By Stephen Downes
December 16, 2003
Reticulum Rex
Flash based
animation, nicely put together, intended to introduce
Creative Commons remix. Most of the clip, though, restates
the Creative Commons creed and outlines the agenda - an
agenda I support, mostly. More (text based) information is
available from Jason Schultz By Various Authors,
Creative Commons, December, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Quick! Get Use of RSS Before the Vultures
Ruin It
Commentary from Alan Levine referring to
David Galbraith's: How to make RSS commercially viable.
Levine comments, "there are those that can only look at a
useful communications technology and only rub their hands
in glee trying to figure out how to squeeze money from it.
There was the glory of the web, and now we have non-stop
pop-up ads. There was direct connections via email, and now
we are littered by spam. Next stop? The vultures are
beginning to hover over RSS." Quite right. Now
commercialization typically requires two prongs: first, the
insertion of commercial content into the medium, an
essentially benign step; and second, the exclusion of
competing free content from that same medium, an
essentially hostile step. It is the latter we must watch
for: signs of attacks against the use of RSS for the free
distribution of information. Any day now; wait for it. By
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, December 16, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Leading Publishers Sue Document Deliverers
For Copyright Infringement
The litigants in this
case are the major content hoarders: the American Chemical
Society, Elsevier, Inc., Marcel Dekker, Inc., SAGE
Publications, Inc. and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. The lawsuit,
which the companies say "reflects growing infringement of
digital content," was filed against two of the many clipping services. One of the
companies, LMS Information Services, has been in the
business since 1998 (so I'm not sure what the publishers
mean by 'growing infringement'). The lawsuit might not be a
cakewalk (though this may depend more on the defendants'
bankrolls than on the law, as is usual in such cases). LMS
appeals to fair use on its website, and offers to
handle any commercial copyright clearance the subscriber
may request. I think the lawsuits have more to do with
consolidating the publishers' customer base, an effort to
put clipping services in general out of business.
"Businesses and individuals who buy text content from
document deliverers and other information services want to
be sure the works they are receiving have been lawfully
obtained," says Wiley's Roy Kaufman. By Press Release,
Business Wire, December 9, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Serence
This Ottawa company has
developed an interesting RSS-style headline viewer called
KlipFolio. A Klip is essentially an RSS feed, but with
scripting options, security and other features wrapped
around it. Readers download the application and view the
headline feeds on their desktop. Still, I'm not sure the
approach will meet with wide support in the RSS community.
The site suggests that klips can "Productize your RSS feed
or XML data-source. Klips can commercialize virtually any
digital data source--including RSS--by wrapping it in a
powerful, secure package that supports user
personalization, usage statistics, advertising, and billing
integration." Also, because harvesters cannot get at the
source feed, klips won't allow content from different feeds
to be blended - this is touted as protecting your brand,
but for the RSS reader content - not brand - is important.
By Various Authors, December, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Copyright Doesn't Cover This
Site
Interesting. "To prove that open sourcing
any and all information can help students swim instead of
sink, the University of Maine's Still Water new media lab
has produced the Pool, a collaborative online environment
for creating and sharing images, music, videos, programming
code and texts." There's a link in the article; following
it leaves me with one major comment: I hate the interface.
Really, really hate it. But the concept is interesting, and
well worth the effort. By Michelle Delio, Wired News,
December 16, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
A Visual Vocabulary for Describing
Information Architecture and Interaction
Design
George Siemens picked up this nice paper
describing a visual language for information architecture.
Well written and clear, the paper makes enough sense that I
am going to use its suggestions in my own site design
diagrams from now on. By Jesse James Garrett, Jig.net,
Mar`ch 6, 2002
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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