Pinterest is an interesting tool, and a lot of people I know love it.

This is how it works. You maintain a set of pinboards for different kinds of images – for example, I’ve got pinboards for logos, app wireframes, and interesting visuals. If you visit a site that has an image you’d like to keep, or share, you click a “pin it” button in your browser, and that image is copied to one of your pinboards.

Obviously, not everyone loves this. It arguably pushes the envelope of fair use, and will probably torch it completely once the owners attempt to monetize. Although images are linked to their origin pages, the attribution isn’t visually striking, and it’s not like the web is actually shared under an attribution license. I’m not a lawyer, but some people might see it as copyright theft.

To answer this, Pinterest have created a meta tag that you can stick at the top of your site: meta name=”pinterest” content=”nopin”. If it’s present on the parent page, Pinterest will refuse to copy your images (although I presume you can get around that by loading an individual image in the browser). Hackers are, rightly, protesting that this sets an unmanageable precedent: imagine having to individually opt out of having your content copied by thousands of different applications by having to stick thousands of different meta tags at the top of every page. It’s dramatically unscalable.

Pinning is not a million miles away from Tumblr‘s reblogging, and it seems reasonable that there should be a meta name=”republish” content=”no” meta tag that covers all of these services.

Until then, here’s some dubious fun you could have at your own risk (if you don’t want to include the meta tag). This was pretty common about ten years ago, when hotlinking images could cause major bandwidth bills for the owner.

• Currently, the HTTP user agent for the bot that actually copies images for Pinterest is Pinterest/0.1 +http://pinterest.com/.
• The JavaScript bookmarklet works through your browser, of course, but it sets the HTTP referer for the page to a URL starting with http://pinterest.com/pin/create/bookmarklet/.

I’d detect Pinterest based on user agent, not referer – there are many situations where referer could be stripped out. This is true for user agent too – this isn’t guaranteed to work 100% of the time, and depends on your server setup – but there are only two parties to worry about in this scenario: your server, and Pinterest’s. (If you’re filtering the bookmarklet, you also have to worry about configuration changes in the user’s browser.)

All you need to do is filter requests by user agent in your web server’s graphics folder. If you’re running Apache with mod_rewrite, you could create an .htaccess file in your graphics folder with rules like:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Pinterest.*
RewriteRule .*\.png$ copyright.png

The above rewrites any requests for PNG files to copyright.png. The contents of that graphic will be pinned to Pinterest instead of the intended image.

(PS: want to try it out? Try pinning the image illustrating this blog post.)

When I said my final goodbyes to my team at Curverider and switched off for the day, I sat on my sofa and asked myself: what am I going to do next?

I had the beginnings of an answer already. People were beginning to take the web out into the world, rather than consume it at their desks. It seemed reasonable to create a geographic database of stuff – everything from photos and notes through to scientific readings. I called it Outmap. You would be able to browse these thematically, share them privately, or just see what was near you. Free users could post simple pre-defined kinds of content (which could be commented on and shared, of course). Paid users would be able to create new fields and potentially store entire databases with Outmap as their core. Each set of notes could be crowdsourced (e.g. to create a map of free wifi hotspots) or published (for your own notes, memories and photos).

Technologically, it was the right moment. Google Maps had become one of the most-used APIs on the web. The iPhone 3G had come out the previous summer, and was the first really mass market smartphone to have onboard GPS. And the HTML5 geolocation API had just been released, allowing any web page to ask for the current physical location of the user.

Business-wise, I had strong interest from environmental organizations, rights groups, top-tier universities and other great enterprise users. But alas, for non-technical reasons too irritating to get into here, I had to shelve it. (I did briefly reuse some of the back-end code for Onflood, an experiment in geotagged conversations.)

Three years later, enter Pinwheel.

I don’t know the team and had nothing to do with the product. Nor do I want to imply that this is what I would have released – Pinwheel looks beautiful, and the team (one of the co-founders is Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr) seem to have imbued the concept with a scrapbooky, airy quality that complements the name. But I am pleased that someone has built a service with a similar thought process.

I can see people leaving notes for their friends around the cities that they love. I can even see sending a set of mapped notes to Celia (“do you remember when we ..?”). It’s a lovely concept, that is one great use for the location web.

We’ve been so focused on social for the past ten years or so, that we seem to have forgotten the other networks that tie us together. Locations are interesting: you can represent them as discrete data (a latitude and a longitude), they have strong ties to who we are (where we were born, where we grew up, where we had our first kiss, our favorite view, etc), and can be used with social information to allow you to both express yourself and discover new things and places. Review sites and apps like Foursquare have only scratched the surface; in the future, the location web may be a new fabric of information that almost literally sits on top of everything.

We launched our iPhone app today. By compressing your video before you upload it to the web, latakoo Flight Mobile makes it easier to send high-definition video from your iPhone over a cellular connection. And because it’s latakoo, your video is private, sharable, and beautiful.

Here’s the official press release.

In the comments to this 37signals blog post (which is excellent), dhh and commenter Dave Christiansen collaboratively coined a term for startup companies that aim to go into the black as soon as possible and grow under their own steam: bootstraps.

I’m in love with this. Bootstraps give entrepreneurs full control over their businesses, without interference from venture capitalists or other interests, and put the onus on finding an actual business model that works on day one. To me, it seems like a responsible, autonomous way to create a product and grow a business.

Right now, startups are sexy, and maybe they always will be – but watch the people hard at work bootstrapping, and take note of their reasons for doing it. The risks are great, but so are the potential rewards. And there’s a lot to be said for doing business on your terms.

This is an excerpt from a new kind of project for me. Profile is a serial thriller about identity, the Internet and what happens when we trust companies to tell us what is and isn’t true. I’m going to treat the whole process – from writing through promotion – like a lean startup; more on that later.

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I huddled in the dark, under the wooden stairs leading out to the backyard, the metal of my unsheathed flash drive digging into my thigh. I could hear them in the house, opening drawers and moving furniture. They spoke to each other in a low murmur, an indistinguishable bassline while my Spotify playlists ran their course in the background, silently pushing unknown songs to my Facebook profile.

Through the clouds, an aircraft’s engines announced its descent.

I knew I would have to run. My backyard was surrounded by tall fencing on three sides, the result of neighbors jealously guarding their privacy. If I was going to make a break for it, I would need to climb over on one side, and I wasn’t sure if I could make it without drawing attention to myself.

Creaking floorboards. Inside, the men were moving from room to room. I wasn’t sure how many of them were, but it sounded like five at least: enough to keep guard while the others looked around.

From the glimpse I’d had of them when I looked through my bedroom window and seen them marching towards my house, they were police of some kind. They weren’t uniformed, as such, but each wore an identical suit, and each of them had been reaching for something as they approached my front door. It could have been phones, or documents, or anything, but I didn’t want to risk it. Particularly now as they’d forced their way into my home.

My breath caught the reflected light from the house in front of me, hot clouds of condensation reaching out into the cold of the night. I realized I was panicking.

“He’s still here,” one of them said, his voice urgent and raised enough for me to hear. “His phone’s on the network.”

The wifi! I whipped my handset out of my pocket and pushed down the power button to turn it off. Its screen lit up the yard, turning the grass and my weeds unnatural shades of blue and orange as the men ran through the house in an avalanche of heavy footsteps, down to the back door to find me.

Quickly, I set my phone on a ten second timer, and threw it over the fence to my left as hard as I could. Panting, my heart in my throat, I scrambled past the trashcans and garden debris to the alley beside my house, flung my back against the wall, and waited.

Coming soon.

We spent a lot of time testing the upcoming latakoo iPhone app today. It’s neat: you record video footage using the app of your choice, then click into the latakoo app to send it. Optionally enter a description, tags, destination groups and anyone you want to send it directly to, and the app shrinks the video to a fraction of its original size without losing visible or audible quality, and uploads it over your phone’s connection. The result is a faster upload, and because latakoo is designed around privacy, the video is seen by only the people you’ve given access to. They can comment or attach files, and you can audit who’s seen and downloaded it to make sure it hasn’t fallen into the wrong hands.

In short: latakoo is a cloud video service that gives you full control over who you share and manage your video with.

Here’s an overview of how it works:

Let’s say you’ve got a minute-long piece of uncompressed 1080p High Definition video. That can easily run to 2Gb, which would take forever to upload on most connections – and running your video through compressors like Sorensen Squeeze or the Handbrake client can be similarly painful if you’re not familiar with the right settings to use.

We’ve got a simple app for Windows, Mac and Linux, with iPhone imminent and both iPad and Android to follow. Just drag your video file into the window (or select it from your camera roll on mobile devices) and hit “start”. The file is compressed using the most appropriate settings, and sent to our cloud servers. (If you’re interested: it ends up as an h.264 MPEG-4 file, and we upload using our own API via HTTP over SSL. The result is maximum compatibility with both video applications and Internet connections.) The tool accepts most major video formats.

You don’t lose audible or visible quality, although we do provide quality settings. Users on latakoo’s professional and corporate tiers have access to better settings – but the cheaper version is also good enough to already be used on broadcast television.

Once the video’s been uploaded, it’s in the latakoo private cloud. By default, it’s completely private: only you can see it. But we’ve got a few options that let you share it with the people who need to see it, while making sure you keep full control.

Direct shares. You can send your video to anyone with an email address. They’ll get an email containing a link that gives them access to your video via a private inbox. There’s no way that they can share the email with anyone else. If they’re already a latakoo member, they can just log in and visit their inbox. (They’ll still get an email notification.)

Video networks. Or, to put them another way: collaboration groups. These are shared areas that let you pool video with groups of your contacts. You get to choose who can upload and download. For example, you could set up a video network as a dropbox where people can upload video, but not see anyone else’s contributions. Education and crowdsourced news: I’m looking at you guys.

Hangars and Wings. For some people, standalone video networks aren’t enough. Hangars and Wings are nested groups that allow larger organizations to share within their existing corporate structures. Each group has its own access permissions and individual settings. Appropriately, these are part of our corporate payment plan.

Auditing. You get to see usage throughout all the spaces you control (video networks, hangars, wings and your own private video space).

Finally, each shared video can have notes, tags, comments and files attached to them. These then become part of the search index – so if you post a video’s script to your notes, you can search on its contents.

Coming imminently: the ability to push directly to Facebook, YouTube, Brightcove, Dropbox and many more. Upload once, share anywhere.

All of latakoo’s paid plans allow you to download HD video for use in offline editing. As well as the h.264 MPEG-4 files, the latakoo tool allows you to download in some popular editing formats, including MPEG-2, DV, DVCPro, Avid DNxHD, and more. The idea is to maximize compatibility with peoples’ existing workflows – and although h.264 is pretty great, some of the older editing suites don’t work so well with it. If you’re using Avid, Final Cut Pro, Edius, or many more, we’ve got you covered.

One of the other things that makes us different is that we don’t alter the resolution of the video at all – or its audio tracks. Often, professional video will contain a bunch of different audio tracks for natural sound, speech, sound effects, music, and other useful things, and latakoo will keep them separate. We’ve optimized the tool for editing and professional use rather than broadcasting on the web – although you can do that too.

How’s the quality? Amazing. It’s passed the smell test from many very large video media companies who pride themselves on their quality (trust me, you’ve heard of them). But despite that, the file sizes are very small, making it easier to move them around.

The best way to decide, of course, is to try it.

You’re uploading to a server and then downloading from a server. Isn’t that slower than sending it directly to someone? No – and it’s more secure. With latakoo’s user-centric access controls, you know your video’s being seen by the right people, and the compression means that it’s still faster than using, say, FTP or a file sharing app.

Can I integrate this as a platform with my own service? Watch this space – or get in touch.

What’s that iPhone app like? Take a look:

I wrote a piece about ACTA for Imperica:

When the French MEP Kader Arif stepped down last week from scrutinizing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, declaring that he “would not participate in this charade”, it was the culmination of eight years of political lobbying, back-room deals and undemocratic conniving that now threatens to undermine the entire global Internet economy.

[...] Despite declaring an intention to prevent piracy, the agreements once again represent a significant infringement of civil liberties and undermine the principles by which the Internet works. The agreements’ intentions appear good at first glance – who doesn’t want to protect the rights of artists? – but actually represent an irreversible erosion of personal freedoms.

Click here to read the whole article.

Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator request for startups that will kill Hollywood has opened up a can of exploding radioactive mega-worms – and this time, they’re angry. In the wake of the Internet industry’s fight against SOPA and PIPA, he posed the problem:

The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. [...] How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

Cue pitchfork-wielding posts about how the studios are broken and we should be funding movies using the startup model.

In my opinion, these miss the mark in a fistful of ways.

Paul didn’t ask for new ways to make movies. He asked, what are people going to do for fun in 20 years? That’s a separate problem. Think about how storytelling has evolved through motion pictures: one-off shorts, full-length movies, talkies, serials, TV shows, video games, web shorts. Each of these advances was made possible by technology, but has art at its core. How can a connected medium like the Internet create new narrative experiences without disappearing into the mindless clicking of Zynga et al?

By the way, movies are awesome – and can’t be replaced by games. They’re ingrained as a deep part of our culture in a way that digital narratives have mostly managed when movie people get involved. (My favorite game of all time is The Secret of Monkey Island – a LucasFilm production.) Movies are also a collective experience in a way that digital culture can’t yet manage. Film nights – themed house parties where people watch a curated series of movies – are one of my favorite things in the world. The digital equivalent is probably LAN parties, where everyone has to bring their own computer and play a game together. Admittedly, that was fun when I was 15, but do you have the same conversations? Movies evolved from theater and literature – from pulpy paperbacks all the way through high art – whereas most games can still be tracked back to sports. They’re both important, but occupy different cultural niches.

Also, Raiders of the Lost Ark is five minutes shy of two hours long. Can you imagine sitting and watching someone play a game for that long? I’ve done it, and by the end of the first hour I’m usually half a Goomba jump away from going feral.

You can’t make a minimally viable movie. It’s tempting to treat a movie like a startup – and, of course, most movies are individual businesses with their own profit and loss sheets. But imagine what would happen if you tried to invent a whole plot and script based on the kinds of audience research and iterative demographic analytic analysis we all claim to practice on the web. You’d get the kind of forgettable paint-by-numbers movie that we’ve all seen a thousand times. No risks mean we never get to see anything new. (The same goes for startups, in my opinion.)

(Edit: the community over at Hacker News make an excellent point about this: that test screenings are commonplace, and that I contradict myself by saying that these methods lead to poor movies, which shows that it can be done. I guess I’m saying that movies can’t be made by lean methodologies alone.)

(A further edit: I don’t consider a low-budget movie to be a minimum viable product. This post by Anthony Panozza does a good job of explaining what the difference is, in my opinion.)

Distribution is the weakest link – and the real gatekeeper. Anyone can make a movie, especially now that cameras and professional editing suites have fallen into a price range that ordinary people can afford. The trick is getting a distributor to pick it up. Studios are legally barred from owning movie theaters; in other words, they haven’t owned the whole vertical chain since 1948. It’s distributors who ultimately control release dates and distribution, and who are blocking more innovative models from being established. These companies are the pink elephants on parade. What’ll we do?

The final reel

Movies aren’t going anywhere in the face of digital, just as novels weren’t killed by movies. The incredibly creative people who make them aren’t going away either, although decreasing technology costs mean there may be more of them. Instead, we need to look to the next new model for narrative entertainment: a kind of social experience that we can experience together, passively, holding each other’s hands and laughing at the jokes in unison. That’s the only thing that’ll really kill Hollywood.

Like many of you, I blacked out my site for the protests against SOPA and PIPA. These are bad laws that describe themselves as being anti-piracy but will hinder business, destroy jobs, undermine the working of the Internet, and – to add insult to injury – won’t stop piracy. Khan Academy has a great overview; my previous post about it is over here.

In this post, though, I’m going to rave, because I’m majorly impressed.

The major feature of my SOPA blackout page was a simple widget that detected your location, listed the representatives you needed to call to tell them about your opposition to the bills, and then let you call them straight on the page. This is like magic to me, even though I know it’s a Twilio integration. Brilliantly executed.

The three developers, Drew Inglis, Nick Meyer and Tess Rinearson, built Grassroutes as part of PennApps, a weekend hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania held a couple of days before the protest. It’s not just for SOPA and PIPA: you can relabel it for any political issue that you want to drive action for. Like nothing else before it, it turns slacktivism into direct action that spreads virally among site owners. And, again, it’s slick, simple, beautiful and well-built.

Grassroutes made it to the front page of Hacker News, where hackers continued the work by (for example) turning it into a Facebook app, and I certainly used it to call my representatives. My hope is this is part of a new wave of apps that will overcome the traditional criticisms of politics online and lower the barrier to direct participation in the democratic process.

I’ve got a phone number: +1 (312) 488-9373. Feel free to call or text it.

If I’m walking around, you’ll get me on my Samsung Galaxy S II. If I’m in transit (but not driving), you’ll probably get me on my iPad. If I’m at my desk, I’ll answer and take the whole call through my laptop. For you, the experience of contacting me will be exactly the same (give or take some background noise). For me, the experience fits my context: I can make and receive calls and texts on any of my devices. The same is true for email.

Consumption works the same way. All my important files are stored on Dropbox. If I need to get at something – for example, a work-in-progress piece of writing, or a receipt – I can pick up any of my Internet-connected devices and grab the contents. Similarly, my notes, which I take through Evernote: I can create and consume these anywhere.

A final example: I love movies. Watching them at the theater is still magical for me, but I also enjoy them elsewhere, depending on what kind of movie it is. (My favorite streamable new release right now is Midnight in Paris. A great film.)

At home, I use my dedicated media PC to play through a sound system and flat-screen monitor. It’s not perfect, but it works. Elsewhere, I might use my laptop or my iPad. On the road, I can play the same movie through the same service on my phone, or I may be able to take a downloaded version for offline consumption.

So far, so obvious. These are all known use cases that demonstrate why the consumer Internet is so powerful. But I have a question:

Shouldn’t applications, services and content be sold to me, instead of my devices?

Right now, I have to set each of my services up on each of my devices, and tell them to use the same account. That sometimes doesn’t work perfectly: for some reason, for example, I seem to have two Path accounts – one for my US handset, and one for my UK handset. I’m not sure how this happened.

Ideally, I want to sign up:

1. Once for each device, to tell them that I own it, and where I store my identity.
2. Once more for each service or application, to associate them with my identity.
3. The filesystem would be networked and bound to the identity. So rather than storing it on its own infrastructure, Evernote would save notes to my filesystem, which could potentially be accessed by other networked software.
4. Each identity would have an Internet-accessible unique identifier and point of entry.

The applications would then automagically become available on each of my devices. Crucially, when I go to buy or rent Midnight in Paris, it then is also available on all of my devices, because I’m renting via my identity rather than any one device. For the next 24 hours, say, I can stream the movie wherever is most convenient. If I buy a license for Microsoft Office, then it is licensed to my identity and I can use it on any of my devices.

This is literally a per-seat model for selling software. It makes buying and consuming simple, and will reduce piracy.

So here’s a follow-on question. It’s a dull-sounding one, but bear with me:

Wouldn’t this make enterprise provisioning dramatically easier?

Right now, system administrators in enterprise environments push software over their networks, and often refuse to allow non-approved hardware onto their infrastructure in order to make this easier. In an identity-centric model, though, where applications are delivered using Internet technologies:

1. Software would be provisioned to identities rather than machines.
2. The available identity domains and software on any given network could be locked down as appropriate (so, for example, I could bring in my smartphone but only use a sanctioned identity with it if I wanted to connect to the local network).

Wouldn’t this make consumer applications dramatically less annoying?

For me, the answer is “yes”. I don’t want to care about my devices and their capabilities, and I’m a CTO with a computer science degree. End users want their software to seamlessly “just work”, and they want to seamlessly be able to move content from one machine to another, or share to another person no matter what that thing happens to be, or where their data is stored. Right now, operating systems have become gatekeepers: bottlenecks that get in the way of users.

For me, this is the real application of a decentralized social web. It’s not just about sending messages around – it’s about using the Internet to create a fabric of interdependent applications where we retain control of our data (those identities and networked filesystems could be anywhere) while enjoying a simpler experience. Application providers and content owners sell more of their products, because they’re easier to consume, everyone loves their devices that little bit more, and every new product sold becomes a window onto a much bigger, connected ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Photo by Troy Holden, released under a Creative Commons license.