Welcome Ryan!

We will also be making some other changes here with regard to how we handle guest bloggers, hopefully making it easier to have more guest bloggers. Ryan will be the last one who gets a special introduction. Instead, you will see short bios at the bottom of all posts on the blog. (If you are looking at an individual post rather than the front page of the site you should see this below.) We also hope to have more former guest bloggers stick around like Zoë, popping in to do an occasional post now and then when the mood strikes them. Expect to see these changes rolled out over the summer. Of course, even as we open up to new voices, we intend to keep the same high standards. Know someone you’d like to see blogging on Savage Minds? Feel free to contact us, or leave a suggestion in the comments.

We have two kinds of guest bloggers at Savage Minds, regular guest bloggers who are given their own accounts to do a series of posts on a “theme” over a two week period. Julian’s posts can be all be found here. A full list of all past and future Savage Minds authors can be found in the footer.

We also have “occasional contributors” who write single posts now and then, but who don’t have their own accounts. These posts are posted under the accounts of whomever on Savage Minds invited that person to post. (Like this recent entry by Jenny Cool, posted under Adam’s account.) These posts are all in the “occasional contributions” category. Sometimes we forget to add the category, so don’t hesitate to remind us!

Finally, the list of “full-time” Savage Minds authors is on our “authors” page, including links to their home pages. Many of us are also on Twitter, and you can see the full list by looking at who is being “followed” by the official Savage Minds Twitter feed.

Have a suggestion for a guest blogger? Let us know in the comments!

More recently, Michael has been working in the so-called Real World, as an anthropologist employed at an architecture firm whose business is creating consumer environments, a subject on which I hope he will enlighten us here. Please warmly welcome and appropriately respond to…. Michael G. Powell!

I completed my PhD in the anthropology department of UNC-Chapel Hill December 2009 and currently live in Newport News, VA.My interests in anthropology include American Indian studies, art and display, how people relate to the past, and issues of power. I am very active in SANA, the Society for the Anthropology of North America, where I sat on the executive board as a graduate student. I’m also involved in the American Studies Association.  I am a Chicano, born and raised in Texas. I went to a gradeless hippie school called New College for undergrad but came home to marry my high school sweetheart. Outside of academics I spend most of my time with my three daughters. I enjoy smoking Texas barbeque, reading comic books, and concocting elaborate rum drinks.

In a few minutes, I’ll publish Matthew’s first post.  And for those of you who are celebrating, don’t think you’ve shaken me off quite yet.  I’ll be popping up with a post now and then.

Adam will initiate an untitled monthly interview project where he will talk each month with someone doing provocative ethnographic research. An example would be this fascinating interview Adam did for the Archaeology Channel with Mercedes Doretti, a forensic archaeologist who worked at every known location of genocide and mass murder in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Welcome Adam! If readers have any suggestions for potential interviewees please contact him directly at rawbird {at} gmail(.)com

Two Bits has sold 1142 paperback copies (which doesn’t include publicity or review copies) since its release last June, and we are now preparing to reprint it. At this point we can correct any typos or mistakes that may have made their way into the final book. We cannot make any substantial or editorial changes. However, if you have noticed any misspellings or small factual errors, please let me know. You can send me a list with the corrections, and I will pass them along to our production department.

The production department plans to send the book back to the printer as soon as possible. If you could get any corrections to me by February 9th, that would be great. If you don’t think you would be able to get corrections to us by then, please let me know and we can talk to production about either delaying the order slightly, or putting the corrections on file for the next reprinting.

Since I’m all about open source, and since, given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow… if anyone has noticed a typo or factual error, I’d love to hear about it, so I can take advantage of this little moment!

Herewith, therefore, are two reports generated by Google Analytics, which is hands-down the most un-evil thing Google has ever done (General Report | Traffic Source Report). These reports are chock full of information, beautifully organized and fascinating to explore. Unfortunately, they are also pretty hard to interpret. I’m posting them now, because I think they show a few things pretty clearly, such as the initial spike of interest, the fact that 4 times as many of my readers use Firefox as do Internet explorer, the role of small communities in creating attention (savage minds, hastac, and a handful of close friends account for a significant portion of the traffic to the site).

My book is in kind of a strange space. On the one hand, it is a conventional academic book, a first book by an assistant professor (now tenured, thank you very much Duke University Press); it is accessible, but not popular; it has a large potential audience beyond academics because of its subject matter; and it is beautifully designed and people tell me it is well written. So much for the pro column. In the con column: it is long, it contains complicated theory in the first chapter, including Habermas, which is fatal to any reader even in small amounts; it doesn’t have any sound-bitable arguments and people tell me it is poorly written.

In short, it’s a pretty standard academic book, and therefore a good candidate for this experiment. People always ask what I had to do to convince Duke to let me release the book. On the one hand the subject matter made it easy: I couldn’t respect myself, or Duke, if a book about Free Software were not freely available. On the other hand, I think they were really eager to experiment, to see what would happen. I created the website, so they didn’t have to; and they agreed to use a CC (By-NC-SA) license and to give me the pdf and a very clean HTML copy (thank you Achorn) for distribution. The designer, Cherie Westmorland, used an open source font and the Boston Public Library let me use the cover image. All told, things worked out swimmingly, and the whole process has been, well, entirely normal. Duke is making as little or as much money on the book as they do on others of its ilk, and yet I am getting much more from it being open access than I might otherwise.

So what have I learned so far? A few things:

1) The Internet is dead. Well maybe it’s not that bad, but the era when simply putting something online guaranteed orders of magnitude more readers/viewers/listeners than normal is long gone. To put a finer point on it, let’s say the ‘Age of Boing Boing’ is dead. Sorry University Presses, you missed it. The place is just so saturated with everything and everybody that it now feels more like normal life and less like some special place. This amounts to saying that things have returned to normal levels of hard work. To get a book to sell, one has to invest a lot of work in marketing it, promoting it and distributing it—but all these things now include new forms of marketing promoting and distribution online. Just putting a book online means nothing unless one is going to work hard to bring attention to it (a fact Rex has noted repeatedly as well). How do I know this: because the Google reports tell the story. All the spikes in traffic correlate precisely with mentions in major and minor media outlets, ranging from Savage Minds to the New Yorker. Placing links in widely read places (print or online) increases traffic. Full Stop. But more than that, I know this because the ratio of print sales to downloads downloads to print sales has been 3 to 1 (Thanks, Cathy for the correction) . Not 1000 to 1 or even 100 to 1, but 3 to 1. That’s kind of amazing. It means that neither my outsized expectations of hordes of geeks downloading the book, nor Duke’s fears of massive numbers of lost sales have come true.

2) I have tenure. Putting my book online did not ruin my career. Having Duke publish it, as opposed to, say, some online vanity press, contributed to my tenure case, but simply having it available for free is not career suicide. Quite the opposite, I would say. I have more requests now for talks, reviews, contributed papers, conferences, interviews and projects than I can accept, and probably more than half of them come from people I don’t know from Adam, which means people who have found the book in public rather than through connections with my peers and friends. Lots of people are assigning the book in class, or bits of it, which I can only assume is facilitated by the ease of access. Duke, of course, might not like to hear this since it means people are assigning the book without ordering copies for class, but I’m ambivalent. On the one hand, I would like those people to assign the whole book and for Duke to be remunerated as a result; on the other hand, I know what creating a syllabus is like, and how great it is when something can be added just by inserting a link, as opposed to dealing with bookstores and administrative systems for ordering the book–a book students may or may not buy anyways.

3) I’ve had a pretty excellent amount of media attention. There are books it might be compared to that have done better: Jonathan Zittrain’s book came out at the same time, and he was on the Colbert Report, as was Clay Shirky. But as much as I love Colbert, that’s exactly the opposite of the kind of attention I would want. I have no “message” which I want a hundred million people to hear; I have a scholarly book which I wish Zittrain and Shirky would read, not Colbert and his audience. Nonetheless, I have had mentions in The New Yorker Blog, The Times Higher Education Supplement, Technology Review, Inside Higher Ed, and others. I’ve had conversations with people from Korea, Argentina, Brazil, and India about the book. I’ve had excellent response from European scholars interested in the book. In short, I can’t complain. According to Duke, the amount of marketing that went into my book was more intensive than most, and this may no doubt accounts for some of that attention. Frankly, it’s more than enough. I’m not quite sure what I would do with more, but I do know that with a bit more marketing, the dynamics of attention might conceivably change much more dramatically than just ten years ago. For some books that university presses publish, this fact is worth mulling over.

I am extremely happy to finally be able to announce its arrival. I’m also happy to announce that it is part of a series edited by Michael M.J. Fischer and Joe Dumit called “Experimental Futures” of which Jeff Juris’ excellent book Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization is also a part. And as well to thank HASTAC for helping out in its publication and in marketing it as well.

Two Bits has taken a long time, and it’s a better book for that. In some ways, it is untimely: the moment of Free Software is over– both the media and many of the scholars who focused so much attention on it starting in about 2000 seem to have moved on to some other next big thing. This is a shame, but predictable given the drive for novelty and for being first in academia. But I think (and I will throw modesty to the wind here) that anthropology has a tack on such things that is slower, more coherent, and more concerned with a certain precision in charting historical changes. I like to think that the book isn’t only about free software, but an anthropology of knowledge circulation more generally, and I hope that it interests even those who are too cool for old school.

Obviously I hope that others think the same thing, and I expect people to read it in light of the current peak of interest in web 2.0, social networking and internet celebrities, or whatever, which might be usefully re-thought through the lens of Free Software. And maybe it might just convince a few people, scholars especially, that the moment of Free Software is definitely not over, and that there is some really incredible scholarship out there by people like Gabriella Coleman, Matt Ratto, Shay David, Casey O’Donell, Jelena Karanovic, Anita Chan, Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter, Jenny Cool, Allison Fish, David Hakken and Karl Hakken, Jeff Juris (my labelmate!), Bernhard Krieger, Karim Lakhani, James Leach, Siobhan O’Mahoney, Greg Vetter and many others on these topics. Like the scholarship emerging on gaming (with Rex representing), that on Free Software constitutes a major locus of scholarly concern and questioning that should be the basis for understanding much of the recent past and near future.

Having been through the process of publishing a book, like oneman, I wish we could publish our books faster, and try to merge some of the timely but ill-considered insight of the blog-form with the deliberate and peer-reviewed caution of the book-form… but I’m nonetheless a committed modernist in that I think the book-form has a quality that no other form of communication has, and it has taken centuries for that quality to develop. Nonetheless, nothing lasts forever, and since this is a book about software, there are a few special things that I want readers to know about this book:

• the book is licensed under a Creative Commons (by-nc-sa) license, and is therefore freely available for circulation and modulation. Duke generously permitted me to do this both because I (and the audiences of the book) expect it, and also because I think it is a good experiment (I’d have preferred to drop the non-commercial restriction, but it’s obviously understandable why Duke might want it). I’m convinced, the way Cory Doctorow is, that we can sell books and give them away. And though it is impossible to know how many copies the book might have sold without this decision, I’m convinced it will sell as many and more (and for those wondering, the reasonable expectations in our little corner of the world are more on the order of one or two thousand, not tens or hundreds of thousands in Doctorow’s case). For me, as a teacher and a scholar, openly licensing the book is primarily a way of getting it in front of people the way it used to get in front of you in a bookstore. If you are serious about the book, you’ll probably buy it, but if you aren’t you might a) read a bit anyways, and b) not be angry that you bought it and don’t like it. In either case: bottoms up to Duke University Press for taking the risk.
• The book is online in pdf form, but I also created a site using the Institute for The Future of The Book’s “comment press” template for Word Press. I think the IFB is the bionic bees knees, and I’m keen to see people use this version as a place to discuss the book, both as individual readers, and for classes (btw, Jonathan Zittrain’s book is also in IFB format, and they would make great reading together… hint hint to those organizing reading circles). I like to think that this is a first step towards producing living books, books that modify and modulate, books that respond and transform, but without sacrificing the kinds of permanence and scholarly apparatus that we value. Thanks in no small part to some work by people at Achorn International (Joel Ibarra) and IFB, the online version is correlated with the print version by page number, and includes all the notes and references as well. Adding and updating links is also something that this renders possible.
• The book is beautiful. Duke (and in particular Cherie Westmoreland) did a fantastic job. The font is an open source font (Charis SIL), the cover is combination of a painting from the Boston Public Library by the 19th century symbolist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes depicting the telegraph (and called colloquially “Good News, Bad News”) and a Hollerith punch card. And here’s a reason to choose a short title: the spine has the title written perpendicular to, not parallel with the length of the book. Minor, I know, but how cool is that?
• Last but not least, I’ve been thinking about the meaning of “re-mixing” a scholarly work. Various works on the Internet and free software have experimented with this… Lessig’s Code V2, Benkler’s Wealth of Nations as well as others, scholarly and not. However, I’m not so sure it’s clear what remixing means in scholarly terms. I’d love it if people want to translate parts of it, or transform it for other media (anyone interested in doing a version for the Wii contact me immediately), but those are explorations of the form, and not the content of the book… so what would remixing scholarly work really mean? One thing I hope it means, in the social and human sciences especially, is that we contribute to a shared collection of conceptual tools that are refined by confrontation with empirical reality. Two Bits contains a couple such concepts (recursive publics, usable pasts) as well as contributing more generally to research on the public sphere, on the meaning of making things and making things public, as well as a substantive field of work focusing on software, networks, geeks, hackers, entrepreneurs, intellectual property and so forth. So one key aspect of the future of this book is a project I’m calling “Modulations” for short, which is an attempt to think about not just these concepts and problems in particular, but the modes and manners in which we interact as scholars around the development, refinement and co-ownership of such concepts. I don’t really know what this means yet, but I’m looking for anyone with ideas.