Music 2.0

The Pay What You Want Argument:

I believe that any song or piece of music that achieves sustainable popularity and is recognized instantly by generations of listeners, regardless of how niche the audience is, would have been written and performed by the artist regardless of whether they got paid or not.

In fact, the best artists do their craft because they have to. A song writer writes and performs new songs for the same reason prolific bloggers write and publish new posts. It’s the internal need to express oneself to an audience.

A Solution That Might work:

A system that would take the middle man out of the picture and give the market back to the artist and the listeners would work something like this:

A) Labels and artists directly upload their songs to a common catalog.

B) The system itself becomes a registry of ownership rights. Every user who wishes to upload a song must be the rights owner for that song. Else, they’re liable to get sued for damages by the rights owner. To enforce the ability to sue for damages (if you’re dumb enough to upload a song owned by some label or artist as you’re own then you deserve what’s coming) anyone who wishes to upload a song must validate their identity by charging say the smallest amount that can be charged to their checking account, e.g. $0.01. This way the system knows the legal identity of the uploader and can list the person’s real name in their profile, which makes the uploader accountable for what they upload, i.e. they must have the legal right to publish/sell what they upload.

C) As the rights owner, you have the option to pay, say, $500 (which is less than the cost of suing somebody) to have an actual person (e.g. paralegal) verify that you own the rights to the songs you wish to upload. With this option invoked, any copies of your song uploaded to the system will be removed immediately (e.g. using fingerprinting.)

Note: So far, using this model, you can see that you don’t have to pay any 3rd party or wait ages to get your song(s) published.

D) Forget iTunes $0.99 model. Adopt Radiohead’s Pay-What-You-Want model. Set a minimum payment of say $0.01. So you can actually download 100 songs for a dollar if you want (here’s your 100X disruption) or you can reward your favorites artists with $2 for each of their songs and maybe go big and pay $5 for a song you really love from a band that you know could use the money. Money becomes more like a voting tool than money as you know it. The system can even rank artists on how much users pay for their songs on average. Or it can rank songs on how much users pay for the song on average. Again, money becomes a voting tool, in which case you’d want to set a max limit on how much users can pay for any given song, so it won’t become fiscally draining on the users to promote artists or bands they are passionate about.

The point is: let people pay what they want.

Related Posts

1. The True Definition of FREE
2. Techrunch rant on FREE music

Related Services

1. Noca, micropayment service

Posted by Marc Fawzi

The True Definition of FREE

Reprinted from my follow-up response to a Techcrunch thread (with permission from myself)

–

The true definition of “FREE” is not $0.000~ but ANY PRICE *YOU* WANT TO PAY, including Almost Nothing, but NOT Nothing.

Since we cannot divide by “Nothing” (i.e. zero) then “Nothing” (i.e. zero) [as the price of goods or services] could not exist in the realm of economics. For everything must be described mathematically. How do you represent Free in economics in a way that fits existing equations? If you make it really small then it’s not “Nothing.”

That is unless some new math is invented.

Google Got Its Mojo Back (Or Did They Have One To Start With?)

One word:

Android!

Update:

I believe that what Google has done (i.e. investing in Android and getting the FCC to mandate open handset/network requirement for the new “Block C” spectrum) is good for consumers and the industry. I don’t think they’re getting enough credit for it.

Open Social is another good initiative that they should get more credit for.

It’s interesting to see that when faced with overwhelming competition they end up doing what’s good for everyone. And where they have an overwhelming monopoly they aggressively consolidate their hold on the market (and the user.)

I’m very interested to see how they would compete against Apple in the mobile business. It maybe that they’re promoting Android to get Jobs to fully open up the iPhone to 3rd party development.

After all, what business do they have with mobile phones? They’d happily leave that to Apple, IMO, if Apple would open up their SDK and distribution model.

Posted by Marc Fawzi

Towards a World Wide Mesh?

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has delivered a little miracle known as the XO laptop.

The reason it’s a miracle, IMO, is because of it brings us closer to the idea of a World Wide Mesh (WWM).

The XO laptop has the ability to form a wireless mesh together with other XO laptops in its vicinity. Each laptop extends the mesh further, like a link in a long chain.

Such mesh technology when aided by well placed repeaters can span entire villages. Since villages, towns, cities are connected to each other via the Internet these meshes come together in one world-wide mesh.

The Web and the Internet as a result is constrained by many economic, political and technical factors to work within the client-server model. The inability to communicate between applications sitting on different PCs without having to go through unreliable paths (think: UDP hole punching, NAT traversal, uPnP etc) combined with ISPs’ tendency to throttle or even block P2P traffic has resulted in an unhealthy environment for P2P applications.

The XO laptop maybe the first sign of a global shift from the client-server model of the Web to the peer-to-peer model of wireless mesh technology.

The Web will continue to exist, but it may become less significant as the architecture of global communication moves from the client-server model of the Web to the more robust mesh model inspired and potentially pushed forward by the XO laptop.

People already use Bluetooth-enabled phones to share information over a direct wireless connection with other mobile phone users in their vicinity rather than emailing it or sharing it via the Web.

An interesting alternative to waiting for an XO laptop-enabled World Wide Mesh is the possibility of hacking the WiFi stack in WiFi capable phones to add the ability to form a wireless mesh between phones that happen to be in the same area.

Related

1. World Wide Mesh

Posted by Marc Fawzi

Google tries again to Copy/Co-opt the Wikipedia 3.0 vision

[source: slashdot.org]

Google’s “Knol” Reinvents Wikipedia

Posted by CmdrTaco on Friday December 14, @08:31AM
from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.

teslatug writes “Google appears to be reinventing Wikipedia with their new product that they call knol (not yet publicly available). In an attempt to gather human knowledge, Google will accept articles from users who will be credited with the article by name. If they want, they can allow ads to appear alongside the content and they will be getting a share of the profits if that’s the case. Other users will be allowed to rate, edit or comment on the articles. The content does not have to be exclusive to Google but no mention is made on any license for it. Is this a better model for free information gathering?”

–

The only problem is a flaw in Google’s thinking. People who author those articles on Wikipedia actually have brains. People with brains tend to have principles. Getting paid pennies to build the Google empire is rarely one of those principles.

Related

• Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?

Posted by Marc Fawzi

The World Wide Mesh (WWM)

I’m not sure why Wifi hardware vendors don’t update their firmware so that each Wifi router/bridge sold can communicate with nearby ones.

Who needs Level 3 and Worldcom if we have the ability to connect to each other over the air!

Posted by Marc Fawzi

Hakia, Google, Wikia

My intention with Evolving Trends was to foster debate about, um, evolving trends. My intention was not to see ideas that reflect our view of the future get copied or co-opted by major and/or well-known corporations without any sort of debate.

However, I was reminded today as to the actual reason for this blog:

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

– Howard Aiken quoted by Ken Iverson quoted by Jim Horning, 1979″

Well, it looks like we did our part in ramming it down Google’s throat: link // and now Google “Knol”

And now Wikia is into it. too: link (also see this)

Here’s the Evolving Trends article that preceded both: link

Now it would seem that Hakia may have joined the club.

Description of a new service that Hakia just put on their site http://labs.hakia.com/hakia-lab-dial.html

Dialogue Algorithm

The long-term objective of the Dialogue algorithm is to establish a human-like dialogue with the user. The vision is to convert the search engine’s role into a computerized assistant with advanced communication skills while utilizing the largest amount of information resources in the world.The challenge is to analyze search results ranked by the SemanticRank algorithm one step further to determine whether the information can be used to communicate with the user at an elevated level of confidence about its accuracy and credibility. hakia’s conversational system is currently under development. A simplified version of this utility is at the BETA site that allows hakia developers (and the users) to monitor the incremental improvements at every step of the way.An interactive test system is available by invitations which is further advanced than that on the BETA site. You can request access to test this system, or Login using your access code.

Compare this to the Evolving Trends article that preceded their description:

Designing a Better Web 3.0 Search Engine

It’s interesting to see how ideas spread.

Posted by Marc Fawzi

Google vs Web 3.0

In Web 3.0, he who owns the metadata owns the Web.

User Enhanced Search

With Googel Co-Op, Google tried to leverage user-supplied metadata to enhance the accuracy and relevance of Google searches.

Now they’re trying it again with Image Labeler.

But this time they want users to actually use it so they’re making it into a Squirrel Wheel kind of game where you get to play the squirrel.

From their description:

“You’ll be randomly paired with a partner who’s online and using the feature. Over a 90-second period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner’s label, you’ll earn some points and move on to the next image until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you’ve seen and the websites where those images were found. And we’ll show you the points you’ve earned throughout the session.”

You’re better off annotating Wikipedia (using Semantic MediaWiki) and applying your knowledge of a given subject (or domain) to build intelligence into Wikipedia, which is owned by the people (as a non-profit, people funded, people powered encyclopedia.) Why be a squirrel in Google’s squirrel wheel only to have Google abuse your good will?

Update

Google won’t give up. They really do wanna be the Microsoft of the Web.

Here they are trying to copy/co-opt the “Wikiedpai 3.0″ vision by developing their own Wikipedia:

1. http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2007/12/14/google-tries-again-to-co-opt-the-wikipedia-30-vision/

Again, the only problem is a flaw in Google’s thinking. People who author those articles on Wikipedia actually have brains. People with brains tend to have principles. Getting paid pennies to build the Google empire is rarely one of those principles.

Related

1. Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?
2. Google Co-Op: The End of Wikipedia?
3. Web 3.0 Update
4. Is Google a monopoly?
5. Designing a Better Semantic Search Engine*
6. Web 3.0 (Definition)

Posted by Marc Fawzi

The Missing Link

At the time the Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google? article was written, I didn’t think it necessary to supply external references, especially since I wrote it as an opinion piece, not expecting the massive interest it would generate. Lately, however, I’ve been looking at what others have done and I came across this old but relevant paper from 2003, which should provide a more detailed technical context to developers as far as the use of rule-based inference engines and ontologies in the context of Semantic Web + AI (or Web 3.0.)

1. Description Logic Programs: Combining Logic Programs with Description Logic

“A key requirement for the Semantic Web’s architecture overall is to be able to layer rules on top of ontologies–in particular to create and reason with rule-bases that mention vocabulary specified by ontology-based knowledge bases–and to do so in a semantically coherent and powerful manner.”

Posted by Marc Fawzi

Spiral Meandering, Brain Waves and Creativity

I believe that creativity is about controlling chaos, not simply generating it.

Whenever I have an empty paper and a pen I always instinctively end up drawing a spiral with dots arranged along the spiral line following a patten of curved lines that emerge from the tip of the spiral and reach outwards (almost appearing to be moving in their stillness, in clockwise motion.)

I’ve always thought of it as a personal BIOS screen, preprogrammed into my brain. Whenever I have an empty piece of paper I just draw that.

So lately, I have been thinking about the reason behind it.

Here is what I’ve found out so far:

“Brain waves, comprised of neuron impulses, seem to flow along the neurons and down the spinal cord in a spiral pattern.”

“We see spiral forms omnipresent throughout the visible and invisible universe, in galaxies, accretion disks around black holes, coalescing interstellar clouds, [excitable media,] and many other forms of matter and energy.”

Source: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast12may_1.htm

So that leads us to the idea of meandering spiral brain waves.

Bear with me, as I am in a spiral meandering moment… :)

Fig. 1: Spiral Mendering (note the ‘beautiful’ quasi-periodic pattern)

“Reaction-diffusion equations modeling excitable media are simulated ([6,7]). Initially the spiral rotates periodically about a fixed center. The tip of the spiral (shown in white) traces a circle around the center of rotation. The simulation is then stopped and a model parameter is changed. (Specifically the parameter which controls the excitability threshold of the system of equations is changed). The spiral now exhibits a more complex motion known as meander. The meander is due to a Hopf bifurcation as seen in the linear stability spectrum.

Model Parameters for simulation:

“

Source: http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/~barkley/Research/spiral_spectra/node1.html

Simulation software: http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/%7Ebarkley/Software/ezspiral_3_1.tar.gz

Fig. 2: Core Breakup in Spiral [Brain] Waves

Fig 3.: Far Field Breakup in Spiral [Brain] Waves

Moral of the Story

Creativity is about controlling chaos, not simply generating it.

Update

Scientists are now saying that nerves use sound not electrochemical signals to communicate information between the brain and the rest of the body.The nano-vibrations generated would explain the emergence of spiral patterns in brain wave prorogation. I suppose it’s like how having a fine powder on a vibrating plate generates a spiral pattern at a certain frequency range.

Self-Aware Text

(this post was updated at 12:10am, Jan 15, 2007)

Enabling self-organizing text

—Summary of an interesting model for realizing self-organizing text (excerpted from this weird but technically sound source)—

Spin glasses are materials with chaotically oriented atomic spins which can reach neither a ferromagnetic equilibrium (spins aligned) nor a paramagnetic one (spins canceling in pairs), because of long-range spin interactions between magnetic trace atoms (Fe) and the conduction electrons of the host material (Cu). Because these effects reverse repeatedly with distance, no simple state fully resolves the dynamics, and spin glasses thus adopt a large variety of [globally] disordered states [with short range order.] Modeling the transition to a spin glass [i.e. simulated annealing] has close parallels in neural nets, particularly the Hopfield nets consisting of symmetrically unstable circuits. Optimization of a task is then modelled in terms of constrained minimization of a potential energy function. However the problem of determining the global minimum among all the local minima in a system with a large number of degrees of freedom is intrinsically difficult. Spin glasses are also chaotic and display sensitive dependence. Similar dynamics occurs in simulations of continuous fields of neurons.

Annealing is a thermodynamic simulation of a spin glass in which the temperature of random fluctuations is slowly lowered, allowing individual dynamic trajectories to have a good probability of finding quasi-optimal states. Suppose we start out at an arbitrary initial state of a system and follow the topography into the nearest valley, reaching a local minimum. If a random fluctuation now provides sufficient energy to carry the state past an adjacent saddle, the trajectory can explore further potential minima. Modeling such processes requires the inclusion of a controlled level of randomness in local dynamical states, something which in classical computing would be regarded as a leaky, entropic process. The open environment is notorious as a source of such [controlled level of randomness], which may have encouraged the use of chaotic systems in the evolutionary development of the vertebrate brain.

—End of Summary—

Imagine the interaction between random words in the English language having two properties: aligned and none-aligned. If you throw the whole set of words into a heated spin-glass alloy (e.g. Cu-Fe), where the words replace the atoms and where word-word interactions replace spin-spin interactions, and then let it cool slowly (i.e. anneal it) then the system (of word-word interactions) should theoretically self-organize into the lowest potential energy state it could find.

The spin glass model (from the above quoted summary) implements an optimization process that is also a self organizational process that finds the local energy minima associated with a meta-stable state for the system which in turn organizes the local interactions between atomic spins (or words) to minimize discordant interactions (or disorder) in the short range, thus (in the case of word-word interactions) generating text that goes from garbarge in the long range (as a result of globally disordered interactions in the long range) to well-formed in the short range (as a result of mostly aligned/ordered interactions in the short range.)

This idea is pretty raw, incomplete, and may not be the most proper use (or abuse) of the spin glass model (see References.)

However, in line with evolution’s preference for such a model for the brain, I find it useful to inject a controlled level of noise (randomness) into the thinking process.

–

Well, after having some apple crumble, I realize now (randomness works) that the reason this model will work well is because it will generate many well-formed sentences in each state of the system so there is bound to be a percentage of sentences that will actually make sense!

Having said that, this adpatation of the [SK] spin-glass model is pretty rough and needs more thinking to nail down, but the basic idea is good!

From Self-Organizing to Self Aware

What if instead of simply setting the rules and letting order emerge out of chaos (at least in the short range), as implied above, what if each word was an intelligent entity? What if each word knew how to fit itself with other words and within a sentence such that the words work collaboratively and competitively with each other to generate well-formed sentences and even whole articles?

The words would have to learn to read. :)

[insert your Web X.0 fantasy]

Reference

1. Spin Glass Theory and Beyond

Images

Short range ordered regions in 2D state space of a spin glass.

Posted by Marc Fawzi

Share and Prosper

Tags:

web 3.0, web 3.0, web 3.0, semantic web, semantic web, artificial intelligence, AI, statistical mechanics, stochastic, optimization, simulated-annealing, self-organization, spin glass

Designing a better Web 3.0 search engine

This post discusses the significant drawbacks of current quasi-semantic search engines (e.g. hakia.com, ask.com et al) and examines the potential future intersection of Wikipedia, Wikia Search (the recently announced search-engine-in-development, by Wikipedia’s founder), future semantic version of Wikipedia (aka Wikipedia 3.0), and Google’s Pagerank algorithm to shed some light on how to design a better semantic search engine (aka Web 3.0 search engine)

Query Side Improvements

Semantic “understanding” of search queries (or questions) determines the quality of relevant search results (or answers.)

However, current quasi-semantic search engines like hakia and ask.com can barely understand the user’s queries and that is because they’ve chosen free-form natural language as the query format. Reasoning about natural language search queries can be accomplished by: a) Artificial General Intelligence or b) statistical semantic models (which introduce an amount of inaccuracy in constructing internal semantic queries). But a better approach at this early stage may be to guide the user through selecting a domain of knowledge and staying consistent within the semantics of that domain.

The proposed approach implies an interactive search process rather than a one-shot search query. Once the search engine confirms the user’s “search direction,” it can formulate an ontology (on the fly) that specifies a range of concepts that the user could supply in formulating the semantic search query. There would be a minimal amount of input needed to arrive at the desired result (or answer), determined by the user when they declare “I’ve found it!.”

Information Side Improvements

We are beginning to see search engines that claim they can semantic-ize arbitrary unstructured “Wild Wild Web” information. Wikipedia pages, constrained to the Wikipedia knowledge management format, may be easier to semantic-ize on the fly. However, at this early stage, a better approach may be to use human-directed crawling that associates the information sources with clearly defined domains/ontologies. An explicit publicized preference for those information sources (including a future semantic version of Wikipedia, a la Wikipedia 3.0) that have embedded semantic annotations (using, e.g., RDFa http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/ or microformats http://microformats.org) will lead to improved semantic search.

How can we adapt the currently successful Google PageRank algorithm (for ranking information sources) to semantic search?

One answer is that we would need to design a ‘ResourceRank’ algorithm (referring to RDF resources) to manage the semantic search engines’ “attention bandwidth.” Less radical, may be to design a ‘FragmentRank’ algorithm which would rank at the page-component level (ex: paragraph, image, wikipedia page section, etc).

Related

1. Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?
2. Search By meaning

Update

1. See relevant links under comments

Posted by Marc Fawzi and ToxicWave

Share and Prosper

Tags:

web 3.0, web 3.0, web 3.0, semantic web, semantic web, ontology, reasoning, artificial intelligence, AI, hakia, ask.com, pagerank, google, semantic search, RDFa, ResourceRank, RDF, Semantic Mediawiki, Microformats

Who 2.0: Update

First see:

• Who 2.0: Tagging People in the Real World

Then read this (coming to a cell phone/search engine near you):

• Polar Rose AB

Posted by Marc Fawzi

P2P to Destroy eBay, Google, Yahoo

Forget Web 3.0 and P2P 3.0 for a second.

Conventional P2P-enabled versions of Google, eBay, Yahoo et al. can totally shift power to the user, especially since P2P eliminates the need for massive corporations to spend massive amounts of money on server farms to process the users’ transactions. Each user provides a piece of the server farm. The Web’s reported 2 billion users mean that a P2P version of Google can run on a server farm of at least 200 million servers. That is significantly more servers than Google can ever have.

So you wanna take down Google, eBay, Yahoo et al.? Just make a P2P version of them.

But there are even deeper ideas that will disrupt P2P itself.

Update:

Yahoo is destroying itself. They need no help from you.

Posted by Marc Fawzi

The New York Times and Web 3.0

Here is an entry from this blog that chronicles the coining of the term Web 3.0 on this blog in specific relation to Semantic Web and AI agents. It predated by over five (5) months the use of the term by the New York Times in this same context: http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/web-30/

Here is the Evolving Trends article that was the first article to coin, in a highly publicized way, the term Web 3.0 in the context of the Semantic Web and AI agents:

http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2006/06/26/wikipedia-30-the-end-of-google/

And here is the Johnny-come-lately Web 3.0 article by the New York Times that does the same thing but in a different way …

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/business/12web.html

Update

The NYT article made it into the Wikipedia entry on Web 3.0 but some Wikipedia zealot rejected mention of the Evolving Trends article on the basis that it is a blog entry. That is despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people read it and that it defined the term Web 3.0 well before the NYT article did, in the same context.

Who needs centralized media when we have blogs and who needs centralized (and censored) Wikipedia when we can have a distributed one with user-rated entries (like Google’s Knol but distributed [P2P] rather than centralized.)

It is time to adopt P2P and wireless mesh technologies and undermine antiquated, centralized structures of power.

Related

1. Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?

Posted by Marc Fawzi

Web 3.0, Web 3.0, Semantic Web, New York Times