist (Small - 6 MB)

Ashley the Bookmobilist (Hi-res - 83 MB)

Audio - Ashley the Bookmobilist (MP3 - 3 MB)

Here are a couple more photos linked to high resolution JPEGs:

This is just a little clip I excerpted from Lessig's complete SXSW 2003 presentation:

Lessig On The Internet Archive (Small - 5 MB)

Lessig On The Internet Archive (Hi-res - 60 MB)

Audio - Lessig On The Internet Archive (MP3 - 4 MB)

This work is dedicated to the
Public Domain. (Take it and run, baby!)

Many apologies for taking so long to get the Alan Kay presentation up.

I wanted to present all of the elements of Alan Kay's talk and presentation -- as exhibits in my library, if you will.

I've been pondering the different possibilities for some time. How should I organize my library for those who prefer to browse through history, rather than have it flung at them in numerous lengths and file formats.

So, with this presentation, I bring to you the advent of my "tour" pages. Pages that I hope to place in every directory of my Internet Archive Library that will provide you with a little more information about what's on the page, as well as the licensing info and any other relevant information for those works, as more information is made available to me.

Complete with new and exciting reasonable file sizes!

Below are links to a high resolution and low resolution QuickTime movies and audio MP3 file. Let me know if you need another format.

Brewster Kahle and son, Caslon, at the Creative Commons Launch

Brewster Kahle at the Creative Commons Launch - 25 MB

Brewster Kahle at the Creative Commons Launch - 14 MB

MP3 of Brewster Kahle at Creative Commons Launch - 5 MB

Nice.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1032988956841142113,00.html

Here's the full text of the Internet Archive Bookmobile part of the WSJ story:

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1032988956841142113,00.html

Book Mobile

Think of it as a Good Humor truck for books.

But instead of selling ice cream, the Digital Bookmobile gives away books. Brewster Kahle, founder of the nonprofit Internet Archive in San Francisco, is driving cross-country next week with his eight-year-old son in a Ford Aerostar van with a satellite dish mounted on top and high-speed printers and book-binding equipment inside. They're starting in East Palo Alto, a pocket of poverty in the heart of Silicon Valley, and will stop at schools, retirement villages, a bookmobile convention in Columbus, Ohio, and a Carnegie library in Pittsburgh, where the motto "Free to the People" is engraved above the door.

At each stop, they will download books from the Internet, print them out and bind them, all at no charge. "There's a lot of hand-wringing about the dot-com implosion," says Mr. Kahle. "But we're missing the bigger picture of how great the Internet is as a library."

But all is not rosy, he says. A new law extending copyright protection for 20 additional years means that in the next two decades, no new books will enter the public domain. Mr. Kahle plans to pull up in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 9, when the court is scheduled to hear a challenge to the copyright law in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft.

"The public domain is on trial," Mr. Kahle says. "The bookmobile is a tangible manifestation of the usefulness of the public domain."

--Compiled by Ann Grimes, with contributions from Julia Angwin, Allyce Bess and David Bank.

Updated September 26, 2002

Annalee Newitz has mentioned the Internet Archive Bookmobile project in a column about the Public Domain:

techsploitation - the public domain

The Internet Archive volunteers have put about 9,000 public domain books on its site, and now they're driving around the United States in a high-tech bookmobile where people can link to the archive via satellite, download the book of their choice, print it out, and take it home to read. And yes, it's all free. The Internet Archive bookmobile will make its first visit to an East Palo Alto school Sept. 30 and will stop at numerous other schools, libraries, and nursing homes during its cross-country trek...

Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.sfbg.com/36/51/x_techsploitation.html

techsploitation
by annalee newitz

Public domain

THERE WAS SOMETHING so relentlessly cartoony about the television coverage this Sept. 11. Each cable channel put its own targeted spin on the thing, with satirical terrorist specials on Comedy Central and patriotic collectibles being hawked on QVC and various crappy insta-documentaries on the History Channel and A&E. I couldn't tell if Sept. 11 was being treated as some kind of demented celebration or maybe a collective historical reenactment like one of those fake Civil War battles they do every year in Virginia. I flipped on CNN only to see a legend at the side of the screen that read, "Terror alert: high." Some hack in the graphics department had tweaked the weather alert icon to reflect Our National Day of Terrorist Consciousness.

So, in a symbolic act possibly as useless and doomed as the symbolic acts it was intended to critique, I turned off my TV and celebrated freedom.

I began by talking with Lauren Gelman about a new project she's working on with the Internet Archive (www.archive.org). The Internet Archive volunteers have put about 9,000 public domain books on its site, and now they're driving around the United States in a high-tech bookmobile where people can link to the archive via satellite, download the book of their choice, print it out, and take it home to read. And yes, it's all free. The Internet Archive bookmobile will make its first visit to an East Palo Alto school Sept. 30 and will stop at numerous other schools, libraries, and nursing homes during its cross-country trek. "We want to remind people that when things like books enter the public domain, they become a major public good and a public utility," Gelman says.

More to the point, the bookmobile plans to motor into Washington, D.C., Oct. 8, the day before the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft, a crucial copyright case that Gelman says will decide how many books are part of the bookmobile's digital library. Gelman explains that although the founders of the United States originally mandated that copyright protection should last only 15 years, with a possible renewal for an additional 15, copyright today is for the author's entire life plus 70 years. Eldred v. Ashcroft is "a challenge to a law that extended copyright by another 20 years [to 70 from 50]," she says.

The fate of the bookmobile's collection reminds us that people in the United States still need to fight to preserve the public domain, where anyone can access ideas for free. "Copyright should last long enough that authors are compensated and people's creativity is encouraged," Gelman says. "But with current copyright laws, ideas are too easily locked down." The public domain is a place for artists, writers, and other copyright holders to give back to the public after the public has compensated them for their work. If you don't catch the bookmobile, you can download the books from the Internet Archive or from other public domain book sites such as Project Gutenberg (www.promo.net/pg) or the English Server (www.eserver.org).

If you want to contribute to the domain of public knowledge and can't wait another minute, you can spend hours, weeks, or years participating in the fast-growing Wikipedia community (www.wikipedia.com). Wikipedia is a group of thousands of people who use WikiWiki, software that allows visitors at a Web site to update it dynamically to build and edit a giant online encyclopedia. The Wikipedia site contains information on everything from algebra to the history of homosexuality, and anyone can add to or revise entries to make it better. Amazingly, this has resulted in one of the most brain-enriching documents I've ever used on the Web. The contributors have worked to maintain a genuinely high standard of accurate information, although there are occasional jokes or bits of absurdity.

And if you want a taste of what the public sphere in the United States could become if we let corporations limit our access to knowledge in the name of profit, check out an interesting site prepared by Ben Edelman, who works at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

He's been following up on reports that when Chinese citizens type "google" into their browsers, the Great Firewall of China redirects them to a different site whose search results are deemed appropriate. He's detailed how this works, including some weird screenshots at cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/google-replacements. Many U.S. citizens think that this kind of censorship-via-redirection only happens in strongly state-controlled countries like China. But it's likely that the corporate ownership of broadband in the United States will result in a similar situation. AT&T might make a deal with Bob's Search Engine in which anyone typing "google" into their browser would be redirected to Bob's. Or someone looking for Powell's Books might get redirected to Barnes and Noble. Ah, the joys of unchecked capitalism. Almost as good as unchecked state power.

Annalee Newitz (punting@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who needs to see more explosions. Her column also appears in Metro, Silicon Valley's weekly newspaper.

Brewster Khale of Wayback Machine and Internet Archive was quoted by the NY Times today when asked to comment on all of the "junk" he must be archiving along with all of the "worthwhile stuff."

See the article by John Schwartz:
From Unseemly to Lowbrow, the Web's Real Money Is in the Gutter

Brewster Kahle, who has created a large Internet archive he calls the Wayback Machine, which contains several times the amount of information in the Library of Congress, said that the number of questionable sites is beside the point so long as search engines do their job.

"We don't worry about how many pages that I don't care about are in the Internet archive," he said. "What you do care about is, `Does it have the pages that I want?' "

He acknowledged, however, that "we haven't done a very good job of putting the good stuff up there" on the Internet to dilute the bad, and that as a result today's leaders "are shortchanging the next generation."

...To Mr. Kahle, the Internet's diversity, good and bad, means that people will find the information they want, as narrowly and as deeply as they care to explore it. While he, too, would like some method to control the spam that flows into his e-mailbox, he said he preferred a complex ecosystem to a monoculture as bland and regular as a suburban lawn.

"I grew up where almost everybody could sing all three verses of the `Gilligan's Island' theme song," he said. "I don't want my children to grow up like that."

Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/26/technology/26CYBE.html

From Unseemly to Lowbrow, the Web's Real Money Is in the Gutter
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Life is good at the bottom of the cyberspace pit. When the Arizona attorney general's office recently shut down a Scottsdale company, CP Direct, it offered a glimpse into the spoils of the Internet's dark side. The company sold pills via the Web that promised to increase penis length, bust size and body height.
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Enough people had spent $60 an order — mostly for the "Longitude" treatments, with ingredients that included pumpkin seed, sarsaparilla and "oyster meat" — that the state was able to seize more than $30 million in luxury real estate and a herd of Mercedes-Benzes, Rolls Royces and a Lamborghini.

The dot-com bust has left the economy littered with the husks of companies that said they would transform the way that people work, live and play. But aside from such notably profitable Internet winners as eBay and edging-into-profitability giants like Amazon, it is not easy to find many pure Internet companies that make healthy profits without appealing to baser interests or using questionable business practices. Even huge companies like AOL Time Warner appear to be struggling to figure out — still — how to come up with online content and services that mainstream consumers will be willing to pay for.

Those who provide some of the sites that many people object to say they have nothing to hide. "Obviously, there's a want for this stuff, because there's billions of dollars spent on it every year," said David Marchlak, who has brought the world sites like Voyeur Dorm, a Web precursor to the "Big Brother" television show that watches a Florida house shared by a cast of young women. "We're not forcing it on anybody."

Yet these days, Internet users complain of a proliferation of Web sites that offer a peek up Anna Kournikova's skirt or that hawk pills to increase the size of their sex organs. The Internet was supposed to make people's brains bigger.

People now talk about wasting too much of their time sifting through e-mail invitations to view photographs of nymphets or unspeakable acts with farm animals, as well as requests to send money to people who say they are relatives of Jonas Savimbi of Angola or Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire so they can release their stolen African millions.

Cyberspace is "debasing itself in front of our eyes," said Bruce Sterling, a science fiction author. Mr. Sterling, who sees the Internet becoming a pit of spam and swindles, pornography, corporate advertising and government surveillance, warns, "We will lose the Internet if we don't save it."

Why is so much high technology so lowbrow, with abominably written prose, horrific images like the beheading of the journalist Daniel Pearl and the sweaty sensibility of a tromp through the febrile fantasies of adolescent boys and middle-aged men?

One answer is that the Internet businesses that thrive most readily are the kinds that do well in every medium — including those selling titillation and cheating their customers.

"Every industry has its charlatans, and e-commerce is getting its share," said Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. "I don't see evidence that it is more than you would expect, especially in a new industry."

Not everyone who hangs out a shingle in the grimy quarters of the online world becomes rich. Maria, a woman who runs adult Web sites and a telephone sex service, said that dreams of quick riches are quickly dashed, especially for those entrepreneurs who spend thousands of dollars for pornography-site-in-a-box kits that are sold online, which often include stockpiles of images that are already in wide circulation.

"I don't see people getting rich," said Maria, who spoke on the condition that her full name not be used. "I see people getting burned" by their own inexperience and crushed by so-called chargebacks — cancellations of credit card charges by consumers.

Louis Bajjali, who runs a number of pornography sites, said that those who succeed share some characteristics with their counterparts in mainstream business: They are on the scene early to establish brand recognition, work hard and stick with what they know.

"We're businessmen," he said. "It's actually a simple and clean job."

At least the online pornography purveyors deliver what they promise, however unseemly. CP Direct, the penis-pill merchants, sold snake oil to consumers by the thousands, the Arizona attorney general, Jeanne Napolitano, said in her announcement of the civil forfeiture action.

"The product was purchased by CP Direct for $2.45 a bottle, and sold for $59.95 — that's a nice markup, isn't it?" said Lawrence J. Warfield, a certified public accountant who was appointed by the state to administer the sale of assets and distribution of money to victims of the swindle.

John Hannah, a lawyer for Michael Consoli, one of the principal figures in the CP Direct case, noted that the state seizure was not a final disposition of the case. "I have every reason to believe that Mr. Consoli will deny that he did anything wrong and will ask for his property back," he said.

CP Direct is one of many companies that — at least, until law enforcement showed up — proved that the wages of sin can, in fact, be bountiful. Last November, the Federal Trade Commission and the New York attorney general settled charges against a New York company, the Crescent Publishing Group, after proving that Crescent and 64 affiliated companies billed thousands of consumers as much as $90 a month for access to pornography sites that gave the appearance of being free. In a settlement with the company, the government got $30 million for consumer refunds.

Pyramid schemes, too, flourish online: In August 2001, the Federal Trade Commission fined the creators of BigSmart.com $5 million in a settlement over the business practices of its online shopping mall. BigSmart's customers paid $110 for a home page with links to other merchants, and the only way to make money was to recruit newcomers to the scheme, the commission found.

The reasons that people engage in such activity are simple enough, said Eric Wagner, a lawyer in the division of marketing practices at the Federal Trade Commission. "Fraud is profitable," he said. "If it wasn't profitable, people wouldn't be doing it."

The relatively low cost of using the Internet for marketing makes it every bit as attractive to swindlers as it is to legitimate businesses.

The commission has declared war on spam and fraud, and has trained people from 1,700 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to detect and prosecute online fraud. The F.T.C. has collected 13 million spam messages in its efforts to study the problem, and has initiated dozens of "Netforce" sweeps to drive spammers out of business.

From Unseemly to Lowbrow, the Web's Real Money Is in the Gutter

(Page 2 of 2)

To be sure, the better neighborhoods of the Net — where one can find learned discussion of Kierkegaard or analysis of Gram Parsons's influence on rock music — are flourishing. But critics like Mr. Sterling argue that those leafy digital neighborhoods are increasingly surrounded by wildly expanding zones of slums, bad taste and risk.

He thinks "civil society" has broken down online, and that "it's not just a digital problem, it's the digital reflection of a global problem."
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Criticism of the Internet has its antecedents in the fears of every new technology that has come along, said Paul Saffo, an analyst at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. Some of the earliest printing presses were put to use publishing pulp and trash, and even early printed playing cards had salacious images. "A collective appetite for sleaze," he said, "seems to be a real constant."

Despite that, or perhaps because of it, reports of the death spiral for the online medium are premature, said Gary Chapman, director of the 21st Century Project, a nonprofit research and education program on science and technology policy at the University of Texas.

"I am astonished practically every day by something new on the Internet," he said. The medium has grown so extensively that "at this point, it's almost impossible to characterize what the Internet is like."

Spam, for example, "is an annoyance and something that is a regrettable display of the human tendency to go for the lowest common denominator," he said. "But it can't possibly be viewed as representative of the entire Internet."

Brewster Kahle, who has created a large Internet archive he calls the Wayback Machine, which contains several times the amount of information in the Library of Congress, said that the number of questionable sites is beside the point so long as search engines do their job.

"We don't worry about how many pages that I don't care about are in the Internet archive," he said. "What you do care about is, `Does it have the pages that I want?' "

He acknowledged, however, that "we haven't done a very good job of putting the good stuff up there" on the Internet to dilute the bad, and that as a result today's leaders "are shortchanging the next generation."

Other initiatives to dilute the bad by raising the concentration of the good have also begun. Project Gutenberg, an arduous effort conducted largely by volunteers, has put more than 400 books online. The Million Books Project at Carnegie Mellon University is trying to create an online home in every field for major works that are no longer protected by copyright.

And the Digital Promise Project, begun by a former Federal Communications Commission chairman, Newton N. Minow (who famously called 1961-era television a "vast wasteland") and Lawrence Grossman, the former chairman of NBC and PBS, aims to improve education and the Internet by earmarking some $18 billion raised in federal auctions of rights to use portions of the broadcast spectrum.

"There's so much good stuff that is trapped in libraries that should be digitized and made available," Mr. Minow said. "It's just yearning to get free."

To Mr. Kahle, the Internet's diversity, good and bad, means that people will find the information they want, as narrowly and as deeply as they care to explore it. While he, too, would like some method to control the spam that flows into his e-mailbox, he said he preferred a complex ecosystem to a monoculture as bland and regular as a suburban lawn.

"I grew up where almost everybody could sing all three verses of the `Gilligan's Island' theme song," he said. "I don't want my children to grow up like that."

Our first Creative Commons' interview is up on the website:

Rick Prelinger.
(Keeper of the Prelinger Archives, which have just been accepted into the Library of Congress.

Through our partnership with the Internet Archive, my images are just going out all over the world. They are achieving a level of spread and penetration I could never do on my own. And therefore, I think that giving things away ends up benefiting me. You know, these images don't get used up. They don't get yellow around the edges. They don't become less valuable from being shown and repeated. Ubiquity equals value. That's how I think you can make money by giving things away.

Here's the full text of the interview in case the link goes bad
(wow I really hope this particular link never goes bad):

http://www.creativecommons.org/features/rick

Rick Prelinger
Interview by: Lisa Rein
Photos by: Lisa Leigh

Dateline: 1980. New York-based typesetter Rick Prelinger was trying to "make it in the movies" and writing a reference book on two-way radio frequencies on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Two years later, he became the Research Director for "Heavy Petting," the Norman Lear-funded Atomic Café-like documentary about sexuality in the 20th Century. Armed with photocopies of old educational film reference books and Library of Congress copyright catalogs, he began a project of surveying, cataloging, archiving, and cross-referencing educational, industrial and advertising films produced in the United States between 1903 and the early 1980s.

Over the past twenty years, Rick has collected more than 48,000 complete films and roughly 30,000 cans of raw footage. The Internet Archive currently hosts 1,125 titles online, with plans to have 1,500 uploaded by the end of 2003.

The Library of Congress recently acquired the Prelinger Archives, which will be made publicly accessible after a 3- to 4-year processing period. In the meantime, the Internet Archive will be the primary way to access the films.

We caught up with Rick fresh back from New York City, where he had been cataloging and preparing to ship the actual film stock for delivery to the L.O.C. The process had left him covered in rust and dust from digging into the corners of his storage facility in search of any lost films that may have slipped through the cracks.

CC: Rick, what exactly is the Prelinger Archives?

RP: The Prelinger Archives is a large collection of what I call "ephemeral films." These are industrial, advertising, educational, amateur and government films -- films that were generally made not to show in movie theatres or on TV, but films that were made to teach, to educate, sometimes to miseducate, to train, to sell, pitch a product, or promote an idea. Films that embody the persuasions of the past. In addition to showing us the way things were, they also show how things were supposed to be. They are a wonderful set of visions of the way we were supposed to think, what we were supposed to buy. A vision of the sort of people we were supposed to become, and as such they record aspects of our history that are suppressed. They are not necessarily public aspects of our history.

CC: What do you mean "not necessarily public aspects of our history"?

RP: I'll give you an example. If we want to have a sense of what it was like to be a member of a family, a nuclear family in the American 50's or 60's, you really can't get that authentically from a TV sit com, or from a Hollywood movie, or from a news reel. But when you see these films, they are filled with footage of idealized families in action. We get a sense of how the family actually looked and behaved, what was the body language, what were the gender roles, how kids were supposed to behave differently than adults, and you also get a sense of that sort of all-encompassing ideology. So you could argue that all of these films, in a way, are sort of an ethnographic vision of a lost America.

CC: Do you feel that producing these films is a lost art?

RP: These kinds of films really aren't made today, but if you could imagine the World Wide Web -- where organizations and institutions, companies and individuals use the Web to build a site to make their voice heard --imagine that instead everybody was making movies…every company made movies to promote products and train its workers and reach the public. In the schools of the past, really from the turn of the century until recently, films were shown to teach everything. Whether it was "How To Brush Your Teeth," "How To Get Married," "Social Studies," "The Products of Guatemala"…this is the kind of material that I've collected for about twenty years.

CC: How long has the Prelinger Archives offered films on the Web?

RP: We first started putting movies up at the very, very beginning of 2001, and the site was kind of embryonic for a while. It's still a work in progress, but well over 1,250,000 movies have been downloaded -- some of those for people to just look at and enjoy from the privacy of their homes, their dorm rooms. Others have been made into other movies.

CC: The movies in the Prelinger Archives have been used to create a wide range of "derivative works." Could you give us some examples?

RP: In 2001, we had a contest on the theme of "The World At War"…the winners are actually on the Internet Archive Website. The film that took the first prize was "The ABC's of Happiness," where an animated character tells the audience that we really shouldn't worry about the past. We should be happy. We shouldn't look at disturbing images and let this knock us off of our complacent center -- and of course the images we're seeing in the background are all very disturbing. It's a very funny and a very sweet film, but with a real punch to it. An artist in England whose name is Vicki Bennett -- who performs under the name of "People Like Us" is a musician whose work is made of sampling other kinds of works and knitting together a new whole which is kind of utopian and imaginative. She made a ten-minute movie called, "We, Out of the Life," which is about the history of electronic music and the (perhaps) obsolescence of human beings in the future, and it's all made with material from my collection that was downloaded through the Internet Archive. It's a funny and very complex little movie.

People are working with our footage to make shows for Tech TV. There's a series called "Big Thinkers" that makes very, very heavy use of our material. And you know, when you're making a movie about "Big Thinkers," you have people talking, and how do you add ametaphoric dimension to what people are saying? How do you visualize their ideas? One of the ways that the producers decided to do that was to download an incredible amount of footage from the site, build a little library, and use a lot of these archival images to contextualize what people were saying.

A woman in San Francisco named Heather Rogers just made a great little film on recycling that actually questions whether recycling is beneficial. We all think that recycling is a good thing…she's not sure that it is, and she uses a lot of old imagery from the Archives depicting consumption and waste to illustrate her point. It's a strong movie. So, there are artists. There are documentaries. There are people doing conventional commercial TV, and there are people doing work that doesn't look like anything that has ever been made before. But all of it relies heavily on having access to a pool of old imagery.

CC: Could you explain more of the details about how making your footage available "for free" through the Internet Archive has actually increased revenues for your stock footage business?

RP: I run a small stock footage company. It grosses every year in the low-to mid-six figures. My competitors are big companies who spend at least as much and maybe more money than I gross every year just on magazine advertising. Probably, they spend that much money just to build their Websites. I couldn't afford to do that. But if the footage that's in my collection is "out there," and [if] it works its way back into the culture by being ubiquitous, I gain. Because ubiquity of images makes them more valuable.

CC: How about an example of what you mean when you talk about how an image's being used over and over again makes it more ubiquitous and therefore more valuable?

RP: The example that I always like to point to goes back to when I used to work at HBO. (I worked in the entertainment industry for six years.) One day, I was sitting with a colleague of mine who was head of the Time-Life picture collection -- a wonderful, wonderful collection of images, many of which are the most emblematic images of the last 70 or 80 years. I asked [my colleague], "What's your highest revenue-producing image?" She said, "Why I'm surprised you asked, Rick. Of course, you know what it is: It's the image of everybody sitting in a movie theater with their 3-D glasses on." You know this famous image. It's kind of emblematic of the fifties. [Time-Life] makes a great deal of money selling that image...it's also pirated. It's been shot over and over again by people. People have set up people in theaters and then shot it on film, so they have a movie version of it. Repetition and ubiquity haven't lessened the value of that image: they've increased it.

Through our partnership with the Internet Archive, my images are just going out all over the world. They are achieving a level of spread and penetration I could never do on my own. And therefore, I think that giving things away ends up benefiting me. You know, these images don't get used up. They don't get yellow around the edges. They don't become less valuable from being shown and repeated. Ubiquity equals value. That's how I think you can make money by giving things away.