Saturday, February 11th, 2023 - TrickJarrett.com: Be excellent to each other.

New York Public Library researchers find that up to 75% of books published before 1964 may be in the public domain

2/11/2023 9:00 am | : 2 mins.

... According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights.

"That's sort of a staggering figure," Cram told Motherboard. "That's 25 to 35 percent of books that were renewed, while the rest were not. That's interesting for me as we think about copyright policy going forward."

Cram warns that since the project is still ongoing, the data may ultimately come out to be slightly more or slightly less, and that NYPL hasn't even begun to dive into films, music, or other types of creative works. But these early findings could help lawmakers craft copyright policies from an evidence-based standpoint that wasn't easily accessible in the past.

"Folks need to understand that this data is really important to the record of American creativity," he added. "It is the history of American creativity. To some extent, it is a great record of American creativity, and I think that the data should be usable not just by us, by the libraries, but by everyone. I think it belongs to the people and is the people's data."

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| Tags: library, books, copyright, public domain

Medium.com's current CEO shares some thoughts on why the company has floundered / failed

2/11/2023 10:07 am | : 6 mins.

This is a comment on a discussion titled, "Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?"

I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222

It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it:

Lost our way on recommendations. When I showed up the company was convinced that engagement equals quality. That's not true and it gets even more pronounced if you pay people to game your recommendation system. I think we were boosting articles that made people think we were a site for clickbait. The canonical example for HN is "Why NodeJS is dead" by a new programmer with zero experience or context. Readers noticed this, but worse, so did authors. And so we lost the incentive for a lot of the best and most interesting authors to bother because they were getting swamped by content-mill type authors. As of December, about 30% of our recommendations are generated by a new system that is picking much higher quality articles that have been vetted for substance over clickbait. This is getting a lot better, rapidly.

Got lost thinking about the creator economy, when we should have kept thinking about doers. Distribution was our winning value proposition (on top of simple free tools). We were built to find and boost individual articles and that meant that anyone with something great to say had a chance to get their story boosted, often by a lot. This is my original background in publishing: working at O'Reilly helping them publish programming books that were written by programmers. For a lot of topics, personal experience trumps everything. Not to knock creators, but by definition full time content creation gets in the way of having personal experiences that are worth writing about. We are partly through fixing this and #1.

Those are the two most obvious ones. But then there's a longer list. We competed with our platform publishers by starting our own in house publications. Those are shut down now. We started but didn't finish a number of redesigns and so the tools didn't get better for a couple of years. We're past that now and are putting out table stakes features again and some innovations too.

What I told our investors was that there was a huge pile of shit to dig out of, but that it would be worthwhile eventually. And I still believe both that there is a lot more to do and also that it'll be worthwhile.

I think point two is an interesting one. As a publishing site / tool, the better content is better for you, for the author, for the reader. Losing sight on that is the downfall of a publishing site who relies on content which draws readers back, and more importantly, for them to pay.

This does not lessen full time content creators. They have an audience and even have a use for businesses of various kinds. Specifically the ones who make things and need people to market and talk about them.

Regarding medium.com, other comments on the discussion and in direct reply to the CEO's post call out the business model and methods of medium.com as problematic for various reasons. But I wanted to highlight this specific response by the CEO for that second talking point.

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| Tags: writing, content

2/11/2023 10:28 am | : 2 mins.

I continue to dip my toe in using ObsidianMD as a larger writing tool for myself. I've begun using it for archiving writings by others, interview and podcast transcripts, etc., for organizing and building a reference library on various topics.

I'm wondering, since both this blog and Obsidian make use of Markdown, if there is a use case where it would be useful to save my daily archives also in a markdown format which is easily importable to my Obsidian for search and reference. I think the answer is yes.

If so, then it becomes a question of best implementation. I already maintain a backup of my Obsidian "Vault" as it is called online, so it's about publishing the day's document to that location, and then syncing my laptop and phone to pull in the recent updates. That can be done easily enough manually, but of course I am interested in automating the process.

This also calls into question if I should enable a reverse setup. Perhaps retiring the web interface I use for managing this blog, and instead do my publishing via Obsidian. The downside there is when I am away from the computer, where the web interface enables me to publish easily from anywhere and on any web-connected device.

Edit:

Second idea, whenever I star an article in my Wallabag (Pocket-like tool for reading articles later) I should automatically export them to my Obsidian as well as something for future reference.

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| Tags: reference, digital tool, blog, note taking