Sam sets up a dichotomy between price and value, which he defines as, respectively, “how much you pay for [a good or service]“, and “how much a thing is worth”. The former varies quite a bit for a given good or service; the latter, for the most part, does not. He then goes on to describe a disconnect between the two, and how in recent years it’s gotten worse:

We now live in a world where the minimum price you can expect to pay for a piece of music is zero dollars. And if people have trouble telling price and value apart, which I think it’s clear that they do, then there are a lot of people who think that recorded music isn’t worth anything at all. Now, this is an obviously erroneous belief, because these people listen to music, and therefore it has value to them. But they don’t realize that. They think that the value is the price, which is nothing. And by “they,” I mean “all of us.”

The problem with this argument is that it’s too narrow a description of what people are willing to pay for. This argument views buying a album of music as a straightforward money-for-music deal. The real market isn’t that simple. There are other factors to consider: what can I use to listen to this music? What does it cost me in terms of time? Am I limited in any way in how I use it? Am I in danger of legal trouble for using or having it?

From the purest standpoint of a consumer, what piracy ultimately boils down to is a different distribution method, which has its own conveniences and drawbacks. Let’s take CDs as an example. Clear costs are in red (since some are debatable). A CD’s features are:

• Can be played in portable CD players or computers.
• Must be physically retrieved to be used.
• Can be optionally encoded to a computer.
• Can be easily shared with friends.
• Comes with art and lyrics and possible other features.
• Costs around $10-15.
• Requires either a trip to a brick-and-mortar store, or a several day wait to acquire.

Now let’s look at pirated music through the same lens.

• Costs nothing.
• Requires no physical storage.
• Can be easily shared with friends.
• Instant or very fast gratification.
• Can be played on computers and PMPs, or optionally encoded onto CDs.
• Requires users to organize their music themselves.
• Carries a minor risk of legal reprisal from authorities such as the RIAA.

It’s hard to argue from those lists that CD’s are a superior format, no? Takes up little to no space, can be played on any device (including much smaller ones than CD players), and it costs nothing! Not to mention, so few people have been sued by the RIAA that the lawsuits that have happened have served more to piss people off than scare them into paying for things.

When piracy first became a viable option for the masses–that is, when Napster became popular–the music industry’s response was to try to defend their operations by attacking it. For whatever reason, their thought was not “here’s a new opportunity, let’s learn how to make money from it”, it was “this threatens our business model, let’s destroy it”. And let’s be clear: this is a service that was better. Yes, it being free was a factor in that, but CD’s don’t offer instant gratification and will always require physical storage.

It took a few years, but music distributors figured this out. They know that instant gratification is very, very, very important if you want to get someone to pay for something. That’s why the iTunes Music Store is the largest music distributor in the world–it provides music straight into a user’s iTunes library in just a few clicks (effectively a music package repository). Amazon understands this with their MP3 store, which can automatically export its downloads into a user’s iTunes library or Windows Media Player.

And it’s also why streaming music is changing everything now.

I’m talking about Pandora, last.fm and Spotify. I’m sure we all know the former two–the latter third has made a tremendous splash in Europe, and will undoubtedly make a similar one once it makes its way to the USA. It’s basically like iTunes, except all of its music comes straight from their servers on demand, ad-supported or for a monthly fee. Let’s look at the feature list for that:

• Costs nothing.
• Allows personalized choices of music on demand.
• Instant gratification.
• Requires no physical storage.
• Can be played on computers and increasingly common internet-conneted portable devices.
• Costs money to remove ads.

This is better in almost every way, for nearly all use cases.

Economics has been called the Dismal Science for a reason: it’s amoral. It assumes that people don’t do what’s right: they act in their self interest. But there’s an upside to that: it means that piracy can be beaten by offering a better product. In the early days of piracy, it’s true that the technology didn’t exist yet for making current and emerging distribution methods practical–but it’s constantly getting cheaper, and as it does it’ll only become easier to make services like Spotify profitable.

For other examples in other media, there’s Audible.com, Netflix and Steam–all services which clearly have something to lose from piracy, and yet are doing pretty well. These businesses have all come up with ways to be better options than piracy for at least a lot of people, and they’re quite rightly doing well for it.

So yes, there may be a disconnect between what’s right and what happens in practice. But that’s no excuse for anyone to dig their heads in the sand and refuse to innovate. The world changes; if that threatens your business, then change your business. Draconian measures to protect a demonstrably inferior business model will not halt progress.

That curse is URL shortening. And yes, it did exist before Twitter, but Twitter both limits how much its users can post and depends on those users sharing content with each other, often in links–and those URLs can take up a lot of space. The growth of URL shortening has brought with it the growth of URL shortening services, which apparently hope to monetize it.

Leaving aside the issue of how monetizing such a thing can be done, URL shortening is bad from a user’s perspective for the simple reason that if someone shares a link with me, I have no clue where it’s going. If someone just posts “OMG this is awesome”, the shortened URL they post it with could just as easily be a rickroll attempt as it could be an evildoer hijacking their account and sending me to malware. And while I may be running Ubuntu, there’s no way of knowing that there isn’t some kind of zero-day exploit already being used on it (I have no illusions about Ubuntu being perfectly secure, after all).

This isn’t just a security problem–it’s also a usability one. What if I’m playing music and I don’t want to see a Youtube video? What if I’m working and only want to click on a link if I know it’ll be something quick? What if it’s a link to an inflammatory Reddit post that’ll just get me angry and ruin my mood?

Clever users may respond that there are browser extensions and Twitter clients that can solve this problem by showing a preview of the destination. Maybe, but if they don’t show you the URL, do you really think it would be hard for a malware writer to put up a fake display of the site at the destination? If they’re willing to meticulously fake the appearance of a Windows security warning or antivirus program, would it really be hard to put up a fake image of a Youtube page and then switch it out with Javascript if an actual browser is detected? Admittedly, this would likely have to target specific previewers to fake them out, but it’s a real possibility, and not one that an informed user can ignore.

In order to avoid subjecting people to this danger, I’ve installed YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener… clever!) on my hosting to try to avoid putting people through that. I don’t intend to let anyone else use it for URL shortening, just me–so you can be reasonably certain that if you see a short URL beginning with perpetualstudent.net/, it came from me and not someone who hijacked my account. Yes, my domain isn’t especially short, but it’s probably short enough for my purposes. YOURLS is a great project, if only because it shows just how little work it takes to make a URL shortener beyond thinking of a clever short domain name. All it takes is a cleverly-written .htaccess file, a bit of PHP code and a MySQL database. YOURLS even gives you all the same URL tracking features that the likes of bit.ly do.

So please–if you’re going to use a URL shortening service like bit.ly or u.nu, have the decency to explain in context where those links go and what I’ll get if I click on them. The occasional rickroll won’t kill me, but the last thing I want is to feel paranoid when clicking on links my friends share.

This most recent change consists of a revamp for Facebook’s already-substantial privacy settings. This change didn’t actually affect anyone’s settings who didn’t tell it to; users were greeted with an unavoidable menu asking them if they wanted to keep their old settings or switch them to new, simplified privacy categories–the default of which in a number of them was “Everyone”.

This is, to be perfectly fair, not something I really have a problem with. While “Everyone” was preselected for some users (UPDATE: apparently not all, since for some at least, it was set to Original Settings), they gave you all the information you need to decide whether that was actually a good thing. Plus, I get why they’re doing it; they want all the data they have on their users to be available to search engines and marketers so they can monetize it, and so they can position themselves as the search result that people might want to come up on Google searches for their users’ names. Monetizing profile data without incurring the wrath of privacy advocates is something they’ve been doing for years through, among other things, their own targeted advertising network (the one that’s known for selling sex to men and weight loss to women), the ill-conceived and ill-fated Beacon, Facebook Connect, and the notorious ads that use friend connections to make it appear as though a user’s friends endorse a product.

Many of Facebook’s users tend to forget that Facebook is neither free nor intended as a public service. They’re in the game to make money, and the data they’ve amassed on their users is worth a fortune to the right people. With that in mind, I don’t really blame them for encouraging their users to make their profile data public. (As long as, y’know, they’re not doing anything shady on the side in complete violation of their privacy policy.)

On the other hand, I imagine many of their users neither take the time to learn about how far their profile data can go nor care about the issue, and might very well absently click their way through the menu without thinking about what “Everyone” actually means. Frankly, I have little sympathy for those users, but the EFF disagrees. I would be quite interested in statistics on how many users actually changed their settings to Everyone as a result of this menu–those would presumably be the ones who just didn’t want to be bothered and thought “yeah, whatever”.

It just goes to show: as always, there is no replacement for a smart user. Internet companies will monetize however they can. It’s up to users to decide where they want their data to go, or if they even care.

Edited: Fixed a minor typo. Also, I’ve received reports that Everyone wasn’t always preselected, which is quite significant for the “yeah, whatever” cases.

New URL for my feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/perpetualstudent/eEFV.

Maybe he just doesn’t want to. Maybe he just wants to go back to the good old days when a news establishment couldn’t be challenged by people working in their basements. Or maybe he genuinely does believe he can completely block off the WSJ’s content with a pay wall and have people actually pay for something they’ve always gotten for free and could just as easily continue to get for free from elsewhere.

But for better or worse, the Internet is here to stay. He’d be better off, y’know, innovating. Instead of shouting about pay walls and blocking his sources of traffic and trying to force his competitors to do the same thing to avoid losing his readership over it.

By the way, traditional news companies can innovate. The New York Times is doing an excellent job of this, even releasing public APIs for other developers making mashups from their content! The BBC even released an open source Javascript library for other web developers to benefit from their work!

But if Rupert Murdoch wants to try to wish away the Internet, I’ve no problem with that. I’ll just keep reading the NYTimes, giving them advertising revenue and link traffic. I might even buy a subscription. Maybe even through TimesReader, which runs on all platforms where Adobe AIR does.

On reading it, some food for thought: how much of this is new? How much of it is made easier? How much of it is worth doing?

• Pay your bills.
• Download a music album, video game or movie, legally or illegally.
• Learn the history of the life of Nikola Tesla.
• Download a free operating system.
• Collaborate on a calendar.
• Find out what your friends are doing.
• Collaborate on a massive trolling effort.
• Find out how much money is in your bank account, your IRA, or any stock market holdings.
• Choose from numerous comics to read, without buying a newspaper.
• Find out what a word means in any language with a web presence.
• Talk to a friend in real time on the other side of the world, for free.
• Find out how to get past a tricky part in a video game.
• Find a job, or network with potential colleagues.
• Find out what’s happening in real time in Congress, and read commentary from any political perspective in existence.
• Offer your own commentary, and maybe even convince someone you’re right.
• Learn how to make a web site or program of your own, using any existing methodology.
• Buy basically anything that can be legally shipped to you–and a lot of stuff that can’t.
• Reunite with someone you’ve completely lost contact with.
• Find porn of anything. (I’m not kidding, and you know it.)
• Aggregate all the most recent news about everything you care about into a single window.
• Learn how to program in any programming language.
• Learn about any topic in music theory.
• Have an affair. Discreetly.
• Read the entire text of a public domain book, or have it read to you.
• Acquire, modify, patch and redistribute the original source code of numerous high-quality pieces of software.
• Collaborate with many other developers who share your interests and intentions in doing so.
• Remotely and securely control a machine nowhere near you.
• Download a screensaver that constantly evolves based on user preferences.
• Participate in a revolt against an authority figure.
• Provide your own opinions, and maybe even make money doing it.
• Develop a new way to make money that no one in the world has ever done before.
• Get into an incredibly vitriolic argument, and enjoy every minute of it.
• Sell anything.
• Let whoever made a piece of software you’re using know if something is wrong with it.
• Watch TV shows from another country long before they’re ever officially brought to where you are, complete with subtitles.
• Teach the world how to do something.

Anything else interesting you can think of that I missed?

We are living in an age of incredible technological advancement. The world is being transformed by it–the way we think, learn, communicate and live has been torn down and rebuilt within the past fifteen years. And yet, no one who lived before the Internet’s ubiquity could possibly have forseen how far it would reach. Today, living without systems like Wikipedia, AIM, Google, Facebook and Twitter is unthinkable. Within the last fifteen years, the Internet has already transformed public discourse, revolutionized content distribution, and redefined communication for everyone with easy access to it. Businesses race to it, visionaries build upon it, enthusiasts deconstruct it, establishments fear it.

Some take it for granted. Some even think the current Internet developments are a bubble (as they say in the Dismal Science). I don’t. I think the advances the Internet has brought are here to stay, and improve. I believe the Internet is a development that easily surpasses the invention of the printing press in importance, and that it collectively has the potential to become greater than the sum total of all human development that preceded it. And I believe I’m unbelievably lucky to have been born in the earliest generation that gets to define it, allowing me and everyone I know to personally witness its developments, setbacks, controversies and breakthroughs.

So what next? A prominent article about the movers and shakers of the Internet recently implored them to “Never. Stop. Innovating. Never. Never. Never.” Innovation will always continue, undoubtedly to places where we can’t possibly fathom now. And I’m unbelievably excited to see it happen.

So that’s what I’ll write about here: how technology, especially the Internet, is changing the world. The future is bearing down on us, and I for one am excited.