Blogs & the Life of Journalism: Welcome to the Jungle

By Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Query: What separates man from ape? Perhaps the same thing that separates journalist from blogger. In his 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen analogized T.H. Huxley’s “infinite monkey theorem” to the rise of Web 2.0. If you provide infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, one of them will eventually write Shakespeare. But the problem with the Internet, as he put it is, is that the typewriters are personal networked computers and the monkeys are bloggers, and “instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys–many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins–are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.”

Like most writers of books like these, Keen is strikingly polemic–but that’s why he, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, Lawrence Lessig (whose new book Remix not only encourages the monkeys but takes away their blank paper and just gives them the Shakespeare as a starting point), end up on The Colbert Report. And I may disagree with 80% of what he says (and object to being called a monkey, besides), but he does make a point that I whole-heartedly agree with: we need objective, professional journalists to responsibly collect the news. Where I diverge from Keen, however, is that I think this statement has little or nothing to do with bloggers.

Continue reading ›


Modded Roomba Lays Down Graffiti for its Brother to Clean Up

By Jimmy Rogers (@me)
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

If you are familier with iRobot, the people who make the everybody’s favorite robotic vacuum cleaner, you know they are famous for their hacker spirit.  There’s even a hackable version of the Roomba to support the community of tinkerers who have gathered around it.

Well iRobot has been doing some tinkering of their own and came up with this little beauty.  Instead of sweeping up, it sprinkles powder in nifty configurations on your carpet.

This reminds me of the Math and Science Center I went to as a child.  They had a robotic turtle with a pen in the middle that would write on a big sheet of paper anything you typed into the terminal.   Robots are awesome!

[Botropolis via Gizmodo]

The ‘cost’ of piracy

A claim that the annual costs of piracy to the software industry has topped $50 billion for the first time highlights a major flaw in the way such ‘costs’ are estimated.

According to the Business Software Alliance, 41 per cent of software worldwide is pirated. It argues that this represents losses to the industry of approximately $53 billion.

However, there are two major problems with this analysis. First, the calculation of the piracy rate itself is questionable. The Economist has previously accused the BSA of relying on “sample data that may not be representative, assumptions about the average amount of software on PCs and, for some countries, guesses rather than hard data.”

It appears the BSA’s method involves estimating how much software is installed around the world, subtracting the known legal sales, and taking the remainder as piracy. Clearly any calculation which involves the relationship between solid numbers and an estimate is prone to inaccuracy.

But it’s the lost revenue figure which is the more dubious. The formula here is simple: the losses are the number of pirated copies multiplied by the retail price.

That’s a virtually meaningless figure as there is no way to know how many people who use pirated software would have otherwise paid for it. Many people who use copied programs do so because they literally can’t afford the retail price. Many others do so because they only need to use a program occasionally or for a few features and thus don’t consider it worth the price. And others have no interest whatsoever in paying even a cent for the program and have only acquired an illegal copy because doing so is free of charge.

This is not to say there is any legal or moral justification for software piracy. And the losses are probably (proportionally) higher than with movies and music where some people download more ‘free’ content than they could ever listen to, let alone consider paying for.

But groups like the BSA have legitimate points to make about the genuine costs of piracy: not just whatever lost revenue exists, but in increased security risks, lost business for third-party retailers, and even lost tax revenues from legal sales. Trotting out a figure which is clearly a ludicrous overstatement based on a fallacy simply undermines this message.

I Am a Geek! – A Message from the Society for Geek Advancement

From the Society for Geek Advancement, which is not only a sort of club, it’s a movement to put the power of geekiness to work to improve the world. Buy a t-shirt and help fund Room to Read, a charity that builds schools, libraries, and computer labs for children in Third World countries.

People featured in this video: Gary Vaynerchuk, Shaquille O’Neal, Steve Wozniak, Kevin Pollak, Wil Wheaton, LeVar Burton, Jason Calacanis, Samm Levine, Felicia Day, Kevin Rose, Alex Albrecht, Leo Laporte, IJustine, David Karpe, Brian Solis, Veronica Belmont, Sarah Lacy, Randi Zuckerberg, Pete Cashmore, Jonathan Coulton, Kevin Pereira, Tay Zonday, Julia Allison, Julia Roy

[via Buzzfeed]

Mario now a historical number two

Wii Sports might – repeat might – be the new best-selling game ever, topping Super Mario Bros.

Nintendo has just published a list of all its games which sold more than a million copies last year, along with their respective lifetime sales; Wii Sports is listed at 45.7 million sales. That’s just above the 40.23 million listed by Guinness World Records for Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo Entertainment System.

It’s worth noting that the Mario figure is as of 2006, so there’s a slim possibility it’s still above the Wii Sports total thanks to download sales through Nintendo’s virtual console service. Nintendo isn’t confirming or denying that Wii Sports has overtaken its sales figures.

There’s also some debate online about whether copies sold as part of a console bundle should be counted in such figures. Given that bundles vary in different markets, it would be difficult to work out figures for standalone sales only. It’s also debatable to what extent particular games can be the driving force for the console sale itself: without demonstrations of Wii Sports, the concept of the Wii as a console for all the family and the motion controllers features might have been harder to market.

The other figures suggest both the Wii and the DS are doing a great job of attracting new users to the games markets. There are now more than 22 million people owning Nintendogs and 17 million using Brain Age, while Wii Play and Wii Fit have 40 million sales between them. These may not be the titles of choice for the hardcore gamer, but it’s proof that video games don’t have to appeal to a narrow demographic to succeed.