Nice tip : feeds from several tags with AND/OR in WordPress : http://ping.fm/M6N8I

Free Software And Proprietary Dead-ends: Stumbled over this interesting discussion about WordPress “premiu.. http://snipurl.com/9g1n6

Stumbled over this interesting discussion about WordPress “premium” plugins and themes, i.e. plugins or themes which are sold at a price, just like any other piece of proprietary software. WordPress Premium Themes have been around for a while, and they recently spawned quite a discussion on the WP-hackers mailing list, when over 200 themes was removed from the Wordpress.com selection of themes.

The focus of the discussion is the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License (GPL), and whether plugins or themes based on a GPL’ed piece of software such as WordPress can be sold for profit.

There are several voices in this broad discussion, and to characterize some of the perspectives :

• Commercial developers and start-ups, who need a way to make a living from what they do : create WordPress plugins and themes
• WordPress users who demand more features and ever more clever ways to personalize and customize the software they use
• Open source developers who feel cheated when what they’ve spent hours and hours developing is “sold” by others
• Purists who feel that since WordPress is free (GPL’ed as well as free of charge) every component based on or rooted in WordPress ought also to be free
• Pragmatics who tend to say that as long as the GPL is respected, developers may do anything with the code, and that plugins which are developed from scratch are not necessarily born GPL’ed

I think this is a crucial discussion for the future of open source and “free” software.

As far as my understanding of the GPL goes there’s nothing wrong with redistributing GPL’ed software, in fact this is the point of the license. The only condition is the software remains licensed under GPL or a similar license. That receivers in your end receive the same benefits that you had, is a key component of what is usually referred to as copyleft.

There’s nothing wrong with charging money for the redistribution of this code either. Noone says anybody should provide stuff for free, just because it is GPL’ed “free” software. What the freedom in “free software” means is that anyone who obtains the code also remains at liberty to redistribute the GPL’ed code and charge for it too, if he or she wishes to do so. We all have expenses, and there are all kinds of good reasons to ask money for the time and work we put into providing a service or a product to someone else.

The tricky thing is, that since users who buy a piece of GPL’ed software also has the full right to redistribute that software, the business model appears to be broken. It may not actually be broken, since there are many good reasons to pay to receive benefits with the software “purchased”. Someone who obtains a piece of GPL’ed software via a bittorrent network, won’t get the support and imminent future updates that someone who “bought” the software from the developer does. But if we toss this aside, that the business model appears broken is probably what leads some developers to pursue proprietary business models.

Now, there’s a perfect match between supply and demand in the users who wants new features and are willing to pay for them too, and the developers ready to supply new features. It appears pretty straightforward. It’s good for users and it’s good for developers, who make a living from what they do. Right? Wrong.

The advantage of using GPL or any other copyleft strategy is that the process of redistribution and refinement can easily be facilitated. If or when a useful feature is included in a version of the code, it can be adopted by the source developer or anybody else involved, so that everybody gains, whether they charge for it to others or not. It can facilitate the creation of a community around “the project”. The software is improved by community developers, and eventually the code or project may leverage much more than any individual developer is capable of.

If you use a proprietary model as a developer you’re shutting others out. As a proprietary developer you have to build your entire organization around the fact that all problems must be solved in-house or paid for. You’re in the business of constructing a costly operation, which must be paid for. In contrast, the free software developer may not have a great income from his work (someone in the linked discussion said he had received 50$ in donations at 20.000 downloads), but also has few expenses and obligations. Once a website has been set up, he can begin to facilitate the distribution and development of his project because it is GPL’ed. This of course doesn’t do it alone, but if it isn’t out there, it won’t be used and improved upon (for free) at all. If an open source developer has 20.000 downloads, it means his work is popular and things are working out. He ought to wake up and find a way to leverage all that traffic and interest to create even better software, which will attract even more users and reach even greater markets. I find open source developers are typically not very good at this, and there are no easy recipes for how to make it work.

My point is, however, that even while it may not seem so at the surface level, you’re in a much worse position as a proprietary developer, than the open source and free software hobbyist, who is capable of inviting global input and value to his work by using the GPL and has very few expenses doing so.

Now, what about the user? At a first glance, users get what they want, a theme or plugin of their choice and style. But the price they pay is not simply the money changing hands. They also become dependant on a company or a particular developer to provide for them the code and support they want. If the user becomes dissatisfied with the company’s service or the company goes bankrupt, or if the developer decides to go his own way leaving the product and it’s users behind, few will relate enough to the product to be able to pick up where he left. If a piece of code has had 20.000 downloads globally, it becomes a lot easier to find someone, for whom this piece of work is not just a strange mess. But it is also possible, for a user who can’t find somebody to help him, to dive into the code himself and learn to solve problems and create new features, and then redistribute his work.

I’m really great with developers selling their work, but I believe they’re shooting themselves in their feet, if they use GPL’ed software in the first place as a platform or market, and then do not use the powerful legal tools at their disposal in the GPL and other free licenses, to leverage the reach and further refinement of what they do. And I believe users who are too impatient with open source communities and hobbyist free software developers and pay for themes and plugins help trap themselves and their developers in closed circles, which will lead them nowhere while the open communities grow stronger. There’s a real danger however, that great developer talent will wind up in these kinds of dead-end relationships, which doesn’t expose their projects to the open scrutiny of global free software communities. There’s also a real danger that open source software projects won’t spawn the businesses and startups they need, in order to create thriving communities and cultivate collaborative efforts to create even better architectures for facilitating the development of great free software. This may happen if developers and startups decline from using the GPL or other copyleft strategies, out of the misunderstanding and fear that they can’t make money on something which is “free”.

technisch erg knap gemaakt http://stream.kaplak.com/

Retweeting @JinniMedia : from our blog Can we discover value in the long tail?: “While you can have a long tail.. http://ping.fm/m0vdU

Retweeting @JinniMedia : from our blog Can we discover value in the long tail?: “While you can have a long tail strategy, yo.. http://pi …

Looking at various entry points for my "going to learn to program again in 2009" project… getting excited about all the things possible

@KellySutton Anyway, both are _really_ compatible reads with what you’ve already been through with Chris Anderson

@KellySutton Any time - all my respect for Benkler aside, I can’t recommend Clay Shirky enough, in terms of readability as well as insights

I often find engaging conversation to arise in contexts I don’t always anticipate, which makes it all the more interesting and engaging

I dislike clutter and spam, but for us to carve out our own customized information paths, it’s great to shoot with a wide arc sometimes

Rich contexts and engaging conversation is great, but surfacing information in new contexts and inviting new input is vital

Respectfully must disagree with Muhammad Saleem http://ping.fm/lTFNX even if I see his point

Great introduction to Ruby, "Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book" : http://ping.fm/8X4iR

@Kaplak Thanks for the recommendation!

Retweeting @KellySutton Discovered the Learning Rails podcasts. This is exactly what I needed. http://bit.ly/7TBX

@KellySutton Try Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, and Charlene Li’s Groundswell…

Which means I have to dive down into this messy business of WordPress plugin hacking again

Having some issues with feeds showing up okay in Google Reader …: Posted by Kaplak (Morten Blaabjerg), January.. http://tinyurl.com/a64×9j

Having some issues with feeds showing up okay in Google Reader, but not in Firefox or FeedWordPress… hmmm… _puzzled_

@purplepopple i.e. fanhistory.com/date/posttitle-etc and not fanhistory.com/p=143…etc. And make post titles appear first in page titles

@purplepopple Laura, you should use long urls and page titles for your blog - will probably give you a better position

@jeremymeyers For now, we’re in near 100% testing mode.. here’s something on the purpose of Kaplak Stream : http://tinyurl.com/8jdsyr

@kaplak Your Kaplak stream has better Google placement than Fan History: http://tinyurl.com/kapsrch

@Kaplak What’s the purpose? are you just pulling in favorited posts? saw a couple of mine on there…

@jeremymeyers What would you like to know? :-)

Full details on the YouTube API and available feeds : http://ping.fm/5U5Ho

The hidden feeds of YouTube : http://ping.fm/p3qBi

anyone know anything about kaplak.com?

When syndicating a "search feed" from Twitter or Identi.ca, would be great to keep all links in a message intact

Why doesn’t Identi.ca feeds contain the text message in the "item body" rather than in the title? It ruins all links in a message

Why doesn’t Identi.ca feeds contain the test message in the "item body" rather than in the title? It ruins all links posted in an item

@GeBie Well, I like it a lot too - I grew up with those books.. I’d really like to see "The Horse and His Boy" make it into film

@Kaplak It doesn’t ever get any better than the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe-well maybe Prince Caspian

@martinboz Yeah, I learned that yesterday - but I’ll take that news with a grain of salt.. that’ll be a great waste if they don’t

@Kaplak: You may be interested to know that Disney is not planning to produce any more "Narnia" films: http://bit.ly/Hcpy

A somewhat related rebuff of the claims that the Narnia Chronicles should be Christian Evangelist propaganda : http://ping.fm/avHIf

kaplak: "The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe" is a wonderful film, based on a wonderful book: kaplak’s status o.. http://tinyurl.com/a6k3qv

"The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe" is a wonderful film, based on a wonderful book

Just saw the film for must be the 6th time - recently with my daughter when she was sick, and now it was aired on television

Great analysis and review of "The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe" : http://ping.fm/PdWym

Thanks for following: @digitalista, @jimcaruso, @The_Right_Girl, @silentsurfur, @jbjfan, @Crenel, @Kaplak, @AprilBraswell

@chuckypita Thanks, and I do ;-) And btw, Obama’s "The Audacity of Hope" kicks ass. Reading it at the moment.

"- and connect us with great talented people and ressources, at about the same pace, as new problems arise" after http://ping.fm/e4Zq3

it ruins the conversation when there’s a tweet missing in the middle of a train of thoughts

If Ping.fm says it’s gonna post something, you can’t always trust that it does, which is a big shame - have to use something else

Using ping.fm with GTalk and Twitter et.al. is not quite reliable

@Kaplak - Good luck with that CTO search. Let’s hope he’s better than America’s 3 stooges! http://tinyurl.com/6j9bqc

In 2009 I hope we’re going to find our CTO, and hope to be able to finance him also :-) His job will be to help keep that balance right

Getting the problem-solving capacity vs. expansion and growth rate right, is probably our greatest balancing challenge in Kaplak

During all the things we’ve done this past year I’ve found our online activities have made visible the problems we work with -

I’m inclined to let Kaplak Stream tumble on and even a bit more aggressively, and live with the carnage we knowingly create

thinking out loud… I wonder if we (Kaplak) should go ahead and open up for more feeds and solve problems later, or vice versa

@Kaplak you too!

Aggregation tools such as WP-o-Matic and FeedWordPress just got a promising little brother, and I’m currently playing a little with it in the Kaplak Labs. The name of this nice little plugin for WordPress is Yet Another Autoblogger or YAAB in short. It is developed by Satheesh Kumar, who was kind enough to post a note on the blog about it just recently:

I too have made a similar but better plugin called YAAB-Autoblogger. Yaab has all features of wp-o-matic and in addition it can create automatic blog carnivals in your site. Also it supports SMS blogging and Youtube cloning. Ebay product syndication and automated content rewriting are upcoming features. After all I myself is a doctor ( not a programmer ). I started making this plugin for my personal use, but when I doveloped it, it was highly impressing and I have planned to release it for public. Kindly download it from http://www.psypo.com/yaab , try it and if possible please review it in your valuable blog

I have only just played around with this plugin a little, but it looks fairly promising. Here are my initial comments and feedback for further improvement (which I also posted on Satheesh’s blog) :

• I can’t get YAAB to fetch multiple posts in separate posts, like FWP or WP-o-Matic does. It fetches only the latest post or saves the complete feed into a single post, no matter what values I provide it with. I’m sure this is easily fixed or explained.
• YAAB is very userfriendly and has an almost cartoony tutorial-like quality. I like the little character who helps guide setting up a feed for aggregation. Neat stuff, but it makes me wonder how flexible the plugin will be for more “unusual” type feeds.
• I also like the template very much. It’s very similar to what Guillermo did in WP-o-Matic, and I liked it there too :-)
• However, there are no variables for author, date posted, permalinks back to the source, or other data included in the feeds. Would be nice to be able to extract all the information in the feed, and place it where I want in the post. Also would be nice to have a regex like functionality to replace terms or code in a feed item, like the one used in WP-o-Matic. But especially the author and source/permalink information is crucial, IMHO.
• There are no functionality for tagging incoming posts, or fetching the tags included in the feed. Also a bit crucial in my book.
• YAAB has some very promising YouTube feeds functionality which makes it easy to set up an autoblog with automatically embedded YouTube videos. I haven’t played with it yet - but I will :-)

As previously stated, I have absolutely no idea how flexible this plugin is yet when it comes to feeds from Twitter Search and other such weird Atom sources. But as this is the first version, I’ll worry about that later :-) Keep up the good work, Satheesh!

@Kaplak Anytime ^_^ Twitter should be fun.

@yuyudin Thanks for that link to the shoe-throwing story - gave me a few minutes of fun :-)

Shoe-throwing game popular after the incident where a reporter threw a shoe after George W. Bush : http://ping.fm/RBetl

@yuyudin Y’re welcome :-) I found it refreshing, that the camera was turned the other way this time: at the spectators of the porn video

@Kaplak Thanks for the follow. Interesting dig you did. I find the whole capturing your reaction thing a bit alarming.

Joost Just Gives Up On P2P Altogether : http://ping.fm/Xi4UU

Everybody fucks: I was called up on the phone today by a guy from Jyllands-Posten, which is, as some will know, .. http://snipurl.com/8pue7

I was called up on the phone today by a guy from Jyllands-Posten, which is, as some will know, a major Danish newspaper. The guy in the other end told me they’ve just converted to a tabloid format and wanted to sell me and Kaplak a subscription for one year, and he would give me a free laptop too, if I’d take his offer. I thought the offer sounded a bit suspicious but didn’t decline, as I thought a free laptop always might come in handy. So I said I couldn’t decide right now, and went online to search for more information on this offer using Google.

I didn’t find much on the laptop offer. Instead, this turned out to be an interesting case of using search and of what one finds when looking for something else. I stumbled over this article in Jyllands-Posten (now also quoted in this space), which I found sufficiently interesting to spend a few minutes hunting down the object of the article, this video, which was first posted to YouTube, but then taken down by the service :

The story goes like this : Bilka, a large Danish chain of supermarket stores sells computers. One of their customers had an unusual agenda. Unnoticed he used a demo model of a laptop which was showcased in one of their stores (located in Holstebro) to play a porn movie for customers which happened to be passing by. Meanwhile their reactions were captured with the laptop’s built-in webcam. Apparently the plan was put into action using a USB stick to get the movie onto the showcased laptop. Some way the perpetrator managed to get the footage of customers’ reactions edited and uploaded to YouTube, from where it was later removed (by YouTube). It is now an entry in the collection of YouTomb, a MIT study dedicated to takedown patterns on YouTube (and other online services).

Fortunately, someone also uploaded this obvious case of the consumer-producer convergence to other online spaces, from where it may be seen and be redistributed. The days have passed when YouTube could take down a video and then it would cease to exist on the internet.

This story is a good case of PageRank which generates activity for all the wrong reasons. The video didn’t appear in Google’s own video results, for obvious reasons. YouTube took down the video so they wouldn’t include it, and Google’s video search is not (yet) very good at locating video from third party sources. Clearly Bilka doesn’t like to get all this attention from a story like this and have likely been trying to shut it down. And I wasn’t even looking for something about Bilka or for cases like this. So why did I find it?

Thanks to PageRank, it is easy to find these kinds of cases, as they are typically linked to from a number of places. PageRank also makes it difficult to find stuff, because these kind of stories prioritized by PageRank are deeply irrelevant to the information I was seeking : my original search for something on the laptop offer. I didn’t find what I was really looking for. But in this case, this wasn’t important enough for me to not be easily swayed from my way.

To find the story, the only keywords I had to use was “Jyllands-Posten” and “laptop”, originally searching for something on the laptop offer I received. Subsequently, after I found the article from the paper’s website, I tracked down the video in question, mostly out of pure stubbornness and refusal to let YouTube decide what’s good for me. It also seems strange to me to have a news story on the internet about a video, but not display the video. I wanted to see it for myself. In order to find it, I looked for “video” with the other keywords “Bilka”, “porno” (Danish for “porn”) and “Holstebro”, and dug up the title it had on YouTube before the takedown. After the takedown, someone posted the title of the video, “Electronic Harassment #1 - Porno on Laptop” along with the YouTube user name of the user who uploaded it. After that it was easy to locate it somewhere else. I was lucky it still carried the same title.

I can’t help but find this story incredibly funny. In all it’s comical simplicity, pulling this stunt showcases the shift in power, voice and authority, which distributed computing and online media enables - from large respectable companies, channels and filters to every one of us, independent of filters, disrespectfully engaging, limits imposed only by the audacity of our creativity. Let’s continue our work to find and build filters, which are independent of YouTube, Facebook and other such services, which so ridiculously lie flat on their stomachs for yesterday’s norms and masters. Which have so little concern for the individual voice of experimental producers, that it’s just sickening. And let’s spread stuff like this wide and far, to let executives everywhere know, that we know, that their unquestioned power is about to end - if it hasn’t already. “Everybody fucks”.

@PPureIndulgence You might find this interesting from @kaplak: http://is.gd/ccz1

Gardner Campbell on blogging in the classroom - great piece of instructional inspiration rooted in practice : http://ping.fm/mjvjh

Wow, cool giant knitted art: http://stream.kaplak.com/tag/phat-knits/

Incredible images from the floating Mulberry harbours towed to and rebuilt off Normandy beaches after D-day 1944 : http://ping.fm/67dtG

@mark_menard It is legendary stuff, Doug and his companions are incredibly insightful and inventive people

@Kaplak That demo looks very interesting.

The Mother of All Demos : Doug Engelbart presents to the world everything social computing is about - in 1968 : http://ping.fm/CgvlD

I just joined the pftf Twitter Group http://tgr.me/g/pftf and you can too. Please Retweet.

Mike Masnick on why compulsary licensing schemes in online music distribution are a really really bad idea : http://ping.fm/9tHUt

@rauchg Great to see you on Twitter, Guillermo!