Wikinomics author Don Tapscott has an intriguing argument, reported in the Times this morning, that “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is … Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don’t need to know all the dates. It is […]
I’ve been putting together a chart of placenames and adding in sources. I need to check some of the sources to set up the correct licence but I’ve derived the base data from Wikipedia which is GFDL and now (hoorah) Creative Commons Share Alike (as I understand it but I’ll check when a few more […]
Ars Technica reports on the passage of HR6845 into the House of Representatives. Titled “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act”, this bill could well damage the efforts of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US make publicly funded research work open access. The only people who “benefit” from this in the short term […]
Google are working with various publishing partners to digitize newspapers from, it appears, Canada and North America. As Punit Soni, the product manager for the programme, writes: “This effort is just the beginning. As we work with more and more publishers, we’ll move closer towards our goal of making those billions of pages of newsprint […]
I’ve been sitting on this for a bit and mulling it. BoingBoing ran an article to Professor Eric Ringmar who is using tools to “open” documents up which were private or held behind closed walls, ‘cleans’ the document by removing licenses and posts the new version on public sites. Whilst the ambition to open data […]
Just heard about this piece by Aaron Swartz on the history of free software and its tenets which is clear and entertaining. Definitely one for the book marks.
I’ve nearly finished the Milton “patch” to Shakespeare and will be loading it to the svn tonight. The all new Shakespeare runs on Pylons and looks rather nice. One of the next things that I want to look at is it the idea of making the interface machine readable and the use LinkedData (good tutorial […]
Over on BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow has an excellent link to Danny O’Brien’s post on attribution for re-using works on the Internet. Attribution is, to my mind, one of the keys to creating a succesful and thriving remix environment. Why? At one level it is simple courtesy to mention where one gets the item that is […]
The Guardian have a couple of articles which have a relevance to the notion of creative openness. Cory Doctorow extends the copyleft argument to the recent agreement between ISPs and the BPI whilst Keith Stuart explores how the games industry have dealt with piracy. Cory Doctorow‘s article uses the recent agreement between the ISPs and […]
A thought. Given the amount of IM and chat clients, how do we store any knowledge across that is being transferred? Is it be lost or can you “dump” the logs for later use? A similar thing must be happening with SMS. I would have thought that the providers store these but can we get […]
