Day: February 23, 2010

The Lo-Fi Manifesto

Karl Stolley’s The Lo-Fi Manifesto is an excellent statement of principles for keeping the web accessible, especially in education:

“Lo-fi” describes a preferred set of production technologies that digital producers should strive to command, but as an acronym, LOFI outlines four principles of digital production that are essential for the advancement, extension, and long-term preservation of digital discourse:

  • Lossless: Discourse presented through lo-fi production technologies neither degrades nor becomes trapped in the production itself. Text migrates and transforms from a single source (e.g., XML, or an application of XML) to any number of other devices and artifacts; images, video, and other media elements maintain their integrity as individual files that are orchestrated with one another at a reader’s moment of access, not at the producer’s moment of File > Import or File > Save.
  • Open: Lo-fi artifacts’ source code and media elements are available for inspection, revision, and extension outside the scope of any one piece of production software and any one producer. Openness includes and encourages end-user/reader customization and repurposing.
  • Flexible: Discourse artfully and rhetorically created with lo-fi production technologies can be experienced unobtrusively in multiple ways by different users equipped with a wide variety of conventional, mobile, and adaptive devices—all from a single artifact. No plugins, special downloads, or device-/reader-specific artifacts are required.
  • In(ter)dependent: Lo-fi production technologies direct orchestration (like a recipe), not composition (like a TV dinner), allowing users and their devices full control to render (or not) and perhaps repurpose the media elements that constitute a digital artifact.

I Canceled My Jungle Disk Account

The other day I finally canceled my Jungle Disk account. I had canceled my Amazon S3 account awhile ago, but forgot to also cancel the Jungle Disk account.

The main reason was price. The backup set of my personal documents is > 500gb, so using Amazon S3 was costing about $75/month. I can buy a 750 gb hard drive on Amazon for $70 and a 1 TB one for $85 if my data starts growing even faster.

So my new backup procedure is each month I buy a new hard drive and do a complete backup of my data drive. Then I do daily incremental backups for the month. At the end of the month I take that drive and store it offsite, buy a new drive and repeat.

On a quarterly basis I also take the latest backup and make a copy on BD-R so I’m not completely dependent on magnetic media for backup.

Libraries Are Killing the Publishing Industry

GoToHellMan recently published a hilarious parody of publisher complaints about piracy Offline Book “Lending” Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion,

Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly that “publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy” comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were “loaned” last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself.

From what we’ve been able to piece together, the book “lending” takes place in “libraries”. On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange for a “card”. But there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of other patrons. Although there’s no admission charge and it doesn’t cost anything to borrow a book, there’s always the threat of an onerous overdue bill for the hapless borrower who forgets to continue the cycle of not paying for copyrighted material.

The whole thing is hilarious and well worth reading. Keep it in mind the next time you read one of those idiotic “piracy cost X industry $Y hundred million.”