By Stephen Downes
January 27, 2004
What is the Blog Revenue Model and Can Blogs
Gather News as Opposed to Pontificate on
it?
Roland posts this summary and link to a
summary of discussions about blogs at the Davos economic
forum, where their concern is (as usual) how to turn
something into money. "This creates a classic free-rider
problem. If the blogs eventually steal the mass media's
audience (or at least, key parts of it) and the Internet as
a whole continues to steal its revenues, there will come a
time when those big, expensive news-gathering operations
will become economically insupportable." Here's a clue:
they are already economically unsupportable. We need to
think about different ways of looking at news as opposed to
through the big centralized amassers, hoarders and filters
of Organized Content. Take this item: a meeting summary
produced by a participant that works its way through the
blogosphere. Parasitical? Sure - I wasn't at the meeting.
Parasitical on the traditional media? No way - the media
isn't touching this one. We need to recognize that there
are alternative forms of news, where the participants make
their own news, and that we no longer need media to do it
for us. The same, by the way, goes for learning. By Roland
Tanglao, Roland Tanglao's Weblog, January 26, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Bloated, Dysfunctional World of
Enterprise Solutions
A little strongly worded,
but it taps into my own sentiments on the subject: "And
what do we have here? Novell Portal Services - "the
industrial grade portal solution for all your enterprise
needs"? Sounds solid, all right. Let's open the project
management folder to have a closer look. I see: stability
problems, deadline was 18 MONTHS ago, 200% over budget,
thousands of lines of bad code to get plugins to work but
failed anyway, total database crashes in the staging area,
severe security problems - and all that for a portal
project with almost no more features than a static website?
Hm." The question purchasers must ask: Do I need to spend
several hundred thousand dollars when there's a piece of
off the shelf software for fifty bucks (or for free!) that
will do the same thing? By thasmudyan , Kuro5hin, January
27, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
InsurgenceEmergenceConvergence
Nice
set of thoughts assembled in Wiki form on the way online
teaching changes what teachers do. As the author quotes
from David Wiley, "...while teaching in the classroom and
teaching online are both teaching, this does not mean that
they are the same. Imagine an Athletic Director telling the
water polo team that beginning next semester they would be
playing on horseback. 'Don’t worry,' he tells them, 'it’s
still polo. You still need to score goals and keep the
other team from scoring in order to win. Just use the same
offensive and defensive strategies you’ve been using for
years. I’m sure you’ll still be conferences champs at the
end of the season.'" That's just about it. Brian will be
presenting this at NLII - don't miss it if you're there. By
Brian Lamb, UBCWiki, January 27, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Distributed Digital Rights
Management
Slides from my online talk today with
TeleEducation New Brunswick on the topic of of Distributed
Digital Rights Managament, the DRM we are building here at
NRC for the eduSource project (and everyone else). By
Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, January 27, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Digital Tweed
Syllabus advertised
in today's newsletter a new blog by someone called Casey
Green ("Sorry, you must be a registered user to view
profiles" and that's all I know). It might have been a good
idea to see if the blog was updated before advertising -
the last entry in from December 4. Syllabus also has the
oddest blogging software I have ever seen. Some piece is
asp software. No RSS. Why didn't they just fork over a few
bucks and get Moveable Type or something. Anyhow, I forward
you this link so you can read both of Casey Green's blog
posts. By Casey Green, Syllabus, December 4, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
E-learning Bodies in Historic
Talks
Looks like the corporate e-learning
community in Britain is getting together. This is similar
to what happened in Canada with CELEA. I would reserve the
word "historic" for meetings between heads of state,
though. By Press Release, eLearning Network, January 27,
2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Economist Intelligence Unit Releases Global
e-Learning Rankings
I have no idea why a company
would issue a press release describing a new report without
providing a link to the report, but that's what IBM does
with this item. The IBM elearning site has a number of
iteresting papers (no RSS feed for them though), but not
this one. Anyhow: "According to the white paper, successful
e-learning countries -- such as Sweden, Canada and the
United States -- lead in broadband connectivity,
mobile-phone usage, and PC penetration. These countries
have a strong education system, traditions in job training,
support for lifelong learning and a high rate of literacy.
Successful e-learners have access to content -- library
materials, newspapers, corporate information, government
databases, and much more, online and in their native
language. The final building block for success is the right
culture." By Press Release, IBM, January 26, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Findory
The future of
personalization is in approaches like this site, which
adapts to your choices and presents you news you are
interested in. Brought to you by the same people who
brought you Memigo (which I linked to yesterday). Great
stuff. By Various Authors, January, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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