The Princess Who Saved Herself [MP3]

The "Code Monkey Saves World" project is about to stretch itself into the world of kickass princesses. Troubadour Jonathan Coulton and filmmaker and comics writer Greg Pak teamed up a few weeks ago to launch a crowdfunding effort to raise $39,000 to create a series of comic books based on the villains and other characters from Coulton's songs. On their way to blow past $200,000 in pledges, the dynamic duo added more pages to the future comics, promised JoCo would record an album of newly recorded acoustic versions of the songs referenced in the comics, and provided other rewards, most of which existing backers get added without having to increase their pledge.

Pak and Coulton have at least one more rabbit to pull out of their jointly worn hat: a children's book created from "The Princess Who Saved Herself," the title of which explains the song.

Illustration: Takeshi Miyazawa and Jessica Kholinne

"If ever a song wanted to be adapted into a children's book, this is it," Pak said in an interview. If the project hits $250,000, the book will be created after the "Code Monkey" comics are done, and fulfilled digitally. Existing backers at $15 or higher will get the "Princess" book as well. There's no plan (yet) for a printed version of the book.

The story is along the lines of Brave rather than, say, The Little Mermaid film. Pak pointed to little girls who may play at princesses today, as that's encoded in the culture and beyond, but wear ripped jeans under the ball gown and don't need someone else to guide their adventure and control the outcome.

It's a neat model they are following as goals keep being exceeded. Some Kickstarters have been criticized because they mostly pay the creator for his or her time; why that's a problem, I'm not sure, because people who make things deserve to be paid, and crowdfunding is a voluntary operation. As far as I know, Kickstarter does not send goons to homes to threaten people into providing valid credit-card information for stuff they don't like.

But for projects that start to grow extremely large, seeing additional creative efforts included from the new funds certainly makes them more appealing to those that haven't contributed. Pak said that he and Coulton have wanted to layer on more elements to each reward level as the pool of money has increased, which also means being able to pay all of their collaborators for more work. "Because people have supported it, because so many people have come on board, the whole thing can get better," said Pak. The rising tide of funds float everyone's boats. This includes working with the team creating the "Code Monkey" comics: Takeshi Miyazawa, Jessica Kholinne, and Simon Bowland.

After quickly passing their initial goal, Pak said that he is a state of constant amazement. Though he knows that his and Coulton's work has been well received and that fans have supported their projects directly in many ways in the past, the intensity and scale of response has been a "huge amount of fun."

Photo: Matt Bresler

Whatever you do, don't call Ophira Eisenberg a comedienne. That's an outdated, patronizing term from an era when men patted women on the head (or, unsolicited, on the ass) and called Amelia Earhart an aviatrix.

If only her fiancé, now husband, had known that before he compiled a spreadsheet of every woman he had slept with before meeting Eisenberg, a list she discovered by accident and couldn't resist examining, and which listed her as the latest entry with the unfortunate label comedienne in the cell next to her name. She was furious. But Jonathan is a remarkable man, and, in one of the best parts of her new memoir, manages to explain himself credibly. (Spoiler: She marries him.)

Eisenberg is a professional comedian, thank you very much. She tours, she hosts the NPR quiz show Ask Me Another (with the Internet's Jonathan Coulton as the regular musical sidekick), and recently came out with a memoir: Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy. You can hear a half-hour conversation she and I had about the book, her life, and her husband's beautiful, piercing eyes in the podcast in this post.

It's a Bildungsroman, like many memoirs, dealing largely with the period from when she came of age and sexual maturity as a teenager through moves from her hometown of Calgary to Toronto and then New York, and her shift from IT support to full-time funny lady.

And she is one funny lady. As she recounts her life through the lens of the beds she's passed through, she has plenty that we can laugh with at her side. The guy with the bedroom full of Garfield stuffed animals for one. His big dick got women into bed, despite all the plush (she nicknamed it “Odie"); his mechanical and unerotic behavior in the sack meant Eisenberg looked at hundreds of lasagna-loving dolls staring at her just the one time. The discomfort of losing her virginity on a bathroom counter, but at least it took the curse off from never having done it before. The morning her alarm clock fails to go off, and her mother discovers her punk-rocker boyfriend still in bed with her, him not having snuck out at 5 a.m. Sand-encrusted Australian beach sex with a near stranger, followed by recriminations by a long-term boyfriend about V.D. — even though she figured out later he'd picked it up from a fling of his own.

But there is something substantial missing from this book: shame. Eisenberg doesn't wring her hands over the life she's led, although there's a little chagrin here and there, especially about the Garfields and the time she picked up a bartender's boyfriend by accident. She must have missed the lectures on feeling bad about intimacy, even enjoying it, while growing up as the youngest of six, the child of older parents.

She didn't even get the extra patina of misery when experiencing happiness that comes from being a Jew. (My Jewish parents also failed to tell me I should expect to be unhappy.) Her mother was Dutch and father from what was then the British Mandate for Palestine, and they didn't impose a particular morality on her. They may also have been a little exhausted raising six children over a span of over 40 years.

Eisenberg went home with men and pursued long-term relationships with some and then didn't agonize later about whether or not she should have slept with them. She loved the connection. She loves men, their bodies, and sex. Marriage, commitment, and monogamy were never the Barbie Dream House goal for her, but she found the right guy when she wasn't looking for him, which is how it always goes.

Eisenberg tells a great story, and she's a natural at weaving together the funny bits, many of which involve a bar followed by a romp, and the more serious stuff, such as how she almost died at eight from a horrific car accident, and bears a large and visible scar on her torso to this day. The scar becomes a totem in the book: she worries about how men will react to it, even as she bears it as a mark of survival.

Some of the best comedians are deeply unhappy people who are able to use that sadness to tap into some part of the human condition that lets them rip laughs out of the audience. I recall seeing the late Mitch Hedberg perform at a small comedy club in Seattle a decade ago. My wife and I loved his performances on Comedy Central. Seeing him in person, though, it was immediately apparent how miserable he was, even though we were laughing nearly uncontrollably. At the end of his set, he said, "If you'd like to talk to me after the show…I would be very surprised." That is it, in a nutshell.

Eisenberg is the other kind: the one that comes to humor from a knowledge of the vagaries of life, but hasn't been broken by it. Good natured, but not insipid. She wears her joy as a shield, from whatever deep well she continually calls it up.

But she pulls a trick on us with her book's title. She may "screw everyone," but this is a sweet and funny book in which she tells us how she went from a teenaged girl to an adult girl to a woman, and found true love. The sex is just cherries on the wedding cake.

The Internet went to sleep last night and tossed and turned with a fever dream of monkeys, mad scientists, and robots. When it awoke, it found that Jonathan Coulton and Greg Pak had launched a crowdfunding campaign to create a series of comic books based on characters from Coulton's songs.

That sound you heard is the Internet going "squeeeeeeeeeee!"

If the Kickstarter project funds, the two will produce four comic books released in digital form to backers as they're finished over the next several months, and then as a print collection at the end to those that pledge at the necessary minimum level.

Who am I kidding? If it's successful? C'mon. Seriously. If enough funds are raised over the goal, the page count of the comics might increase.

Buying in at a higher level, as with most rewards-based crowdfunding campaigns, gets you extra-special stuff. "The highest level of our Kickstarter is, you get a capuchin monkey shipped to you," joked Coulton. For slightly more money, you don't get the monkey. Pak suggested, instead, that for a high premium, "you get to spend 10 minutes in a kissing booth with Jonathan." The actual awards are nearly as good, with less chance of contagion.

It's an almost embarrassingly perfect storm of wonderful things. Coulton made his fame as a troubadour of nerdiness starting in 2005 when he quit his programming job and produced a "Thing a Week": one song every week for a year, which he then turned into four albums. Coulton's songs tapped into our inner geek, because he was (and is) one of us. We are all Code Monkey, aren't we? I know I am. He's now the regular music guest on NPR's Ask Me Another quiz show, and headlines the JoCo Cruise Crazy boat excursion developed by Paul & Storm that just attracted 700 people who, Coulton said, come to the cruise now just as much to be with a like-minded coterie as to mix with him and his buddies. (I interviewed Coulton recently for my podcast series The New Disruptors, talking about the choices he made that gave him his independence.)

Greg Pak burst into general consciousness with his live-action film, Robot Stories in 2003, which he wrote and directed. The film is about morality and consciousness told in four separate tales. He toured with the movie for two years (winning dozens of awards along the way) while also starting what is now a career as a comic-book writer for major Marvel titles and characters. He also produced his own magnificent tale of the near future, Vision Machine, which seems eerie now with Google Glass nearly on the market. He recently signed on with DC Comics to work on the Batman/Superman series.

Combine these two gentlemen with comics and crowdfunding as the glue, and I suspect that happy mutants of a delicate nature have already cracked open a homebrewed hard cider and are fanning themselves with an old, well-thumbed issue of Concrete.

I spoke last week to Coulton, who was in Brooklyn, and Pak, then at an undisclosed location that I guess is close to the earth's core or, to judge by Skype's oddities, in a stealth ship orbiting the planet under bombardment by tachyon particles.

"I think everybody working in comics is aware of the incredible opportunities that creator-owned work provides. and I've had my eye on more creator-owned stuff for a while," Pak said. He and Coulton have been friends since they attended Yale twenty years ago, and Pak said he's long been a fan of his buddy's music. (I overlapped with both at that New Haven institution, but knew neither at the time.)

Last November, Pak randomly tweeted that characters from Coulton's songs would make an excellent supervillain team. Pak said in our interview that the musician's characters are "the kind of twisted guys for the most part who, for whatever reason, are filled with longing and resentment." ("Yeah, for whatever reason," Coulton said, laughing.) "Every one of these songs has a strong story at the core," Pak said.

Coulton publicly tweeted that it would be a good idea, and they privately set rapidly to work on planning the series, called Code Monkey Save World. The spoilers-free outline is that the heroes are Code Monkey (an actual monkey) and Skullcrusher, the owner and operator of villanous Skullcrusher Mountain. They are both victims of their ineptitude in pursuing unrequited love. Code Monkey becomes the semi-willing sidekick to the mad scientist, and events unfurl from there.

"No friction prevented this thing from happening," Coulton said. Coulton owns his work entirely and Pak is an independent contractor to Marvel and DC. That allowed them to figure out arrangements quickly without involving other parties. Pak signed on Takeshi Miyazawa to draw the four-comic series.

Crowdfunding seemed a natural for them, because they know they can reach people who already like their separate work, and hope that a collaboration is appealing to that likely highly overlapped audience. "It's a classic superhero team-up," said Coulton. Pak replied, "Or is it a supervillain team-up?" We'll find out.

We talk more about the details of writing and collaboration between the two in the 16-minute audio interview embedded above.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/15/kickstarteverything.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/04/vinyl-vault-lights-fuse-on-cop.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/04/vinyl-vault-lights-fuse-on-cop.html#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2013 16:32:06 +0000 Glenn Fleishman http://boingboing.net/?p=210511 Photo: Masayoshi Sekimura (cc)

Amoeba Records' new out-of-print music service, Vinyl Vaults, proves a deep knowledge of the industry it cherishes. But the much-loved music store's archive of obscure classics is also a potential time bomb, ticking away inside a bizarre legal tangle that few in the business are inclined to unravel.

Amoeba is the real deal, a California record-store chain with three massive retail outlets in an age of digital downloads. It has 10,000, 19,000, and 28,000 square feet in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Hollywood. Its online efforts are more modest, launched in 2012 after a bafflingly expensive $11 million, 6-year in-house project. It offers just 600,000 items, Amoeba told Variety, because its reporting system isn't robust enough for the major labels.

Sales are steady, though, in an age when it competitors are failing. And now the chain is digitizing LPs, 45s, and 78s of forgotten and undervalued music.

It sells tracks as MP3s for $0.78, in Apple Lossless (ALAC in MPEG4's M4A file format) for $1.18, and WAV files for $1.58. There's a slight discount for buying albums. Amoeba says in its FAQ that it tried to run down the rightsholders for these recordings. Where it can't, however, it posts the music anyway, and said to Variety it holds fees for that music in escrow.

There's a problem here. There's no such provision in copyright law for such an exemption, and Amoeba could find itself in real trouble, no matter its goodwill and above-board behavior. This doesn't mean that current copyright law is reasonable on this score; it is not. Rather, that it's fairly clear that what Amoeba is doing isn't permitted.

There's no active copyright police trolling for violations: rightsholders would have to discover Amoeba's work and decide to act, whether to claim escrow fees or file suit. I hoped to ask the chain about the legal advice it had received, but at this writing haven't received a response.

Music published in the United States has two sets of rights attached: the composition itself, which is under a straightforward copyright, and the audio recording, protected separately by a "phonogram" right. Performers negotiate through contract their rights in a work, as a variety of law prohibits reproductions of performances without permission of the artists. (Some countries also have moral rights separate from intellectual property ones, which give irrecoverable vetoes to artists to keep their name on a work or off it, and to prevent their material from being used in a way to derogate them or their work.)

Amoeba runs into trouble in both regards. Compositions published in the United States before 1923 are in the public domain. You'll find that most compositions were put into print because audio recording rights were so fuzzy. Composers and music houses made money selling sheet music to the oceans of home musicians of the day who performed for family and their own enjoyment. (Has that day come back? It seems increasingly so!)

But after 1923, as with books, almost every composition remains either under copyright until 2019 or later, or difficult to track down affirmative knowledge that it's protected. Compositions, books, and other kinds of media between 1923 and 1951 were under copyright's aegis for 28 years and required a renewal in writing to extend the expiration for another 28 years. If the first extension was missed, later updates to copyright law don't protect lapsed work. Some of what Amoeba has digitized may fall into that category. But any work from that time that had a renewal was swept into a 1976 copyright law and then the later 1998 "Sonny Bono" extension. Works from 1923 expire no earlier than 2019 if renewed.

The legal nature of phonogram rights is particularly bizarre. In the United States, no federal law covered audio recordings until 1972. Instead, common law and state law governed whether an audio recording could be duplicated, and such rights would never expire. In fact, all recordings from the dawn of sound in the 1870s through early February 1972 remain under such murky law until 2067! On February 15, 2067, all pre-1972 recordings are federalized for a split second and then pushed into the public domain. (I wrote about this at BoingBoing in relation to the Library of Congress's extensive historical holdings, much of them now digitized, that the library cannot release without permission.)

For the kind of material that Amoeba discusses, it's likely virtually all of it remains under protection until 2067. There are two odd footnotes to this, as well. First, some copyright scholars maintain that the pre-1972 miasma of laws indicates that the party that possesses the master recordings also has the phonogram right to duplicate them unless addressed in a recording contract — and maybe even despite contract terms. (Amoeba's FAQ references those holding rights to either compositions or master recordings.) You can see how that might freak record labels out. They wonder if an album they've sold in the millions since the 1950s or 1960s could actually belong to someone else who holds the master, either to recover past royalties or for future sales.

The second quirk is that because of mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcies of labels dating back at least to 1900, modern record labels may have the phonogram rights to a lot of out-of-print albums and not even realize it, until there's money to be made or to use as a weapon in negotiation. For instance, RCA was originally part of GE, and owned NBC. RCA bought Victor in 1929; GE divested RCA in 1930, and bought it back in 1986 to get NBC (later sold to Comcast). It spun off RCA's catalog to Bertelsmann, which ultimately sold all its music rights to Sony Music Entertainment. You can't use a Victor recording without Sony's permission.

Some of that history is easy to trace, and I expect Amoeba went directly to the source for well-known ancient labels, like Victor, OKeh, and Columbia (also owned by Sony). Edison's record label shut down in 1929 and masters were sold to Henry Ford, who wanted to protect industrial history. The masters are with the National Park Service now, but the ownership of the rights is cloudy.

The small label Dust to Digital re-releases 78rpm and other old recordings in some incredible curated compilations, but its founder tells me it has been assiduous in tracking down ownership. That was particularly arduous in producing Opika Pende, which had 100 recordings from across Africa from 1909 to the 1970s that had never been issued since their original date.

Where does this leave Amoeba? It seems to be standing on the notion that orphaned works are up for grabs so long as you pay out the owners' cut later when it's claimed. Orphaned works are creations for which no clear knowledge of ownership exists. But there's no provision in U.S. law for how to deal with orphaned works of any kind, music or otherwise. A proposal from 2006 was languishing at the Copyright Office, as it requires Congress to take it up (ha) to establish a clear procedure in law. It's just started moving along again, with the public comment period closing February 4th.

The Copyright Office's most recent statement (PDF) about potential legislation back in October 2012 sums up the issues neatly, including Amoeba's potential problems:

Under current law, anyone who uses an orphan work without permission runs the risk that the copyright owner(s) may bring an infringement lawsuit for substantial damages, attorneys’ fees, and/or injunctive relief unless a specific exception or limitation to copyright applies.

In such a situation, a productive and beneficial use of the work may be inhibited—not because the copyright owner has asserted his exclusive rights in the work, or because the user and owner cannot agree on the terms of a license—but merely because the user cannot identify and/or locate the owner and therefore cannot determine whether, or under what conditions, he or she may make use of the work.

This outcome is difficult if not impossible to reconcile with the objectives of the copyright system and may unduly restrict access to millions of works that might otherwise be available to the public (e.g., for use in research, education, mainstream books, or documentary films).

The legislative proposal suggests that anyone who engages in a good-faith effort to find the rightsholders for a given work (of any kind) would be released from harm should the owners later turn up and threaten a lawsuit. Instead, the party who used the orphaned work would have to then pay a fee that is customary and in line with other work of the same sort. Some worry this law would only help large media companies who could afford both the searching and any fees required later, but I think it has a broader applicability as it eliminates the threat of lawsuit and actual lawsuits, and only allows reasonable fees. (For essentially non-commercial uses, no fee would be owed as long as the work was pulled down if requested, kind of like the safe-harbor provision in the odious Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which prevents liability to hosts of content as long as they follow the form of a take-down notice by purported copyright holders.)

There's a model for this, which reared its head two weeks ago in the case of Jonathan Coulton, Glee, and "Baby Got Back." The compulsory rights model for music licensing, as defined in the U.S., mandates that any composition, once publicly distributed (for sale, given away, or otherwise), can be covered by another artist with a simple notice and a standard fee per copy sold or distributed. For physical recordings and digital downloads, the rate is 9.1¢ for songs up to five minutes and 1.75¢ for every minute (or fraction) thereafter. The original composer can't prevent covers; the artist performing the cover creates a right in the resulting audio recording, but has no copyright in composition, and thus can't protect an arrangement or interpretation.

(That bit Coulton, as Glee's plagiarism of his arrangement is essentially legal, even though Glee, as a TV show, had to obtain synchronization and other rights to distribute its version of "Baby Got Back." But Glee may have used Coulton's actual audio, and if so, Coulton can pursue action on the violation of his phonogram rights.)

Orphaned rights rules can have unintended consequences, because a "good-faith" effort can be subject to interpretation. A bill in the UK in 2010 would have defined an orphan work so broadly that a photograph disseminated in any form, even posted on a personal Web site or emailed to a friend, could be stripped of its identifying characteristics and used without permission by any media firm or private party. The bill lacked strong good-faith provisions and penalties. The bill would have required a standard payment in what would become a form of compulsory use. Proposed rates would be low compared to actual licensing fees. Photographers and others balked and the provision was removed in 2010, but appears to be a problem again this year.

Google in its book-scanning effort became mired in this because it mixed together four categories of books: those to which publishers acceded to include in its scanning or posting efforts, copyrighted works to which the owners were known and didn't give permission, public domain works, and orphaned works. Orphaned works were the least of their problems, really, but its attempted settlement with authors' and publishers' associations would have anointed Google as the sole entity allowed to offer orphaned works for sale, rather than establish a broad principle that any private or non-profit group could follow. Not cool, Google. (The associations also don't speak for all authors and publishers, but were essentially claiming that right.)

Nonetheless, copyright in the United States has already locked up so much material intended to assist in the progress of science and the useful arts beyond the intended brief monopoly that ignoring orphaned works and allowing the status quo to persist would be a colossal mistake. Amoeba's efforts may yield it only hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it's clearly partly a labor of love. But one vindictive rightsholder could make life exceedingly unpleasant for the record-store chain, and pursue maximum statutory damages regardless of all of Amoeba's good faith.

Dust to Digital, the re-release label mentioned earlier, is starting up a non-profit to rescue the massive amount of music locked up in out-of-print 78rpm discs and older recordings. The firm has equipment placed with collectors to let them slowly digitize their discs. But until the law is clarified about orphan works and the risks that ensue, Amoeba may have stepped forward to take the heat, while others linger behind seeking clarity.

RSS co-inventor: no

Aaron co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification. Impressive enough for anyone at any age, Aaron was perhaps 15 when he accomplished this. But he didn't co-develop RSS itself, as most mainstream press accounts have stated. RSS originated at Netscape (as version 0.9) to handle channels on its portal site, based in part on previous work by Microsoft and others. Netscape revised the spec to incorporate ideas from Dave Winer; Winer revised RSS further, incorporated it into his firm's products, and evangelized its adoption. He also updated the spec to version 0.92 to add audio enclosures, which led to the spectacular growth in what rapidly became known as podcasting. (That was partly due to work by Winer and Adam Curry to demonstrate automatic delivery of podcasts to iPods and other MP3 players.)

RSS 1.0 was an entirely separate effort spearheaded by O'Reilly Media with the participation of many other interesting Internet media and syndication firms, and which used RDF (Resource Description Framework) elements, which form the basis of the Semantic Web. RDF comprises both ends of a link (not just a hyperlink pointer) and the relationship between them. RSS 1.0 was a dead end in itself, though still in wide use because many blogging system generate RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom syndication files. But Aaron and others went on from RSS 1.0 to work at great length on RDF at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The Semantic Web remains an important concept, still not fully realized, and Aaron was a critical part of that evolution.

Winer's RSS went from 0.92 effectively to 2.0, the rights to which he transferred from his firm to the Berkman Center at Harvard, which then released it under Creative Commons license in 2003. The Atom spec was meant to replace RSS with something fresh and designed around how blogs and commenting were being used, but has ultimately only complemented RSS. The RSS Advisory Boardhas become a kind of keeper of the flame making minor tweaks and having been formally assigned by Netscape the 0.90 and 0.91 spec and by Yahoo the Media RSS spec.

Reddit co-founder: yes

It's a minor quibble, but has provoked many arguments over the years. Reddit was founded in June 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. There are varying accounts by the two of them and by Aaron over the years as to when Aaron became involved, but it was after the start. Aaron moved Reddit from lisp to python, and later released the web.py script into the public domain that was the framework for running Reddit. (Reddit later moved to other code.)

Aaron's existing firm, Infogami, merged with Reddit in late 2005 at the suggestion of Y Combinator, which had funded both. Ohanian often calls this an acquisition by Reddit; Paul Graham of Y Combinator has repeatedly called it a merger. Condé Nast acquired Reddit at the end of October 2006. Aaron moved to San Francisco and worked out of Wired's office (also a Condé Nast property) until he was fired or asked to resign after an extended vacation and (Aaron said) convalescence.

Aaron didn't technically co-found Reddit, although he claimed in May 2007 that he had worked on it earlier than Ohanian and Huffman agree. Ohanian posted a Google+ item in 2011 trying to clarify with a timeline when Aaron joined after his arrest for the JSTOR incident pointing to a 2005 Wired story with quotes from both Aaron and him in it. But it seems clear that Y Combinator's head, Paul Graham, anointed Aaron a co-founder after the merger, since the three were founders of their respective firms. The press release from Condé Nast announcing the acquisition (PDF) also called him a founder; that would have been approved by Reddit before being released.

web.py is one of many pieces of code that Aaron wrote and released either into the public domain or via broad Creative Commons licenses. Between that code, his early involvement in Creative Commons, RSS 1.0, and RDF its likely that a good hunk of the Web pages in existence have some connection to his work.

Aaron's reach was huge, and his loss incalcuable. But his work should be accurately remembered.

To find the heart of the nation's audiovisual memory, I took a lovely drive in October along ever smaller highways heading southwest from Washington, D.C., to Culpeper, Virginia, where sound recordings, films, and video reside in temperature-controlled vaults beneath Mount Pony.

Passing historical sites like Manassas (where Bull Run is located) , and watching the landscape shift rapidly from government buildings and commercial high rises to strip malls to farms and antique stores, it felt as if I traveled through time as well as distance on the 75-mile trip.

But the library's Culpeper facility is firmly rooted in the 21st century, and its existence owes much to the latter half of the 20th. While the focus is on what's buried inside, it's hard to ignore the beauty of the setting, its landscaping, and the building's architecture; it's the best use of concrete that I've ever seen in interior design, and I say that completely unironically.

Bursting into flame

The Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation has a mouthful of a name, and sits in a seemingly peculiar spot, perched on a hill above the quaint small town of Culpeper, which is chock full of shops and mildly trendy restaurants.

Gene DeAnna, the chief of recorded sound collections for the entire library, explained during a visit in October that the building's underground storage area had once belonged to the Federal Reserve, and stored enough currency to restart a cash economy east of the Mississippi River in the event of nuclear war or other massive disasters.

It became superannuated, and in 1988, the money was removed. The facility was put up for sale in 1997. David Woodley Packard, the son of HP founder Dave Packard and his wife Lucile, was instrumental in arranging for the private purchase of the site. The bunker was transformed through $155 million provided by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Packard Humanities Institute, the latter of which the younger Packard heads.

Congress also allocated $82 million, but the site was under Packard's supervision, which explains why it's gorgeous. The government's brief for functional architecture doesn't include beauty (and sometimes even fails the functional part) lest officials are castigated for wasting money. Packard had a handsome building constructed for office and conservation functions, as well as upgrading and expanding storage to the precise needs of the LOC, before handing it over to the Librarian of Congress.

In a film about the facility, Packard makes this extraordinarily humble statement, that's also absolutely true: "The reason that we can do this is because of the achievement of the tens of thousands of employees of the Hewlett-Packard Company over the years, especially in the first 50 years. I think they should take the most pride and I don’t think anyone should give me credit for it."

The audiovisual conservation part of the Library of Congress has under its purview all recorded audio, film, video, and associated printed material (like movie scripts) donated to and collected by the library. (Conservation refers to keeping material stabilized, with repairs done without irreversible changes.) The Packard Campus holds much of this collection, including 124 nitrate film vaults, 3.5 million "items" of recorded sound, 1.2 million films and videos, and much more. (A smaller amount that doesn't require the same degree of care or conservation is in other LOC archives.)

If you ever wondered why we need an official repository to keep a record of our creative past that has an eternal charter, rather than allowing academic, corporate, and private libraries and archives to handle it, one only need consider the problem of nitrate film base. Kodak's founder George Eastman commercialized the use of cellulose nitrate to make rolls of film in contrast to the individual plates previously required. The ease of shooting onto continuous roll film appealed both to professional and amateur photographers, and also gave Eastman the lock on the nascent film industry. (He violated a patent and later paid out a vast sum to settle.)

Unfortunately for preservationists, nitrate film is highly flammable even when it's new, and it decomposes in storage into flammable gas. Films that haven't burst into flame — as prints did in many theatres, killing patrons, and in storage, destroying themselves and archives around them — will eventually turn into goop and dust. Kodak notes on its site, that "as the film breaks down, it gives off nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, and other gases that yellow the film base, yellow and soften gelatin, and oxidize the silver image. Later, the base cockles, becoming very brittle and then sticky. Finally, it disintegrates completely." Delightful.

Photographic negatives until the 1930s and motion picture negatives and prints from the start of the industry until about 1951 used nitrate film base, and those that remain are all at risk. The LOC says over 80% of movies made between 1893 and 1930 are lost for good. The vaults under Mount Pony keep remaining memories alive.

A Mercury record.

Resuscitating the past

The LOC conducts specially arranged tours of the Packard Campus. It also has showings in its facilities of films from its collection; since the movies are shown on site, the library doesn't have to arrange permission from the copyright holders for those still under protection. The lucky folks who live within a reasonable drive of Culpeper can attend screenings for free most Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays of well-known movies and films that few have watched in living memory. The lovely theater even has an organ used to play along with silent films.

The library's ability to bypass copyright restrictions holds true for its sound recordings as well. In the library's Recorded Sound Reference Center in D.C., and in limited other locations, researchers and civilians may listen to parts of the collection with advance arrangement. But the limits on what and where one can listen are what brought me to Culpeper.

I'd met the recorded sound section head, DeAnna, on a previous trip to D.C. after interviewing him in June 2011 about a project he'd spearheaded called the National Jukebox. The jukebox streams audio from a digitized collection of more than 10,000 recordings from the Victor Talking Machine Company from 1901 or 1925 retrieved from wax and shellac discs.

A thoughtful man with a touch of Southern lilt in his voice and a clear love of music and his work, DeAnna showed me the labs in which technicians digitize a myriad of audio formats dating back nearly 130 years. It's a tedious process, because most media — either due to fragility, playback equipment, or other factors — must be digitized at real-time rates or even in multiple passes or fits and starts. Most labs are equipped with reel-to-reel, cassette and other formats of tape players, as well as record turntables. One even has a cylinder reader for wax and other ancient formats.

One room contains recording and playback equipment that spans the entire history of fixing sound permanently onto a medium. In a more contemporary lab, DeAnna showed me IRENE, a system developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to scan grooved recordings, like 78 rpm discs, and reconstruct sound without any physical contact. (You can view an annotated set of pictures from my visit at Flickr.)

Years ago, the library would play the original media on request for researchers in D.C. under carefully controlled conditions. More fragile material, such as lacquer discs and brittle or damaged tape, would be transferred to mylar tape reels for playback to keep wear and tear low on the originals. Analog audio degrades every time it's played back — some forms more than others.

Now, DeAnna said, the creation of a digital version is likely the last time the master recording will ever be played. "These copies will be the last we'll have time to make," he said. No correction is applied in the transfer, with the exception made in cases in which material is unlistenable without some editing. (One might ask why the original is maintained, since it will likely never be consulted again or will degrade beyond playing; that gets into philosophical issues.)

The library digitizes material when it's requested for research and even personal purposes as much as is feasible, as well as having a program of converting material that's falling apart or that works towards the goal of having complete collections in digital form.

To hold these digitizations, the Packard campus sports a server room that's modest in floorspace and vast in storage. It contains both spinning disks and robotically retrieved offline tape storage. The center has the capacity for 10 petabytes of tape storage currently, but that's about to quadruple with an upgrade to the tape format. The Culpeper facility is connected by fiber-optic line back to listening rooms in D.C. proper, in which researchers can hear the digitized work. Keeping up with digital storage requirements is the least of the library's problems.

Collectors of miscellany

Silence!

Which brings us back to the National Jukebox. Despite the material dating back no later than 1925, launching the project required permission from Sony Music Entertainment, which is the successor through a chain of ownership to the Victor Talking Machine Company. Briefly: RCA, part of GE at the time, bought Victor in 1929. GE had to divest both RCA, which also owned NBC, in 1930. In 1986, GE bought back RCA and sold off everything but NBC, now owned by Comcast. Bertelsmann bought the music catalog, and eventually sold it to Sony in 2008. The rights followed all that. (I'm distantly related to RCA's once long-time chief, David Sarnoff, on my mother's side. He sent my parents a telegram and hefty check when they were married in 1965.)

"Wait!" I hear you cry. "Why would the Library of Congress need permission for material that old to offer it freely? Isn't it in the public domain?" That, my friends, is an involved answer, and something I talked about extensively with DeAnna during our ramble through the audio archives and labs.

Sound recordings typically have two sets of rights: a copyright in the underlying material, such as a composition or an oral work (even if the oral work is a public extemporaneous performance), and a sound copyright, sometimes called a phonogram right, which covers the audio part. (The phonogram right has a neat Ⓟ symbol that has a distinct meaning apart from copyright's ©.)

Until February 15, 1972, the sound copyright fell under the common law of whatever state in which a recording was made. Common law had no expiration date on rights, and also made it murky as to what party possessed the right to reproduce audio. The singer? Musicians? The studio? The producer? Some experts believe that whoever owns the master recordings (in whatever form: wax, lacquer, tape, metal, and so forth) also owns the audio rights. Studios are reluctant to test this in court.

Recordings created after February 1972 have a federally regulated expiration, and phonogram rights can be vested and assigned just like the copyright in a book. (For the uglier details, read "Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States," a one-page summary by Peter B. Hirtle at Cornell of all of America's copyright vagaries.)

Federal rules leave work under state protection until February 15, 2067. On that date, a peculiar legal event will occur. All material under protection is federalized for just a moment, and then instantly put into the public domain. It's a form of copyright magic. You read those dates correctly, too. Edison's first utterances in 1877 onto tinfoil (lost now) may bear 190 years of protection. (I dive into this particular aspect in greater depth in my Economist blog entry about the rights issues associated with the Jukebox.)

There's an effort underway by the Copyright Office to fix part of this by retroactively federalizing the phonogram right for all works before February 15, 1972, and assigning sensible expiration dates of 95 years from the date of publication or, for unpublished works, 120 years from when it was fixed in an audio medium.

That would expire the phonogram right for all published audio from 1917 and earlier (unpublished audio, 1892 and earlier), representing a wonderfully large hunk of the LOC's collection, along with material in other governmental hands and in academic and private collections. It's also intentionally close to the 1923 cutoff before which published printed works vest in the public domain with no ambiguity. (Books, films, compositions, and other material published in 1923 through 1972 had retrospective extensions of 75 years, later extended to 95 years, that mean that anything published in 1923 doesn't enter the public domain until January 1, 2019.)

Artifacts of a past age.

Listen carefully

The current state of things clearly pains DeAnna, who is rightly proud of the remarkable range of material in the library's collection. He said the LOC was once culturally snooty and rejected popular music in favor of classical, which led to lacunae, some of which were later backfilled by donations and collection efforts.

Universal Music Group donated 200,000 master recordings (nearly a mile of storage) in 2011 covering released and unreleased material from the late 1920s to the late 1940s, but not the rights to that material. Universal managed to shift the cost of maintaining these archives to the LOC without providing any cash or revenue stream, although it has given permission for parts of the archive to be streamed in the future.

Much of the library's audio holdings, even most of that Universal gift, have little current commercial value to the parties that retain the phonogram right and often the associated copyright. In one lab, I looked into a bin and spotted a box containing the October 20, 1942 NBC radio broadcast captured on a lacquer disc of several programs, including an episode of "Fibber McGee and Molly."

NBC meticulously recorded its radio broadcasts, and donated the archives in 1978 (150,000 lacquer discs from the 1930s to 1970s). When NBC gets an inquiry about using this material, DeAnna said the interested party is referred to the library, which digitizes it and charges its cost in doing so. NBC separately negotiates its own licensing fees.

Thousands upon thousands of hours of broadcasts, including an enormous amount of news recorded during World World II, are locked up. DeAnna would like to set them free, but he lacks the authority, and copyright and phonogram rightsholders have little motivation to let their rights go as they cling to the notion that some portion of donated or library-collected material could potentially generate revenue. DeAnna would make NBC's material broadly available, if only someone with authority at the network had the interest in signing over the necessary permissions.

The nation's audio history remained tantalizingly at my fingertips as I toured around the main building and, later, through one of the 17 vaults dedicated to recorded sound. In the future, the library hopes to create dozens of outposts under its control across the country to allow more people access to digitized material of all kinds.

DeAnna doesn't want to deny rightsholders ownership nor commercial exploitation of valuable recordings, but that remains a tiny part of what is in the library's hands. The rights situation means, for now, the sound of silence reigns over our past — unless you can make a trip to a listening room in D.C. or cadge a visit to Culpeper.

​This article appeared previously in ​The Magazine​, an iOS periodical.

Jeopardy! Contestant Audition in Seattle

Ha! That's a new scam, I thought, before I recollected that I had taken the Jeopardy quiz show's online screening test earlier in 2011. While I have been told my entire life that I would be perfect on Jeopardy due to my ability to retain and produce (on demand or in spite of protestations not to) trivial information, I thought I scored poorly on the online test. Apparently not.

I called the number in the email after first confirming via Google that it was actually connected to Sony Pictures Entertainment, which produces the show, and was told that, yes, it was legit. A year later, I found myself at Sony Pictures in a suit and a tie shaking hands with Alex Trebek, and hearing the dulcet tones of announcer Johnny Gilbert say my name.

If you have access to this quaint thing called "broadcast television," whether over the air or through cable or satellite receivers, you might have seen me win $15,199 last night by ultimately correctly recalling Karl Marx's name in the nick of time. That was a squeaker. I'll be on again this evening, and you'll see how I perform this time around.

Jeopardy is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. Everyone I know seems to have watched it as a kid, and some friends and colleagues' parents continue to watch it every night. The show had a top viewership of 50 million in the 1990s, but has declined to about 9 million today. The last time you may have thought about it, if you're a typical Boing Boing reader, is when you heard that Ken Jennings won 74 episodes in a row after the program lifted a five-win maximum. (Ken was an outlier. Few people have won more than five episodes since, and no one has come close to his run.)

Because it's in syndication, you can't stream it online. The show must police its copyright quite rigorously, too, as it's hard to find more than a handful of short bits on YouTube and elsewhere. Thus, the only way to experience it is to watch or record it when it's broadcast. (Someone uploaded a few minutes of last night's last clues and Final Jeopardy to YouTube, where it's still available at the moment.)

Achieving an ostensible lifelong goal was just as good as I'd hoped, especially since I won. The show requires that contestants be coy since it's taped two months in advance. We're not supposed to disclose outcomes, and I even waited until this week, when contestants' pictures are posted on the Jeopardy Web site, to promote my appearance. All I can say as this is published today (Friday) after winning a single game, I may lose tonight or I may still be flying down every week or two to record more shows. You won't know I've lost until you see a putative future episode in which I am no longer champion.

After my first (and only?) stint on the show, a friend of mine pointed out that while Jeopardy appears to be a quiz show, it's really a very particular form of a reality show. It's like The Amazing Race with most (but not all) of the personality stripped out. Instead of competing Survivor-like in physically intense challenges with deprivations and also trying to manage the social calculus of not being voted off, Jeopardy reduces us mostly to brains and reflexes.

This starts with the selection process. For decades, Jeopardy had cattle-call auditions in which interested people were called in to take a quick test. Those that scored well continued on, and some made it on the air. But most people were sent away. This is, of course, highly inefficient. Three years ago, the show switched to an online screening test, and now has 100,000 people take that quiz each year.

From the 100,000, the contestant coordinators winnow out about 2,000 to 3,000, they say, for in-person auditions, like the one I went to in August 2011. The audition is intended to make sure that people perform well on the show, and starts out with a 50-question rapid-fire exam in which answers don't have to be in the form of questions. It then proceeds into a quite realistic simulation of the show with signaling buzzers, a game board, and an interview section.

(Quick Jeopardy review: Three rounds. Jeopardy, Double Jeopardy, Final Jeopardy. First two rounds have 30 clues each divided into six categories, hidden on the board behind dollar amounts. Jeopardy questions are $200, $400, $600, $800, and $1,000. Double Jeopardy doubles that. Clues are in the form of an answer to which an appropriately phrased question must be posed by the contestant when called upon by Alex Trebek. A hidden Daily Double (one in the first round, two in the second) allows a contestant to bet either as much as they have accumulated so far, or, if a low or negative amount, up to the top dollar value on the board. In Final Jeopardy, you may bet up to whatever you have in your account on a single question with 30 seconds to answer. The show's winner by dollar amount keeps those funds; second and third prizes are $2,000 and $1,000. The one-day record is $77,000, but $15,000 to $20,000 is a more typical haul.)

The show wasn't and isn't looking solely for smart people who test well. Rather, they want people with a combination of traits: a deep knowledge well, the ability to retrieve an answer quickly, unflappability, a decent personal presentation and personability. The 21 people in my audition slot in Seattle (including an old friend I ran into who had auditioned before) for the most part had those characteristics.

If contestants were cast simply by rote memorization and rapid-retrieval abilities, you know the result, because you see it at technology trade shows and engineering colleges: a row of people, mostly men, would affectlessly and rapidly answer every question as fast as possible and seem somewhat unsympathetic. They might not even scream or smile when they won. That's not good TV. The show wants people who have a few interesting stories about themselves, and to whom the 10 million or so home viewers will be able to relate. They can't be super-brainiacs, because that deflates viewers playing along at home.

The questions on Jeopardy are difficult across the dimension of time and context, but typically not hard at all in the wider world of trivia and knowledge competitions that Ken Jennings (the 74-time Jeopardy winner) documents in his neat book Brainiac. (The book alternates covering his Jeopardy career with deep book and on-site research into the history and current practice of trivia competition.)

Rather, the combination of competition among well-matched players who are very good at this form of testing, but not ridiculously perfect at it, combined with the physical task of depressing a signal button, and the rapid pace of the show produces something people watch night after night.

From the auditions, Jeopardy calls up about 400 people a year from the general pool across 47 weeks of taping. There are also kids, teen, college, military, and teacher competitions now, as well as an annual tournament among the top-earning or longest-winning players in the season. Every week, 10 new people cycle through; some win and stay on longer as champions, while others appear and disappear in a single episode.

I thought incorrectly that the number of contestants in a week varied by who won, but my friend Paul Kafasis, a software developer, showed me some queueing theory on a piece of paper that made me smack my head. Every week starts with a returning champion, and each day two new people appear. It's thus nearly always 10 new people each week.

The exceptions are that it is both possible for everyone in Final Jeopardy to wind up with $0, in which case Alex dismisses them all, or for two or three contestants to finish with exactly the same dollar amount in that final round, in which case the tying parties keep the money and return the next day to battle again. It's rare. The show calls up 12 people for each taping day in which five episodes are recorded in case of illness, ties, or even disqualification. (Eligibility requirements have to be met, such as not having family working for Sony and a number of other companies.)

I knew my general knowledge was rusty, and consulted piles of almanacs, watched the show, and went through the J-Archive, a compendium of every clue and question ever posed on Jeopardy, run by fans and unaffiliated with the show. I read the three best-known Jeopardy books, too: Secrets of the Jeopardy Champions (1992), Prisoner of Trebekistan (2006), and the aforementioned Brainiac (also 2006). I had coffee with Jennings, who lives in the Seattle area, just before appearing, which was a nice morale boost. (I have an article about the studying process over at The Economist's Babbage blog.)

Contestants from outside the area tend to all stay at the same hotel a few miles away using a group rate from the studio. Jeopardy doesn't pay expenses to appear, although if you win over a gap in taping and need to return in a week or two for the next show, the program starts picking up airfare. We gathered in a group the Tuesday morning I arrived, all of us dressed nicely for TV and clutching garment bags with the requested outfit changes the show wanted us to bring to make it seem like shows are taped on separate days instead of back to back.

As expected, it was a lovely cohort. Matt gives away teddy bears for a living. Shaanti works in climate change research. Jan teaches physical education in a college. Abby is a senior at Rutgers University and towered over me. And then there was Stephanie. We arrived in the green room, where pastries, fruit, and caffeine awaited, and were introduced to the...five-time returning champion. Polite, forced smiles.

Stephanie, we shortly witnessed (as anyone who watched her 8-show run of 7 wins can attest), demonstrates how a human buzzsaw works in practice. She was fast, bright, and brassy, and as an American history professor with a clearly remarkable memory, gave us all whiplash. But she was also great. The secret of Jeopardy, what defuses the reality-show aspect, is that we all universally wanted each other to win even though we knew that only one person took home the big money and would return to fight again. (Don't cry for Stephanie. She won a pile, finishing at about the 12th position among regular season play, and she'll be back for this season's tournament of champions.)

The show's staff are also fantastic: Glenn, Robert, Corina, and their amazing chief, Maggie, made us laugh, cajoled us, encouraged us, and made sure the game is played fair. Everyone is looking out for fairness, both because of the laws around quiz programs, and because of basic decency. However they hire staff on the show and however they run the program day to day, they do it right. Everyone I had anything to do with was delighted to be there. They give money away every day, and that's their job.

There's a bit of the reality-show part in just the waiting. You're nervous the night before (or weeks before, even). Then you have to get dressed neatly and hang out with other people, some of whom you will be pitted against in combat. There are hours of briefing and rehearsals. The adrenal gland can only produce so much before it gives up. I developed something I will politely call a "gregarious bladder," which necessitated possibly 30 bathroom trips in the space of a few hours. The other contestants may still wonder if I was a drug addict.

The actual game play goes by faster than you can remember it happening. Clues come up an average of one every 12 seconds. If played well, you enter a sort of fugue state in which the board and Alex's voice and the signaling button in your hand are all that you hear, see, and feel. When they break for commercial spots, the coordinators and other staff come up with water, make us laugh, give advice about the buzzer. They can't offer tips on information or wagering, but they can help people for whom ringing in isn't going well.

You can't ring in for regular questions until both Alex finishes reading the clue completely, and then one of the writers presses a release button to unlock the signals. Lights light up on either side of the board when that released button is pressed, but if you rely on the lights, you're too late. You have to time it to start pressing madly at the right millisecond after Alex stops talking or, when competitors also know the right answer, you won't be the first to ring in. Ring in too soon and you're very briefly locked out, giving the edge to someone else with better timing.

We all get rehearsal time with the buzzer in the morning, but playing the real game is a different experience. Once you've played a game and return, you have more confidence with the device, and are facing other contestants who know you've just won. In Ken Jennings' run, a combination of preternatural signal reflex and the fact that people arrived and were told, "Ken has just won X dozen shows" seemed to give him the edge along with his extraordinary depth of trivia knowledge.

The strangest thing about appearing on Jeopardy is just how not strange it is. There's no green screen or artificial bits to it. The set is precisely what you see in the broadcast program, with all the lighting and game board and whatnot. It's like stepping into the television set to play. It's more surreal than real. Even the awkward banter with Alex is actually awkward. (If you want to know what I talked to him about over the credits Thursday night, I asked how he wound up at JPL's Curiosity rover landing event alongside our own Xeni Jardin. He's got the space bug, and was invited to be there. He also answers questions from the audience during breaks, and is a very witty and smart guy.)

Even though I can't tell you what happens next, beyond the fact that I'll be on the air on Friday, too, I can admit that it was a singular experience that stands outside what most of us might expect in a normal, quiet life. The money is nice, and I don't want to pretend it isn't. But I didn't need to win to enjoy being on the show. Jeopardy is a cultural phenomenon, even if its ratings have lagged, and while I may never meet an American president, I got to shake hands with Alex Trebek, look deeply into his eyes, and tell him a ridiculous story about breaking an iPod.

Andrea Seabrook had a brilliant career at National Public Radio (NPR), and spent the last several years covering Congress in Washington, D.C. If you listen to NPR, you know her voice, and likely perked up when the anchors threw it over to her to give insight into the latest federal nonsense. Seabrook recently walked away from that rare thing, a stable job in public radio doing precisely what she loves, to start a podcast called DecodeDC hosted by the new Mule Radio Syndicate. She has three episodes of truthtelling in the can so far.

Seabrook says that NPR didn't force her to lie, but neither did it let her tell the unvarnished truth that everyone in D.C. politics knows, but nobody speaks. Now, unbound in her own podcast, she's burning my ears off explaining the stuff that has always bothered me without being able to put my finger on it. In episode 2, "Mind Control," for instance, she follows the entry of neuroscience into politics, and, along the way, details why Republicans universally describe those across the aisle as the "Democrat Party" instead of its proper name, the "Democratic Party."

Seabrook plans a season of 30 episodes, and is following the model earlier this year of Roman Mars with his 99% Invisible radio show and podcast, by raising the core money necessary to pay the bills and produce the show. The crowdfunding campaign has a couple of hours left, and she's hit her goal.

Kickstarter won't allow drawings or simulations for products and electronics. Only the current state of a prototype can be pictured or shown in action (if there is any action) in video. Further, project creators can't sell multiples of an item, except if it's a set of disparate things. This will change things in a big way that should be good for Kickstarter and creators both. (All project impresarios will also have to fill out a "risks and challenges" section about what could go wrong and why someone is competent to fulfill the project. I encouraged this already to anyone asking me how to plan a project; I'm glad it's codified.)

Kickstarter began as a way for creative projects to bring their audience to a place where it was easy to give money that was primarily support for an idea and secondarily relied on rewards, much like public radio and TV. You don't back a ballerina choreographing and staging a performance because you want the tote bag she designed, and you could always buy a ticket to her show later. No: you're buying into her success.

In that model, the reward is a separate thing from the thing being backed. For instance, 99% Invisible, a radio show I love, raised money to fund its third season. The rewards are notepads, T-shirts, audio recorded by host Roman Mars, and more. But the true reward is that we all get the show (and 40 episodes instead of 30). The $170,500 raised (for a $42,000 goal) doesn't mean more gizmos must be made; rather, Mars hired a near full-time editor, can produce a video episode, and will create a smartphone app, as well as hire designers to revamp the Web site. (He can also sleep a bit more.) The scope changed slightly, but not overwhelmingly. He has a bunch of shipping envelopes to stuff for a short period of time.

That's distinct from the rising trend since not long after Kickstarter's early days for both newbie and professional industrial and hardware designers to turn to crowdfunding for new projects. In this model, the project and the reward are essentially identical. Some rewards include intangibles, special editions, and the like. But the essential process is a pre-order: "Give me that thing." Those backing a project are mostly not patrons of an idea. When the thing is late or it never emerges, that then turns into a consumer-protection issue rather than one of  disappointment or frustration.

Way back in November 2009, I backed John Sundman's new book "Creation Science." It's still not in my hands. He wound up becoming more successful than he'd imagined in other areas, and the funding for the book was relatively tiny. He works a living. I didn't give $15 to demand a book in a year! I gave it because I liked his writing. Someday, I hope, to read the book. But I'm not disappointed that it's not done, because his career and life have improved so much. That's what being a patron is about, as opposed to being a consumer.

Arts that become expressed as an instantiation—like a book or movie, rather than performance or an event—float a little between product and idea. But I'd argue that you're still backing bringing something into intellectual existence, which then gets manufactured in a very standard way into something digital or physical. An iPhone dock, however pretty, is an iPhone dock. A film is an idea made manifest in its creation, and the arts of mechanical and electronic reproduction puts that idea in your hands.

There's also a reason to call out hardware and products as opposed to computer software. Software has much the same problem whether you fulfill 100,000 copies or 1,000 copies through a digital download. Software has a much higher risk of delay. (Go read Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming In Code for an exegesis on why.) But that risk is better implicitly understood by most of us who have waited for a software update or new release than tapping our foot for prototyped things made of atoms that appear to be ready to head into a manufacturing cycle.

Conflict over the patron/consumer worldviews has grown this year as computer hardware and other projects started bringing in dozens to a 100 times the original goal amount to receive funding. Delays abound with completed projects, and concerns remain over projects that haven't passed their deadline. This is partly because of scale.

The makers of the Pebble E-Paper Watch set out for $100,000 and brought in $10.3 million before halting the campaign. Delivery was planned for September, but now is "soon." A target of 15,000 watches a week is the goal towards making about 85,000 total. That means even were shipping to begin in October, some backers wouldn't see a watch til December.

People are also concerned about Ouya, an open-platform video game system that raised $8.6 million against a $950,000 goal, and has rewards to fulfill of roughly 60,000 controllers by March 2013. It has to go from production to manufacture, as well as finalizing the software platform  and releasing a developer SDK.

I could go on. Wired ran a story about five overdue Kickstarters a few months ago (a couple of which have now finished fulfillment), and I have a clipping file in Instapaper of more than a dozen articles that look into which big projects are late.

Many people ask me regularly, knowing my interest in crowdfunding, whether Kickstarter has hit the inflection point of having too many big projects too fast that are out of control. I say, no: every project has its own community and audience. Failures or delays in big projects won't necessarily have a halo effect outside the group that backed them, although a continued pattern in that direction (especially if a complete, million-dollar-plus wipeout occurred) could certainly cause a broader level of aversion.

Yancey Strickler, one of the company's founders, spoke at the XOXO Festival last weekend, and I had a moment's chat with him. As he did on stage, he emphasized to me that the staff isn't as fascinated with the blockbusters as the rest of the world appears to be. Thousands of projects run through Kickstarter every month, and most are modest. A healthy half are funded, putting hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars towards quite achievable goals. They love the little stories, of which there are so many.

This new policy seems absolutely consonant with Kickstarter's chief stated goals: turning ideas into reality, not selling stuff. Kickstarter takes 5% of all funded projects. With these rules in place, perhaps Pebble would have funded at $1,000,000 instead of ten times that. That would have reduced Kickstarter's fee from $500,000 to $50,000. But the potential drop in commissions doesn't seem to bother the founders as they recalibrate against their founding mission. It doesn't hurt that many of Kickstarter's investors are community builders who may want a financial return, but not at the expense of the broader mission.

One of the bits of buzz about Kickstarter, including at the XOXO conference, was how a new model might emerge for dealing with things being manufactured in large quantities that had never been made before. It's possible Kickstarter closing some doors here means another company will open them, with a different set of rules and expectations, and perhaps a real focus on incubating, accepting pre-orders for, and releasing mass-produced products when the time is right.

I have fallen in love with a building, hundreds of people, a MakerBot, a portable toilet trailer, food trucks, and two men each named Andy. Is it possible to fall in love with a conference? If so, I have. The organizers named the conference XOXO for hugs and kisses. This was presented without hipster irony or marketing-speak. They meant it. They delivered.

We spent $2.5 billion to put Helvetica Arial on Mars (and incidentally, an SUV-sized robotic science rover), and yet not a cent was devoted to kerning. The Curiosity rover carries a calibration target for its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), an adjustable focus camera designed to take close-up pictures. It's one of 17 cameras on the rover, but it's the only one that has its own target for testing a photo against known colors, brightness, and scale. (​Update: ​The sundial on top of the rover has color swatches for the mast cameras.)

But as a former typesetter, I had to poke fun at the kerning in the word "Target", where the "a" in any design software would be neatly tucked underneath the "T". NASA is old-school in type, too, as this is Helvetica, not Helvetica Neue.​ (Update! Readers note this is Arial, as the angle terminators on the upper-case C give it away! Go, go, Microsoft fonts!)

The calibration target includes a 1909 penny as a homage to the practice of using a coin for scale in images. One of the scientists bought the penny from the first year Lincoln appeared on its front, and sent it on its merry mission. The target is now lightly dusted with Martian soil, but still useful for its purpose.

A full size image is available from NASA.

The 1980s had many surreal and outré comic-book stars. I recall particularly following The Tick, Concrete, and Nexus. They were respectively a nigh-invulnerable, possibly mentally ill superhero with a chubby accountant sidekick in a moth-themed flying suit; a writer whose brain was transplanted by aliens (themselves possibly escaped slaves) into a nearly invulnerable rock-like body often performing missions of mercy; and a man (later others, including men, women, and children) picked by a nearly omnipotent being residing in the center of a planet to atone the genocide of his father by being forced to be an almost indestructible and thoroughly powerful superhero, lest he face disabling pain.

You catch the theme here, right? Omnipotence, invulnerability, superhero—all but the Tick reluctant. Into that mix, Flaming Carrot was something altogether different.

The man wore a giant carrot mask (which I sometimes thought might be part of him) with a continuously burning flame on the top, and fought crime. He carried guns and killed people! He had sex (off screen)! He got flooby! Flaming Carrot was an endless source of nourishing nonsense that flooded forth from creator Bob Burden, who is still at it. Plotlines would meander about, involve strange supervillains (the Blipio!), strange allies, and strangeness in general. Burden drew the strip with a pulp feel, including buxom ladies in cutoffs and tight shirts.

Burden himself wrote, in issue 24, "While Flaming Carrot is an interesting character, the basic concept is not as easily grasped as with most super-heroes. Why does Flaming Carrot dress up in such a bizarre costume and go around shooting people? What are his powers? What's the point of it all? And that is the point. There is no point."

The comic books, which appeared largely in the 1980s through 1990s (with a reappearance from 2004 to 2006) followed the best rules of nonsense: those involved consider their lives absolutely serious, a la the original Airplane! movie. You can get a sense of these at his difficult-to-navigate Web site: click Special Features at the top and then Thrilling Visions for Flash-driven access to a 140-page collections of writings and sketches.

Burden also created the Mysterymen, a sort of third- or fourth-tier set of blue-collar-style superheroes like Flaming Carrot, who received Hollywood treatment in a terrible, terrible film full of great moments and actors. (It didn't pay for itself, but it actually made real money.) I particularly like The Sleek, the world's 17th-fastest superhero.

I'm recollecting Flaming Carrot, because he's...being re-collected! Burden and his team launched a Kickstarter campaign, already past its goal with new items being added, to produce digital editions of a previously published collection, Man of Mystery and The Wild Shall Wild Remain. The price is modest: $10 gets you the 250-page digital version of The Wild Shall Wild Remain; $15 adds the 130-page Man of Mystery.

Burden is also producing a new limited-edition hardcover of The Wild at $50, which includes a new eight-page adventure. The project offers packages at all sorts of price ranges that include original-run comics from his personal collection, and hand-drawn illustrations. I've opted for the $100 "champagne" level which gets you the new hardcover, a Burden-drawn Flaming Carrot, and both digital editions.

Flaming Carrot, like the best fever visions, can't be described so much as experienced. Ut!

Glif famously started as a Kickstarter project when the two guys still had full-time day jobs. It was an early success story of crowdfunding, raising far more than they'd set as a goal, and led to them starting a company called Studio Neat, which now has a four-product line-up.

This story is told in depth in their new book, It Will Be Exhilarating, which recounts Tom and Dan's journey both as an inspirational lesson in what they call independent capitalism and as a guidebook to replicating their process from conception to fulfillment. Exhilarating is the right word for the two guys, and for this book. (The DRM-free ebook costs $5, and is delivered in PDF, EPUB, and Mobi versions.)

Dan and Tom explain how crowdfunding, 3D printing, targeted promotion, and a host of on-demand services let them and others bypass angel investing, venture capital, and bank loans. It's a story that's now been repeated thousands of times since the Glif raised $137,000 (towards a goal of just $10,000) in 2010 but never in this depth and with this much advice along the way by first-hand participants. The authors don't suggest everyone will be able to achieve the modest and sustainable level of success that they have, but explain how any well-conceived project could allow expression of a creative insight as a commercial operation.

The Glif, for instance, arose out of wanting to use an iPhone 4, with its squared edges, in a tripod and lacking such a tool. Using inexpensive 3D modeling software and a 3D printing service bureau, Dan and Tom, who had no previous industrial-design experience, prototyped and refined the product until they were ready to start raising funds for a short injection-molding run to bootstrap selling it commercially. They applied much of what they learned with the Glif to the Cosmonaut crowdfunding campaign, and took away some additional pricing lessons from that journey.

They spell out their philosophy in an early chapter: bring a passion to making things that suit one's own needs, keeping it simple and having a good story to tell about it. If that reminds you of the advice given in the middle period of blogging for a successful blog, it should, as design entrepreneurship, as Tom and Dan define it, is a similar form of self-expression. Here, it requires a lot more sweat equity than blogging (even if you're making software instead of an industrial product), but for potentially greater independence to make more things in the future.

The book interleaves how-to advice with hard-knock stories from Tom and Dan as well as colleagues who have created other crowdfunded projects. They bring up some consistently heard lessons from crowdfunding with the detail to help you avoid them, such as figuring out fees and potential tax issues, estimating the cost of international shipping, and the complexities of finding a manufacturer for physical goods.

I'd call out particularly their discussion on contracting to have stuff made in China, which they provide some insight into, but also turned for a lengthier account to Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy of CW&T (makers of the ruler/pen Pen Type-A). From their account, and from many others I've read in recent years, high challenges exist in finding reliable suppliers who make items consistently to spec and who won't produce knock-off or identical versions in their spare time. (Sleek Audio, a large-scale commercial headphone maker, had a similar story told in Wired last year.)

Exhilirating is a slim volume full of goodness, and while it can't answer every question about making products, it's a great kick in the tuchus for anyone who wants to turn a passion into a product. Dan and Tom offer no guarantees for success, and they know that they have to continue to turn out new products and fulfill and update existing ones to keep their business going. But they describe a new way of combining passion and capitalism that appears to be a model for cottage enterprises that connects industrial craftsmen with individual customers.

(Disclosures: I asked Dan and Tom to be in the video for the crowdfunding book I've put on hold to retool, and I provided a blurb for this book that they're using on their site after reading an advance copy. No money has changed hands; I like what they do, and their positive energy.)

Even after thousands of projects had been funded and completed, it was common to read articles or blog posts stating that crowdfunding was a flash-in-the-pan and a fad. People would become tired of backing efforts, the argument went, and stop contributing. Donor fatigue is a real problem with any fundraising, whether for non-profits or commercial outfits. But it occurs when you pass the hat with the same group of people. What's evolved with crowdfunding is that every project has a unique audience, although some lucky projects break out through word of mouth and mainstream coverage to reach a much broader range of potential supporters.

How real is crowdfunding from the economic side? The Economist said in a recent article there are 450 crowdfunding sites worldwide, and it cites a report estimating $2.8 billion with raised in 2012, nearly twice that of 2011. Hardly a fad! Kickstarter, in particular, has raised the most consistently, with $84 million in completed pledges brought in last year, and likely double that for 2012.

Kickstarter is a generalist's site that helps pull projects from idea into existence for any serious visual artist, videogame designer, independent filmmaker, musician, graphic novelist or cartoonist, industrial designer, food maker, and other makers and creators. But there are many others (hundreds!) with different rules and which reach different people.

I'm turning this fascination into a book about how to plan and execute crowdfunding projects. I'm funding the book's costs, such as travel, collaborators, and print production, through Kickstarter. I like the notion of a snake eating its own tail, and I can't imagine that I could be taken credibly in writing about how you go about raising money in this fashion if I hadn't gone through the process myself.

Over the last two years, I've interviewed piles of people who have raised funds (or failed to) through crowdfunding, and had many more informal conversations on Twitter and through email with others. I found that everyone I spoke to had learned one or more lessons in the process of building a project and getting it funded or missing a target. It dawned on me that collecting this information and then distilling it into a book would be both a great journey and destination both for who want to launch a funding effort and for myself. Tens of thousands of projects have launched so far; hundreds of thousands will launch in the next few years. I want to help people achieve their goals more easily and with more participation.

My effort won't just focus on blockbuster projects, even though Amanda Palmer, who raised nearly $1.2 million for her latest album and tour, shared an enormous number of useful bits of information valuable to anyone when I interviewed her recently. But so have folks who raised just a few thousand, like Kyle Durrie and her cross-country type truck tour. Rather, I'll look at projects of all scales, from a few thousand dollars up to millions to find the commonalities that exist.

I think of the book as two entities: one is a series of essays illustrated by photographs (and accompanied online by videos) about individual projects and creators, focused on what they did, and what they learned in the process. The other is specific how-to advice from conceiving a project through launching it, funding it, and fulfilling it. I want the book to be good to look at as well as a guide to making a crowdfunded project happen. (The book will focus heavily on Kickstarter projects, but I'll provide advice about choosing among the various crowdfunding sites depending on what the project is.)

I've figured out the minimum cost to travel far enough and enlist enough assistance to create a solid book, which I've tentatively titled: "Crowdfunding: A Guide to What Works and Why." While I'm on the journey over the next several months, I'll write blog posts (some of which will appear here at BoingBoing) about people I interview and what I learn, as well as shoot and post video interviews for backers of the project. By about March 2013, I'll have a finished book available as an ebook and as paperback and hard-cover editions.

Crowdfunding lets artists and makers explore work that they might otherwise be unable to find funding for, and take creative and technological risks that they couldn't afford. I want to document what's happening out there, bring back stories from the field, and bundle it up for others to learn from. I've launched my project. Now I get to see if I learned lessons well enough so far to bring my idea to fruition.

(Photo: Used via Credit Commons license and with permission. ©2011 Mike Krzeszak)

Kickstarter project for Crowdfunding: A Guide to What Works and Why [kickstarter.com]]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/09/crowdfunding-a-guide-to-crowdf.html/feed 14 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/04/raise-every-voice.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/04/raise-every-voice.html#comments Wed, 04 Jul 2012 16:46:22 +0000 Glenn Fleishman http://boingboing.net/?p=163157

Photo: Scott Snider

Photo: Diorama Sky (cc)

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The science geekiest show on broadcast television was once Futurama, an animated series co-created by The Simpsons' Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, a Simpsons writer and showrunner. The show has competition now from programs as varied as broadcast's Big Bang Theory, cable's Mythbusters and Eureka, and Felicia Day's Web network "Geek & Sundry."

But, good news, everyone! Futurama is back for another season, starting with two new episodes on June 20 on Comedy Central, where it premiered the last two seasons as well. Thirteen episodes will air on Thursdays at 10 p.m. (9 p.m. Central). It's possible the final episode in this season...will be its last! Or...will it?

Cohen, who spoke from a sound-recording studio in Los Angeles on Thursday that was nearly a Faraday cage as well, said, "These are really good classic Futurama episodes, as good as any we've ever done. There are perhaps a few more flying body parts." He said the arc of this season through next summer is Philip J. Fry, the show's hero-idiot-lover, will try to win the one-eyed Turanga Leela's heart for good.

The show has survived more cancellation attempts than perhaps any show in history. Cohen said in the podcast interview linked below that writer Ken Keeler has penned each of the four "final" episodes of the program. He's getting pretty good at them.

Fans keep bringing the show back. After four seasons of Fox's broadcast division bumping and preempting the program on Sundays due to sports conflict and a strange hostility (were Fox execs all jocks, and giving Futurama a wedgie?), the program went off the air in 2003. Cohen says the show aired at 7 p.m. on Sundays for much of its run, and Fox's slogan was, "The fun begins at 8!"

Re-runs started on Cartoon Network, where it built an audience, and following Fox Home Entertainment's successful release of a Family Guy direct-to-DVD movie, had four of its own DVD releases. That led to Comedy Central taking on the program's re-runs and commissioning a whopping 26 episodes, which aired in 2010 and 2011.

Cohen's sister is an old friend, and I was invited to attend the table reading for episode 26 of that run of shows at which point it was still unclear if Futurama would be picked up yet again. (BoingBoing ran an item and some links from the table reading back in 2010.)

But it's back, baby, large and in charge, starting with a pair of episodes: a surprising sweet case of Bender becoming a robot daddy, and an ancient doomsday prophecy coming true. Morbo says, panic, puny earthlings. Futurama has, for reasons that are unclear to Cohen, amassed 22 million likes on its Facebook page, reflecting the show's global audience. (That puts it among the top 10 shows on Facebook including broadcast programs.)

In the interview embedded in this post, we talk about Futurama's tangled production history, the science and math nerds who make up the staff, the emotional heart that developed at the center of the show, and what the coming season will bring.

Also, Hypnotoad. BRRMRMMRMRMRMRRMMRMRRRRMMRMRMRMRMMRMRMRMMRMRMRMMRMRMRMRMRMRMRMR.

Cristoforo: Victorian Cthulhu Fonts Revived [kickstarter.com]]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/06/11/hrii-cthulhu-goka-font-phng.html/feed 6 http://boingboing.net/2012/05/16/alt-cartoonist-receives-high-p.html http://boingboing.net/2012/05/16/alt-cartoonist-receives-high-p.html#comments Wed, 16 May 2012 11:00:42 +0000 Glenn Fleishman http://boingboing.net/?p=161045 Stereotypes abound of the political cartoonists found in so-called alternative papers: the weeklies full of escort ads in the back and snarky commentary in the front. Matt Bors, on the surface, seems to embody the characteristics.

He's scruffy, doesn't own a suit, and lives in Portland. He expresses withering contempt at politicians, mainstream media, and what he views as hypocrisy. He's never made more than $15,000 a year from his cartoons, and supplements that income with illustration, freelance editorial jobs, and, possibly, blood plasma—at least he did in college; he has the scar to prove it.

The 28-year-old Bors was thus a bit surprised this year, and occasionally nonplussed, when he won the Herblock Prize for "excellence in editorial cartooning," was a finalist (with Oregonian newspaper staffer Jack Ohman) for the Pulitzer Prize, and received a Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Award.

Jesus Christ, Matt, when did you fucking sell out?

He didn't. The establishment came to him after a stellar run of cartoons in 2011, in which he sent up the pope, climate deniers, Ariana Huffington, the death of newspapers, Mitt Romney, marriage inequality, and our Kenyan-born, American-citizen killing, war-loving, extrajudicial president (who we love dearly and are praying, to all our gods and Richard Dawkins, gets re-elected). His style is more in the mold of the daily strip cartoonist, like a Doonesbury, common among alt political artists, and that makes it seem benign even while he jabs out with wounding satire. Bors doesn't hesitate to switch from jokes or bitter irony to a documentary strip, such as one about Portland residents, his trip to Haiti in 2011 (he went with two other cartoonists, unembedded, to Afghanistan in 2010), or insights from his work as an editor at the Cartoon Movement site.

His most significant strip in 2011 arose from a mild disgust at the imaginative limitations of most cartoons following the death of Steve Jobs. Countless panels showed Jobs at the pearly gates with St. Peter holding an iPad. Bors response was a five-panel outing in which St. Peter welcomes him to the "iCloud" and whips out an iPad. Jobs notes flatly that he's a Buddhist, and wants some respect. So St. Peter swipes a gesture on the iPad, and the final panel has the reincarnated Apple chief as a Chinese Foxconn worker.

The Herbert Block Foundation called out the Jobs cartoon in its award citation. The prize came with a hefty trophy and a $15,000 (after taxes) check, an awards ceremony at which Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau delivered a lecture on his career, and a fancy reception in a gloriously decorated room at the Library of Congress's Jefferson Building. Bors was the first alt cartoonist to get the award, given since 2004, although fellow online scribbler Matt Wuerker of Politico (this year's Pulitzer recipient) got the nod in 2010. Matt's co-Portlandian and friend, Jen Sorensen (Slowpoke Comics), was named the finalist for the award, and received a post-tax $5,000. She, too, appears in weeklies and online, but was unable to attend.

It might seem peculiar for a foundation associated with the Washington Post's long-running cartoonist to bestow accolades on someone so far outside the tradition set by the Post and other papers. But the Post's editorialist didn't dispense pabulum. Herbert Block was a demon with a paycheck, back in the day that newspapers remembered people might purchase their fishwrappers specifically for strong opinion presented graphically. He advocated against racism, coined the term "McCarthyism", railed against Nixon, and showed the Supreme Court stealing the Bush-Gore election. Block, active for 72 years, produced 14,000 cartoons for the Post, from 1946 until his death in 2001. Bors and Block actually have a lot in common, despite form (Block used the convention of labeling items in a cartoon with terms like "the economy" and "middle-class voters") and source of income. The truth is there to be told in a way that forces people to cope with its reality, whether in Herblock's or Bors' distinctive style.

Matt is a Twitter buddy, and he even adapted a cartoon (with permission and credit) from one of my tweets ("U.S. out of lady parts"). That's an honor of the highest order. After the Jobs cartoon appeared, I immediately asked Bors if I could buy it; it's sitting in a flat mailer behind me waiting to be framed. When the news came out that Matt had won the Herblock Award, I felt compelled to go as a long-time cartoon fan, and a supporter of his. Despite my living in Seattle and he in Portland, we met in D.C. for the first time, not unusual in our fast-paced 21st century hovercar and jetpack lifestyle. (I had some interviews and tourism to conduct in D.C., too, so the timing made sense.)

The audience at the awards was mostly gray to very gray, with a few people dressed in a fashion that made it clear that they were cartoonists (nice hat, Cavna), and not, say, the founding chairman of the Kennedy Center (also in attendance). The audience laughed long and loud at Matt's jokes, save one at Huffington Post's expense. Matt noted that Politico had won this year's Pulitzer for editorial cartooning by his colleague Wuerker, and the Huffington Post had received a Pulitzer for reprinting Wuerker's cartoons without permission. That provoked low, throaty, growly laughter. In deference to the audience, Matt told me he cut a joke about thanking the vagina haters for providing so much material, being assured that it wouldn't go over well. His talk was captured on video and is already online. (Trudeau's amusing and informative talk is also up; it has nothing to do with Matt, as Trudeau recounts the history of his strip. Make sure and watch Trudeau's answer about Wounded Warriors at the end if you want to see where his passion lies.)

Herbert Block's foundation is run by his old pals, and Matt said over coffee the night after the award that he was told openly and politely by board members that they really didn't know his stuff, although the board is passionate about strong opinion and social issues. But the foundation is smart, and picks contemporary peers that know the lay of the land. (Last year's Herblock Award winner Tom Toles was on the panel, along with the Philadelphia Daily News's Pulitzer-prize winning Signe Wilkinson, and Jenny Robb, a cartoon collection curator from Ohio State University.)

Political cartoons haven't gone out of style, but the ability to make a living while creating them has largely eroded in this country. As Matt noted in his speech, dictatorships don't crush people's hands because the cartoons they drew have no impact. But the high-profit-margin structure that allowed newspapers both the funds and the independence to compete to hire editorial cartoonists is now long past. Matt is on the board of the editorial cartoonists' association, and tells me that at the peak of opinion comics, at least 1,000 illustrators were employed in the U.S.; the number might even have been as high as 2,000. There are now 60 full-time staffers in that role.

Both the alt-weekly comic artists and their mainstream comrades have been looking for a path out of the darkness. Web sites, besides Politico, don't have regular cartoonists. Matt is one of several artists now syndicated at Daily Kos, where Dan Perkins ("Tom Tomorrow" of This Modern World) edits, appears, and gathers Matt, Wuerker, Sorensen, friend of Boing Boing's Ruben Bolling ("Tom the Dancing Bug"), and others. But all of them complain that editorial sites that commission original print work seem to forget about the popularity of political cartooning.

Matt estimates his Jobs cartoon was viewed hundreds of thousands of times, with many of those even at his own Web site. Editorial cartoonists know how to create memes and the power in images that lampoon the mighty. The disconnect between the audience for such work and the organizations that could fund it seems huge. I congratulate Matt on receiving recognition for his craft, but he and his colleagues know all too well that the hard work of figuring out how to keep at it continues, every day.

The foundation of Web security rests on the notion that two very large prime numbers, numbers divisible only by themselves and 1, once multiplied together are irreducibly difficult to tease back apart. Researchers have discovered, in some cases, that a lack of entropy—a lack of disorder in the selection of prime numbers—means by analogy that most buildings on the Web would stand in spite of gale winds and magnitude 10 earthquakes, while others can be pushed over with a finger or a breath. The weakness affects as many as 4 in 1,000 publicly available secured Web servers, but it appears in practice that few to no popular Web sites are at risk.

Why primes are useful for security

Web security relies on generating two large prime numbers with sufficient randomness that it is vanishingly unlikely that any two parties in the world would ever stumble across the same number twice—ever. It's impossible to assure, but uniqueness is nevertheless a requirement of the most nearly universally relied-upon algorithm, RSA, to secure Web browser/server transactions via HTTPS.

Here's how it works. Take two big prime numbers that are also similar in size and multiply them:

858599503 * 879190747 = 754872738416398741

The only legitimate divisors (the factors of the product) of such a number are 1, the number itself, and the two primes. The fact that it divides by 1 and itself are obvious. But even using all available mathematical and computational approaches, it takes an inordinate amount of time to tease out the two prime numbers used to create it.

So long as enough entropy is involved, larger primes and thus a larger product—at least 1024 bits long or over 300 digits in decimal, but, as we'll see, far better at 2048 or 4096 bits—result in better security. (The example above, only 23 bits long in binary, would be woefully inadequate, taking perhaps seconds to factor.)

Less entropy means that the same large prime numbers wind up being used repeatedly, which makes finding their factors simple for publicly reachable sites, routers, and other hardware.

What's wrong with RSA

The flaw in randomness that has been revealed has to do with the public part of public-key cryptography; RSA is a public-key algorithm and virtually all public Web servers rely on it. With the RSA algorithm, the two primes are used as part of a method that derives two related exponents—further multiplications of a number by itself. The exponents and the primes' product are used to encrypt and decrypt a message. The product of the primes and the public exponent may be distributed freely without compromising the private exponent (nor the two prime factors, for that matter, which aren't used again). A sender with a recipient's public key sends a message; the recipient uses the private key to reverse the process (using a multiplicative inverse operation, as I just learned).

The weakness found by two different sets of researchers doesn't relate to the algorithm. It's already known that sufficiently small products may be factored to their original primes through the best-known computational method. Products of 512 bits (150 decimal digits) or smaller are essentially broken; 768 bits is within reach, but only with substantial effort.

No, the problem isn't with a new method of speeding up factorization. Rather, as noted early, it's about entropy and the public nature of public keys. Web sites that use SSL/TLS for encrypting connections with clients publish a certificate that the client receives as part of an initial handshake to establish security. This certificate includes the public key information along with other identifiers and, in nearly all circumstances, a signature from a certificate authority (CA) to allow additional validation. (There are problems with certificate authorities' authoritativeness, too, but that's a different issue.)

These certificates from public Web sites may be freely retrieved. This is happening ever more frequently because the growing lack of trust in the security measures employed by CAs to keep SSL/TLS certificates from being generated for illegitimate parties has led to various projects scanning all public Web sites on a continuous basis to determine and alert users and site operators if the certificate for a given domain changes over time. This led the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for one, to pull down most recently 7.1 million certificates as part of its SSL Observatory. Another research group harvested millions of public certificates through their own efforts in a relatively fast and painless operation.

Once you have a large database of certificates, you can extract the public keys and look at the products. Researchers from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) and one independent collaborator released an academic paper on February 14th that examined both public keys in SSL/TLS certificates and PGP-style public keys used typically for person-to-person communications. The PGP keys revealed almost no problems; RSA keys in Web certificates, on the other hand, were very troublesome. The authors found that about 0.2% (2 in a 1,000) of the dominant 1024-bit RSA keys they checked in a first set and closer to 0.4% of a larger set with more recent data were vulnerable because two or more certificates shared a prime factor.

It's not impossible that the RSA key generation software would have "collisions," in which the same primes were generated on multiple occasions by different systems. But it should be far more unlikely. Thus, there is some flaw that prevents the degree of randomness necessary to ensure the least possible repetition. In private use, this wouldn't matter. But because public-key cryptography relies on publishing keys, such overlap may be found easily. (CAs don't typically generate the public/private key pair. System administrators generate an RSA key using software like openssl on a computer under the admin's control. That key is then bound up in a certificate signing request that's submitted to a CA to get its imprimatur.)

I'm not a mathematician, so I can't translate the specifics of how sets of different products sharing a single prime factor can result in a relatively easy extraction of the other prime. Once you have both primes, the calculation necessary to create the private key exponent may performed without any fuss. That eliminates all obfuscation from transactions conducted using that RSA key.

SSL/TLS and other methods of establishing secure network connections use public-key cryptography for the initial part of the setup to exchange a short symmetrical key used by both parties that's much faster to compute, and is used only for a session or part of a session. The public-key portion ensures that the session key isn't sniffed. But if the private key is known, the initial exchange of the session key may be decrypted through passive data sniffing, and thus the session key revealed. In some implementations, as EFF notes in a post on this research, learning the private key could allow decryption of previous encrypted communications if someone attempting to intercept such traffic retained records for later cracking.

The Lausanne researchers worried about disclosure, as their work could be easily replicated. In the end, they notified as many certificate owners with extractable primes as they could, based on information in the certificates and at Web sites at which the certifications are used. They found that to be quite spotty in practice. EFF is also engaged in notifying vulnerable parties.

The fallout

This is all troubling, but what's the upshot for practical threats?

First, the authors of the Lausanne paper found that 2048-bit RSA keys aren't invulnerable, but a literal handful (10 keys out of 3.2 million in the latest dataset examined) could be factored. That compares to about 20,000 out of 3.7 million 1024-bit keys. EFF's recent scan also shows that Web sites are migrating to 2048 bits, with a shift of nearly a quarter of all certificates moving from 1024 to 2048 bits from its August 2010 to its 2012 scan.

Second, for a broken certificate to be used to sniff data, an observer has to be on the wire, in a position between clients and the server. If you can break into a server to monitor traffic, you don't need to subvert SSL/TLS. You can grab the decrypted data on the server as it arrives. Being able to sniff at a major data center or Internet exchange where SSL/TLS is assumed to cover any risks would possibly be easier to arrange, but not trivial. Being able to be a man in the middle at the right point in the topology is largely relegated to corporate spies and government agencies.

Third, a separate group of researchers outed themselves on February 15th, as they had been engaged in a similar set of research. In a post by Nadia Heninger at Princeton's Freedom to Tinker blog, she explained we shouldn't get our IP panties in a wad over this. Her group, which has a forthcoming paper it will release after finishing disclosures to affected hardware manufacturers, found that the primary position for these weak public keys was in embedded devices, such as consumer routers and corporate firewalls. She suggests that embedded device makers have the most work to do.

This is the dilemma with all security and encryption issues. This is a problem—a serious problem! And it's not theoretical, but the practical impact appears to be small, and it's fixable in a reasonable amount of time without an insane amount of effort. But there's no way to know which popular sites used weak RSA keys unless someone replicates this work and publishes it openly. Nor can we know whether any data was extracted from sessions conducted with them. The odds seem to favor few sites and no data, but it's simply impossible to know.

You can ignore any hype about this problem. RSA, public-key cryptography, and SSL/TLS certificates aren't broken or even damaged. We just need a little more random acts of key generation (and an option when making keys to check them against a public database of identical prime products), and the problem will disappear.

I contacted Mathias to ask about privacy and security issues, as one might be concerned about email addresses being stored and the association of a Wi-Fi network name with such. He said (and his FAQ notes) that he doesn't reveal information to third parties. While he's based in Germany, his data and application is hosted in the Google App Engine in the United States.

I'd love to see a variant on this idea, in which an existing network name could be paired with a unique few letter long code that someone would then append to their network. Look up the code, and you'd get the same result. I admit Nitzsche's idea is neater, encoding the URL and the identifier all at once.

This is probably a good time to also mention WTFWiFi.com, the site that is to network names what Damn You, Auto Correct! is to rewritten text messages.

After my first child was born, I found that taking pictures was a problem. The Canon S1 IS I'd purchased was a terrific model, but unwieldy when holding a baby. With kid number 2, the problem became worse. One can only juggle so many children while snapping the shutter. And there's the whole business of being fully in the moment with your kids, instead of constantly looking at them through a lens. I turned to crummy (later better) cameras in phones and little snapshotty digital cameras. I figured that when the kids were big enough to not need to be carried, I could graduate to a full DSLR with lenses.

Something happened along the way, however. I discovered James Duncan Davidson and Greg Koenig's Luma Loop. (I'll explain why it's not linked in a moment.) It was built like an adjustable bandolier with a freely traveling slider. The camera attaches through a detachable string loop at a hook in the camera's frame, just the way you'd add a normal neck or hand strap. When you're connected up, you put the strap over one shoulder and the camera can freely hang at your hip. Reach down to grab it, it slides up, take the shot, and release gently or just drop it.

I've known and liked James since I met him on a MacMania cruise in 2002, when he was still up to his neck in Java development. (James spent a few years at Sun, and was responsible for Tomcat and Ant, which means something if you, too, were up to your neck in Java.) He gave up all that programming glory for photography. He has a terrific eye, and you've likely seen his photographs of speakers at O'Reilly and other conferences. His work goes far beyond that to oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and the sights of rural Bangalore.

The author takes a picture of himself viewed through a stereoscopic high-resolution display system

James and Greg partnered to make the Luma Loop, James bringing what a shooter needs and Greg the industrial design experience. They sold the original Loop, then revised it to be more comfortable and have a better release mechanism (a one-handed metal push button), as well as adding a tripod screw mount for attaching the strap, and extending the line with a consumer-grade lighter-weight strap. (Disclosure: James knew I was a fan of the Loop, and sent me the updated version gratis and with no strings attached. I had planned to write about it, and disclose the gift in that writing.)

That's all come to an end for the moment. James and Greg have pulled the pro and consumer loops from the market out of fear of a patent lawsuit. The patent was granted November 1. The Luma Loop was not, of course, the only freely traveling bandolier style camera strap, and the folks at Black Rapid had a version on the market years before Luma Labs. There are other competitors as well. Black Rapid filed for a patent in 2007 to cover key aspects of a free-sliding sling. James said he and his firm's lawyers reviewed the prior art and the patent filing, and thought it highly unlikely it would be granted. James provides examples in a blog post dating back to 1885 of similar attachment slings.

In an interview, James declined to be more specific about his contacts with Black Rapid. He said he became aware a few days after the patent was granted that it was issued, and he and Greg had to make a decision immediately about a course of action. Even without an injunction or lawsuit in front of them, and with a firm belief that the patent's claims wouldn't withstand a re-examination in light of the introduction of more prior art, selling the product after becoming aware of the patent would be willing infringement, he said. "The risk equation changes."

As a small firm that outsources pretty much everything but design and marketing, including using a Portland-area sewing firm that puts together their straps, James said, "to do any legal action would have consumed the company." It would cost at a minimum many thousands of dollars to pursue a patent re-examination with no assurance of the outcome, no matter how strong James's stance on prior art, during which time selling product would increase the risk to which the firm were exposed.

Now let me switch perspective a bit. Black Rapid didn't respond to a request via email to its press address for comment. I disclosed in that email that James and I were friendly, that I was a fan of the Luma Loop, and that I had received promotional product. I can understand the lack of a reply to such an email, but it would be unfair of me to not present the owners with an opportunity to discuss their positions. Also lawyers often advise those who haven't taken action in a given realm to keep their mouths shut to forestall shutting down avenues that may be used. (Assuming they read this story, I hope they weigh in via the comments.)

Thus let me be scrupulously evenhanded. This isn't a typical patent-troll story of the kind we read about seemingly every day in which a firm that makes nothing of its own except trouble for others acquires or creates business-method patents—ones that describe a way of doing something rather than the creation of an actual physical product or process. Those deemed to be in violation may have lawsuits filed without any notice, which is perfectly legal, or be sent dunning letters for licensing fees.

In the patent-troll universe, very little of value is created. An idea is turned into paperwork not stuff, and the inventor may have never had an intent to make anything of worth, either. The Supreme Court has gradually, and too slowly, ratcheted down such patent lawsuits, and Congress may ultimately pass reform to prevent such patents from being issued in the first place.

Patent trolls have a variety of defenses for their actions, most of which revolve around the notion that people that come up with unique ideas should have some title to them. Intellectual Ventures, a patent-holding fund founded by Nathan Myhrvold, asked rhetorically in a blog post this summer, "...what are the best ways to ensure that ideas are given the value they are due?" (The answer is "sue.") Ideas aren't patentable, however. Only methods and processes. It's part of the patent-troll distortion field that "ideas" are due protection independent from their implementation. (Listen to or read the transcript of NPR's excellent Planet Money report from this summer on business-method patents for a fair and detailed explanation.)

Firms that make products and hold patent troves typically don't love the current landscape, even when they have piles of intellectual property (as in the current patent wars among mobile handset makers) because it consumes too much time, money, attention, and effort. Amazon is often cited as an early abuser of business-method patents, especially for its 1-Click patent. But despite the chilling effect of the existence of 1-Click and many other Amazon patents, the firm has to my knowledge only prevented Barnes & Noble from using 1-Click, and otherwise hasn't pursued action. (Disclosure: I worked at Amazon in 1996 and 1997, and wrote up a patent that Jeff Bezos invented to hand off to a patent attorney.)

But Bezos in an interview this month with Steven Levy at Wired sounds like the most extreme of patent reformers:

Bezos: For many years, I have thought that software patents should either be eliminated or dramatically shortened. It’s impossible to measure the toll they've had on the software industry, but on balance, it has been negative.

Levy: But without software patents, you wouldn’t have exclusive rights to 1-Click shopping.

Bezos: If that were the price of having a dramatic reduction in software patents, it would be great.

All that said, that's not the nature of Black Rapid's patent. Its strap patent is for a product its founder and later owners developed and produced. They haven't filed a lawsuit against Luma Labs to my knowledge. It is likely and may be implicit, but it hasn't happened yet. It's possible Black Rapid has pursued the patent from a defensive angle, although its Web site's tone ("Anything else is a cheap imitation") makes that unlikely. A defensive patent is filed to make sure a business has put a stake in the sand to prevent other firms from keeping a company from going about its business. That's one strategy, although releasing detailed information into the public sphere (not public domain) about a product can establish prior art.

If we view the matter from its perspective, Black Rapid created something new, unique, and of value if kept exclusive. The patent system, in its original intent, was designed precisely for that purpose: to allow inventors the fruits of their work for a limited period to encourage a flourishing of experimentation.

Where the dispute lies is prior art. Patents (in the United States) must be useful, novel, and non-obvious to those who have expertise in the field. Prior art, or examples of patented or non-patented work that date from or before the patent's filing that essentially encompass what the patent covers. Improvements, if significant, may be patentable, but the same basic concept re-used is not.

James maintains that Black Rapid's notions aren't novel. The US Patent and Trademark Office didn't find it so. That's where it stands. James expects his firm would be targeted by Black Rapid because Luma is the most bijou firm in the free-sliding strap space. "Companies that have a patent will typically go after the smaller, weaker players first because they can get quick judgements before they go after somebody bigger," he said.

Luma Loop had another product under development for the last few months that doesn't overlap with the claims granted in Black Rapid's patent, and which James and Greg are accelerating development of, hoping for a December release. With this new product, which James said has a number of innovative elements, he is considering filing for patents. He said, "I don't want to do it because I don't want to perpetuate the system. But, on the other hand, I have a business to run and defend, and I totally get the idea of a defensive standpoint now."

UPDATE: A response from Black Rapid's Kurt Peterson follows. — Rob

We have been watching some of the comments being posted regarding the Luma Loop voluntary removal of their sling strap product line. Your site's article comes close to the facts. In perspective, we applied for this patent in 2007 and I can ensure you that our intent was not even closely focused on thinking about cornering the market ‹ as we did not even know if there was a market ‹ we did it, taking a huge financial risk, to protect the survival of a small start up company from being inundated by copy cat products or larger established companies from crushing us during our development phase. We are still a very small company just trying to build a respected brand and good products. As noted in the article, companies, such as Luma Loop, were provided notice of our patent pending upon the conception of their product line and they understood the business risks on proceeding with production and, respectfully, they voluntarily switched their design efforts upon the granting of the patent. Again, this was nothing more than a strategic business decision to protect our innovations and, by default, others during the start up period. I am sure that most of our competitors, possibly Luma Loop, have applied for some type of patents (most likely design) or trademarks on their products to protect their interests.

After killing the TouchPad a near-record 45 days after launch, then discounting it in a clearance sale at as low as $99, HP opted to fire up its production line to make and ship more. A baffling decision, right? The rumor is that a backlog of parts inventory and unhappy suppliers—not informed of the cancellation until the rest of the world knew—make it smarter for HP to assemble more and sell them at a loss.

I tweeted at the time that this was the only case I could recall that a cancelled product by a major electronics manufacturer was taken back on the assembly line for another run. Sure, older models superseded by newer ones have sometimes been brought back into production for short or long periods. But an item that's singing with the choir invisible? A colleague in Australia, Tim McGuire, has a long memory, and a shelf full of back issues of NeXTWorld magazine. He sent me a clip and his permission to share it.

In mid-1993, a few months after CEO Steve Jobs had shuttered the NeXT factory, and was in the process of switching to an all-software company—a path that led to its later acquisition by Apple—the lights were turned back on in its Fremont, Calif., factory. NeXTWorld's rumor columnist, Lt. Sullivan, reported that the U.S. military and another undisclosed customer wanted more machines, and so NeXT was to fire up and spit 1,200 more devices out. (Dear readers, please explain the Lt. Sullivan reference?)

The TouchPad and webOS are unlikely to have the same sort of long-lasting legacy as NeXT. The NeXTSTEP operating system and its use of the Mach microkernel architecture led to a number of decisions that produced Mac OS X, which runs both Macs and iOS devices like the iPhone.

Should we pity a once-popular blog when its time in the sun has come and gone? Not so much. I'm watching the sunset of a moderately high-traffic site I've run for a decade, and that seems the natural course of events. Like the hecatomb of evolution, many blogs rose and then were slaughtered in the crucible of viewer attention (and blogger interest). Those that survive are fitter—or at least live in areas with abundant page views.

A recent glance at my statistics put me in a funk, briefly, until I dashed through Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief, adapted for the fast-paced online age. Denial: The stats must be broken! Anger: This is an awesome site; everyone must be blind! Bargaining: Maybe if I do a redesign? Depression: All that effort, for naught. Acceptance: Hey, what's going on at Reddit?

The site, Wi-Fi Networking News, has been mostly a one-man band, run by yours truly since April 2001. I launched it after reporting for The New York Times on the new and bizarre phenomenon of Wi-Fi hotspots, which were in their infancy, and poised for explosive growth. (Bonus points: The picture that accompanies the article was taken in a train station in Fremont, Calif., that my father once leased as a furniture store in the 1970s.) Wi-Fi meshed with my technical knowledge and interests, and it seemed like the right star to which to hitch my wagon.

The site received inordinate attention, even to my ego-driven self, after some months of operation because I mixed straight technology reportage, opinion, and normal link-to-others blogging. There weren't that many blogs like that at the time, partly because it was difficult to build an audience. I was still near the start of my freelance career, and was suffering through the dotcom collapse, which left folks like me without as many paying outlets, and the pay was worse. Reporting for my own blog seemed like a wise course of action, and a calling card that did in actuality bring me more paying work later on.

I was also early on in accepting sponsorship, and then later advertising. The blog was never a vast moneymaker for me, but it brought in some tens of thousands of dollars a year in its best years, and I was able to hire a part-time collaborator for a couple of years as well. John Battelle's Federated Media, which started up in part to push ads to Boing Boing's pages, took me on as an early experiment, and they still power the page impressions on my site.

But as a niche player, I could only fill up that niche. As more general sites appeared in which Wi-Fi played a role, my blog shrunk in importance. I even helped move this along, as I discovered in 2007 that the Wi-Fi site was part of the inspiration for the first in what are now legions of gadget blogs. (I'm sorry.) Peter Rojas, the first editor of Nick Denton's Gizmodo, said in an interview back then, swelling my head:

We came up with this idea for Gizmodo...if we were going to do a blog, it had to be something about technology. And we were really inspired by Glenn Fleishman’s Wi-Fi Networking News, which is a blog that he had done which was almost kind of like a trade journal about Wi-Fi, which was still a relatively new technology....And so if you were a technology journalist or someone in the industry, it was like a great place to go. And it was very focused. And we thought, “Well what if we did that with something like gadgets...

Rather touching, that. Rojas left Gizmodo to build Engadget for Jason Calacanis (it was later purchased by AOL), and later gdgt with a close colleague. I might quibble about which of these sites and some others of similar scale are worth consulting (or trusting) today, but they filled the zone of technology news, competing among themselves for any scrap of information worth publishing. (Hey, even Boing Boing had one of those for a while, led initially by the inestimable Joel Johnson.)

Now hundreds upon hundreds of similar but inferior sites daily pore over the least bit of unintentionally revealed dibs and dabs, or purely speculate, and then clusterlink to each other in the echo chamber of technophilia. Many thousands (or tens of thousands) of scabby sites simply excerpt articles from others, making the furore even louder. Haven't you all had the experience of finding an inadequate few grafs about new technology, following the link to the original story, and repeating until you were five sites away?

I kept the Wi-Fi site focused, however, as I lack the true obsessive nature of the gadget hunter, and I prefer more than a handful of hours of sleep each evening. That proved my undoing, and I don't regret it. I had a good run in the mid-oughties. The site prospered from the confusing state of wireless networking that lasted until about 2008. The term Wi-Fi is a trade group's kiss of interoperability, ostensibly assuring that all such branded hardware works together. In practice, until relatively recently, the combination of different generations of hardware, operating system support, third-party add-on software, and security measures, such as firewalls, often prevented one-click access.

This was particularly the case with 802.11n, which is now the standard flavor of Wi-Fi found in all gateways, laptops, and nearly all mobiles. For three years, the industry roiled around different elements of the protocol, releasing pre-standard uncertified gear that often didn't work across different makers' models. The industry opted for a grand compromise in early 2007 that prevented it shattering into chipmaker-specific gear.

Good fortune also came in 2004 with the short-lived run of municipal networking, in which towns, cities and counties promoted large-scale Wi-Fi networks built for indoor and outdoor use. Right-wing, bought-and-paid-for thinktanks created several negative reports, based on incorrect analyses of fiber-optic networks. I fought back. Of particular interest is my 2005 post "Sock Puppets of Industry." But it never seemed like municipal networks would take off because of technical limitations of Wi-Fi. I penned a dubious take for The Economist in 2006 at the height of the fervor, which peaked in 2007. Out of well over a hundred planned efforts, only a few were built and a couple remain active. (There's been a recent uptick in interest again with a more realistic basis using better-suited equipment, and public-safety wireless networks, often using licensed bands dedicated for the purpose, have worked quite well on the whole.)

The Wi-Fi site's traffic peaked at the top of muni-Fi hype, receiving about 250,000 page views a month in 2006 and slightly fewer unique visitors. It has had a slow and inexorable decline since. It now welcomes about 25,000 visitors monthly who look at a page or so each. Most visitors are reading older pages, directed there by Google. The most popular page of all time is how to set a password on a Linksys model that hasn't been sold for a few years. As traffic has ebbed, I have updated the site less frequently.

Everything has its season, and the paucity of visitors corresponds both to the level of competition from general technology reporting and gadget sites, and to the ease with which Wi-Fi now performs. When Wi-Fi was hard, my site was useful; when it's like breathing air, not so much.

Such independent reporting sites as mine are fewer and farther between, because we simply can't afford to devote the time without at least some moderate recurring income. The promise of making a living from advertising turned out to be a function of the power-law curve described by author and academic Clay Shirky in a famous 2003 essay. More popular sites inevitably became substantially more popular, while attention wanes disproportionately on sites that receive somewhat less attention.

Partly, too, newspapers, magazines and purely digital operations absorbed the lessons of the blog—breezy, informal, brief, and timely items—which took mojo away from sites that couldn't market to existing large readerships.

Boing Boing floated to the top of the blog-slash-reportage world, as it fed ever more readers ever more items from a growing cornucopia of wonderful things. My site and many like it sunk to the bottom as fewer visitors led to fewer visitors. And that, dear readers, is why you find me at this address today.