The cost of digital content is more than just its dollar price. The cost for digital content such as an iTunes tv show includes the time you spent looking at it and the amount of space it takes up on your hard drive. Time is hard to quantify, unless you’re paid by the hour and you are viewing the digital content during work hours. Bandwidth is another cost. DRM and licensing restrictions are another.

Disk space, however, presents a unique problem. Disk space is the amount of space on your hard drive the content uses. There is a limited amount of space. As your collection of digital content grows, you continue to use up more and more space. Disk space is not like physical space. Disk space requires maintenance, it can fail, it can become obsolete. Generally it is best to back up digital content, because of disk space’s unique vulnerabilities. A backup is a second copy. That means in order to protect valuable digital content, you need to multiply the space it takes up by two. One gigabyte become two gigabytes. You’ll require double the space. Maybe not all the digital content you have justifies this additional cost, but if you paid money for it, it makes sense that you do back up.

Digital content also has many unique attributes that make it different from other goods you buy. For instance, you can make multiple copies of it. You can’t easily make multiple copies of a car you bought, or a can of worms. Another unique property of digital content is DRM, Digital Rights Management, a way that copy right owners protect their right to control the copying and distribution of their intellectual property. When you buy digital content, you don’t actually own the content, you have purchased a license to consume it. There are also other unique properties of digital content, far too many to list them all, but another interesting one is that you can’t really know what benefit an information item will provide you until you have consumed it (this makes it hard to measure the price you’re willing to pay for it). Also there’s no way to return the benefit you’ve received from it - you can’t return your knowledge in exchange for your money back.

The last item I want to talk about is the right of sale and its consequences in the context of DRM. You can’t sell your iTunes videos; when you purchased the content you agreed to this (even if you didn’t read the agreement). You don’t have the right of sale, but your content still has value: you can view it some other time. Or maybe the value it had for you expired once you’ve viewed and the price you paid for it was worth the one viewing. In this case disk space is not a cost, you can delete the content, you’ve gotten your worth from it. But more than likely you’ll care about the money you spent, and you don’t just want to delete your files. Maybe someday, Apple will let you sell your purchases (don’t hold your breath). If you don’t want to lose your content because of its value, you can’t sell it, you’ll have to store it. I’m not a futurist, but I predict that your digital storage needs will continue to grow, and you’ll find your needs will make continuous, and perhaps perennial, withdrawals from your wallet.

What is my point? That $1.99 price for the latest episode of “Lost” or “The Office” does not represent the real cost to you. Think about it. Think about how storing your CD collection in the 1990’s (if you had one) became a real issue for you - but you could sell them. Buying that $1.99 episode will burden you with a lifelong obligation to store it, at least until you get fed up with it and just finally delete it. More than likely, by the time this happens, you will have spent more than just, a dollar and ninety nine cents.

Open Access News touts a new book, by Yochai Benkler as evidence that Web 2.0 is the Midas of the 21st century. The book, much as its demure title suggests, praises user created content (such as YouTube, videos, blogs) as only one of the most mediocre greatest things to ever happen in the content industry world and will only have a tiny huge impact on publishers everyone.

The book is not only about standardista approved AJAX injected Folksonomy tagged web 2.0 sites with social voting, it is web 2.0: it has a wiki, and can be downloaded with some rights reserved.

Some excerpts:

At the same time, we are seeing an ever-more self-conscious adoption of commons-based practices as a modality of information production and exchange . . . a self-conscious social movement.

. . . we can make the twenty- first century one that offers individuals greater autonomy, political communities greater democracy, and societies greater opportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection.

Wow! A free and new future awaits us. Well, actually it doesn’t have to wait, you can . Enjoy the paradigm shift.

I’ve been working on a second version of my Color Tool. I want to move it to JavaScript and AJAX, instead of using flash. Here’s what I have so far. Some of the information boxes will overlap on smaller screen resolutions, but those are just there for debugging purposes. Eventually I’d like to display more color variations and add tons of extra features. My time to work on this project is limited though, because of school. I’ve tried to do a good job to comment the code. Also the RGB to HSL and HSL to RGB conversions were done with the help of formulas I found at easyrgb.com. I’m also using the prototype and script.aculo.us libraries for small things here and there. They have some great tools there. Let me know what you think or if you have any comments.

More on my adventures on switching to Ubuntu. You can read my first installment if you want some background info. There’s always a lot of discussion about user-friendliness and it means different things to different people. Is Linux user friendly? With a graphical desktop environment like gnome installed you could make the argument that it is. What a Linux distribution isn’t, however, is ‘lazy-friendly.’ I’ve learned that the hard way. Not paying very careful attention to what instructions say or what you’re doing inside of a configuration file could spell instant death for your operating system. I tried to install xgl on Ubuntu, on a version on which it is not really wise to do so. The instructions said this, but I missed it. I lost everything and had to begin from the start.

Linux gives you a lot of power and control, while Windows takes it away from you for your own saftey. Linux treats you like a responsible adult giving you freedom and responsibility and Windows treats you like a child, taking it away and telling you what you can and can’t do (like with DRM for instance).

It’s not about technological know-how. I don’t have a PhD in computer science. I don’t even know a high level programming language, and I’m able to install and configure and run a linux OS. I finally took the plunge and followed it through. There was a lot of work involved but it paid off, and it was entirely free. I look at my Ubuntu OS and I feel a sense of ownership over it, I feel a bit of pride in having been able to get it running, and I’ve even managed to customize it in a way that suits me. I feel as if I control my OS and not the other way around, and I’m sure as I learn more about it, that feeling will only grow.

Linux is a real alternative OS. It’s not the half-assembled car in your garage you tinker with for fun but never intend to drive to work with (if you ever get it running to begin with). Larger corporations like IBM, Sun, and Oracle with multi-billion dollar global assets run Unix and Linux operating systems in production environments. There are distributions that will do everything you can think of for your personal needs. Just two days ago my wife and I worked out our monthly spending for February on OpenOffice calc. It did everything we needed it to, and it’s all free.

What have we been afraid of? Saving money? A little bit of work? It’s time to stop giving money to Microsoft out of fear and start jumping into the free world of software, a world of freedom and responsibility, and reward for diligence and hard work. At least it is time for me.

I installed ubuntu on one of my hard drives two days ago after creating a partition for it in Windows setup. That explains my absence from writing for that time. I was hearing so much about this Linux based OS that I wanted to try it. It was a lot of work to get everything to work right because of my hardware. For many though, it will work right out of the box. You just go to ubuntu.com, download the latest stable version and burn it to a disk. To put it on a system just put the disk in and boot from it. It pretty much installs itself.

The hardware issues I had were a bit tough, but the ubuntu community is so very helpful. I had a lot of my questions answered by people on #ubuntu on irc.freenode.org and by searching the internet and the ubuntu forums. The toughest was installing the latest nVidia driver so that I could get 3D support for my nVidia 7800 GTX. The process is very picky and you have to install various things before you can even begin and initially it was such a headache (the graphical user interface crashed several times) that I almost gave up. Linux, however, rewards patience and persistence.

Once I had sound, video, and printing working I was set. I am set! It’s so nice. It is an impressive experience. The best part is that all the software is free! Gimp, a very powerful linux Photoshop counterpart, and inkscape, an illustrator counterpart are free! As far as I can see they’re just as powerful as Adobe’s products. Gimp comes installed! Firefox, xchat, and many other programs come preinstalled. Installing new applications is easy with the package manager, it’s easier than having to scour the web to get free software for Windows.

I love it. It is beautiful. I’ve managed to install Japanese language input, so my wife can use it to talk to her family and browse Japanese websites. I’ve upgraded to the latest versions of Firefox and installed all the extensions I had on Windows (including Google and Yahoo’s toolbars) and imported my bookmarks. It’s amazing.

The negative is that my USB headset doesn’t work so well, a shame, and my scanner isn’t supported. I can switch back to Windows to scan though. I can talk to everyone on IM using GAIM (the Linux version is much prettier). I have OpenOffice to write documents with, basically, I love it. I’m going to see if I can just use it, instead of windows. If I want to play my games, I’ll have to switch to Windows though. Also, I’ll have to figure out how my wife and her mother can talk using MS messenger, maybe we’ll have to schedule when they’ll call each other so that I can be using Windows at that time.

It’s great, I recommend Ubuntu! I consider myself to be only moderately technical, and I feel that if I can get all this to work, many others can to. I’ll provide updates to my Ubuntu experience by writing about it here.

Everyone’s been talking about recently, the free website creator from Google, and even I have a page I’ve been playing around with: I call it . But I’ve found something very similiar and very interesting: infogami. It’s a free webpage creator. You simply enter a subdomain in the provided box, provide an email (a working one if you want to keep your page - you can create and play with the site without confirming the email), and there you are!

A great thing about infogami is that you can allow anyone to edit your site! Which makes it sort of a wiki.

Check out mine: Share Wonders at infogami.

It comes with a blog too. There’s no option to comment but there is a feed. Maybe comments will be added later. infogami is not even a beta yet, apparently.

Oh, they have a developer blog.

The format used for editing pages is not HTML, it’s something called Markdown. You can play with a Markdown sandbox if you like.

If you use Google Talk or Wikipedia at all you may be familiar with this type of text formatting and markup code:

*italic* **bold**
_italic_ __bold__

This is a link to Share Wonders
[Share Wonders](https://sharewonders.com/ "Share Wonders")

Very nice. I expect to hear more about infogami soon.