1.When & how did you decide this was ‘your thing’? When did you decide to become a 3D artist?
I began to work with all kinds of digital art around the age of 15. I always was extremely fascinated by 3D animation. I started to do a lot of classical 2D design and sometimes a little bit of 3D, but it took me 5-7 years of try-and-error-working until I could really offer professional 3D work to my clients. It was very hard to me to discover the complex field of 3D software because I didn`t know anybody to show me some tricks and had to find it out all by myself. Now I have a lot of people around me to ask if there is a problem and from a certain point on especiall online forums like cgtalk.com or www.3dmax.de (german) were extremely helpful.

2. What is your favorite movie and why?
I love to be thrilled by films that are told so clever and constructed so precisely that it makes me feel as if the director knows how to build up a complete world.
My pulse went never higher in cinema than in “Das Experiment” by Oliver Hirschbiegel and “The Game” by David Fincher because in my eyes it has the most thrilling movie ending I have ever seen. One of my alltime favourites also is David Finchers “Fight Club”, because it is so intelligent and thrilling by telling a story as if you were watching in the narrators brain.

The production began in September, 2004 with the storywriting but the final rendering wasn’t finished until February, 2005 after 6 months of working day and night. It’s been produced in 1280×720p resolution and I used 3ds max 7 and Adobe After Effects. It was made using 50% keyframing and 50% motion capturing.

3. What’s the idea behind DELIVERY? Is it based on something or is it a unique concept? How did you come up with it?
Developing a story is always difficult for me. I am not a trained writer so instead of writing a story to the end I always think about other ideas and jump between them, not being satisfied with any of them. I wrote different short concepts when I was spending holidays in Khao Lak / Thailand and one of them was DELIVERY. It was not based on anything, I just had certain images in my mind that I wanted to be part of the story, such as a big city, a bridge between dimensions, a poor old character, etc. In the end it is a story about the power and powerlessness of the individual combined with the fascination about philosophic theories concerning the existence of our universe. Sometimes I wonder how simple the story is and nevertheless causes some attention.

4. The intro sequence is very cool, it sets the tone just right for the rest of the story… how long did it take you to come up with this very long shot?
The Intro sequence is my favourite shot in DELIVERY: The flight through some kind of huge jungle which ends seamlessly introducing the hermit on the balcony with the small flower. This sequence was developed very late during the production and it is a good example for the ideas that had not been in the story board and came up spontanious but make a very important part of the final result.
It contains some hidden information about the story. The flower which reappears in the end is already focused. The motif of a small object to appear very big is already visible here. The sunlight shining through the leaves is a symbol for the ending of the story when the sun comes out again. I am happy that many people recognize the parallels to my favourite directors, Fincher and Jeunet. This sequence for example is comparable to Fincher’s title sequence for “Fight Club”, which also features a seamless macrolense-shot that includes hidden information about the final conclusion.

5. Andreas and Matthias Hornschuh made the music for DELIVERY. How long did it take them and did they compose it to your directions or did they have all possible freedom?
My university gave me 6 months to complete DELIVERY from the storywriting to the final rendering. After 4 months I had a lot of final renderings combined with cheap prerenderings to a almost finally timed version. So they could start producing and it took them about 6 weeks to complete it all. I told them that I wanted a dark, wide, emotional, orchestral score. There were not too many changes on their first draft, except the middle part of the story which had to be rewritten because the idea with the torch was again one of the things which came up very late during the production. If you have questions about the music you can contact the brothers at www.hornschuh-musik.de

6. DELIVERY pictures a rather dirty and mechanical image of the future. Do you think this is how we’ll end up?
There will always be beautiful parts and bad parts in the world. And many parts of our world already look – or at least feel – like in DELIVERY, except the little flying vehicles which came more out of “cultural” science-fiction inspirations instead of realistic future forcasts. One aspect of the factory city of DELIVERY is that you can see no humans in it. This is just an exaggerated way to express the inhumanity that exists already today.

7. Can you line up the chronological evolution from original idea to finished concept to help new artists and interested people understand the process from the birth of an idea to the ultimate creation of it?
The first and most important part is to develop a story. I always spend weeks or months to do that because this process is responsable for what you spend your next 1 or 2 years with. I am not motivated to start design or modelling until I have the feeling about the right story. But to be honest many good details develop during the production, but there has to be the right base idea and most important: the right idea for an ending. To make it really thrilling you need a good ending. After that I make a rough storyboard with simple 3D models, because I am a bad drawer. So I just let out the part of drawing skribbles and designs and proceed to work directly on the final 3D models. This means that I use my 3D software as my sketchbook and start modelling from my brain. This is only possible because I work alone on my shortfilms and I am a fast modeller. While modelling and animating the scenes I already send the first scenes to the render farm. I used 10 PCs to render DELIVERY and they started to render after the first month of the production. In the end there is a long phase of fine-tuning, compositing and correcting which is important to make it really round. At least one third of the production time is just working on these little tunings.
But after all of that the work is just about to begin, because entering the film to many shortfilm festivals all over the world and travelling to the festivals is very expensive and exhausting, but it also is great fun and extremely important for your way as a filmmaker. For DELIVERY I produced 6 months and travelled 12 months until now, of course working in my office inbetween the festival journeys.

8. What was the hardest part of this clip and why?
The hardest part for me was the character animation. I never modelled or animated a character before. I used motion capturing for the walk and rough movement, but facial animation, hands, eyes, etc. still had to be animated manually and the Mocap Data needed a lot of fixing to fit into my scenes.

9. How many awards did it score by now, and what’s the one you cherish the most?
I got about 10 awards for DELIVERY until now and some exciting nominations are still open, like the nomination for the european film award which is held in Warsaw in December. Every award was very exciting for me, but maybe the best surprise until now was to receive the jury award and the audience award at AFI FEST in Hollywood.

10. Did you learn to manage the software yourself by tutorials, or did you follow courses for it?
I learned it almost all by myself. I just was not in the business and I never did any internship in any company. This “isolated” way of learning CGI Production was hard and took a long time. But I think it forced me to find quick and easy selfmade solutions which makes me very independent from plugins or tutorials today. And on the other hand it made me develop some strange or unusual workflows which probably didn’t come up if I learned it in courses. One of these workflows is for example that I very often sculpt my 3d models directly out of the photo footage (camera mapping) instead of modelling them from a draft or skribble. You can get an impression of this effective workflow here or here. This special workflow lets the texture do most of the work but also has its limits and sometimes creates messy geometry.

11. What are your favorite websites/weblogs? What do you read? (e-books and books)
I am sorry but I am almost reading nothing, because I just spend all my time working. I am a little bit ashamed about it, but its true.. :)

More info:

DELIVERY Trailer (.WMV, 8 MB)
A panoramic Quicktime (360°) of the weirdo’s room
Press Kit
Till Novak’s site

“So let’s talk about DVB and CPCM works. DVB is a private industry consortium, it costs 10.000 Euros a year to be a member, you have to be either a manufacturer, or an academic, or a broadcaster or a film company to join. EFF is a member, my former employer is a member. We represent a manufacturer, an open source manufacturer called GNU Radio and the meetings are subject to a kind of non-disclosure agreement, so you can’t really talk about what’s said in the meetings until DVB decides to go public with it. This is essentially a secret law making process that’s under way there. Then when we’re talking about technical standards, it’s not such a big deal, but as soon as we’re talking about sweeping restrictions, changes to the way the copyright bargain works, it becomes very great indeed.

Warner Brothers, who were represented there – the representative from Warner Brothers is also the chairman of the compliance ad hoc group in the DVB/CPCM group- gave a presentation last year in March in Dublin at the DVB World Conference (.pdf, 138kb) in which they promised that they would see regulatory mandates across Europe, forcing CPCM, and these would mirror the regulatory mandates that forced the broadcast flag in America. This was a proposal that said: ‘people who build digital television technologies should first get the permission of the entertainment industry for all the features that these technologies would have. Now remeber in 1967 to 1984, the movie studios claimed that the VCR would put them out of business, and they sued and they lobbied very hard to get the VCR prevented from being introduced into the market. In fact in 1982, Jack Valenti the mouth piece for the Motion Picture Association went to a congressional hearing at UCLA, and said that the VCRs is to the American film industry as the Boston strangler is to women home alone, as a serial killer. And promised that this would be the death of his industry. And at his exit interview just a couple of years ago when he retired he said he never regretted a word of it, that he still believes that the VCR is dangerous to the entertainment industry and should be banned, and that the brand new motion picture association building in Washington D.C. is called the Jack Valenti building. This is not an industry that is in any position to tell us which feature should or shouldn’t be allowed in digital television.

What CPCM does is specify a wide range of restrictive flags that can be set for digital television programs and a compliance regime that manufacturers will have to adhear to in order to be in compliance with the standard. And that compliance regime basically says what they have to do when they need these flags and how they have to design their technology. Now I’ll talk a little about the specific restrictions, but those aren’t the important pieces here. The important piece here is that we’re moving from a world, potentially, where the thing that determines whether or not your device is allowed in the market and succeeds, is whether or not customers want it and are willing to spend money on it to a world where where the thing that determines whether your device is allowed in the market, is whether or not an entertainment executive says it should be. We’re moving to a world where the person who makes the record gets to design the record player.

Moreover, because the compliance regime specifies that everything in the technology has to be resistant to user modification, we will have for the first time, a strong motivation for the companies that make technology components like hard drives, video cards, tuner cards and so, will have a strong motivation for those people to design their devices so that users can’t modify them, so that open source drivers can’t be written for them. So the entire PC ecosystem starts to ripple from this, as we see manufacturers building their tuner cards, their video cards, their hard drives and so on, to resist free and open source software, because they’re afraid that should these components end up with free and open source drivers, that they will no longer be useful or lawful for use with television technologies.

And finally, as digital television migrates to the PC, this starts to put PCs in the realm of a regulator. We suddenly go from a regulator doing nothing but assuring themselves that a TV works as it is advertised to assuring themselves that PCs are programmed and designed in a way to protect the entertainment industry’s business model that suddenly becomes incumbent upon technology makers who make general purpose technologies to assure themselves that what they build doesn’t unduely disrupt some other industry’s business models.

The restrictions themselves are in fact quite scary for all of that. The thing that gets me most is something called ‘authorized domain’. The idea of authorized domain is the idea that you can flag a piece of content so that it can only be consumed by devices owned by a single household. Sounds reasonable enough on the surface. But it raises this question: ‘What’s a household? If you’re from a diaspora family where part of your family is in the developing world, and part of your family is here in the developed world maybe working as a daylabour, as an au-pair… are you part of the kind of family that this system will recognize? Is it likely that these engineers meeting in closed-door meetings and smoke-filled rooms at the EBU in Geneva have countenanced ‘that’ sort of family arrangement? Can they design a computer technology that can distinguish between a family with far flung members all over the world and just a group of people who are sharing media indiscriminately? Can they distinguish between a situation in which a bunch of neighbors who are part of the same household and all live on the same floor of an appartment building are trying to share media and a situation in which a communal household merges, like when you put your father in an old folks home and he wants to take his media with him when he checks in? Can they distinguish between a person who goes from house to house sharing his content and the child of a divorced couple that goes back and forth once a week per the custody arrangement and tries to share the media? Now I’ve raised this question and they said ‘we saw this problem in other fora, we have for example Windows XP activation’. Sometime you try to activate a copy of Windows XP and it looks like you’re trying to do something dodgy and XP says: ‘call this number to confirm that what you’re doing isn’t dodgy’. Well that’s fine when you’re writing a copy of Windows, but since when does watching television require that you ring up a call center and explain the circumstances of your parent’s divorce. I think it’s a terrible thing to expand the copyright monopoly into.

It’s one thing to say ‘I get to say who gets to copy my books’ it’s another thing for me to say: ‘I get to tell you what you’re family is allowed to consist of’. There are other areas in which we’ll see restrictions, more kind of easily understood restrictions like the number of screens that a show is allowed to be on, the duration that you’re allowed to store a show for, the number of viewings that you’re allowed to have and how far away from the receiver your screen is allowed to be. Today you can buy simple devices like SCART that will wirelessly transmit your SCART signals from one room to the other. I do this at home, I’ve got a cable box in one room and on another floor I’ve got a television I wirelessly transmit to, rather than stringing the wire up through the floor. Now when you hear the standards body people talk about this, the entertainment people talk about this, what they say is that watching a show that’s been received in one room while you sit in another room has value. And if it has value we should be able to charge money for it. This is the ‘IF VALUE THEN RIGHT’ theory. If there’s a value to something, someone else has a right to that value. They’re correct, there is value to being able to watch a show that’s being received in one room while you’re sitting in another room. We can measure that value: it’s the price that I’m willing to spend on the wireless device that retransmits from one place to another. What the standards propose us to do, what this law propose us to do is expropriate that value from you and me, with whom it currently vests, and to give it to the entertainment industry who can then sell it back to us. They characterize this as a new business model. There’s kind of an internet-ready business model for this and I call it the urinary-tract infection business model (edited: hope I got it right). It used to be that you were sitting in your living room and there were a million things that you could do freely and easily. You could change the channel, you could pause, you could rewind, you could plug in more screens, take fewer screens, you could watch a show in one room that was being received in another room… it was all very free and easy. And now every button of your remote has a price tag. It comes in slow, painful drips. It’s not a business model that I want to be a customer of.

So every government in Europe is trying to figure out how to create a digital television transition, how to convince people like you and me to buy digital televisions or digital television receivers and get rid of the analogue televisions. There’s a pretty good reason for this. Right now, every government in Europe is broadcasting, has set up broadcasting licences to broadcast the same shows in two different ways. One is analogue, one is digital. The spectrum that’s being used for analogue television transmission could be reclaimed and used for mobile phones, used for licenced wireless, auctioned and sold out to taxi drivers and there are numeral ways in which that value could be reclaimed. It’s certainly not in the public interest to have all this prime spectral real estate, this electomagnetic real estate sitting out there fallow. It’d be great of we could get people to buy new digital televisions. The entertainment industry’s story, again and again, is if we can give people good enough tv shows, that are ready for digital, then they’ll go out and buy digital televisions. That what people want is high quality content. There’s a technical matter, it doesn’t seem to be working. This is what they pursued in America. It’s just not a big winner, America is really lagging the digital television transition. In the UK they tried something else. In the UK what they tried to do is giving people free tv. That turns out to be very succesful. What they’ve done is multiplexing, that is to say they’ve putten more shows into one signal. They’re multiplexing 3 or 4 standard definition shows in every one of those high definition channels. And then they’re selling freeview boxes for 70 pounds or even less. And these freeview boxes give you 30 free channels of television and 20 free channels of audio forever. You buy one box and you never have to pay a cable bill again. Unsurprisingly, that has convinced a lot of people to buy digital television boxes and to get rid of their analogue sets.

In America we killed the broadcast flag. We killed it in a couple of ways, but the key insight that we had that made the broadcast flag go away in America is that no law maker wants to be remembered as the elective representative who killed television. There’s no surer way to convince Americans to vote for someone else than disrupt their TVs. It seems to be a truism that lawmakers have taken to heart. So when the broadcast flag was proposed the initial idea was that a lawmaker from Louisiana, a guy named Billy Tauzin, would make a law that would require the Federal Communications Commision which is the regulator, to inact the broadcast flag regulation. It woudl give them the explicit jurisdiction to become kind of ‘kings of devices’ and regulators of device characteristics. Now as we made a bigger and bigger statement about what was happening with this broadcast flag, this lawmaker’s enthusiasm for making this law got smaller and smaller and smaller. And eventually when they deliverd their report, which consisted of 20 pages of recommendations, and 200 pages of objections, this lawmaker got cold feet and said: I’m not going to make a law. Instead he sent a letter to the commisioner of the FCC saying: I think you’ve already got the jurisdiction, you don’t need my help. Go ahead and make the regulation without me. I’m not going to be the lawmaker who broke (edited: couldn’t find adverb) TVs. And the FCC did indeed make this regulation. Being the regulators, they lost concern with what voters think of them. They know that they’ll be home when the next party takes office and that they’ll move to a position in the industry. So they went ahead and enacted this regulation. But what came as a consequence of enacting this regulation was that we were able to sue, to asks the courts to determine whether or not that had this jurisdiction and the courts and the courts unsurprisingly said ‘No, they don’t! We don’t let the broadcast regulator tell you how you can design your PC, that’s not what they’re there for.
If you guys want to make this kind of regulation, you’ve got to go and get a law made, in support of it’.

Now the studios had a hard time finding a lawmaker that was willing to make that kind of law. And so what we saw was a lot of very sneaky lawmaking, a lot of people tacking to the broadcast flag law to the end of a budget balancing bill. And we just kept a very close eye on this stuff, and we sent lots and lots of letters from lots and lots of people, voters, to lawmakers saying ‘we see what you’re up to, we don’t like it’ and over and over again these things just kept getting withdrawn.

In the Senate they’ve just introduced the Digital Content Protection Act, the DCPA, this suicidal senator has introduced it. It contains the broadcast flag, it contains the broadcast flag for radio and it governs the characteristics of any device that can receive a signal after it’s been received by a radio or television. So that is to say your iPod suddenly becomes the subject of regulations. Well it’s a pretty amazing idea and again I think we’re going to win.

In order to win this fight in Europe, we need to get involved with domestic European civil liberties organizations as well as the EFF, which has a presence here in Europe and does some activism here. As you’ve heard I’ve spent two years here working on this, there’s now another guy who’s working on this digital television stuff. But there’s also a lot of ‘made in Europe’ organizations as Creative Commons Brussels, there’s Bits Of Freedom in the Netherlands, there’s the Choas Computer Club in Germany, there’s ORG in the UK, there’s Digital Ireland in Ireland and everywhere you go in Europe you see these digital liberties movements cropping up, these digital rights movements cropping up and it’s because what’s happened is that all of the stuff that’s used to matter in the real world, has started to matter online as well. The more time we spend online, the more vital our interactions become online, the more incursions into our online liberty start to matter as much as the incursions into our offline liberties and the more we see people congregating around these issues.

Bits are never going to get harder to copy. Ever. We are at this moment experiencing the hardest bits will ever be to copy for the rest of time. Bits are only going to get easier to copy from hereon end. If there is a business that relies on its bits not getting copied, that business will either have to change or die. Every year we hear about how there are fewer CDs being sold, or fewer books being sold, or fewer other packages that are traditionally used to deliver bits being sold. And it’s unsurprising. It would be surprising it were the inverse. CD sales are never going to go up again, in the same way that oatbag and horseshoe sales will never go up again. We’ve stabilized the amount of horseshoes and oatbags that will be sold year on year. And we’ll shortly stabilize the number of CDs, and we’ll sell them like oil paintings, to a very small number of people who are interested in acquiring them. But we’ve reached the end of a life span for platters that deliver bits. Bits are here to be copied, and bits will continue to be copied, and business models need to start embracing copying.

I’ve done that with my own book. My first novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was released just over three years ago on January 9th, 2003. It was the first novel released under what’s called a creative common license, these are licenses that encourage people to non-commercially share works. I released it then because I realize that as a novelist my biggest threath to my livelyhood wasn’t piracy, it was obscurity. Of all the people who were potential customers from my books, the reason that the main number of them would fail to buy them, wasn’t that someone would give them a free electronic copy. It was that they never heard of it. And by making my books available electronically, they would spread a lot further, and I’ve done this with three novels now and a short story collection. My first book has been downloaded now 650.000 times from my website, and an oldtold number of times from other people’s websites. And it’s in its sixth physical printing. It’s just been out in Spain, it’s coming out in Japan, there’s a French edition coming and so on. Giving the book away has sold lots more copies. I’ve found a copy-friendly business model. And it’s a different business model from the one that we had before. Now it’s true I think, that eventually we’ll reach a point where electronic books don’t sell print books, where instead of being a complementary good, or having the print book and the electronic book at the same time makes the print book more valuable and the electronic book more valuable, before reaching a point where having an electronic book is all that you really want in the main. That’ll be the convergence of two things, one is the fact that screens are getting better and the other is that we’re getting less discriminating about what we read off the screens. We have a generation of people who spend every hour they can find reading off the screens. Those people will always be comfortable reading off the screens and if there’s a literary form or a narrative form that doesn’t lend itself to screens, those people just won’t consider, they’re consumer-based for that kind of work.

I feel that I’ve got to figure out now, what the business model is going to be then. I’ve got to make hay when the sun is shining. I’ve got to give away books to sell books today, but also give away books to figure out how to sell books tomorrow, when physical books are no longer things that people are really willing to spend money on. And the way to do that is by watching what people do when you give them electronic text. There’s this nice confluence of the thing that sells books today and the thing that will sell books tomorrow. I don’t think you can learn anything about how people will use digital media by giving it to them in restricted wrappers. If you give someone a book in a restricted wrapper, all that they can do with it is the stuff that you thought of. They’ll never surprise you. So those of you who are engaged in avid copying, and if you’re an internet user there’s at least a 50 percent chance, that you’re engaged to very avid copying, it may feel sometimes that what you’re doing is illegal or immoral or entreating to the downfall of society. It’s quite possible that what you’re doing is illegal. It’s unsurprising to hear that copyright law hasn’t kept pace with technology. After all, all copyright law is is a regulatory system for copying and distributing works, these are technological activities. And if you sat down as a lawmaker and tried to imagine every possible thing you might some day do with a work before writing your law and making sure that all things were countenanced and included in the law, you’d never finish writing. The law would never ship.

So of course ‘new uses’ aren’t imagined in old laws. But what you’re doing is something that’s endemic to a world of bits. What you’re doing when you copy, is something that everyone will be doing shortly. And that businesses that can’t survive in the face of it will fade away as a result of it. It may be that traffic laws didn’t allow for automobiles or horseless carriages, or iron horses -the locomotive – when they were invented, it may be that the laws invented for horse and buggies didn’t countenance those, it may be that everyone who went about in one of those was breaking the law technically. But the outcome was a system that legalized those, was a system that embraced those, wasn’t a system that sought to find a way to ensure that horseshoes would always be sold by requiring four horseshoes per horsepower of a locomotive to be welded to the engine.”

So that was what Cory had to say to us on tuesday night.

The guys over at antwerpenblogt.be have put up a podcast of this speech, of which I made this transcript. You can download it over there.

Also related : Stitch & Split, EFF, Constant vzw

After some smalltalk, I asked Cory about his function in the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Cory said he had retired from the organization and is no longer an active member since january 1st this year. So then I asked about the broadcast flag and about the possiblility that a higher court in the US may still overturn the ruling that the FCC had exceeded its authority in creating a rule that said hardware must “actively thwart” piracy. Cory believes very much common sense will be strong enough, if the public is aware of the broadcast flags’ content, to overrule the request of organizations as the FCC.

Cory says that the thing that worries him about television is that “in the rubric of making the world safe for television and television safe for the world, we’re endangering some of the fundamental liberties that we enjoy. We’re about to sell out the future of technology, the internet, free speech, due process and competition in order to rescue television.” That indeed is a deadly and dangerous place to be in. Yesterday Cory wanted to talk about some of the ways that’s happening, and how we, as consumers of media or viewers of television can fight back.

Let’s tune in for the first twenty minutes of his speech :

“What this is all about isn’t copyright per se, although it’s often characterized as ‘copyright proctection’ or ‘a copyright issue’. This is about a rewriting of a copyright bargain to encompass areas that have never been countenanced in copyright law. To cover areas of private use and of social contract that have never been within the rights of an author to determine or to set.”

This is a mechanism for bootstrapping a monopoly over who gets to copy one’s works into a monopoly over who gets to design and deploy technologies capable of copying one’s works and which features those technologies will be allowed to have in the end.

The thing that worries me most about all of this is the impact that it’s going to have on free and open source software. Free and open source software is like the proprietary software you’ve probably encountered like Microsoft Windows, Apple’s mail client, the early versions of Netscape and so on. Those technologies are like free and open source software but the difference between them and open source software is that in the case of free and open source software the code necessary to make those programs is published. And it’s published under a license that allows anyone else to take that code and modify it, and understand it and improve upon it and publish it again. Now if that sounds familiar, it’s because of the thing that bootstrapped us out of the dark ages and got us the enlightenment.

For 500 years, there were no chemists, there were alchemists. Alchemists are kind of precursor to scientists who were attempting to turn lead into gold and to understand more about the physical universe. And the thing that characterized alchemists more than anything was that alchemists didn’t tell each other what they’d discovered. And so for 500 years every alchemist discovered for himself, the hard way, that drinking mercury was a bad idea. And then one alchemist began to publish his research, and then another and then another. And in a hundred years we had the enlightenment that outstood 5 centuries worth of progress by the simplex media of telling people what you’ve learned and allowing them to build on what you’ve done. ‘If you see farther, it’s because you stand on the shoulders of giants’ as Newton said.

Digital Rights Management technologies, the technologies that are being used to lock down digital television and devices that can connect to digital television, like computers, is not science. It’s based on the idea that the owner of a computer or the owner of a television is the attacker of that television. And that you can somehow prevent the person who owns the device from gaining access to it in ways that you would prefer they didn’t get access to it. For example you can flag a show so that it can’t be recorded, it can only be watched and you can somehow prevent the recording device in my living room from recording a show. It’s kind of like saying we’ve built a safe that’s so secure that we’ve left it in the bankrobber’s living room. If the attacker has physical permanent unlimited access to the safe it’s a surety that eventually the technology will be broken. And of course the people who propose these technologies agree with this. They say: ‘well this isn’t meant to be proof against a skilled attacker. Someone who understands what he’s about someone who’s in possession of the tools necessary to open a safe. Someone who has a blowtorch and some dynamite.’ This is meant to be proof against you and me, average individuals who wouldn’t know how to brake open a safe even if it were sitting right there at the end of your sofa.

But the thing is that in order to gain access to the works that have been locked away in a safe somewhere, in the age of the internet, you don’t need to know how to open a safe. You only need to know how to search the internet for the copy that someone else has taken out of some other safe, somewhere in the world, and put online. Which means that you don’t have to be a skilled attacker to gain access to these works. You only have to be a skilled attacker to make ‘the first’ copy of these works.

So as a system for preventing the people from making unlimited reuse of these works, DRM fails. What DRM succeeds at is at locking us in to technologies so that we have to continue buying them forever, and locking us out of uses that we’re allowed to make under copyright law. So copyright law is generally considered to be a bargain between authors or creators and the public. Authors get some exclusive rights in respect of their works and all the rights that authors don’t get, the public gets. So for example: I sell you a book. And I get the right to tell you whether or not you’re allowed to photocopy that book and sell it on a blanket outside the main station. I get the right tell you whether you can make a film out of that book. I get the right to tell you all kinds of things about that book but I can’t tell you for example what country you’re allowed to read that book in. I can’t tell you whether or not you’re allowed to read that book to your children and if you’re blind in most of the world I’m not allowed to tell you whether or not you’re allowed to convert that book to braille or text so that it can be converted to speech, subsequently, in most of the world blind people have the unlimited right to transcode books into assistive formats.

What DRM does is that it allows rightsholders to invent new rights that aren’t in the copyright statutes that they can claim for themselves. So if you ever brought a DVD home from America, or from Asia and popped it into a DVD player in Europe -one that hasn’t been illegally modified to allow you to watch multiregion DVDs- you’ll find that a rightsholder has invented a new law. That law is that having sold you the DVD, they get to tell you what country you’re allowed to watch the DVD in. That’s not a law in copyright. That’s not part of the copyright bargain. But what DRM does is it allows people to invent business models through which they can get more money out of the people who chose not to download their media from the internet through unauthorized services.

Keep in mind, the only people who will ever encounter DRM, are the people who start off by saying: ‘well I’m not going to download this over bittorent, I won’t get a copy of this from Kazaa, I’m going to go to the High Street and I’ll buy it from a Tower Records. Those are the people who’ll get CD’s that are restricted, who’ll get movies that are restricted. Those are the people who find themselves locked in.

DRM is not a contract. We often hear DRM being characterized as a contract. What they say is that DRM ‘may’ take away some of the rights that copyright law gives you but it’s in consideration for some benefit. Surely we should all be allowed to freely contract, to wave some of our rights to get some rights back. Maybe you agree only to rent those movies, maybe you agree to wrap it in a DRM wrapper that will erase the movie when you’re finished watching it, or after a short period of time. When you actually examine the functioning of a DRM contract you’ll find it resembles no contract that we’re accustomed to in the real world. For example: I was at a DRM standards meeting with the representative for the Motion Picture Assiciation of America, and we were discussing whether or not a flag could be inserted into digital television in Europe that would allow your tv, your receiver to switch off certain outputs depending on which program you are watching. In other words they would say: ‘while you’re watching this show, the output that connects to your DVD recorder won’t work or to your old-style analogue tv-set or old-style analogue VCR won’t work. Or certain other devices might not work. Say the output that connects to your computer wouldn’t work. Show on show, depending on which show you’re watching. So I said: ‘how would that work?’ and he said: ‘well maybe you would wave your right to record a show or to watch it on this set or to tune it in using this piece of computer equipment in exchange for consideration, in exchange for the right to watch the show you’d enter into that bargain. And shouldn’t people have the right to enter into a bargain like that?’ And I said: ‘Sure, maybe we could enter in those kinds of bargains… would you tell me how we make a bargain like that? How that bargain would work? What would be the mechanism by which I agree to that contract?’ and he said: ‘Well you know, you’d be watching channel 3, and you take your remote and you press ‘channel up’ and now you’d be watching channel 4, and when you press ‘channel up’ you agree to whatever terms were set for channel 4. You’ve made an agreement’.

That’s a funny kind of agreement. It’s the kind of agreement you might find if you walked into a shop and the shopkeeper punched you in the mouth and you say: ‘why did you punch me in the mouth?’ he’d say: ‘well if you look under the doormat of another shop you’ll find that it says ‘people who enter my shop agree to let me punch’em in the mouth.’ It’s a funny kind of agreement, but it gets funnier.

If you bought some iTunes, a couple of years ago when iTunes was up to version 4.0, you got a bunch of rights with those iTunes. You got the right for example to stream your music from one computer to another. Now at that time I was living in San Francisco and working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I had a computer at home and I had a laptop that I took to work and the computer at home had a much bigger hard drive than my laptop so I kept all my music on that including all my iTunes. And the cool thing was that iTunes 4.0 had the ability to streal music from one computer to another. So I used it to listen to my home music while I was at work. It was great. Now when Apple shipped iTunes 4.01, the next update which was supposed to improve functionality, it clawed that feature back. In fact time and time again Apple has clawed back new features. At one point you could stream your music to any 5 people that you wanted, five people at a time as many as you wanted for a 24 hour period, now you can only stream to 5 people total per 24 hour period. At one point you could burn a playlist ten times, now it’s 7 times and so on and so forth. These changes have been made, time and again and they’re generally presented to you as non-optional or semi-optional updates to iTunes, generally with very small amounts of consumer information about what you’re losing.

Now if you took your car to the garage for its regular checkup, as mandated by the manufacturer, and when you took it out again you found that they’ve taken out your phone charger, ripped it out and replaced it with a new lighter arrangement that wouldn’t take your phone charger anymore because while you had it in the garage they’ve made a new deal with Nokia to block out SonyEricsson phones, I think you’d be very upset. But what we find is with our music and our movies and our books that our software, our tools are being updated time and again to claw back rights. Now it’s not a big deal, if it’s a car. Because there’s someone else who can fix your car. If the manufacturer upsets you enough you can always go somewhere else and get your car fixed. And certainly you can always imagine that someone out there will figure out a way to plug something new into your car cigarette lighter. But with DRM we have laws that make it unlawful to do just that. We have 80 certain mention laws that are embodied in Europe through the EUCD, the European Union Copyright Directive and in America through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and all around the world through laws that exceed to a WIPO treaty, the WIPO copyright treaty of 1996 or WCT, that’s all over the world, every country that has got electricity pretty much either has a WCT invitiation or is about to get one, usually as a condition of bilateral or mulitlateral trade arrangements with the EU or America or both.

Under these laws it’s unlawful to break a lock off of a piece of media, it’s unlawful to tell someone how to break a lock off of a piece of media, it’s unlawful to tell someone who they should ask, who might be able to tell them how to break a lock off of a piece of media. You already had some Norwegian teenager who’s spent years in court before his country adopted the EUCD, fighting over a law, fighting over a charge rather, that he had broken the law because he had gone into his own computer to look at how his own movie player worked and open up that movie player and make a new movie player that would let him watch his own movies on his own computer in the way of his choice and he told other people how to do this. They said essentially that he was guilty of unlawfully accessing a computer system, and when he asked which computer system he had unlawfully accessed, they said it was his own. So it’s fine if your manufacturer wants to engage in these terrible anticompetitive practices IF you can go to another manufacturer. It’s fine if the guy who makes your stereo turns out to be a jerk if you can play your CDs on someone else’s stereo. But when it comes to DRM, you can only play your DRM on the stereo provided by the DRM provider. You can’t play it on someone else’s stereo. And someone who makes the stereo that’ll play it, that person brakes the law.Apple sued Real Media when they made a compatible player for the iPod that would play Real Tunes music as well as iTunes music on the iPod.

DRM is not a contract in some other ways, even if you say that we could agree to these contracts, generally speaking we say that having agreed to them, we finalize them but as we’ve seen with iTunes and more recently in the US there is a case were TiVo was updated without people’s permission – TiVo is a digital tv recorder that records your favorite tv shows and stores them on a box that’s aside of your television- TiVo was updated without your permission, without your knowledge to include a new copyrestriction system called Macrovision, and what Macrovision lets program creators do and program broadcasters do is flag some shows as ‘not recordable’. And so the TiVo, when you set it to record some shows, it won’t record them if they had this ‘flag’ set. So when you bought your TiVo, you bought a device that would record everything on the air and then a month later they changed your TiVo so that it would record everything that’s on the air that wasn’t flagged as ‘not recordable’. Your VCR would still record those shows, the law lets you record those shows but your TiVo won’t let you record those shows.

Finally, DRM can’t be open source. Open source technologies are technologies that are designed, understood, modified, improved upon by their users, by their owners. The Linux operating system, the Firefox browser, and numerable other pieces of critical infrastructure that make up the internet and your desktop are built on free and open source software. DRM presumes that the owner of the computer, that the user of the computer is the attacker. And that the user or owner of the computer won’t be able, shouldn’t be able to change the computer to change the restrictions. If you got a piece of media that says that this media may be played on five computers, the owner of the computer shouldn’t be able to go in and change that to 15. But in the instance of free and open source software you CAN in fact go in and change it to 15. And that is a consequence you see in the licencing arragements and regulatory mandates for DRM; there’s always a requirement that these systems would be made resistant to user-modification, which is to say: not open source.

Now under way in Europe is a proposal for a sweeping DRM system that will touch digital television and everything that sits downstream from digital television, including personal computers, general purpose devices and special purpose devices, like for instance the iPod. The DRM proposal, is something called CPCM, Copy Protection Content Management, that comes from a standards body group called the Digital Video Broadcasters or the DVB, DVB specifies the standards for the use of digital television in Europe, Asia, Australia, parts of Latin America, and its often the case that a DVB standard is subject of a mandate of a law because it’s often considered by regulators to be in the public interest to require that everyone who build a digital television receiver or transmitter will build it to some specifications that you can be sure that when you turn on your tv you can receive a tv broadcast, after all it’s your airwaves and mine that are used by broadcasters to transmit. They take them in trust from us and we should be able to see what they transmit on electromagnetic spectrum.

So you have regulatory mandates for digital television being the norm and you have the digital televion standards body creating a DRM standard that will be part of the digital television standard. When you put these things together you have a sixteen-car-pile-up on the motorway, you have a terrible disaster in the authing which is a mandate for DRM.

1. How did you get into blogging?

I was helping plan the 2000 CNET Builder.com Live! Conference and two of the speakers told me that we should think about blogging. They were Dave Winer, http://www.scripting.com, and Dori Smith, http://www.backupbrain.com. They didn’t convince me it was important enough for the conference to worry about (I could only find a couple hundred blogs back then) but they convinced me to write about my experiences behind the scenes.

2. What is your blog’s name, what is it about?

http://scobleizer.wordpress.com is just ‘the Scobleizer’ to most. Microsoft’s Geek Blogger to others. Anyway, it’s about the tech industry and what I am excited about. Often Tablet PCs, SmartPhones, Xbox 360s, and such.

3. Are there any policies you follow when reporting on an issue?

Be smart. I try to have my facts right, and if it’s something that could be explosive I get input from the people directly involved. Often, though, I’ll post something even before that just to show that I’ve seen the issue and I’m paying attention to it. I wrote a whole book, Naked Conversations, http://www.nakedconversations.com, along with Shel Israel, who was a PR guy in Silicon Valley, though, and it talks at length about policies and best practices.

4. What guidelines do you follow when linking to an outside source?

Link early and often. I link to everyone whether they are on our side or not.

5. Do you think you are trustworthy? Why do your readers trust you?

I try to be. Why do they trust me? I am not so arrogant as to believe that they do. A good reader will always get a few opinions on something and check it out for him or herself. That said, I’ve gotten a bit of readership because I’m not afraid to attack my own company when wrong, and praise a competitor when they do something great.

6. Do you think bloggers should be treated as journalists and be privy to the rights and protections that journalists enjoy?

That’s an interesting question. Should bloggers all get back stage passes to concerts? Some bloggers probably deserve that because they’ve gotten a large audience that cares about the band. But other bloggers shouldn’t. I hate entitlements. Just because you blog doesn’t mean you’re a full-fledged journalist who should get free passes to conferences. That said, I believe legal protections given to journalists should be given to bloggers. And, so should the legal consequences if a blogger slanders or libels someone.

Hope that helps!

Initiated together with Jason Schramm, this guest blogging series will continue to make people aware of the power of linking and the need to give credit to the people who earn it.
Together, we’re improving the Blogosphere, you can help too if you start linking here !
And be sure to check out Jason’s post here.

Note :

Jason and I are not related but have a common field. Jason writes for the BlogNewsChannel, and takes care of Apple Watch, very surprisingly the Apple section of Nathan’s network.
I sometimes write on Inside Google & Inside Microsoft.

1. How did you get into blogging?

Since pre netscape 1.0 days I’ve always had a personal website in one form or
another. Around 2002 I was updating it more regularly and didn’t want to lose my old content after I updated the main page so I started doing it ‘journal style’. I resisted at first to have it setup with RSS feeds and the rest, but after a disc crash in 2004 (ironic since I set things up so I wouldn’t lose changes) where I lost a couple of years worth of content I decided in my rebuild I’d include some regular blog features, and thus became a blogger by name. I think it wasn’t really until I went to my first blogger meetup, and met other bloggers that I truly identified myself as one though.

2. What is your blog’s name, what is it about?

Nothing too original, I just named it after myself (what is blogging if it isn’t tainted with bit of vanity?), I Am Chris Nolan.ca [rss]. By having such a generic name as well, it leaves me open to blog about whatever I feel like. I don’t feel compelled to stick to certain themes as really I just do it for myself, and if people happen to come by and read it and find something interesting for them, so be it (I have tag/category specific feeds too so people can subscribe to just what they like).  A bit of a wide summary of my typical posts could be described as a movie loving geek living in Toronto who comments and sometimes rants on aspects of technology and society as they cross his path.

I’ve also recently started up a blog @ http://Kekova.ca/ with my wife as we learn RubyOnRails together, and another one @ http://blog.kweschun.com/ called Kweschuns & Answers which is for a project I’m working on (shameless plug?).

3. Are there any policies you follow when reporting on an issue?

I don’t have any sort of formal document if that’s what you mean.’Reporting on an issue’ makes it sound all very formal as well, and I’ve tried at times to specifically keep my blogging informal. I just try to follow my own sense of what’s right and wrong.  Is this coming across as very egotistical?

4. What guidelines do you follow when linking to an outside source?

It is very rare when I make a post that doesn’t include at least one link to another source, and I often have many.   But again, I have no real policy on it.  Linkage for me is just such a built in thing that I wouldn’t have it any other way.  I think a lot of bloggers don’t really understand how the information is spread out behind the scenes in terms of what google and sites like Technorati do with the links, and some of the lack of linkage is more ignorance than evil.

If a link exists for what I’m talking about, I do my best to put it in.  I think we’re on a cusp of things where this will be made even easier to do by the different blogging softwares as well so that those that don’t take the extra time involved to mark up their posts can have it made easier on themselves.

5. Do you think you are trustworthy? Why do your readers trust you?

Of course *I* think I’m trustworthy, but does anyone not think that about themselves? Do my readers trust me? I guess I’ll have to ask them.  See that kweschun soon on my blog.

6. Do you think bloggers should be treated as journalists and be privy to the rights and protections that journalists enjoy?

This is something I’ve thought long and hard about and my opinion is still up in the air but definitely leaning towards no.

Trust in the main stream media is declining, but is 100 million voices in the dark the answer?  Maybe, maybe not.  If a blogger is to get the same rights and privileges as traditional journalists than they’d be expected to follow the same standards and code of ethics that traditional journalists do as well.  I don’t see that happening, nor do I completely agree that it should.  Where does one draw the line, and how does one communicate that line to such a diverse readership?

The age old problem of a journalist trying to appease their advertisers is now a problem for a certain class of blogger as well since they draw chucks of their revenue from advertising, perhaps that hassle alone is worth some of the journalist perks?  

If you haven’t read "What are Journalists for?" by Jay Rosen, it may be of interest to you.  Also "We the Media" by Dan Gillmor.  

That said, bloggers should be considered writers and their written word should be treated as such to round out the blogarism topic.  If somebody writes something that inspires or enrages you, write something about it on your blog and link back to the source!

Thank you, Miel and Jason for selecting me for your interview series.

Initiated together with Jason Schramm, this guest blogging series will continue to make people aware of the power of linking and the need to give credit to the people who earn it.
Together, we’re improving the Blogosphere, you can help too if you start linking here !
And be sure to check out Jason’s post here.

Note :

Jason and I are not related but have a common field. Jason writes for the BlogNewsChannel, and takes care of Apple Watch, very surprisingly the Apple section of Nathan’s network.
I sometimes write on Inside Google & Inside Microsoft.

First there’s some info about George Jaksch, then some related links, and then there’s an 11 page long transcript. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

George Jaksch was born in London and grew up in the UK and Germany as a citizen of both countries. Following studies of economics (Cambridge, UK) and agriculture (Seale-Hayne, UK), he for several years developed his own farming business in Colombia. He first joined Chiquita Brands in Colombia, then later held management positions in banana production (Panama, Ivory Coast), quality assurance in Europe and the USA, sales and marketing, and recently corporate responsibility and public affairs with residence in Antwerpen, Belgium.

Related links to this interview :

- Chiquita
– Nature & Community Project
– The Rainforest Alliance standards
- Sustainable Agriculture Network Standards for Bananas (pdf, 89k)
– Chiquita’s Core Values
– Chiquita’s Code of Conduct
– The Better Banana Project
– The Television & Print ads
– That Famous Jingle

What exactly is your function at Chiquita? What is it that you’re responsible for?

My title is senior director of corporate responsibility and that means I’m responsible for social and environmental matters within Chiquita’s European team. I have another colleague who has a similar function in the tropics and public affairs is also part of my responsibility, which means that when we get inquiries from the public or communicate to the public or when we advertise in public ‘in matters which affect social and environmental responsibility’ then that becomes part of my world.

Well, I was browsing through some of the documentation you handed over to us and I have a question about the fact that only 9 selected countries will have the new label, that says you’re in the Rainforest Alliance. Aren’t there more countries in Europe, or are there just 9 countries in which you do business?

No indeed, we do sell in more countries, in many more countries in Europe, but we selected these countries for several reasons . One very important reason for us is that these are the countries where our brand is best known. In other countries like France or the UK, for historical reasons, our brand is not so well known. So we decided to concentrate on these 9 countries. It is also just a fact of logistics that we couldn’t provide or we couldn’t guarantee fruit from Rain Forest Alliance Certified Farms in all countries of Europe because that requires a volume which at the moment we don’t have. Even so as you can see from the documentation, we’re talking about the very considerable amount of bananas that’s 500.000 boxes. That is a lot, and it’s a big effort for us to guarantee. It’s around 500 truckloads, that gives you a rough idea.

Yet still, Belgium seems to be only 10% of your market, or maybe I interpret it wrong. It says here in the stats : “volume deemed to be at risk in the absence of Rain Forest Alliance” is 10%. So is 90% of our market guaranteed to come from those Rainforest Farms?

No, that statistic reflects the situation three years ago. What this is intended to show is the volume which would be possibly lost, e.g. the sales we would not have if we did not have social and environmental certifications. This is relatively low in Belgium because at the time my colleagues who worked with our Belgian partners or retailers felt that it was not so critical in that business, probably because the Chiquita brand is very strong, very well established and very well known, and so there’s a lot of trust of consumers towards Chiquita. Maybe even more so than in some other countries. They’ve never really asked us for ‘evidence’ in the same way as in other countries.

So Belgium is not really aware of the fact that you do have all these certifications, or the green label, the green frog you just added wasn’t really necessary for Belgium and it’s an extra service you’d like to make us aware of?

That’s true. Also over the last few years the situation has definitely changed. I think we can also see in Belgium that the consumer’s becoming more aware of these matters. That’s happening relatively quickly. But Belgium is a very important market to us where we have an important market share and we absolutely felt that it was the right time to us to communicate to the Belgian consumer about this work with the Rain Forest Alliance and our environmental responsibility and generally, from what I’m hearing – we have not done a full evaluation yet of the response of consumers in Belgium – our impression is that it’s generally been well received by Belgian consumers. We have not had critical voices in Belgium. We have had them in some other countries.

What were those critical voices about? Was it about environmental problems?

Some critical voices, there haven’t been many, but some critical voices have, I think, misunderstood our campaign as a campaign against Fair Trade. Our campaign is not against Fair Trade, it’s for Chiquita but we do regard it as ‘against something’, and it is against a situation where companies do not do anything, and there are many companies in our business who have no commitment, who have still relatively low standards in their plantations. So we do want the Belgian and other European consumers to know that this is in fact a better product then products coming from other companies where there’s no social or other form of commitment.

You’ve been working for 10 years to get this label. What exactly was the evolution, I mean it took 10 years to take all the steps necessary to get this ‘certified label’?

Well the development of this is actually quite interesting. In 1992, Chiquita and other banana companies were invited by the Rain Forest Alliance, which is as you may have heard an American based NGO which works in fact with many Latin American environmental NGOs, we were invited by them to cooperate in testing a set of rules or criteria which they had developed for sustainable banana production. Sustainable meaning: with social and environmental standards. They had previously developed something similar in forestry, because they had good experience. We at the time were very hesitant, but we didn’t say no. We said: “we’ll try it”, so then we tried the system on two farms. It involves a very extensive set of rules, it involves also annual inspections of the farms by people from independent nature conservation organizations from the region and when we tested this on two of our farms, and then obtained in 1994 that certificate of the Rain Forest Alliance which means you comply with the minimum standard.

Those rules are listed in the two-page advertisements you’ve printed in the newspapers?

Those are in fact all the rules, that is correct, they’re also published in several languages, but not in Flemish, on the website of the Rain Forest Alliance. So, after that we’ve had that experience, in 1995 I think it was, Chiquita published a commitment to obtain this certification for all Chiquita-owned farms. That took a lot of effort and in fact we’ve completed that in the year 2000. It cost us around $20 million. Some people say that’s not a lot of money for a big company, but it actually was a lot of money. We were going through a very difficult time financially but we felt this was a very important thing to do.

Then after we’ve had, in the year 2000, completed the certification on all of our farms, we still had a very big job which was to get our many independent farmers with who we work to also obtain that certificate. We felt that in order to be able to guarantee to the European customer/consumer that the bananas come from Rain Forest Alliance certified farms, we needed our producers to also obtain that certificate. So it really was only in this year, 2005, that we came to a sufficient volume where we could say: “we can now arrange for all Chiquita bananas coming to most of Europe that they will come from Rain Forest Alliance certified farms.” In fact over 80% of our independent growers now have also obtained the Rain Forest Alliance certificate. Of course we want it to increase. But some of the bananas which are coming from farms which haven’t completed the certification process are now going to Eastern Europe, Southern Europe and the UK and France. Other countries outside the nine.

I’ve also seen on the website that you do housing projects. You have these small villages, I believe there’s one in Honduras. Are there any other actions alike from Chiquita?

The answer is yes. This kind of projects where we enable our workers to become home owners is very important to us. I should say a little bit about the background to this. In the past, banana plantation have been established in regions where often there were no villages or towns, so we have provided settlements, housing for workers. But it’s been company housing.
And that meant that the workers are very dependent of the company. When they retire, that house is needed for someone else so they would find themselves without a house and in many cases they haven’t made any provision for that. What we’ve now wanted to do is to enable them to become home owners. In Honduras, in cooperation with the Honduran government we have now created a new settlement of new homes for Chiquita workers.

It was once small, it’s not small anymore. It’s now 1300 houses, so it’s really turning into a small town. It’s away from the farms, which is good because a farm is a workplace which for children isn’t always a good place to grow up in. There are tractors and certain risks to health, so now we’ve created something much better for our workers. They’re now not only home owners, they’re living closer to cities where they have access to health services, education, libraries, theatres, entertainment and so on. We have similar projects in Costa Rica, not on the same scale, but in Costa Rica we’re doing it slightly differently. The plantations are established very recently there, so many of the workers are living in company owned housing which is of quite a high standard. We have arranged for that to be transferred to them at a very reasonable cost, I mean a two-bedroom house may cost them around $1000, to give you an idea.

So that’s been very important. In some cases we have moved the houses, these houses can be dismantled, so we moved them out of areas where there’s a risk of flooding for example, into a higher area. In Guatemala, just this year a new housing project was inaugurated by the president of Guatemala, president Berger, on the 22 nd of April. We will be building 330 new houses there, 200 new houses already exist which are owned by workers, so it’s an extension of an existing project. This is a very important step for workers. I’ve visited this project myself several times and I know how valuable it is for them.

You’ve given us an article of the Financial Times from 2002, was this the time it was actually first noticed that Chiquita was doing such a great effort? Could you explain a little more of the background and importance of this article?

Sure. We published our code of conduct in the year 2000, just to give you an idea of the chronology. What we call “corporate responsibilities” started in 1998. We spent about 2.5 years developing our values (which by the way are on the back of my business card). We spent then some additional time developing our code of conduct. The values are listed in the code of conduct and everybody in the company, with very few exceptions, has them on their business card as well.

We feel it’s extremely important to us to maintain these values alive, because it’s very easy for companies to print brochures and pretty pictures and so on, you know all companies and agencies do that. For a lot of money you can get it done by tomorrow if you like. But these values were developed with a lot of effort. We’ve had about 1000 people participating in their development. In the year 2001 we’ve signed the agreement with the International Union of Food Workers, a very important development. And in the same year we also published our first corporate responsibility report.

So in fact in 2001 we did several things which were very new in our industry which awakened a lot of interest. In the year 2002 appeared that article from the financial times. They heard of it through a lection which I or one of my colleagues gave, and the became aware that this was a company which in the past had quite a bad reputation, we used to be called “United Fruit”, but that clearly something was happening. In fact if you look at the subtitle, it’s very interesting, it mentions the word “partnerships” with environmentalists and unions. And that for them was a signal also of willingness to do this in a transparent and open and sincere way, because these were totally new concepts in our industry, or in many industries to work so closely with NGOs, so closely with trade unions.

Do you think that Chiquita was doing groundbreaking work and was in fact ‘leading’ so that other companies would now have to do the same for themselves to develop, to grow and comply with the same rules and ethical standards?

Okay I think you really ask me two questions. One is about the word ‘leading’, and certainly we feel that there are certain things which have made us take this initiative. One is very clearly to maintain our leadership position in the industry. We feel that the European consumer especially is looking for products which are responsibly produced, the organic movement, the Fair Trade movement – these are evidence of this, and so we wanted the concept of Chiquita to include not just a good product which tastes good, but also a product which comes from a good company it a product that is produced under responsible conditions.
That’s been the background to this. That’s clearly our ambition, to lead the industry. In that, and in other aspects.

Concerning the role of other companies – yes there are initiatives of other companies and we are very pleased that other companies also accept that kind of commitment to environmental and social responsibility. Some have begun to do that, some have advanced quite far – others haven’t started. But there is a movement. Have we influenced that movement? I’m certain we have.

Would it be because Chiquita was a rather large company and really needed to set an example?

I don’t think we needed to set an example. I think we had the choice. We have made the choice right through the last decades of Chiquita’s history to lead and to be a, what we call, a premium brand. Which means a brand which is recognized as to be a leading brand, a brand which can also ask for higher prices and it would’ve been so easy for us at some stage to say: “this is too much effort, too much cost – no let’s just be a commodity producer” We’ve had that discussion But our decision has always been “no”. Part of our personality as a company is to lead, to be better in ways. To have the best quality systems, the best people and now also the best environmental and social practices. We see it as part of the brand personality today and in the future.

The code of conduct of your company is rather long compared to other companies in Belgium, who often limit theirs to something of two or three paragraphs. Is there any particular reason for this 35-pages long document?

Yes it is rather long, and we appreciate that it is probably too long for most readers, but we wanted to produce a document which was quite comprehensive in fact if you look at it – may I just walk you through the structure of that document? That’ll explain a little bit why it is so long. Of course probably the most important pages are number one and two. Number one, which is our values, and number two which is a letter from our CEO, where he says: “the successful implementation of corporate responsibility is one of my highest priorities.” You see that’s a very strong leadership, and this kind of thing can’t happen without leadership.

Then the next few pages describe what it means and why it is important to be a company with high standards. It says here for example “What about the obligations?” on page two, what are the obligations of workers, what are the obligations of managers in order to maintain these high standards.

I actually used the wrong word because it says in the code of conduct : “as employees we share common responsibilities” so that includes everybody, I mean the president is a worker or employee as much as somebody who maybe can’t read or write and is working in Guatemala in the plantations. So there it sets out the obligations and then there is a very interesting discussion of what ethical behaviour means. When you have the opportunity I advise you to read that, because you study ethics, are you not? And that’s a big question: what is ethical conduct? We understand corporate responsibility as – if you’re looking for a simple definition – it means: high standards of conduct. It means high standards of legal compliance with the law, so there can be no exception to compliance with the law in this country, or international law or the local law in Guatemala or Costa Rica, wherever we are.

So that is legal compliance. Secondly high ethical standards you know, thinking not just about the law. It says in fact here (in the code of conduct) “to comply with the law is not enough”. You’ve got to think carefully because indeed just complying with the law is often not enough. You’ve got to think about your relationship with others in fact it (the code of conduct) asks some interesting questions : “would I feel comfortable explaining my decisions or action to my children or my family and to the senior management of Chiquita?” So you know ethics is also about how you feel about what you’ve done.

Then, the next few chapters going right through to page eleven are a reproduction of the social standard we have adopted which is SA 8000 , with very few technical exceptions the whole SA 8000 standard has been incorporated into our code of conduct. We had long discussion whether this was the right thing to do. Some of my colleagues said: “no, we should develop it ourselves” you know “if it is made by ourselves then it would have more credibility within the company”. We argued, and I myself argued that it’s not going to work. First of all it won’t have credibility outside the company and secondly it is an unending process because there will be endless negotiations inside the company. Let’s find the best standard we can find outside the company developed by real experts in human rights and labour rights and ethics and then let’s take that. And that’s exactly in the end what we did. So now as you know our own farms are all certified to social standards according to SA 8000, a very thorough and effective process in our experience.

Then the foreign chapters is concerned with additional social responsibility which are not addressed by SA 8000, for example food safety, environmental protection, due diligence for potential acquisitions and supply agreements, which means to examine who you’re going to business with or which company you’re going to purchase (from). Workforce reduction, what to do in the case of workforce reduction. There are clear rules which are also spelled out in our agreement with the IUF, because sometimes you need to close a farm or a business because it’s not profitable or for other reasons – Employee privacy – And then it goes on to ethical and legal responsibilities such as harassment which are covered by laws, international laws or especially in our company very much by American law. Our company is an American company and we’re subject to American law and many Europeans don’t realise how severe and strict American law is about certain things. For example: there is a law called “the foreign corrupt practices act” which is a prohibition of bribery or corruption. So that means that American companies and employees of American companies are subject to very severe penalties if they engage in giving bribes or in receiving bribes.

For example I, and all management colleagues in Chiquita have to sign every three months a statement certifying that they have neither received nor given bribes. Every three months, four times a year. The other law which is mentioned here – it is mentioned under ‘fair competition’ but also under ‘anti trust compliance’ – is about not cooperating improperly with competitors. For example no price agreements. That kind of thing. No quantity agreements. And again we have to sign a certificate every three months confirming that we have not engaged in any conduct of that kind. So another law which had a big influence on us recently is that we’re also prohibited of any kind of contact or cooperation with terrorist organizations -conflicts of interest – and the rest is about who to speak to if you have a problem, where the policies are, so it’s quite comprehensive.

Suppose I would offer myself for a job at Chiquita, is this code of conduct something I get on the very first day, before I sign the contract?

Anyone who enters the company receives that, and not just the document but also an explanation of corporate responsibility.

Do they have to know everything that’s mentioned in this code of conduct?

We expect them to know. In fact, a new version of the code of conduct has just been issued and it says very clearly in a letter from our current CEO: “ignorance is no excuse”. We expect you to know, all employees, the rules of our code of conduct. So yeah, you literally have to read it. What of course is something, because it’s a very practical question you’re asking, what about workers who cannot read or write, very well. We have many workers like that in developing countries. So we’ve developed a simplified version with drawings and almost cartoon-like drawings explaining to someone who’s not very literate what this means.

For example a simple picture, when we’re speaking about the prohibition of child labour, there is a child in the offices of the company and the person who is obviously the company representative is pointing through the window. And on the other side you can see, across the street, a school. So what it is saying is: you should go to school. You should not be here, we want you to become educated. So that a very simple practical way to explain it.

So if somebody working at Chiquita violates one of these rules, is there – probably depending on the degree of violation – discussion possible or are you “out” when you violated these terms. Is it negotiable?

That’s a good question. We do in fact have a policy of zero tolerance, meaning if you commit any significant violation of the code of conduct, that’s the end of your time at Chiquita. We’ve found that to be very important, to create complete clarity. Obviously if it is a minor violation – let me give you an example: respectful treatment of your fellow workers is very important, so if you have a manager reported to have shouted at a worker obviously you won’t be kicked out immediately because of that, that would be unreasonable. He would be called, there would be a meeting, there would be an investigation and it is found to be true that that happened than he will receive a warning and he will be asked to change that behaviour.

So it’s not so utterly draconian that with the slightest misconduct you’re fired, but if you have bribed somebody, if it is an important violation of the law, if you’ve spoken to a competitor about how to arrange prices and so on – that’s your last day. In that case there’s no hesitation at all. We’ve had cases. We also have something which is not mentioned here, which is relatively new and it’s called: the hotline.

There are posters put up to encourage any employee who knows of any behaviour which is in violation of the code to phone and to report. But he doesn’t call a Chiquita person, he calls an independent company. He doesn’t have to mention his name, he can remain totally anonymous, he or she of course, and in fact that person has the right then to ask a few weeks later for the results of the complaint. It’s a very effective tool.

Does it happen a lot that people call to report something?

Not so very much, I know that last year we had about 30 calls, so for a large company that’s not a lot. It’s partly because workers are now beginning to understand that they have this tool. Although we’ve communicated it very widely, but there’s always some hesitation to use something like that, and also because within the company we have many alternative ways of complaining if you want to.

Yes I saw it’s stated in the code of conduct that you are always free to talk to your first superior manager in rank if there are any questions you should have or if you’d like to report any misbehaviour.

Of course, let me just name some of the instruments there are our workers can use, or managers can use, to complain, or too make suggestions too, of course. There’s a positive and a negative type of communication. One is: to your supervisor. But of course if it’s something serious, if you know your supervisor is violating the law for example, it’s going to be difficult to go to him obviously. There are people within the organisation who are, like myself, corporate responsibility officers who are committed to complete confidentiality. If you were to come to me with a problem, I would make certain that your name or your involvement would never become public knowledge. The second and very important instrument is the trade unions.

We as a company have very strong trade unions, we work very closely with them, we have very extensive agreements with trade unions, what are called collective bargaining agreements. And if a worker has been mishandled or treated disrespectfully he will normally go to his trade union and the trade union will ventilate it with management. That’s two. The third possibility is: if people have access to email, they can write a letter directly to our CEO. We have a provision for that. It can also be anonymous, so you just fill in a form, you don’t have to give them your name if you don’t want to and those letters are always responded to. If the person doesn’t give his name, in fact, all of the answers are published on our website, so you know exactly what the complaint was and what the answer was.

Is it accessible for external people too?

No I don’t think so. I think it’s on our intranet site.

And then the other (last) means is of course the hotline, so this kind of information is not accessible for external observers but for people working within the company it’s marvellous to have these options, definitely. And they’re quite actively used. And I think it’s part of corporate responsibility, there’s been a big effort within the company to have a more active communication with employees. So for example our CEO Fernando Aguirre, who’s our first Latin American CEO, he holds a quarterly employee meeting when we all connect by video conferencing, and anybody can ask him any kind of question. And sometimes he’s asked quite difficult questions.

That’s pretty interesting. I didn’t know CEOs were so easy to reach.

Usually they’re not that’s the big exception. And now on the 15 th of December he’s going to be in his offices and he’s invited me and other people to a thing called “coffee with Fernando”.
That’s not just with managers, there will be secretaries, maybe some of the cleaning personnel, somebody from transportation and so on. He’s very very open it’s quite remarkable. He cultivates that.

You’ve just mentioned the cleaning personnel, isn’t that usually an external company that comes in and cleans the desks?

Yes, it is as a matter of fact.

Do they have to comply with this code of conduct too? Are they asked to sign anything, to live for the same agreements?

Well, as a matter of fact, we are obliged by SA 8000 to do whatever is in our power, to make certain that they also comply with the law and with human and social rights. There’s a section in the code of conduct called “control of suppliers” and it says here: “the company shall establish procedures to evaluate suppliers and select suppliers based on their ability to meet the requirements of this standard.” So we could never work with a supplier who’s employing children for example. That’s very important in our case, and in the case of many other companies, because we work with thousands of companies, we work with, I suppose, a thousand agricultural producers who provide us with food, vegetables – but then also I know we work with about a thousand suppliers of goods and commodities, you know, paper, fertilizer, boxes, coffee, cups and so on.

We’re still working out how to handle them, because there’s so many of them. Some of them only supply Chiquita and have no other customers. Well then we have a very direct relationship. But some of them supply a hundred companies so we have very little influence over them. But we do make a considerable effort to make sure that they comply. Our contracts with all of our banana growers for example oblige them to comply with human rights, labour rights, international and local. And if they get Rain Forest Alliance Certification, we provide them with a bonus for that which for them helps them to get that certification but for us costs us several million dollars a year, so it’s a big commitment.

Now you have the green label from the green frog, has it really changed the company for the customers? Do they see the company differently now?

This campaign is still relatively new, you know we only started this for example in Belgium in late October, so we have relatively short experience. We know in customers, and when we speak of our customers we mean retailers like Delhaize and so on, they have for years been very much informed about what we’re doing. We see it as out duty to keep them informed and they expect that. But the people who go into their shops, the consumers, have never been informed by Chiquita in this way before. We waited for years before we were willing to do that. We had a policy called “create facts first” so we had a good solid foundation to communicate about. Now how is the consumer receiving this information? Just so you know, we are conducting every month surveys of consumers , I suppose this also comes into interactive marketing to see how the consumer is responding to this, and we haven’t yet had the first report from Belgium, we’ll have that now in week 52, but where we have started a bit earlier, for example in Sweden, there appears to be a significant shift in the way we are understood.

For example they (consumers) are asked a number of questions about the company in this survey. For instance: “do you consider that Chiquita bananas are produced responsibly in compliance with environmental standards?” And similar questions, and the answers to these questions have shifted apparently in a positive sense. Most people didn’t even know the answer to the question and now we appear to be seeing a difference. We believe the answer is yes, because first of all we’ve invested a lot of effort and a lot of money in this campaign, you may have seen we have print adverts, we have not just tried to produce pretty pictures but to provide information as well whenever we can. I don’t know if you’ve seen our double paged adverts. So that is a lot of information so it’s not just a superficial campaign.

We know that the poster in Belgium doesn’t really say much about the background, we get questions like, what is the frog? If they go into the store and they pick up a leaflet, they can learn about that, so we use that if you like as a teaser, and then when the interest is there they become receptive to information. Because people normally don’t read much information.

Are there any similar projects that Chiquita is involved in, that aren’t really accomplished yet?
Are there any other labels you’re trying to obtain?

Yes, there are some things we are doing which we haven’t spoken about, which over time may become important. But we’re not at the moment looking for additional labels. We are looking for additional partnerships, because we have found that when we work together in partnership with a retailer, NGO or trade unit it creates a lot of energy. Maybe two examples: we’ve just recently signed an agreement with the WWF, the World Wildlife Fund to work with them, to ensure the purity of rivers and streams coming out of banana farms and flowing into the Caribbean, that’s one (we haven’t published that yet).

And another one is our Nogal project, I don’t know if you’ve seen it – the nature and community project that’s on our website, and that is a very interesting project I personally have invested a lot of time in, where we’re working together with Migros, which is a Swiss retailer, the biggest retailer in Switzerland, and the German government, the GTZ – their development agency – in Costa Rica to develop an educational nature reserve. We’re trying to create a model of cooperation.

Together with the Rain Forest Alliance we’re working on this project. We’ve got three objectives: conservation, we have some forest there which we are protecting, we’re also connecting, we’re planting strips of forest and connecting one forest to another so the species can migrate, especially the monkey species. Next: environment education. We’re going to train 4000 school children, Chiquita workers, families -to create awareness for this project.
Last “Livelihood” is mentioned here because we’re trying to enable these people to create additional sources of livelihood. They’re not just depending on agriculture, and we have created so far four small cooperative groups, handicrafts, eco-tourism, textiles, health care products (shampoo and so on) all of this based on nature and natural products.

So that’s what we’re doing. Very interesting, but we’re now in the first year of this three-year project with the GTZ, of course we don’t want it to stop then but that’s what we’re doing.

One thing I’m trying to do with colleagues is to develop additional such projects, where we work together with retailers, our customers in developing exceptional model projects which are focused on environmental and social improvements. The next one we want to do in Panama, in fact I’m going to speak about it with the customers on Monday (November 28th), to propose another such project.

Thank you for the interview and your time.

Pieter Janssens from my class also attended this interview session, and helped to write the rest of the paper, as did Joachim Rombaut, who contributed the part where we compared Chiquita’s standards to the Ethibel standards. We made a good team together and we really impressed our teacher.
Ethibel is an independent consultancy agency for socially responsible investments that advices banks and brokers offering ethical savings accounts and investment funds.

1. How did you get into blogging?

I started blogging back in 2001, when I was working for Red Herring, a monthly business magazine. I got so much additional information on stories I wrote on a daily basis that I decided to share it with others. Of course, you know what they say…. out takes of movies are better than the movies themselves. same for me, I decided to publish my out takes.

2. What is your blog’s name, what is it about?

My blog is called, Gigaom.com /Om Malik on Broadband [rss]. I write mostly about the latest developments in the broadband world and how they impact the world of technology at large. It is an extension of my work for Business 2.0 magazine, where I write about the fast changing tech landscape and innovation.

3. Are there any policies you follow when reporting on an issue?

I follow the same policies as I do as a reporter. Three sources are a must, or otherwise the story is reported as a rumor. I never do single source posts, and have to confirm facts from diverse sources in order to put it on the site.

4. What guidelines do you follow when linking to an outside source?

I simply link to whom ever is the author of the story, and try and include folks who got me to the link in the first place.

5. Do you think you are trustworthy? Why do your readers trust you?

I think this is a question you need to ask the readers.

6. Do you think bloggers should be treated as journalists and be privy to the rights and protections that journalists enjoy?

Again, I am a journalist who blogs. So perhaps, I am not equipped to answer this question.

Initiated together with Jason Schramm, this guest blogging series will continue to make people aware of the power of linking and the need to give credit to the people who earn it.
Together, we’re improving the Blogosphere, you can help too if you start linking here !
And be sure to check out Jason’s post here.

Note :

Jason and I are not related but have a common field. Jason writes for the BlogNewsChannel, and takes care of Apple Watch, very surprisingly the Apple section of Nathan’s network.
I sometimes write on Inside Google & Inside Microsoft.

1. How did you get into blogging?

It depends on what you call blogging. I started to maintain an online diary on a business-related topic back in 1997. It was a html-site that was updated almost every day. It was in november 2002 that I used for the first a real blogging tool with trackbacks, pings, rss-feeds and comment functionality. I started with a new job and was looking for a more convenient tool to maintain my websites. Until that time I didn’t know that I was blogging ;-)

2. What is your blog’s name, what is it about?

In november 2002 I started with Marketingfacts [rss], a Dutch blog about interactive marketing and new media. Over time, MarketingFacts expanded into a group blog. Traffic built to over 50.000 unique visitors and more than 200,000 page views per month.

3. Are there any policies you follow when reporting on an issue?

There are many marketing blogs in the Netherlands nowadays so I try to cover actual news and to be the first blog with scoops. To be the first I don’t always have the time to check the facts, for scoops especially, that is done afterwards (sometimes with consequences). For the remaining postings, I always check the facts. Issues have to be related to interactive marketing and/or new media.

4. What guidelines do you follow when linking to an outside source?

It is common practice to refer to both the original source and the source where I got it from. The postings are a mixture of content that is found elsewhere and personal opinions. Occasionaly we post related press releases as well.

5. Do you think you are trustworthy? Why do your readers trust you?

Marketingfacts is one of the leading marketing blogs in the Netherlands with traffic built to over 50.000 unique visitors and more than 200,000 page views per month. We have left the time behind us that we didn’t check the facts and the readers know that. And when we are wrong (we are still humans), our readers are the first to let us know in either the comments or by email.

6. Do you think bloggers should be treated as journalists and be privy to the rights and protections that journalists enjoy?

Marketingfacts is already treated as a serious publisher of marketing news by both the communication departments of companies, PR agencies and traditional publishers. This means we get the same press releases that are sent also to traditional magazines and get invitations to events just like the traditional journalists do. I don’t know if I want the same rights and protections that journalists enjoy as I’m not a journalist but a business blogger which means I have no educational background in journalism but in marketing.

Initiated together with Jason Schramm, this guest blogging series will continue to make people aware of the power of linking and the need to give credit to the people who earn it.
Together, we’re improving the Blogosphere, you can help too if you start linking here !
And be sure to check out Jason’s post here.

Note :

Jason and I are not related but have a common field. Jason writes for the BlogNewsChannel, and takes care of Apple Watch, very surprisingly the Apple section of Nathan’s network.
I sometimes write on Inside Google & Inside Microsoft.

1. How did you get into blogging?

I have always had a passion for reading and sharing. My friend, Nishad had
introduced me to bloglines. Having had a passion for writing, I found this to be
a useful and easy tool to share. That’s how I got into Blogging.

2. What is your blog’s name, what is it about?

My blog’s name is Customer World [rss]. It is everything to with
customers, technologies that affect customer experience and communication
tools that will enhance relevance, customization and personalization.

3. Are there any policies you follow when reporting on an issue?

I normally give credit to the source. I believe it is extremely important.

4. What guidelines do you follow when linking to an outside source?

I give credit and a direct link. Any article reference and words, I provide
a link so that my readers can have a access to the source. I think the key is
to have transparency and honesty. If sharing is true promise of blogs, then we
have to do it by giving credit where it is due.

5. Do you think you are trustworthy? Why do your readers trust you?

Yes. I would like to believe I am trustworthy because I follow some very strict practices of referencing my articles/posts.

The reason why they trust me, I guess, is the authenticity of the information being provided. And on top of it I have my comments and view of the topic. If you have a point of view on the topic and have a certain reputation that you carry, I think readers will trust you. I believe I am building-up towards that.

6. Do you think bloggers should be treated as journalists and be privy to the rights and protections that journalists enjoy?

Well protecting one’s idea or thought is a must. If you go back to traditional
papers and articles, they always give references. I think that is something
we must adopt. I don’t think we need to "exert" control but we need to"encourage" referencing.

Initiated together with Jason Schramm, this guest blogging series will continue to make people aware of the power of linking and the need to give credit to the people who earn it.
Together, we’re improving the Blogosphere, you can help too if you start linking here !
And be sure to check out Jason’s post here.

Note :

Jason and I are not related but have a common field. Jason writes for the BlogNewsChannel, and takes care of Apple Watch, very surprisingly the Apple section of Nathan’s network.
I sometimes write on Inside Google & Inside Microsoft.

1. How did you get into blogging?

I guess it just kind of happened. Last year, I was getting bored with editorial duties and the fact that I didn’t write articles as often as I’d like, and I was very interested in Google’s IPO. I was reading so many Google-related websites, that I decided to start a LiveJournal community called ‘InsideGoogle’, hoping that others would contribute and save me the effort of doing all the newsgathering. Instead, people started relying on me to publish, and I moved, first to Blogger, then to my own website at the Blog News Channel. I enjoy it immensely, but I never sat down and said, ‘This is what I want to do’.

2. What is your blog’s name, what is it about?

I write both InsideGoogle [rss] and InsideMicrosoft [rss], and I am trying to grow a small collection of review blogs. InsideGoogle and InsideMicrosoft are about the companies titled, about the industries they play in, about their competitors, and about their employees and corporate culture. Besides that, whenever I find something fun or interesting to blog, I spend a few seconds deciding which blog it belongs more on, and post it there.

3. Are there any policies you follow when reporting on an issue?

I don’t like reporting rumours. When you are dealing with a company like Google, rumours come down the pike multiple times a day, and I have no interest in mindless speculation. As a general rule, I won’t present a rumour as a story, and many times I will ignore the rumour entirely until it has been proven/disproved, and report that.

Besides that, my goal is to be as broad and expedient as possible. While I currently cannot work on my blog 24 hours a day (although that may happen if the money is good), I try to keep one eye on Bloglines at all times, so that if a story happens, I can be one of the first to report it. Half the excitement of a blog is not the reporting of a story, but the thrill of seeing it unfold, and every time I can be a part of that, I think it adds a lot of value other media cannot compete with.

4. What guidelines do you follow when linking to an outside source?

Always link. Link to who I quote, link to whom I get information from, link to who linked to that page, link to who sent me an email pointing me in the right direction. I always link, except when dealing with anonymous sources. There was one incident where I refused to link to a page because it had messy popup ads, but for the most part I link anywhere, even into a bad neighbourhood, using the nofollow if the site is doing something illegal.

5. Do you think you are trustworthy? Why do your readers trust you?

I’d like to believe so. I’ve never screwed a source, never flamed a person who didn’t deserve it, never made anything up, and I avoid stories that sound untrustworthy, even when they come from legitimate sources. I think that if you want to be trusted, you need to hold yourself with dignity. That’s also why I never use profanity directly.

6. Do you think bloggers should be treated as journalists and be privy to the rights and protections that journalists enjoy?

Of course. Many bloggers are indistinguishable from columnists, and many columnists are indistinguishable from bloggers. The protections of a free press in the United States and most other free countries were designed not to protect any sort of media establishment, but to allow citizens public recourse against government actions; to allow accurate information to defeat acquired power. As long as bloggers are publishing information that furthers freedom in this country, the government has no right to stand in their way.

That said, some bloggers think freedom of speech applies to everything. Wrong. Freedom of speech is designed to safeguard the public good. It is not designed to protect you from lying, profanity, false accusations and irresponsibility. If your speech has little value but does significant harm, the government will agree with your right to that speech, but you will still be responsible for the consequences of it. You can say what you want, and no one will stop you. But if the pen be mightier than the sword, then the penalties for misconduct must be equally serious.

Initiated together with Jason Schramm, this guest blogging series will continue to make people aware of the power of linking and the need to give credit to the people who earn it.
Together, we’re improving the Blogosphere, you can help too if you start linking here !
And be sure to check out Jason’s post here.

Note :

Jason and I are not related but have a common field. Jason writes for the BlogNewsChannel, and takes care of Apple Watch, very surprisingly the Apple section of Nathan’s network.
I sometimes write on Inside Google & Inside Microsoft.

1. How did you get into blogging?

I started my original blog when I started working at Google in January of 2005. I switched to my current blog (and imported my original entries and set up a redirect) when I switched jobs.

2. What is your blog’s name, what is it about?

My current blog is called “Plaxoed!” [rss].
It’s about my life while working at Plaxo. My original blog was called “Ninetyninezeros” (http://99zeros.blogspot.com). It was about life at
Google from the inside (the “inside” of a Google is 99 zeros).

3. Are there any policies you follow when reporting on an issue?

I follow Plaxo’s Public Communication Policy, but other than those relatively loose guidelines, I blog whatever I’m thinking.

4. What guidelines do you follow when linking to an outside source?

When linking to an outside source, if I mention the author by name, I always link to their top level blog/bio/etc. If I talk about an article in particular, I link to the article.

5. Do you think you are trustworthy? Why do your readers trust you?

Obviously, I think I’m trustworthy. I’ve got nothing to hide and besides, what’s the worst that can happen to me? I get fired? ;)

6. Do you think bloggers should be treated as journalists and be privy to the rights and protections that journalists enjoy?

I think this depends on the blogger and on the particular writings in question. If the blogger is acting as a journalist and the writing is reporting on something based on journalistic research, then they should be given the rights and protections of journalists.

Initiated together with Jason Schramm, this guest blogging series will continue to make people aware of the power of linking and the need to give credit to the people who earn it.
Together, we’re improving the Blogosphere, you can help too if you start linking here !
And be sure to check out Jason’s post here.

Note :

Jason and I are not related but have a common field. Jason writes for the BlogNewsChannel, and takes care of Apple Watch, very surprisingly the Apple section of Nathan’s network.
I sometimes write on Inside Google & Inside Microsoft.

1. How did you get into blogging?

It was back in 2000. I was going to London for some weeks and I started a kind of personal diary. I think there is still some of that on the waybackmachine ( link ) Now when I read those old lines, I feel a little embarrassed :/

2. What is your blog’s name, what is it about?

In the beginning of 2005, after doing some easy premium SMS applications for TV and newspapers, I started projecting in my mind a sort of interactive virtual community combining web and mobile. After a few months, when the idea boiled out in the first version of movil.be , I decided to install a blog called “Experiencing mobility and social software” – [rss]. I kind of like the name because it actually describes in 5 words what it’s all about.

3. Are there any policies you follow when reporting on an issue?

I try to refer always where the news came from. Sometimes I combine different sources and write my own story, it depends, but basically I’d like to respect the others.

4. What guidelines do you follow when linking to an outside source?

Exactly what I described before. I try to avoid copying and pasting a big piece of text without any analysis or personal touch. I think it loses all sense like that…but even if you rephrase, it’s good to link to where you’ve read it first.

5. Do you think you are trustworthy? Why do your readers trust you?

I don’t think they are many readers really interested in what I say.Movil is kind of an internal development blog where the users can get informed of the new features and state of the product they are actually using.

6. Do you think bloggers should be treated as journalists and be privy to the rights and protections that journalists enjoy?

Well, I don’t really know that. Real journalists study some years in the university to get a degree. That doesn’t imply that you will get better communication skills, but hey, I don’t think I would come even closer to write like a journalist. I think they are two different mediums. So that depends on how things evolve in the future. Mileage may vary…

Initiated together with Jason Schramm, this guest blogging series will continue to make people aware of the power of linking and the need to give credit to the people who earn it.
Together, we’re improving the Blogosphere,you can help if you start linking here !
And be sure to check out Jason’s post here.

Note :

Jason and I are not related but have a common field. Jason writes for the BlogNewsChannel, and takes care of Apple Watch, very surprisingly the Apple section of Nathan’s network.
I sometimes write on Inside Google & Inside Microsoft.

1. How did you get into blogging?

I first got into blogging in 2002 while working for Opencola. I opened a Userland Radio (paid) blog primarily as a means of figuring out what RSS and blogging were all about. I immediate got excited about the opportunities in this space. I founded a blogging company called Dude, Check This Out! on an idea I had about using associative relevance to determine what you didn’t know you didn’t know.

2. What is your blog’s name, what is it about?

I have two personal blogs; iBLOGthere4iM – [rss] and RVDad – [rss]. I post things on the iBLOGthere4iM blog that I think are cool! Very little on this blog is personal. RVDad is my blog where I talk about personal things, like my motorhome, my family, my adventures and my life.

3. Are there any policies you follow when reporting on an issue?

I really don’t have many policies. That said, there are some blog authors who blogiarize (plagiarize blogs, steal ideas and content) or are generally not nice people who I avoid linking to. I avoid linking to any IDG Website as I caught them re-publishing one of my articles on their Website without asking permission or paying me. I emailed the authors listed on their Website and found a dozen more that were never contacted or paid. When I approached them, they told me I was privileged to get one of my articles on their Website. They ignored most of my emails and thru lawyers at me the rest of the time. They refused to compensate me and basically put me in a position where I would have to take legal action to get any compensation for myself or the other authors. I personally wasn’t interested in a lawsuit and abandoned the issue. But, I avoid giving them any Google juice.

4. What guidelines do you follow when linking to an outside source?

I usually link to the author and the source when blogging. If you look at almost any blog entry I write, I will link to the original content author within the body of the post, but I will also add a source link in the footer of the post that links to the blog entry that got me started down the path to this great content. Quite often, their might be several sources between my source and the original content author and you can usually click thru to find that path. That said, these are not guidelines, it’s just something I do. It’s not that I’m trying to be righteous either. I’m linking because linking encourages accidental discovery of my own blog. Yes, I’m doing it for selfish reasons.

5. Do you think you are trustworthy? Why do your readers trust you?

I’m trustworthy, that is, if you are playing fair. When you are not playing fair, then you can be assured that I’ll come down on you. I think my readers generally trust me, because I tend to play on both sides of the fence. There are bloggers out there who think Microsoft (substitute any company name) can do no right and will bash them for donating money to orphans. Myself, I’ll bash Microsoft with the rest of them, but I’ll compliment them on their orphan donations too!

6. Do you think bloggers should be treated as journalists and be privy to the rights and protections that journalists enjoy?

Why not? Just because somebody pays you to write crap don’t mean your crap is any more valuable than Joe-blogger’s.

Initiated together with Jason Schramm, this guest blogging series will continue to make people aware of the power of linking and the need to give credit to the people who earn it.
Together, we’re improving the Blogosphere,you can help if you start linking here !
And be sure to check out Jason’s post here.

Note :

Jason and I are not related but have a common field. Jason writes for the BlogNewsChannel, and takes care of Apple Watch, very surprisingly the Apple section of Nathan’s network.
I sometimes write on Inside Google & Inside Microsoft.

1. How did you get into blogging?

I’ve started blogging because my news articles became more frequent, and it was a nuisance to upload them. Also, I wanted to create the kind of blog I wanted to read myself, but couldn’t find at that time.

2. What is your blog’s name, what is it about?

Google Blogoscoped – [rss], about Google and “20% everything else”. It’s mostly tech stuff, with a focus on interactiveness, fun, and art.

3. Are there any policies you follow when reporting on an issue?

First, I try to get to the most relevant “source” link. So instead of linking to someone who links to someone that links to something that is the core of the story, I try to link directly to the core. However, the original blog post or news story where I found the link will be credited too at the end of the post. This helps people track the spreading of a meme; it gives credit where credit is due; people can find more relevant information by following the link; and the author I got the news from can see I linked to him in certain backlinks aggregators.

4. What guidelines do you follow when linking to an outside source?

I always include a “via X” in the post when I found something via someone else. When someone sent it to me, I credit this with “thanks X” to differentiate between pull (when I found it myself) and push (when someone alerted me to it). I do not credit the sender if he alerted me to his own site I’m then linking to (as it wouldn’t be necessary). I do not credit the “via” if I found it on a search engine or a generic news aggregator (like Google News).

5. Do you think you are trustworthy? Why do your readers trust you?

Yes, I think I am trustworthy. I follow several principles to be trustworthy:

• I publish my full name, home address, ungarbled email, and photo on my blog
• Every post has a permanent link with a full date and my name below the post
• All posts can be commented on for corrections or feedback
• If I change a post (and it’s more than a simple corrected typo) I will make it clear what has been changed either by using the HTML elements [del] / [ins] which were made for that cause, or by posting an update at the end of a post(which is flagged as such), or by making sure the comments contain the information on the change.
  This way, I won’t report on X, have people link to it saying I reported X, and then change my post to Y, as that would hurt the blogspace discussion.
• I don’t report rumors as facts, and I always state who said what (e.g. by naming the full name — I prefer linking to people who write using their full name — or by linking to the source). I avoid “Some say…” or “Some people argue…” when I don’t have a link ready to accompany this. When I report on a rumor I clearly mark it as such and end the post’s title with a question mark (like “New Google Service XYZ?”)
  and I mention the word “rumor” or similar in the post.
• I come up in official news aggregators such as Google News and am mentioned in other blogs and mainstream news sources.
• I am always available to be contacted and discuss a story, and also, I publish arguments which are against my posts so the other side gets their point of view be seen as well.
• I keep on posting on a daily basis and there is a trustworthy community building around the blog.
• When I did make an error in a post, I clear it up by posting an update. I don’t try to hide this error but make clear that I did it.
  When the post is very fresh and I find out it covers a hoax (even when I warned it might be a hoax or rumor), I rarely remove the post completely; if I do so, I post the full text of the original post in the blog’s forum as reference that it was online.

6. Do you think bloggers should be treated as journalists and be privy to the rights and protections that journalists enjoy?

Absolutely. I’m not sure if everybody who registered a Blogspot sub domain yesterday should be given those rights. Maybe there should be a filter critera to separate which blogger gets the “extended rights.” Maybe it could be the blog’s PageRank, or its Technorati, or Blogpulse rank, or its appearance in Google News, or a mixture of these.

Initiated together with Jason Schramm, this guest blogging series will continue to make people aware of the power of linking and the need to give credit to the people who earn it.
Together, we’re improving the Blogosphere,you can help if you start linking here !
And be sure to check out Jason’s post here.

Note :

Jason and I are not related but have a common field. Jason writes for the BlogNewsChannel, and takes care of Apple Watch, very surprisingly the Apple section of Nathan’s network.
I sometimes write on Inside Google & Inside Microsoft.