Branko's Weblog

Today, I am proud to be one of the Distributed Proofreaders. We just posted a bumper crop of unique etexts to Project Gutenberg. Everything from “The Psychology of Sex” to “Slave Narratives”, from the “Poems” of Jonathan Swift to “Historie de la Révolution française”, from “Punch” to “Scientific American”. Most of these are hard texts, that really show the strenght of DP. By distributing the workload, we make difficult projects manageable. And by making projects manageable, we are creating a rich soil for them. Fifty public domain texts have become available, accessible, rippable, burnable, searchable, mixable, quotable, learnable, giveable, malleable, tellable, et ceterable.

You can find a list of links to the fifty books at http://www.gutenberg.nl/press/dp-5000-pr.

Coltan is probably something you have never heard of, but it would change your daily life if it got taken away from you. It is a mineral used in many electronic devices, such as cell phones and laptops. Eighty percent of the world’s supply comes from Congo, although apparently you do not want to know how. If you do, Bill Hammack wrote a small column about it. (via the Project Gutenberg newsletter).

There is a great story in last month’s Wired (The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, now on the web) about the economy of digital distribution.

It talks about the importance we attach to hit status; if a song is not “Thriller”, if a book is not “Les Trois Mousquetaires”, if a film is not “Das Boot”, it might as well not exist. We can go to the store, and only buy hits: this is because shelf space is limited. Even if there are millions of fans for an obscure alternative band, that does not mean your local CD store will sell enough of them to justify putting their CDs on the shelves in the first place.

The digital arena changes this; suddenly, shelf space is unlimited:

Wired/Chris Anderson: “To see how, meet Robbie Vann-Adib�, the CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company whose barroom players offer more than 150,000 tracks – and some surprising usage statistics. He hints at them with a question that visitors invariably get wrong: “What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a month?”“

“Most people guess 20 percent, and for good reason: We’ve been trained to think that way. The 80-20 rule, also known as Pareto’s principle (after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who devised the concept in 1906), is all around us. Only 20 percent of major studio films will be hits. Same for TV shows, games, and mass-market books – 20 percent all. The odds are even worse for major-label CDs, where fewer than 10 percent are profitable, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.“

“But the right answer, says Vann-Adib�, is 99 percent. There is demand for nearly every one of those top 10,000 tracks. He sees it in his own jukebox statistics; each month, thousands of people put in their dollars for songs that no traditional jukebox anywhere has ever carried.“

As a volunteer for Distributed Proofreaders, a site that produces hundreds of ebooks per month for Project Gutenberg, I find the idea that even the most obscure texts I help produce will find a reader very gratifying.

Why is tabbed browsing so much better than, er, untabbed browsing? An Internet Explorer user said he did not understand why I like Firefox: “What does it matter if you click on tabs at the top of the browser window, or on icons in the task bar?” I could not tell him, just that it does.

Woohoo! SpaceShipOne just won the Ansari X Prize by completing a trip to the edge of space twice within five days. The X Prize was offered to the first private organisation to reach the edge of space twice within fourteen days, so Scaled Composite, makers of the winning space ship, stayed well within the limits.

A mixed bag of responses trailed the news at Slashdot, because some mistakenly thought that going orbital will be for the grasping any day know for private enterprise, and others downplayed the achievement, because the US airforce managed to do the same in the 1960. However, the US airforce abandoned HTOL space faring for vertically launching, expendable rockets; whereas the accomplishment of Burt Rutan and his team may mark the start of smarter and cheaper space travel.

This weekend the 10th annual Interactive Fiction competition has started (be careful, the site might still be a little wobbly from its slashdotting).

Interactive Fiction is a fancy-schmancy word for ‘text adventures’; those who know me know I have a weak spot for those.

Anyway, some 40 people have written a computer puzzler that is solvable within two hours. If you choose to participate in judging, you must play at least five games, for as long as you want, although after at most two hours of play you are duty-bound to score the game.

As every year, I will be trying to play my minimum of five games. Last year had an unusually good batch of entries, with the winner of that year being one of the best of the genre so far.

Akma reports that Mary Hess was advised by the legal department of her publisher to remove all song lyrics from her book about song lyrics.