I started out using Delicious for its intended purpose, bookmarking. Then I discovered that between the tags and the notes field, it was a spectacular notetaking tool. Over time, I built up a network of around a hundred other people. My Delicious use became 10% archiving and annotating links I planned to refer to later, and 90% social linkblogging. The experience became almost Quora-like.

Not that Yahoo ever did anything to encourage the social aspect. Some people made it easy to identify themselves, and I was able to connect with them on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. But most people didn’t, and to this day there are users whose writing and linkblogging I followed on a daily basis, and who I have absolutely no way of contacting.

At some point, an informal tradition emerged known as “Delicious whuffie,” named for the reputation-based currency in a Cory Doctorow story. People started tagging their bookmarks “via:username” to indicate the source of the link. Someone even made a whuffie bookmarklet that automatically added the via tag. Then Yahoo made some behind-the-scenes changes, and the via tags stopped working. The social aspect of Delicious was at that point pretty much broken beyond repair.

Meanwhile, the social web continued to evolve. I now have some other tool for almost every Delicious use case. I use my blog to gather and annotate important links. I share trivia and amusing ephemera on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. I network with like-minded strangers on Twitter and now Quora. But none of them have totally replaced my Delicious network, which has been scattered to the four winds by Yahoo’s ineptitude.

One of my favorite finds on Delicious is C. Maoxian, an American finance guy living in China. Every day he posts dozens of items relating to finance, investment, real estate, and expat life in China. Just from reading the headlines of his posts and his witty comments, I get an excellent overview of these topics that I know little to nothing about. Every so often I’ll click through a link and read the whole story, but mostly Maoxian’s summary is enough. Since he uses the same handle on Twitter, I follow him there, too, but it isn’t the same — 140 characters just doesn’t do it for his style of writing.

So what do I want the YouTube guys to do? Make Delicious more like Quora. Make it social. Make it personal. Make it fun. Introduce voting and reputation. Make it like Twitter but with depth. Introduce archiving of pages you link to, so if the original page gets taken down you can still access its contents. Let us log in with Facebook or Twitter or Quora identities. Keep innovating and iterating. Be the anti-Yahoo.

Original post on Quora

After Techcrunch published the slide, the web lit up with the rumor that Delicious would be shut down. It took Yahoo a full twenty-four hours to respond, an eternity in internet time, and when their official statement did finally come, it didn’t exactly put anyone’s mind at ease. They’re keeping Delicious live for the time being, but they plan to… do what? Sell it? The language is vague.

I’ve loved Delicious since I started using it — here’s my full-length rhapsody on why it’s so valuable to me. Watching Yahoo neglect it has been painful, since there’s a lot of untapped potential. For example, two months before Twitter launched, Delicious rolled its Network feature, which lets you subscribe to other users’ bookmarks. It’s basically a more tightly curated and better annotated version of Twitter. I started going back through my bookmarks to see who else was saving them and following everyone who was coming up with interesting tags and notes. The result is my list of a hundred or so Delicious users who consistently post interesting, useful and entertaining links. I look at my Delicious network feed first thing in the morning, before any news site, or Twitter or anything, because its signal to noise ratio is superb. Yahoo had an opportunity to create a robust social network around the Network feature, and they blew it.

If you’ve invested a lot of effort in curating your Delicious bookmarks, at least you don’t have to worry about losing them. It’s easy to download a backup of them and there are plenty of other services you can upload them to. But having Delicious shut down or just atrophy would be a huge loss because of the accumulated mass of everyone else’s curated bookmarks. Yahoo lets you grab your own data but not everyone else’s, and everyone else’s data is what gives Delicious its value. ReadWriteWeb compares Yahoo’s data policy to “setting a museum on fire.”

Where else are you going to find a reading list of the best collected written works and other multimedia about almost any given topic? Unfortunately, automated extraction is blocked by the site and the rickety, antiquated API appears focused on returning you little more than your own bookmarks. If there’s a clear way to accomplish export of not just my bookmarks, but all bookmarks with one or more tags, from all users – I haven’t been able to find it yet.Yahoo blocks all automated extraction of data from Delicious. The company apparently is going to let this unique cross between a museum, a library and a crazy old collector’s attic burn to the ground. I’d like to take a few things with me before that happens, please. One community of non-profit technologists has been bookmarking links with the tag “NPTech” for years – they have 24,028 links categorized as relevant for organizations seeking to change the world and peoples’ lives using technology. Wouldn’t it be good to have that body of data, metadata and curated resources available elsewhere once Delicious is gone?

What someone probably ought to do, as Karl Long said to me on Twitter today, is scrape all the public bookmarks and data and put it on Bittorrent. That would be against the rules, though.

Please, please Yahoo! let us save some of what you’ve got, before it goes to waste.

I’ve heard the argument that we’ve been using Delicious for free all these years, so why should we feel entitled to anything? I for one would have appreciated the opportunity to pay for it. I quite happily pay for Flickr, I pay for web hosting, I’d pay for Twitter too. Yahoo never even attempted to monetize Delicious, aside from a little advertising on the popular bookmarks page, which I don’t think I’ve ever used. Yahoo’s focus on the popular bookmarks page misses the point. I don’t care what everyone has been bookmarking. I care what specific smart people who I trust are bookmarking. Mass trends are occasionally interesting, but only occasionally.

With the future of Delicious still in doubt, I followed the example of a bunch of geeks I trust and joined Pinboard. I’m using it to mirror my Delicious bookmarks, and if worse comes to worse, I’ll just move over there completely. There’s much to like about Pinboard. It’s not free, which inspires confidence in me that it won’t just vanish. I like its zany pricing scheme, where they charge a tenth of a cent times the current number of users. (I paid $7.65.) I can also set Pinboard to archive all my tweets if I want, though I haven’t taken them up on this because my tweets aren’t that interesting to me. If I have a profound thought I’ll put it on this blog.

So far, Pinboard seems fine and dandy for my own bookmarks, but it’s missing the social component. Delicious has over five million users, Pinboard (as of this writing) has nine thousand. Those nine thousand are mostly power users, but even so, that’s not the glorious emergent hive-mind that Delicious offers. If my entire network were to migrate over en masse, I guess it wouldn’t be such a big loss, but so far I don’t see that happening.

So what’s to become of my favorite thing on the social web? Former Delicious engineer Stephen Hood runs through the most plausible options on his blog:

Selling Delicious to a third-party

is not a straightforward proposition. As mentioned above, most of the team is now gone. Last week’s leak (and the subsequent fallout) also did unfortunate damage to the Delicious brand, sending panicked users to competing products.

But ultimately the real challenge here will be the technology. During my time at Delicious we rebuilt the entire infrastructure to deeply leverage a number of internal Yahoo technologies. It’s all great stuff but not exactly easy to remove or replace.  Yahoo may have to license some of this technology to the buyer. I’m not sure they’ve done that before.

Open sourcing Delicious

This is a seductive concept but doesn’t make much sense.  As in the case of a sale, they would need to unwind a bunch of proprietary technologies before this could happen.  And open sourcing a complex product isn’t as simple as switching your GitHub repository from private to public.  It involves a lot of work to clean up and document the source.  For Delicious this would add up to a huge effort that would be hard to justify purely on a financial basis. Even then, it’s not clear how an open source social bookmarking system would work, given that much of its value comes from being centralized.

Donating Delicious to the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian

Now we’re getting closer.  While it is folly to assume either of these institutions could take over Delicious and keep it running as a viable service, it does seem like they would be interested in preserving the Delicious corpus and making it available for research.

I love Delicious for many reasons, but chief among them is that it is the Internet’s memory storage device.  In the 7+ years of its existence it has recorded the collective online journeys of millions of users during a time when the Web was evolving dramatically.  Those memories are irreplaceable and have enormous value both to their owners (the users) and to society.

For now, I continue to post to Delicious, mirror in Pinboard, watch and wait. Whoever winds up owning Delicious, I hope they value it properly and show it some love.

Doesn’t sound much like the Verve, does it? Here’s the Andrew Oldham Orchestra‘s version, the sample will jump right out at you twenty-five seconds in.

Although “Bitter Sweet Melody” was written by Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft, its publishing rights are held by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. This bit of legal absurdity is due to the Rolling Stones’ manager Allen Klein, who also holds many of the band’s earlier copyrights. Klein successfully sued The Verve for plagiarizing “Bitter Sweet Symphony” from “The Last Time.”

The Verve had legally licensed the Andrew Oldham Orchestra sample, but once their song became a hit, Klein challenged the terms of the license in court. His legal argument was that the Verve had used too much of the sample to be able to claim any authorship over “Bitter Sweet Symphony” at all. The Verve didn’t think they’d win the case and didn’t have the resources to pursue it. They agreed to a court settlement that gave the song’s publishing rights to Allen Klein’s company and songwriting credits to Jagger and Richards.

This case was tried in the UK, not America. Still, if the Biz Markie lawsuit and others like it are any indication, our courts would have probably produced a similar outcome. This is lame. The US Constitution says that the point of copyright is “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” If you think, like I do, that sample-based music is a useful Art, then copyright law as it’s presently interpreted is not doing its job. Allen Klein didn’t contribute creatively to the Stones’ original song, the orchestral arrangement or the Verve song. He has nevertheless managed to collect a lot of the money all three recordings have made over the years. The Stones and The Verve get performance royalties for their songs, respectively, but when their songs get used in movies or video games or commercials, they get bupkes.

US copyright law says that works based or derived from another copyrighted work is the exclusive province of the owner of the original work. The problem with this statement is that all new works are derivative. All creative thinking consists of adapting existing ideas, especially in music. Nevertheless, the law says that if you write or record a song based on an existing copyrighted song, you need the copyright owner’s permission. Same if you write a story or shoot a movie using settings or characters from an existing copyrighted story or movie. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said in Feist Publications Inc v Rural Telephone Service Company that “copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work… It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.” O’Connor thinks that “the sine qua non of copyright is originality”, but as Wikipedia observes, the standard for creativity is not completely based on a work’s novelty. A work needs only a “spark” or “minimal degree” of originality. I’d say that The Verve’s song has more than enough of that spark to meet the standard of an original work.

The fragment of orchestral melody the Verve used for their song is totally unrecognizable as having any connection to the Rolling Stones, unless you know its history. There is a connection, a family lineage, but the Verve can’t reasonably be accused of having stolen anything. The sample is from a melody written by Andrew Oldham that sets up the Rolling Stones’ melody, but is distinct from it. If the Verve had had the foresight to hire a bunch of violinists and percussionists to play an identical snatch of music, the Stones would have no claim whatsoever.

Another irony is that the “original” Stones song is hardly original. Keith Richards freely admits that he borrowed the idea for “The Last Time” from a 1955 Staple Singers record.

This is nothing against the Stones. The Staple Singers were adapting a traditional song that has been widely replicated throughout the gospel world. Plenty of other musicians have derived new original works from the Last Time meme, the idea of a vocalist running out of patience for someone over a rhythm and blues setting. For example, James Brown recorded a song in 1964 called “Maybe The Last Time.”

To compound the ironies, Klein’s claim of 100% of the publishing of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” crowds other would-be stakeholders. The beat sampled in the song comes from “Doggone By Love” by George Suranovich, but he has no share in the song; he clearly doesn’t have the same legal acumen that Klein does.

The Verve’s song is arguably a lot more original than the Stones’, but because of the peculiarities of modern copyright, they’ve been screwed out of a lot of the money. Richard Ashcroft’s lyrics take on a dark irony given how the life of his song played out: “You’re a slave to money, then you die.” Klein licensed “Bitter Sweet Symphony” to Nike, Opel and Vauxhall for TV commercials against The Verve’s wishes, and Richard Ashcroft didn’t get a dime. Same thing when the song is used in video games, movies and TV shows.

Musicians mostly continue to disregard the law when it impedes their creativity. “Bitter Sweet Melody” has been covered, sampled and repurposed endlessly. Michael Jackson fans make tribute videos set to it. Kanye West and Wale rap over it, and it’s been sampled and interpolated for tons of techno and dance tracks, for example this one by David May.

Hear a mashup of most of the tracks referenced above.

Bittersweet Symphony Megamix by ethanhein

Update: this post was used in a Williams College English course called Borrowing and Stealing: Originality in Literature and Culture. It followed a discussion of Andy Warhol’s a, A Novel and Pope’s An Essay On Criticism. Thanks, Professor McWeeny!

Biz belongs to the period in the late eighties and early nineties that many hip-hop heads refer to as the golden age. The tracks of this period were dense with samples and quotes, most of which were used without permission. Biz was no exception to this trend. This map shows only a few of the samples he used.

The golden age came to an end in 1992, when Biz was sued for illegally sampling “Alone Again (Naturally) ” by Gilbert O’Sullivan.

“Alone Again (Naturally)” is a fine song, but it’s not spectacularly original. The chord progressions, melodic motifs and verbal imagery are all popular music boilerplate. The rhyme schemes are mostly cliches like cried/died. Gilbert O’Sullivan was the first person to use this exact combination of standard musical modules, but the modules themselves can be heard in zillions of other songs. I’m giving you all this music criticism because I think it’s ironic that Biz could be sued for stealing from a song that is itself assembled from other pre-existing ideas.

Biz’s song “Alone Again” isn’t on YouTube, but you can hear an mp3 here.

Biz uses a loop of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s piano and a quote from the chorus. He also uses the frequently-sampled beat from “Impeach The President” by The Honeydrippers. Biz’s song follows the time-honored hip-hop strategy of semi-ironically quoting a well-known chorus and writing new verses around it, all over a funkier beat.

Biz’s label, a subsidiary of Warner Bros, attempted to get clearance to use the piano sample from Grand Upright Music, Gilbert O’Sullivan’s publishing company. When Grand Upright denied the request, Biz and his people went ahead and used it anyway. In response, Grand Upright Music filed an injunction. The decision in Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. ruled emphatically in Grand Upright’s favor. The decision was the death knell of sample-intensive hip-hop at the commercial level. Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy began his opinion in the case by quoting the Bible:

“Thou shalt not steal.” has been an admonition followed since the dawn of civilization. Unfortunately, in the modern world of business this admonition is not always followed. Indeed, the defendants in this action for copyright infringement would have this court believe that stealing is rampant in the music business and, for that reason, their conduct here should be excused. The conduct of the defendants herein, however, violates not only the Seventh Commandment, but also the copyright laws of this country… [I]t is clear that the defendants knew that they were violating the plaintiff’s rights as well as the rights of others. Their only aim was to sell thousands upon thousands of records. This callous disregard for the law and for the rights of others requires not only the preliminary injunction sought by the plaintiff but also sterner measures.”

Judge Duffy concluded by referring the matter to the US Attorney, recommending prosecution of Biz et al for criminal copyright infringement.

This ruling makes me sad for several reasons. First of all, Judge Duffy wasn’t in complete possession of the facts. If you choose to define sampling as “stealing,” then stealing was in fact rampant in the music business, and not just among hip-hop artists. Rock and roll was built on uncredited borrowing from blues and R&B musicians. The Beatles used unauthorized samples of copyrighted materials in their artsier tracks like “Revolution 9.” Experiments with tape collage by the classical avant-garde go back to the fifties.

I also take issue with Judge Duffy’s equation of sampling and stealing. There has never been a wholly original piece of music. For that matter, there has never been a completely new idea of any kind that didn’t draw extensively on its intellectual context. Sampling is a novel technological practice, but it’s a seamless extension of the way music has always been made. All creativity consists of recombining and repurposing fragments of existing works into new ones. I would go so far as to say that there is no other kind of artistic practice.

I’m not completely unsympathetic to Gilbert O’Sullivan’s position. I wish that some kind of licensing or profit-sharing agreement could have been reached in this particular case. But where does it end? Would we require Gilbert O’Sullivan to pay every previous user of his harmonic and melodic cliches, and every previous user of the cried/died rhyme? Would there be any kind of art at all if we did?

Meanwhile, I detect more than a tinge of racism in Judge Duffy’s ruling, and in the cultural consensus that produced it. This article from the UCLA/Columbia Copyright Infringement Project is sympathetic to Biz’s legal position, but it slips in some ignorant music criticism:

[A]part from the gibberish chanted over O’Sullivan’s ostinato, there is nothing original in Biz Markie’s song or his recording except his performance of it.

Biz doesn’t enunciate his rhymes very clearly, but there’s a big difference between mumbly delivery of slang and “gibberish.” Maybe the slight wasn’t have a racial motivation, but it’s hard to imagine why else the writer would be so dismissive of the hip-hop art form.

Personally, I value Biz Markie’s music much more highly than Gilbert O’Sullivan’s. I resent the chilling effect that copyright law has on sampling culture, which I regard as the a rich and vibrant method of musical expression. A big part of the pleasure of hip-hop is encountering a familiar sample in a new song. It mixes the warm thrill of recognition with the strangeness of a novel context. Hip-hop has this wonderful ability to make well-worn cliches fresh again.

Even when it’s unauthorized, sampling generally helps the sampled artists more than it harms them in the long run. It keeps the sampled artist culturally relevant to new generations of listeners who otherwise wouldn’t care. I would never have even heard of Gilbert O’Sullivan if Biz hadn’t paid him the compliment of sampling him.

Just for fun, here’s Biz’s best-known song. Like “Alone Again”, the chorus quotes an older song, “You Got What I Need” by Freddie Scott.

Boo copyright. Yay quotation.

Update: Kevin Nottingham posted all the samples from Biz’ I Need A Haircut on his blog. Download and remix to your heart’s content.

Further update: the web site for the documentary Copyright Criminals links to this post.

You can’t ask the computer. Computers fail when you ask them questions with no unambiguous answer. Dividing by zero is just such a question. Folklore suggests that asking the computer to divide by zero makes it spectacularly explode or something. In reality, it returns an error message or the reply Not A Number, or it gives a wrong answer, or the program terminates, or sometimes the machine falls into an infinite loop.

The internet’s favorite divide-by-zero error is the one that temporarily crippled the USS Yorktown, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser that was the test bed for the Navy’s Smart Ship program. When a crew member typed zero into a database field, the computer tried to divide by it, crashing the system badly enough to cripple the ship’s navigation systems for several hours.

Humans are smarter than computers in some ways, and we’re capable of coming up with creative answers to seemingly unanswerable questions. So what do you get when you divide something by zero? My answer draws heavily on the entertaining wikipedia article. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say we’re dividing one by zero. The math people have a crafty method for dealing with problems you can’t approach directly. You can edge closer and closer to the problem and see if you converge on an answer. So instead of dividing one by zero, you could try dividing it by smaller and smaller numbers that approach zero. One divided by one tenth is ten. One divided by one one-hundredth is a hundred. One divided by one one-thousandth is a thousand. Since one divided by one one-gazillionth is one gazillion, logic suggests that one divided by zero is going to be infinity.

It makes sense, but there’s a problem. We’ve been approaching zero from above, but we could just as easily approach it from below. When you divide one by negative one tenth, you get negative ten. One divided by negative one one-hundredth is negative one hundred. One divided by negative one gazillionth is negative one gazillion. So you could just as easily say that one divided by zero is negative infinity. Both infinity and negative infinity are equally valid answers. Here it is as a graph.

Some people interpret this graph to say that infinity and negative infinity are the same number. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Let’s say that instead of being on the computer screen, the graph was drawn on a globe. Imagine the number line wrapped around the equator. Say the spot where the Prime Meridian crosses the equator is zero. If you’re in a rowboat bobbing in that spot in the Atlantic Ocean, enjoying the warm breeze, you can think of the positive numbers as going off along the equator to the east, and the negative numbers going off to the west. Infinity is the farthest possible point away from you on the equator to the east, and negative infinity is the farthest point away from you to the west. On the Earth, positive and negative infinity are the same place, the International Date Line in the Pacific. For this image to be totally accurate, the Earth would have to be infinitely large, but the math guys bracket that. By this thinking, one divided by zero does have a single, unambiguous answer: this mysterious number called unsigned infinity.

When you type “divide by zero” into Google images, you get a lot of stuff like this:

Our European-descended philosophical assumptions are at work here. Western thinkers prefer clear, unambiguous, yes-no dichotomies. Paradoxical and multiply-determined truths make us anxious. Some of the internet cartoons show dividing by zero ripping holes in the space-time continuum, forming black holes, or making your head explode. That much hyperbole has to conceal some pretty intense anxiety. I know these pictures are jokes, but I agree with Freud, on some level there are no jokes.

Computers have become so fast that you can’t see what they’re doing on an instruction-by-instruction basis, so it’s hard to get a feel for what’s going on in a looping failure.  Fortunately, Super Mario Bros has a famous bug known as the Minus World that lets you study an infinite loop in an entertainingly interactive form.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, here’s the basic topology of Super Mario Bros. There are eight worlds of four sections each. Each world is progressively more difficult. Super Mario Bros was developed during the  arcade era, before the notion of saving your progress took hold. So every time you play, you have to start at the very beginning of world 1-1. This can get tedious, so out of sympathy to the player, Nintendo included a few shortcuts in the game called warp zones.The warp zones are hidden, and while it’s possible to discover them by accident, it’s unlikely. Back in the eighties it was easier to just subscribe to Nintendo Power magazine to find out where they were. This was a very clever business move on Nintendo’s part, because it was a way to get kids like me to pay to read advertising for Nintendo products.

The first warp zone is at the end of world 1-2, an underground dungeon. In this world, there are various places where you can get through holes in the ceiling, enabling you to run merrily along past all of the obstacles and foes. If you run along the ceiling past the exit, you come to a hidden room. In this room are three pipes leading to worlds 2-1, 3-1 and 4-1.

The “walls” in video games aren’t solid objects. There’s just a big database of all the screen regions, with some code specifying the collision rules for each region. Normally, when the Mario sprite occupies the same screen region as a brick sprite, the database specifies that Mario should bounce off. The Minus World bug lies in a particular entry in world 1-2′s list of bricks. If you jump at the buggy brick from the right angle, you slide right through it, passing through the wall and into the warp zone.

Jumping through the wall interacts with other code in the game, so that instead of providing you with a shortcut to world 4-1, the rightmost pipe in the warp zone deposits you in what appears to be World -1.

The level is actually numbered “36-1,” but the number 36 is represented by a blank tile for some reason, so it looks like level minus one. The so-called Minus World resembles the underwater levels 2-2 and 7-2.

When you reach the pipe at the end normally leading to the exit and the next level, you are instead deposited back at the beginning of the Minus World. There’s no escape from this loop, until you run out of time and the game ends.

Like most computer failures, the Minus World bug is a soft failure, a memory issue. When you turn off the computer, memory gets erased. That’s why rebooting the NES cures the Blue Screen Of Death, at the expense of whatever unsaved data you had in memory. You can cure the Minus World bug by rebooting your Nintendo, but like I said, Super Mario Bros offers no way to save your game state. Oh well, the zen Buddhists would approve.