mathewingram.com/work » Web2.0 http://www.mathewingram.com/work ... at the intersection of media, technology, business and the web Sun, 13 Jan 2013 19:42:36 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5 The web responds to the untimely death of hacker-activist Aaron Swartz http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2013/01/12/the-web-responds-to-the-untimely-death-of-hacker-activist-aaron-swartz/ http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2013/01/12/the-web-responds-to-the-untimely-death-of-hacker-activist-aaron-swartz/#comments Sat, 12 Jan 2013 15:18:02 +0000 Mathew http://www.mathewingram.com/work/?p=8628 The open web and freedom of information in general lost one of their most passionate proponents yesterday, with the death of early Reddit staffer and Demand Progress founder Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide on Friday, according to a family member. He was facing federal charges for hacking into the JSTOR academic database and downloading millions of research papers, but had also reportedly suffered from depression. He was 26 years old.

As the news of his death spread throughout the web and social networks like Twitter, there was an outpouring of grief and sorrow from some of his friends and those he had worked with on a number of projects — including the early development of the RSS syndication standard, the web.py software framework, the Creative Commons movement and the W3C web standards committee.

We’ve collected some of those comments and responses here (there’s also a Reddit thread and a Hacker News thread about his death, and Alexander Howard of O’Reilly Radar has collected some tweets and links of his own in a Storify post):

Update: Swartz’s family and his partner have released a statement about his death, in which they point the finger of blame directly at the U.S. Attorney’s office and say their prosecution played a role in Aaron’s suicide. The statement says:

“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web, posted a message after he learned of the news, saying:

“Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.”

Cory Doctorow, author and BoingBoing co-founder, posted a long and heart-felt tribute to Swartz and a discussion of his struggles with depression, saying:

“Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. He was one of the early builders of Reddit (someone always turns up to point out that he was technically not a co-founder, but he was close enough as makes no damn), got bought by Wired/Conde Nast, engineered his own dismissal and got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising, reckless and delightful shit-disturber… we have all lost someone today who had more work to do, and who made the world a better place when he did it.”

Matt Haughey, the founder of Metafilter, posted a comment on his site about Aaron, whom he met while he was working on the Creative Commons project with Larry Lessig — and how at one programming event, Swartz had to come with his father because he was only 15:

“Aaron, I’m so sorry to see you go. You were an amazing person who did incredible work that helps us all out and I really wish you stayed for many more decades so you could continue making society a better place to be. I’ll really miss you.”

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, posted a memorial entitled “Aaron Swartz, hero of the open world, dies” — and recalled working with the young man on Kahle’s Open Library project, which he helped to code:

“Aaron was steadfast in his dedication to building a better and open world. Selfless. Willing to cause change. He is among the best spirits of the Internet generation. I am crushed by his loss, but will continue to be enlightened by his work and dedication. May a hero and founder of our open world rest in peace.”

In 2007, Swartz wrote what many took to be a suicide note (thanks to Nik Cubrilovic for the link) after he had been fired by Conde Nast (which acquired Reddit in 2006), a note that eventually led Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian to call the police and break into Swartz’s apartment. The young programmer later explained that he wrote it while he was in pain due to a medical issue, but some friends took it as a sign that he was struggling with emotional problems as well.

In 2007, Philipp Lenssen of the blog Google Blogoscoped posted a long interview with Swartz about his development as a programmer, his work with Reddit and Creative Commons, getting fired by Conde Nast and a number of other topics:

“Seriously, though, the Web is what we make of it. We have a powerful, widely-deployed, largely uncontrolled communication network. It’s up to us to decide where to go next.”

John Gruber of the Apple blog Daring Fireball also posted a tribute, saying: “Aaron was a friend and a brilliant mind… he had an enormous intellect — again, a brilliant mind — but also an enormous capacity for empathy. He was a great person. I’m dumbfounded and heartbroken.”

Swartz was also involved in the fight against SOPA, the draconian anti-piracy law that Congress tried to pass last year — this is a video of him discussing the campaign against the bill, which was later shelved:

Many of those who mourned Swartz’s passing wondered whether he knew how respected and loved he was by those who were close to him:

Some of Swartz’s supporters in his fight against the federal charges related to his JSTOR hacking questioned whether the threat of jail time might have accelerated his depression, but others said he didn’t seem that troubled by it. As we wrote last year, Swartz — who had hacked into a federal database in 2009 and download thousands of documents but never been prosecuted for it — gained access to a computer at Harvard and ran a program that downloaded a huge proportion of the research papers JSTOR sells to universities and other institutions.

Larry Lessig, who worked with Swartz on Creative Commons and other projects, has written a post saying what his young friend did with the JSTOR archive was wrong — although the principle may have been right — but that the government’s case against him was reprehensible and over-reaching in the extreme: “Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way.”

According to those who knew him, Swartz believed that it was wrong to charge so much for access to these papers, many of which were produced by academics for free, and in some cases with government funding (Maria Bustillos has a great overview of the case here). And even though JSTOR said it didn’t want to proceed with a case against him (and has since opened up its database — at least a little) the Department of Justice continued with its case, and Swartz faced a potential 35 years in prison.

Bradley Horowitz of Google, and formerly of Yahoo, remembered talking with Swartz about his plans to use Hangouts for journalistic purposes around the Occupy Wall Street movement:

“I was really heart-broken by this news… Thank you Aaron, for all you contributed to the world, and inspiring so many.”

In this video conversation from 2008, Swartz talked about how he got started as a programmer with Economist blogger Will Wilkinson:

Swartz had prepared a webpage in the event that he was “hit by a truck” as he put it:

“I ask that the contents of all my hard drives be made publicly available from aaronsw.com… please update the footer of this page with a link. Also email the relevant lists and set up an autoresponder for my email address to email people who write to me. Feel free to publish things people say about me on the site. Oh, and BTW, I’ll miss you all.”

Web pioneer and Harvard fellow Doc Searls wrote a memorial post for Swartz, along with a picture of him at a conference with Dave Winer — a conference Swartz had to be driven to by his mom, since he was only 15 — and said: “We haven’t just lost a good man, but the better world he was helping to make.”

Alex Macgillivray, general counsel at Twitter and former Google lawyer, said:

A comment on the discussion thread on the Y Combinator site Hacker News that appeared to be from Swartz’s mother said:

“Thank you all for your kind words and thoughts. Aaron has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful. Aaron was a terrific young man. He contributed a lot to the world in his short life and I regret the loss of all the things he had yet to accomplish. As you can imagine, we all miss him dearly. The grief is unfathomable.”

Microsoft research and sociologist Danah Boyd has written about the boy/man she knew for the past nine years, and how he could be both brilliant and frustrating — but she says the thing that makes her the angriest is how unreasonable his prosecution was: “He became a toy for a government set on showing their strength. And they bullied him and preyed on his weaknesses and sought to break him. And they did.”

David Weinberger of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has a post on his blog in which he calls Aaron Swartz not a hacker but “a builder.” And Weinberger points (as many others have) to a post from Alex Stamos, an expert in information technology who was an expert witness in Swartz’s case, who argues that his downloading of JSTOR articles wasn’t a criminal hack: “I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail.”

Micah Sifry of TechPresident remembers meeting Aaron in 2004, when he was 18, and being impressed with how dedicated he was: “I don’t know where he got the bug, but I understood it. If you have “change the world” disease, there is only one cure. And he tried mightily to change the world using every tool at his disposal.” And Dan Gillmor argues that we should remember Aaron by working for open society and against government abuses: “So amid my grief for Aaron, I’m angry — and committed to working for honorable enforcement of rational laws, and for values Aaron exemplified in his short life.”

James Grimmelmann, a law professor at New York Law School who knew Swartz well, writes about some of the incredible things that he accomplished at such a young age: “Aaron was a friend, and more than that, he was one of my heroes. No one I have known better embodied the bumper-sticker motto to “be the change you wish to see in the world.” It is hard to believe he is gone.” And Glenn Greenwald writes at The Guardian about what he calls the “inspiring heroism” of Aaron Swartz — he didn’t just talk about internet freedom and civil liberties, Greenwald says, “He repeatedly sacrificed his own interests, even his liberty, in order to defend these values and challenge and subvert the most powerful factions that were their enemies. That’s what makes him, in my view, so consummately heroic.”

A number of academics have tried to honor Swartz’s commitment to open information by making their journal articles free to download. And Quinn Norton, who was Swartz’s girlfriend for a time, has written a heart-wrenching post about their time together here.

]]> http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2013/01/12/the-web-responds-to-the-untimely-death-of-hacker-activist-aaron-swartz/feed/ 0 JPG magazine: Great idea, bad business? http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2009/01/03/jpg-magazine-great-idea-bad-business/ http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2009/01/03/jpg-magazine-great-idea-bad-business/#comments Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:00:07 +0000 Mathew http://www.mathewingram.com/work/?p=3950 Like many others, I was saddened to hear about the closure of JPG, the “crowd-sourced” photography mag that started in 2004 and became a real Web 2.0 success story. I confess that I never actually saw a physical issue of the magazine, but I thought the concept had a lot of merit: a collection of the best photos submitted by a community of passionate photographers, voted on by the community and then printed and published. Printing and distributing a high-quality magazine costs a lot of money, however, and it seems JPG couldn’t quite find the business model that would make that part of the organization work.

On the first day of the new year, the magazine — backed by a consortium involving former CNET exec Halsey Minor — announced that it was folding due to a lack of funds. For many, this was the second in a series of tragedies for JPG, with the first being the ousting of founders Derek Powazek and Heather Champ in May of last year, after what appeared to be a falling-out with Minor and other backers. Many people cancelled their JPG accounts as a result, in solidarity with Powazek and Champ, and it’s possible that the friction and stresses that event put on the JPG community helped contribute to its current problems.

On a more hopeful note, there are signs that JPG could potentially be resurrected. As Mike Arrington notes at TechCrunch, there has been an expression of interest from SmugMug CEO Don McAskill, and a post at the JPG blog says that discussions are underway with a number of interested parties. I hope they can come to some kind of agreement, because the concept behind the magazine makes a lot of sense to me, and seems like a natural fit with an existing community like SmugMug’s.

]]> http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2009/01/03/jpg-magazine-great-idea-bad-business/feed/ 14 Personal note: A job change for yours truly http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/11/03/personal-note-a-job-change-for-yours-truly/ http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/11/03/personal-note-a-job-change-for-yours-truly/#comments Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:17:39 +0000 Mathew http://www.mathewingram.com/work/?p=3422 As many people who have been reading this blog for awhile probably know, I work for the Globe and Mail, a daily newspaper based in Toronto, where I’ve been working since 1994 or so. I’ve written about the stock market, the rise of the Internet, moved out West to write about oil and gas, and then came back in 2000 to be the Globe’s first online columnist and its first blogger (before anyone — including me — really knew what that meant). For the past year and a half or so, I’ve been the newspaper’s “new media” reporter, writing about all the ways in which the Web and social media are changing the business of online content for newspapers, magazines, authors, musicians, actors, artists and just about everyone in between.

A little while ago, I was offered an opportunity at the Globe that I got pretty excited about: a position that we’re calling “Communities Editor.” What does that mean exactly? To tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure.

As far as I’m concerned, it means a chance to apply some of those Web 2.0, “media is a conversation,” social-networking principles (the kind we started the mesh conference to talk about) to the newspaper that I work for, instead of just writing about what other content producers are doing. We’re talking about blogs, comments, interactive features, Twitter, Facebook, and much more. Some attempts will fail. Others (hopefully) will not. The reality is that creating communities doesn’t happen overnight.

In fact, I would argue (and have argued) that it’s impossible to actually create a community at all, despite the fact that legions of companies are desperately trying to do just that. To use a real-world analogy, you can build houses and lay sidewalks and plant trees, but you can’t create a community — that’s something that happens organically, if you have all the right ingredients. What are those ingredients? I don’t think anyone has the answer to that, which is part of what makes it so fascinating.

When it comes to the Globe, I think that compelling, thoughtful content and commentary is a pretty good starting place for growing a community, and judging by the response since we launched comments on all of our news stories (the first newspaper in North America to do so, as far as I know), lots of other people think so too. I’m hoping we can build on that. But it’s going to take work, and more than a little risk as well.

As I told the senior editors at the Globe, in order for us to do this properly, we need to be committed to opening up our content in ways we haven’t even thought of — including some ways that might seem strange or contentious, and which could at least initially be met with considerable internal resistance. Among other things, we need to make it easier for people to find our content, share our content, link to our content and even make use of our content (in some cases to create their own content).

To me, that’s part of what “social media” means, and it’s the kind of thing that true communities take for granted.

Are we ready for that? To be quite honest, I don’t know. I hope so. But the reality is that unless we are sincere in our efforts, then we might as well not bother. As I said when I accepted the job, if what we’re talking about is creating the appearance of conversation, a Potemkin village that creates the illusion of a community, or using social-media tools solely to spam readers with advertising, then we have already failed. Creating a real community is infinitely harder — but I think it can also be substantially more rewarding, and that’s what I’m hoping to work towards.

As far as this blog goes, I’m going to continue to write about most of the things I’ve been writing about up until this point — social media, new business models, and so on. I think the challenges that newspapers like mine are facing are more or less the same as the challenges facing the music industry, the movie business, book publishers and pretty much any other content-related industry you can think of. And I hope to be able to tell you about some of the things we’re experimenting with or thinking about, and get feedback from you on what to do or how best to do it (feel free to tell me when and where we are blowing it as well). Should be a fun ride.

]]> http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/11/03/personal-note-a-job-change-for-yours-truly/feed/ 196 Lala: The return of my.mp3.com http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/10/21/lala-the-return-of-mymp3com/ http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/10/21/lala-the-return-of-mymp3com/#comments Tue, 21 Oct 2008 04:19:33 +0000 Mathew http://www.mathewingram.com/work/?p=3079 Sometimes — in fact, most of the time — it seems as though the music industry has changed very little since the early days of Napster and the invention of the mp3 file. Lawsuits still shut down Web-based music services and tie people up in court, record labels still primarily ignore the potential of the Internet, and so on. But at least one thing has changed: the idea of an online music locker where you can store songs seems to be something to promote, rather than something to sue into oblivion. It’s one of the main features of the newly-relaunched Lala service.

This feature, as Harry notes at Technologizer, happens to be exactly the same as a service that Michael Robertson used to offer way back when, known as MyMp3.com. Users could simply have the service scan a compact disc and then the songs would be unlocked online, so that they could be listened to anywhere there was Internet access. It was a great service, and like Harry I was pretty sad to see it get shut down after a lawsuit from the RIAA (Michael has since tried to create a similar service at mp3tunes.com, which is also being sued by EMI).

Now, apparently, the four major record labels see the wisdom of such a service, and have licensed their music to Lala for that purpose. In addition to the locker function, the site also seems to be setting a new low in pricing: downloads are as little as $7.49 for an album — with streaming included — and you can stream any song for just 10 cents (although as Brad Stone notes, sites like iMeem and Last.fm offer streaming for free).

Is the new Lala the next revolution in online music? It looks to have at least one compelling feature that no one else is offering, which is a good start. I’m trying the service out, and I’ll let you know what I think. Stan Schroeder at Mashable says that he doesn’t like Lala’s business model much, primarily because it’s too restrictive.

]]> http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/10/21/lala-the-return-of-mymp3com/feed/ 2 Twitter: The hunt for a business model http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/10/18/twitter-the-hunt-for-a-business-model/ http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/10/18/twitter-the-hunt-for-a-business-model/#comments Sat, 18 Oct 2008 15:06:01 +0000 Mathew http://www.mathewingram.com/work/?p=3044 It’s been a Twitterific kind of week, in a lot of ways. Not just because Ev Williams seized the reins of power (such as they are) at the startup — which led to lots of theorizing about why Jack Dorsey, who originally came up with the idea for Twitter, was so suddenly sidelined — but because Twitter is probably the classic example right now of a Web 2.0-type service that has plenty of users, but still no actual business model. With the U.S. and even the global economy in a state of upheaval and layoffs sweeping through Silicon Valley, what happens to such a company?

Twitter investor Fred Wilson seems to be getting more and more exasperated with the question about the company’s business model, but as my friend Mark Evans notes, it’s a question that has become a lot more pertinent than it was even a few months ago. Another investor, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, says Twitter will introduce a business model of some kind next year, and Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider believes that the company could eventually be worth $1-billion once it figures out how to translate a devoted user base into actually dollars and cents.

Fred’s comment — about how Google “eventually figured out how to make money,” and therefore Twitter will too — strikes right at the heart of the problem. Anyone who argues that building a user base and figuring out how to monetize it later is a dumb way to run a business has to deal with the fact that Google did exactly that, and that doing so hasn’t just worked out for the company, but has been spectacularly, mind-bogglingly successful. Does that mean anyone can do it, or was Google somehow special and/or lucky? I don’t think anyone really knows the answer to that.

Is Twitter the same as Google, in any fundamental way that matters? It’s true that Twitter has a large user base, but at the moment it’s primarily geeks and techies and social-media consultants. Can it go “mainstream” in the same way that Google did? I’m not sure. The need that Twitter fulfills isn’t quite as obvious as it was with Google, and the way in which Twitter is better than existing methods of communication isn’t obvious either. That said, the fact that it’s showing up on the evening news and even inside companies is a sign that mainstream use might not be all that far away.

What remains to be seen is whether the business models or revenue streams that Bijan Sabet is talking about interfere with what has made Twitter so popular. Will people care if there are giant ads in the stream, or if sending more than a certain number of updates costs money?

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