tranquileye | John Harris Stevenson's Web site

It was just a coincidence that yesterday, the day that may have sealed the fate of Internet broadcasting in the United States, was also the opening of the Copyright Board of Canada hearing to establish fees for music on the Internet.

I was at hearing representing community and campus radio, one of the few non-lawyers in the room. The witnesses presented by Canada's performance rights organization, SOCAN, are being questioned aggressively by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, CBC, CRIA, Apple, and others. The stakes are obviously quite high, as some form of Internet broadcasting may replace terrestrial broadcasting as WiFi bandwidth and availability continues to increase.

Under the current copyright fee structure, radio stations pay a set percentage of their budget to SOCAN for the right to broadcast music. The most significant change to fee structures that SOCAN is proposing is the addition of a minimum fee: anyone who streams music in Canada would be required to pay at least $200 a month.

While the minimum fee won’t be as crippling to small netcasters as similar fees in the United States, it will still drive a great number of them offline.

At the hearing I represent the entire community-oriented radio sector in Canada, which consists of over 140 radio stations. For the past thirty years, campus and community radio has been Canada's incubator for new and emerging musicians. Countless major label and independent artists first received exposure and support from community radio. But this role is endangered by the new minimum fees, and the hearing over the next two weeks will go a long way to determining whether or not small campus and community radio stations, and small music podcasters, will be able to broadcast their programming using the Internet.

Initially I found little logical basis for the charges proposed under Tariff 22. The minimum fee that SOCAN proposed was the same for everyone: small podcasters, campus radio, the CBC, gaming Web sites, and big commercial broadcasters like Standard and CHUM. However, I think SOCAN’s objective is to create an artificial minimum value for the music it represents. Internet streams and podcasts are much less expensive to produce and distribute than terrestrial radio. While I think of the new milieu as allowing more voices into the audio media space, SOCAN no doubt sees only the possibility of higher profits for commercial media as distribution costs fall.

SOCAN’s proposed minimum, $200 (or $90) a month, might not seem like much, but let’s put it in context. The station I work with, CHUO-FM in Ottawa, pays SOCAN 1.9% of gross annual operating costs of about $250,000, resulting in a fee of around $4750 a year. Under Tariff 22, and assuming reasonable Web site expenses, CHUO would pay the minimum fee, which would amount to $2400 a year, increasing total copyright fees to SOCAN by 50%. This seems clearly out of proportion with community radio’s use of music.

And CHUO is actually one of Canada's larger community radio stations. There are very many small campus and community stations in Canada that operate on a yearly budget of only a few thousand dollars. A small station with a $10,000 in annual expenses would pay $190 for terrestrial broadcasting rights, but $2400 a year for Internet broadcasting, a 1200% increase.

For any campus or community station, Internet broadcasting is not a matter of extending offerings or reaching a greater audience. They are simply following their existing audience as their listening habits change. Terrestrial radio listening has, for many years, been slowly declining in Canada. This has been an especially pronounced among youth, the principle listeners to community radio. I’ve had first hand experience with the change in university student listening habits in the past few years as they have moved away from FM radio and embraced the iPod and the PC.

If SOCAN’s fee is approved as is, the result will be the effective silencing of non-commercial Internet music broadcasting in Canada. Most community radio, and probably all music podcasters, will simply stop creating and sharing their programming online. This will mean less Canadian music generally, and much less emerging and alternative music, available not just to Canadians who want to hear it, but to a broader global audience.

Posted by John at 4:57 PM | Permalink | copyright internet law music streaming | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of absurdities have come out of the disgusting attacks against Kathy Sierra.

The first has been silence: active tech blogger Robert Scoble wrote that he was going to take the week off "in support of Kathy [Sierra]". I appreciate the sentiment, but as I posted in Scoble's comments, that is the exact opposite of what he and others should be doing. You don't respond to this sort of thing by shutting up. It's an indication of how disengaged some bloggers are from the political realities of the world that they think that silence is helpful. Usually you don't feed the trolls, but saying nothing, or saying less, is not an effective strategy in this case.

That's why it is so painful to hear that Kathy herself is now is writing about withdrawing from blogging, and is questioning whether she will continue to speak at conferences. I hope that she doesn't give up her voice in the face of this nastiness.

The second absurdity has been Tim O'Reilly's draft Blogger's Code of Conduct. Again, I appreciate the sentiment here, but if such a code had been in place two months ago, when the attacks on Kathy started, what difference would it have made? The vast bulk of bloggers and commenters present at least somewhat civil discourse. That is, they already adhere to the spirit of the Code. The few that don't, the trolls and the sock puppets, won't be following to any rules but their own.

Interest in the Blogger's Code has moved the discussion away from what I think is a more important issue: the vicious misogyny of the attacks on Kathy. The tech "culture" remains male-dominated in a way that many segments of Western society no longer are. That challenge isn't going to be solved by whipping up a set of rules, but we certainly need to start addressing it.

Posted by John at 1:57 PM | Permalink | blogging politics | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Can we stop talking about Web 2.0? It's confusing my friends.

I found out last week that at least one person I know thinks Web 2.0 is a new and better version of the Internet, just released. My smart but non-geek friend asked me if, in order to view "Web 2.0 sites" like del.icio.us and Flickr, he needed to download Firefox. Someone had told him Firefox was "the Web 2.0 browser." No, I said, any current browser should be okay, but my friend insisted that he wanted "all the new Web 2.0 features."

I was reminded of how America Online used to promote itself with new versions of its software in the 1990s -- "AOL 3.0! Now with new and better buttons!"

But as I told my friend, there is no new version of the Web. It's true that we're probably doing better with search, collaboration, and content sharing, but this is a continuation of 15 years several decades of work, an evolution rather than a revolution.

One of the ways we're solving these problems is by a greater emphasis on nurturing and drawing on collective knowledge. This is the basis for Google's more effective search technology, which ranks Web pages based on who links to them and in what ways. Sites like del.icio.us depend on individual sharing and classification of information, and then aggregate it to make it more useful. While this sort of participation is central to many new Web services, older dot.coms such as Amazon have been doing it for a long time.

I've heard these technologies called "social technology" or "social software." Bart Decrem, founder and former CEO of Flock, calls this the "Participatory Web." All of these terms are preferable to Web 2.0, which is being used in so many contexts -- design, marketing, coding -- that it has ended up not meaning much of anything.

Posted by John at 11:01 AM | Permalink | social software web web development | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

At Christmas, all roads lead home, but there is always more than one road to take. This year, in green and grey Truro, I can hear my mother still snoring through the floorboards. The day waits chilly and pregnant, and when I can smell the coffee, I'll know to come out. Then we'll drop this Christmas into the silent past, its many imperfections forgotten, and make a perfect new year. I remember that there is no ideal Christmas, only the one Christmas you decide to make yourself.

Posted by John at 8:34 AM | Permalink | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The CRTC released its new Commercial Radio Policy on Friday. I wanted to wait awhile before commenting on it, since my main focus for the past few days has been on the policy's specific impact on community radio. My initial impression -- that it's mostly a do-nothing policy -- remains, but I think I have a better idea of why that is, and what it means.

Some of my colleagues are a bit surprised by how little this new policy does. They, like me, see commercial radio as a failing medium. In terms of program quality, things are about as bad as they have ever been; most commercial radio is backward-looking, repetitive, and unadventurous. The music ecosystem -- that complex relationship among artists, labels, radio, and the audience -- also seems very fragile right now, with music sales in decline, fewer new musicians getting airplay, and sales of Canadian artists stagnant. And radio listenership is shrinking, especially among young people and teens, who value the flexibility of iPods and satellite radio.

But the new radio policy didn't try to address these things. There were no significant changes to Canadian Content requirements, no new regulations to encourage airplay of new artists, and the CRTC long ago abandoned efforts to try to make radio actually sound good. In a study also released last week, the Commission claimed that new technologies will have only a marginal impact on broadcasting for the next while.

Why the disconnect? One should realize that commercial radio's main measure of success isn't any of the challenges I just mentioned... it's profit. And on that count, radio has never been more successful, with a 24% increase in 2005 to an amazing $277 million. That's more than a 20% margin.

In our current climate of deregulation, it's the industry's perception of itself as successful that becomes the reality of policy, not what we, as listeners, know. In other words, if radio doesn't think it's broken, the CRTC won't try to fix it.

There may be another reason why the CRTC is reluctant to address the systemic challenges I outlined above: it doesn't know if it can.

As I mentioned above, new Canadian musicians have a lot of trouble getting radio airplay in Canada, and one of the big themes of the review process was how this could be fixed. Nearly everyone talked about it, and many people supported some new regs suggested by CIRAA, the organization that claims to represent new artists. Many were a bit surprised at the hearing when CIRAA disowned its proposed CANCON Pro formula, revealing that it would have actually lowered airplay of new music. After that, their new recommendation, a 33% "new music" quota, wasn't taken seriously.

There is also evidence that the benefits from the CRTC's most important content regulation, the once reliable Canadian Content requirements, are diminishing. The last increase in CanCon, from 30% to 35% in 1998, had less impact on sales of Canadian music than similar increases in the past. Raising CanCon, as many in the music industry had suggested, would have increased their revenue from copyright, but probably not their sales.

As I suggested to the Commission in my own submission, content regulations are becoming increasingly less effective tools, and direct funding for new media creation and Canadian content should be emphasized instead. In that vein, the CRTC replaced its confusing system of Canadian Talent Development, originally established to support Canadian music from radio revenues, with a better funded and more focused Canadian Content Development (CCD) policy.

It's well known that too much talent development funding ended up benefiting broadcasters, rather than artists. The new rules tighten things up a bit, and also recognize that commercial radio revenues should go to support new and non-commercial media, including community radio. The Commission failed to require specific levels for this, but it's a start.

As many have said this week, the new radio policy just tweaks the system, rather than presenting a needed vision for the future. My fear is that the decline in radio listenership might hit a tipping point and begin to accelerate quickly, perhaps when a technology like ubiquitous WiFi radio takes off. Not that I'll cry too many tears for Canadian commercial radio; it stopped being an important part of my life many years ago.

Posted by John at 11:14 PM | Permalink | canada community radio crtc radio regulation | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was talking to my son Josh on Saturday about how I discovered this or that band, and I told him that the person who had introduced me to much of the music I love, when we were both at CKDU-FM Halifax in the 1980s, is now a taxi driver in Antarctica. He must think I'm lying half the time with my stories, and it's true that the ice vehicles Genevieve Ellison drives aren't really taxis, but more like shuttles, something that we don't have in Ottawa. I've been reading Genevieve's blog on and off for weeks now; she's describing real exploration, personal and geographic both.

Posted by John at 10:56 PM | Permalink | antarctica blog ckdu friend me travel | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Weekend DIY Gizmo Project: Unsuccessfully try to install applications on your new U3 Smart drive, happily find that PortableApps.com has released a suite of great portable open source tools with most of U3's functionality, and then create a "DemocraKey" for anonymous surfing thanks to TrueCrypt and Torpark.

Posted by John at 9:33 AM | Permalink | anonymous portable apps privacy security usb | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the midst of holiday parties and by-law writing, a nice piece from the Mathew Ingram at the Globe and Mail on Conan O'Brien's horny manatee and viral marketing.

Posted by John at 2:55 PM | Permalink | tv viral web | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My good friend Greg Searle doesn't post that often to his blog, electricfrog (named after his radioactively green hybrid car). But when he does, it tends to be interesting, including last year's posts about his travels through India and the Himalayan foothills. Yesterday Greg posted for the first time in a year on a new report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization on the negative environmental impact of cattle farming on the environment. It's worth a look.

Posted by John at 9:44 AM | Permalink | agriculture environment policy | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been quite interested in economic policy lately and was happy to come across a CBC podcast from their Best of Ideas series about Economics and Social Justice (transcript). Avi Lewis' polemic here is passionate and entertaining, though I would have liked to hear more about new economic mechanisms for eliminating poverty in the global South, rather than the usual Keynes-Friedman dichotomy. I found Pier Luigi Sacco's talk less conventional but more interesting. Sacco argues that traditional economic theory assumes a rational consumer motivated only by needs, but that the contemporary consumer is actually more likely to be motivated by the desire to build a unique identity and social status through consumption. We can call this the economics of identity. Sacco argues that the insatiable drive to define identity in this way will only end when we invest in our own knowledge, creating what he calls an Educated Imagination.

Posted by John at 7:22 AM | Permalink | development economics podcast politics | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Conservative Minister of Industry Maxime Bernier has just announced the government will be "speeding up" deregulation of the local telephone market. Given the players, I have trouble believing this will improve service or pricing for anyone.

Posted by John at 4:35 PM | Permalink | canada crtc policy regulation telephone | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Caught the middle of a good documentary on Link TV about war profiteering and incompetence in the administration of aid to Iraq. You can see all of Iraq's Missing Billions on Google Video.

Posted by John at 4:26 PM | Permalink | development foreign policy iraq politics terror | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Take note of a column in today's Globe and Mail by Doug Saunders (subscription required) about what Mark Purcell, an urban design and planning professor at the University of Washington, calls the local trap. Writes Purcell, "The local trap equates the local with 'the good'... It is founded on the assumption that devolution of authority will produce greater democracy. It is assumed that the more localized governing institutions are, the more democratic they will be." I think Saunders hasn't read Purcell closely enough, so I suggest exploring his very readable essay on your own. I share Purcell's rejection of what has become a ritualistic fetishization of quite unrealistic notions of "local" while at the same time calling for greater community capacity building.

Posted by John at 11:59 AM | Permalink | city community politics urban planning | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have joined that elite 5% of the YouTube community who contribute content, by digitizing a few of my media theory video clips and posting them. I've also shared the oldest film of a pro wrestling match and an early-1980s Today Show interview with Miles Davis. I wish I had more time right now to pick through my VHS collection; there's a ton of cool stuff in there.

Posted by John at 7:45 AM | Permalink | google jazz me media video wrestling youtube | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I and my friends from Canada's community radio associations -- the National Campus and Community Radio Association, l'Association des radiodiffuseurs communautaires du Québec, and l'ARC du Canada -- had a good meeting yesterday with Timmins-James Bay MP Charlie Angus, the NDP parliamentary critic for Canadian Heritage. I reminded Charlie that I remembered him from punk band L'Etranger; they played Halifax in the early-1980s with Winnipeg's Dub Rifles. Angus went on to form the Grievous Angels, which has had a long career and become something of a cultural institution in Northern Ontario. As our associations push for the recognition and development of community media in Canada, we're hearing good things from Charlie and the other MPs with whom we are talking.

Posted by John at 7:32 AM | Permalink | canada community me media politics radio | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Google is wading into the deep waters of personally targeted television advertising with a partnership with British Sky Broadcasting. This will be an important project to follow.

Posted by John at 2:32 PM | Permalink | google media tech tv | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's easier to watch Adam Curtis' excellent documentary series for the BBC, The Power of Nightmares and The Century of Self, full length on Google Video, than to try to find the DVDs on Amazon, where they seem to be out of print.

Posted by John at 10:51 AM | Permalink | advertising culture international relations politics psychology terror | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Anne Applebaum on the tangle around the killing of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko: "Though we don't know who killed Litvinenko, we have learned that London is a more exciting place than we thought it was. We have learned that the complex plots of Dostoevsky novels merely reflect Russian reality. And we have learned that the old KGB lives on in new guises."

Posted by John at 1:17 PM | Permalink | espionage international relations politics terror | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"...Said's convenient poststructuralist position that the Orient did not exist, but was a Western construction, ignored reality. Different regions of the world do share certain cultural traits, and it is absurd to deny that Islam plays a major role in the societies and culture of the Middle East -- and that it is a role significantly different from Christianity's in the West. To say this is not to 'essentialize' those societies or reduce them to religious caricatures, but merely to acknowledge the obvious." Gary Kamiya at Salon with current critiques of Edward Said's "Orientalism".

Posted by John at 7:34 AM | Permalink | development middle east politics theory | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There was more than just the presentation of solid research at today's Protect the Net event, run by OpenNet Initiative. I love it when research results are really made accessible, like the maps created by Richard Rogers' team that explain keyword filtering in China and Iran. Ron Deibert's Citizen Lab has taken this research and turned it into action with Psiphon, a censorship circumvention solution that depends on social networks of trust. Great stuff.

Posted by John at 7:53 PM | Permalink | censorship net politics research tech | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a great time last night at my friend Jen Hunter's "evening of conversation and connection" at her home in Old Ottawa East. I know Jen well from her work with Tomoye, and her wonderful energy in contagious. As I expected, I met some fantastic people, and we had some great discussions about such diverse topics as learning technologies and personal productivity.

Posted by John at 6:28 AM | Permalink | gtd learning me | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Despite my concern about satellite radio's impact on Canadian radio, I have long been a fan of, and a listener to, the programming of XM and Sirius Radio. I recently had an email exchange with Greg Bell, the programmer and host of XM's Radio Classics channel, which has been my good and steady companion for many, many nights. The channel's programming is really from my mother's youth, not mine, but I got hooked on "golden age" radio when CBC broadcast the occasional program to fill summer hours in the 1970s. Greg obviously loves his job, and I can't blame him.

However, it's hard not to be a little apprehensive about the future of Greg's channel, and others that do not mimic a terrestrial radio format. Sirius recently lost Public Radio International, a channel of mostly thoughtful non-commercial programming. XM has discontinued many of the channels that attracted me to the service in the first place, including both of their world music channels (World Zone and Ngoma), a lounge channel (On the Rocks), and a blender filled with strangeness that was called Special X.

These channels have been replaced by various pop and rock formats that to me tend to sound a bit much like the same old thing. Sirius even replaced its world music channel with wall-to-wall Rolling Stones. Do we really need more of that? I'm hoping that XM keeps its remaining unique content -- channels like Fine Tuning, Cinemagic, and Audio Visions -- or I'll be buying the next big thing a little earlier than expected.

Posted by John at 2:54 PM | Permalink | media radio satellite radio sirius xm | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I remember the day I first encountered Apple's Macintosh computer in 1985. Craig and I were working with the Flamingo boys on a magazine, and it was Craig's idea to do the layout using this new thing called desktop publishing. Off we went to some strip mall on the outskirts of the city, and there was a Macintosh 128K. When I saw that first Mac I could feel the revolution coming, because it created what I ended up calling the empowerment layer -- the first real intuitive combination of GUI and hardware -- a layer that sat between the code I had learned in high school and the user I wanted to be. Macintosh became one of my passions.

Zoom ahead 20 years. I still love reading about Apple, tracking the rumour sites, and watching the Jobs keynotes. But I don't use a Mac in my day-to-day work, and I haven't purchased a new Mac in ten years.

What happened?

Most people don't remember the difficult period for Apple between those first insanely great Macs and the 1998 iMac. During that time Apple produced what can best be described as some very uninspiring stuff, like the buggy System 7 operating system and the boring beige-box Power Macintosh 7200, my last Mac. That was also the time when the Mac stopped being a great platform for games, and with the launch of Windows 95, the Mac lost a few of its unique qualities.

But I decided a few months ago that my next PC is going to be a Mac. With the introduction of Boot Camp and, more interestingly, Parallels Desktop for Mac, most reasons one might have had to stay with purely PC hardware have been banished. The Mac has gone beyond simply being flexible to become, again, very much about empowering the user to focus on what they want and need within the context of using technology.

Today's evidence of the Mac's Renaissance is the My Dream App event, a sort of collaborative creation of what look to be some amazing Mac apps. In particular, Atmosphere takes the weather forcast gizmo and turns it into a work of interactive art. Portal looks to be amazingly useful, and I'd love to try out Whistler. Looking at the shortlist of six apps, I hope they all get made.

Posted by John at 3:18 PM | Permalink | apple mac tech | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Saturday afternoon I was able to attend some (though not enough) of the Alternative Telecommunications Policy Forum organized by my colleagues at CRACIN. Great comments on what I missed by Allison Powell, Sascha Meinrath, and Ile Sans Fil Co-Founder Michael Lenczner.

I did catch a particularly interesting talk by Ben Scott of Free Press, an American media reform advocacy group which has been leading the charge to save Internet neutrality. After that session there was a lot of great energy in the room. The challenge will be turning that energy into effective political action.

Posted by John at 1:49 PM | Permalink | activism canada media policy research telecom | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Donna and I had the joy yesterday of meeting Sacha Johanna Cook, the brand spanking' new daughter of my old friends Iain Cook and Katherine Morrow. Iain has already set up a Sacha blog, the first entry of which is a snapshot of the world on her birthday, October 19th.

Posted by John at 12:56 PM | Permalink | friends me baby | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

She was something of a silly creature. Little black strawberry nose, little black lips. A curious under bite, perhaps normal for a shitzu. But she was a great dog.

Donna rescued her from a breeder who had worked her too hard. She nursed her after spinal surgery when she had fallen off the bed, took her for long morning walks along the canal, carried her down the stairs when they became too steep for her. If you loved Donna, you loved Sissi.

I thought I was a dedicated cat person, and often chaffed against the structure and uncompromising affection of the dog. But Sissi was relentless. She wanted to be where we were, and she wanted to play: not Frisbee (unfortunately), and even the cat could fetch better, but rolling around on the floor, nipping and grunting, full of life, full of dog.

She loved going for a drive. Once during a walk she took off down the street and jumped into someone else's car through an open door. Her adventure lasted only a few minutes before she was rescued, quite reluctantly.

We let her chase chickens, but only once. She chased squirrels more than that, but didn't know what to do with them when she got close. She wrestled with the cat, with whom she had numerous cross-species misunderstandings. She snored on our beds, she wanted chicken from the table, and we all watched "Six Feet Under" together.

And then she was fifteen. As sometimes happens, her age crept up on us until she couldn't find a comfortable way to sleep, and our play with her was infrequent and laboured. We had a good walk with her last night, her last as it turned out. It was like the old Sissi was back for a few moments, and she nearly pranced and led the way, as she had done so many times before. But she paid for it today. There was blood on her face this morning, and she vomited something black after I went to work. Donna called me crying. When there is no good time for something, sooner is better.

I stroked her chest and felt her heartbeat, and then it faded away, but Sissi is still strong in us, strong with her dog love, which must be the purest love of all.

Posted by John at 6:02 PM | Permalink | me pets | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

My first year at the University of Toronto researching information technologies in international development raised some questions that I still haven't answered.

I am a Ph.D. student at U of T's Faculty of Information Studies and Knowledge Media Design Institute. I have also worked for many years at the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, first working on a booming Web site, and now coordinating IT strategy and projects. During my first year at FIS exploring the theory and practise of IT projects in development. I tried to take a close look at the research conducted on a prominent and well-regarded information and communications project in Southeast Asia, one that has been touted by UNESCO and the International Telecommunication Union as a success. The objective of the project, like so many telecentre initiatives, had been to bring Internet connectivity to an isolated rural area, in this case using satellite technology.

Continue reading "Questions About Development ICTs" »

Posted by John at 3:07 PM | Permalink | development politics research | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)