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A fascinating story of over-the-top copyright enforcement at The Register by Australian copyright lawyer (formerly in-house for ARIA, our RIAA) and music industry commentator Alex Malik.

Malik describes the case of a Sydney teenager being charged with “Aiding and abetting a criminal activity” for linking to files on a music sharing site. There is no evidence that the child profited from the linking, he was 13 at the time of the alleged offense, and any fool would have to presume that sending 8 AFP officers to raid his home is, well, staggering overkill.

Anyhoo, read the article. One has to wonder where all this is leading.

And once you’re done, go read more about the big picture of file sharing and the decline of record industry profits.

Continuing my recent theme of social networks, trust, searching and filesharing I present an article by Clay Shirky.

He describes the technological and social effects of the RIAA’s strategies against file-sharing: by attacking some of the few nodes that make a large number of files accessible for most of the time, they have sufficiently weakened the system that users are angry, both at Kazaa (for example) and the RIAA.

Shirky goes on to describe a new kind of system, one that is slowly evolving today, based on “trust networks”. Users invite each other to join networks of trust, smaller and even less centralised than the current generation of P2P networks (Gnutella, Kazaa, eDonkey etc). Shirky claims that the efficiency of these networks in finding desired content is higher than one might expect for a random distribution of files, because users who trust each other are likely to have similar tastes.

This brings me to a criticism that has been levelled at Outfoxed, and which I think is appropriate here: Trust is not absolute or all-encompassing. If my friend George is a Professor of Theoretical Mathematics at Princeton, then of course I’ll trust his opinion on anything mathematical - however, he may also be a recalcitrant sexist pig, so I wouldn’t trust his opinion on women.

Likewise, I may trust my friends not to rat on me to the RIAA when we share files, but I may also think their taste in music is crap (this is, in fact, true).

So when we talk about the trust vectors that we hook into the cloud, they need to have more dimensions than just “who?” and “how much?”. They also need “with regards to what?”. In order to operate efficiently our file-sharing trust networks need to be built on an heuristic which combines both “secrecy” (traditional trust) and “semantics” - to let us walk the traditional trust graph to content we actually want.

Amazing Flash CIA World Factbook visualiser.

Okay, so after all my huffing and puffing about begging Google to implement browser extensions for trust networks, suddenly (and seemlingly out of nowhere) comes Outfoxed, a Firefox browser extension that uses trust networks to prevent phishing, warn about malicious files, and generally spread trusted information throughout the web. It was created by Stan James as part of his masters thesis. I’m downloading it now, and will report back soon about its effectiveness. To friends of mine who are reading this and use Firefox, let me know if you download this extension and we’ll form our own trust network

Update: So far, it has complained about being unable to connect to localhost:63047, and crashed my browser. But I’m using Deer Park Alpha 1, so don’t take my case as typical. Also, it is (probably by necessity) dependant upon a central server to share information with other browsers (Correction: It is not based on a central server, but rather on XML “feeds” which can reside on any server, just like RSS). However, if this server software is also open source (and I suspect that it is) then it will be possible to set up private trust “Islands”, which is actually a Good Thing ™ as far as the software design is concerned.

Also, the user interface supports ratings and tags - rock! I really hope that an active user and development community builds around this initiative. Great work, Stan

Update 2: Outfoxed re-orders your Google results based on trust ratings. Sweet mother of shit!

Update 3: Went back to the latest stable Firefox (1.0.4) and it works very well. Still get very occasional messages about being unable to contact the local database, but the experience is mostly surprisingly smooth.

Kevin Hale has written an article at ParticleTree which talks about the increasing importance of RSS, which in effect means the importance of subscription-based information consumption (as opposed to search). This has profound implications for the business model of, say, Google because it reduces the relevance of plain old searching - people are already having a certain amount of their customised information needs met automatically.

I’ve noticed that on my blog, about 50% of the referrals come from Google and 50% from technorati. I would imagine that for most blogs with semantic tagging functionality, this would be roughly the same.

Around two years ago, the picture was completely different - almost every referrer was google (with a few from yahoo search, msn search etc.). This shows that the “push” model of publishing, and the “aggregation” model of reading, is really taking off.

Within a short time, will we be typing in “christina_aguilera” as a social tag rather than a Google search term? Google, it seems, is trying to make that question irrelevant. Those at the forefront of web technology believe that Google is working on a system to unify basic search and the semantic keywords usually associated with sites like del.icio.us and technorati. This is, not coincidentally, why I chose to register (syn).onymo.us - tag unification. Semantic browsing. Imagine typing in a word and being able to navigate, not just via the usual links, but also through the dimensions of meaning created by tagging: Start at “Royalty”, navigate to “Empire”, “Rome”, “Italy”, “Pasta”, “Atkins Diet” and so on.

You could develop a seriously awesome browsing experience if that was the case. But wait a second - how do you create that seamless semantic browsing experience without some ghastly frames-based abomination that breaks half the web? You would need some sort of rich client-based front end.

Google has hired some Mozilla.org developers, so one can only assume that they’re serious about releasing browser-integrated functionality. The also have an IE toolbar team in there somewhere, because they released the Googlebar for IE. What we’ll probably see, in my completely irrelevant opinion, is Googlebars (or even whole new main toolbar buttons, right next to “back”, “forward” and “stop”) which provide intuitive ways to browse the web by topic.

So Google, while you’re at it, can I request something? Trust relationships. An easy way to say “this person knows their shit” or “this person is full of shit” (or a spammer) and have that information aggregate through my existing trust network to others who think I’m not full of shit. That way, spammers will be relegated to trust “islands” (unless they can somehow hijack the system) while the rest of us build strong social links that increase the quality of the browsing and aggregation experience.

By storing and propagating trust information (and I realise what a hurdle it will be to convince the tinfoil hat brigade that this isn’t the beginning of World War III on privacy), Google can maintain and extend its relevance beyond simple search.

If they don’t do it, someone else will do it via P2P and within 5 years they’ll disappear.

Ok, that last bit was just me being provocative

p.s. Also, please please include some kind of rich support for geographic browsing - and I don’t just mean “where’s the nearest pizza joint”, I mean “what events are happening in a particular region between these dates”, or “who carpools between these locations at 8am from monday to
friday?. I know, I’m a whiner.

Update: I just noticed that Yahoo’s Y!Q service does something similar to what I’m talking about with the toolbar. They also provide an example web page with Y!Q integrated. It’s quite cute, but Yahoo’s branding is less appealing and subtle than Google’s. I know that _shouldn’t_ be important, but it is. If using Y!Q means having a whacking great floating div appear over your website rendered in vomitous purple and yellow, then how many serious websites are going to do it?