The New York Times had a piece on digital piracy of books and the contrasting views which was picked up by Slashdot. Starting out from the anti-piracy view, it does note that bestsellers are often the most pirated books which backs up Cory Doctorow‘s assertion: “I really feel like my problem isn’t piracy,…It’s obscurity.” His […]
As part of the Open Milton project, I’ve been thinking about the place of XML in it. Over Christmas, I wrote a small XSL transform using the Bosak XML Shakespeare files. Rufus took Anthony and Cleopatra and, using Latex (I gather), created the Open Shakespeare Anthony and Cleopatra pdf. At one level, this is yet […]
I’m a happy bunny this morning with regards to calendaring. I’ve finally managed to solve why MS Outlook was ignoring the events sent with a timezone stamp. If I scheduled an event without specifying the time, then no time zone id is attached to the event so Outlook parses it quite happily. If I did […]
I’ve recently been working on a plugin for WordPress to set up each post as RDF enabled using OAI_ORE and SWORD which I presented to the Oxon SWIG on Tuesday. The Berlin Declaration of Open Access states the work should be free and also that it should be deposited in a repository. This seems to […]
I’m going to talk to you today about opening science and some of the ways that are being used to create platforms and tools and underlying responsibilities and actions that the commons needs to take if it is to develop a truly open way of working. Technology really is a means to an end; not […]
Clay Shirky, who is currently guest blogging on BoingBoing, has a link to a fantastic article by James Grimmelmann on “Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy” which I’ve perused. I’ve been thinking about the nature of groups and how one keeps information and memberships from being inappropriately shared in uses such as scheduling events […]
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 […]
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.
