Wayne D's Blog

Thanks to the invite I received I now know the answers to the questions I previously had posed. Twine does not retrieve web page info when a user creates a bookmark, instead they offer an edit box for the user to enter a description. One Twine user told me that twine will spider a site when a user doesn't add a description but my quick perusal of the twine website I couldn't verify this. I'd like to make it clear that Twine.com does follow all the requirements of the DMCA with respect to removing infringing content quickly and efficiently but it must be the frustrating to the person who shared this information to see his hard work disappear. I'm pretty sure he added it to Twine in good faith.

Twine.com like many other sites that are built around user generated content should assist their users to stay on the straight and narrow with respect to copyright. Though I'm a bit foggy on the whole concept of what the semantic web is all about it would seem to me that when you get a URL and a description from a user you might want to try and check automatically to determine if the description is the content. People are generally lazy and hoping they will produce useful summaries of web pages they bookmark is probably wishful thinking. Producing a page with useful summaries of content would help to differentiate twine from Google.com which gives a one line summary and Mahalo.com or delicious.com which provides bare links. I recently join delicious.com so I could make my bookmarks portable and I could see myself using Twine instead if there was some added if this and some other enhancements were added. This would also help reduce the workload on the person who has to responds to DMCA take down notices. At a minimum Twine.com should add some text to their bookmarking tools to remind users that adding all the text from a page to the description will probably result in the removal of their public bookmark.

I wish Twine.com the best of luck in getting through their beta period and working out all the kinks. Though I'm sure Twine would have preferred me becoming familiar with them in different circumstances I'd suggest you check them out and give them a try and help them get better. I'll be checking back with Twine.com and seeing how things develop.

Update Sept. 13th The final chapter in my Twine.com saga is here

After updating my previous Twine.com post I realized that those who read via RSS may not get the latest updates. I decided to take them out of the original article and create a new one. Sorry if you've seen them already. If you don't know what's going on the back story is here.

Twine.com responded the next day to my email and removed the article.

I have no reason to doubt the comment from Twine.com on the original post that this was simply an over exuberant user and illustrates the problem with user generated content, when you let them generate the content that has your websites name on it you rely on your users to pay attention to copyright and fair use issues.

I am curious what a Twine.com user does to bookmark a page. Do they simply paste the URL and Twine retrieves the page for them or do they have to copy and paste the text from the page? Can any Twine user enlighten me? Twine is still in closed beta so I can't check for myself until and if they give me an invite. I suspect after the fuss I have raised they may not be too happy with me which I can totally understand, They are doing their best and some know it all blogger comes along to make their life miserable. Maybe in their zeal to make things easier for their users they made things too easy. Perhaps some of the semantic webs power could be used to help educate Twine.com's users how to keep on the right side of copyright issues.

(update Sept. 13) There are two additional posts that chronicle me and Twine.com. Find them here and here

I was browsing through my server logs today and noticed a referral from twine.com. When I checked the referring URL I was shocked to find a complete copy of one of my more popular EEEPC articles that one of their users had bookmarked. I checked a few other articles to see what was going on and found that some of them are one line summaries, others are partial reprints while others are complete reprints. All of the reprinted material does include links to the original articles but that certainly doesn't absolve twine.com of their responsibility to get permission from copyright holders. There doesn't seem to be any particular pattern, my 370 word article was reprinted in full while another 170 word article was excerpted to 85 words. There are also quite a few engadget articles reprinted in their entirety. I guess it's time for me to figure out how to send a DMCA take down notice before more people try to trample on my copyright without permission. Maybe I should drop a note to Weblogs Inc. and see what they think of twine.com using their stuff.

I think I'll send them a email first, perhaps it's an honest mistake and their Semantic Web technology. We shall see.

(update Sept. 10) Twine.com responded very quickly and removed the infringing article. They also appeared to have removed the engadget.com stuff too.

When trying to figure out what to write about I realized it's been a while since I told you about my emusic.com picks for the month. This I do without malice even though emusic.com decided that I wasn't getting enough signups for the service to let me continue to be an affiliate. I don't see why one more name in the database matters that much, itseems to me with iTunes and Amazon barking at their heels they want all the publicity they could get. See Geoff Smith is neat, emusic doesn't like me and Emusic really does like me for the backstory.

As might be expected this month's picks are heavily influenced by the artists I saw and liked at Summerfolk and who have checked out by the time I made it to the CD sales tent. First up is Sara Hickman and Motherlode. Twenty tracks of musical goodness. Next up is Kim and Reggie Harris. Get on Board is a celebration of African-American culture with a strong gospel flavour.
My final choice is David Roth's Irreconcilable Similarities. This album is what I would call classical folk music, 16 tracks, 73 minutes, great value for the money.

Now it's time for me to go and remove the emusic.com banner from the footer.

When I hear my U.S. friends complain about the 250 GB cap that Comcast is implementing I have to laugh. Rogers is my ISP and they have implemented a 60 GB after which they charge overage fees. I have never used 60GB a month but when my wife was watching the Olympics streaming on the internet in August I was worried. Turns out I had nothing to fear, my usage for August was only 30GB, That's without any downloading anything through bit torrent. Why doesn't Rogers have a clue? When you mention Rogers in a group of people be prepared for the horror stories. They have to realize they should sell connectivity not bandwidth. The internet is the crack cocoaine of the 21st century and if they want to succeed they need to feed the habit. That means providing their customers connectivity anywhere they can for a flat fee.

I was at Ivor Wynne stadium in Hamilton yesterday and Cogeco has free wifi there for their customers. What does Rogers have for their customers at the Rogers Centre in Toronto? Nada. They seem to be truly surprised when there was the hug e backlash when they introduced the iPhone with an insanely low data cap. Even if the majority of customers would never use that amount of data people don't want to have to worry about it. Now that the 6GB special data package for the iPhone is done, I expect to see the number of new iPhone customers drop. If everytime you pull the phone out of your pocket you are worried how much it's going to cost you why would you bother buying one?

If someone came today and offered me connectivity with a guaranteed minimum rate for $100 a month with half decent roaming wifi connectivity I'd drop Rogers internet and cable in a second, ditch the phone and go VOIP. Bell keeps trying to sell me DSL for a lower price with crazy low bandwidth and transfer levels. Forget it guys, you don't have a clue either. If Rogers want to bury Bell then they need to differentiate their offering from Sympatico not match them GB for GB in their transfer cap level. Rogers needs to look back in history to all those dial up ISP who were left on the technological trash heap and learn a lesson before they get whacked.

Innovate or die boys and girls at Rogers otherwise in 10 years you'll be wondering why the world has passed you by. Sell connectivity not transfer volume. Do you want to be the empty downtown small businesses or the Walmart Superstore?

Now I'm off to watch some streaming video on the web and download a movie from iTunes, if I haven't used too much transfer volume this month.