Monthly Archives: July 2005

Digg: Collaborative Technology News Website

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I just came across Digg (via Daypop) and it seems like it’s based on a pretty neat idea.

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

After finally getting a chance to read the Wisdom of Crowds, it seems to me that this unique type of editorial control may just produce a neat resource.

CNET – Top 10 Web Fads

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I am not sure how new this list is, but I enjoyed having a look at these “web fads” (although I am not sure I would call them that). Some of these I remember well but I think I there are a couple that I missed. For instance, I remember the Apple Switcher Campaign, but don’t remember the hoopla around Ellen Feiss.

And for a much bigger list of related fads, check out the Wikipedia list of web phenomena.

As a side note, it seems that life gets busier and busier all the time, but now I have found a perfect visual metaphor to describe my life at the moment. Now that’s talent!

Press Bias And The Internet

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Dana Blankenhorn wrote an interesting rebuttal to an AP article titled, “Piracy Tool Turns Legit”. The article put a negative spin on Opera’s latest move to support BitTorrent as “The Opera Web browser will soon support a file-transfer tool commonly associated with online movie piracy.”

Blankenhorn writes:

Excuse me, AP, but bull-cookies. BitTorrent is not Kazaa. It’s a technology. There’s no business there. Blaming BitTorrent for piracy is like blaming FTP or SMTP or even HTTP for piracy, because you can move copyrighted files. You can move copyrighted content across all Internet protocols. They are value-neutral.

Yet Blankenhorn’s central thesis pointed to the idea of Press bias being inescapable to its current business model

The news industry as a whole is moving increasingly toward the idea that stories are commodities, like movies or recordings, and that common Internet usage of such material represents piracy. Many AP papers are now behind registration firewalls, and AP’s new pricing policy will accelerate the trend.

Thus, the AP has an institutional bias against the Internet, a business bias.

To me, this is just another sign that it’s much more important today to support collaborative efforts of open publishing such as Wikipedia. Certainly, there will always be bias in any story written (it’s inescapable), but as Blankenhorn points out, fairness (leaning against one’s own bias) is also a central, balancing tenet of news reporting, and it seems this is increasingly much harder to come by in practice.

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What Is Your Social Network Worth?

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NewsCorp has just announced that they will be purchasing Intermix Media, the owner of the popular MySpace.com social networking site, for $580 million USD. Of course, this is not the first big acquisition of a social networking service, as some time back, Google purchased the popular Orkut.

With these strategic purchases, I find myself wondering if these are such formalized networks are the ones with the most overall value. What about the networks that have no portal boundaries? As I look to the hundreds of blogs in my aggregator, I realize that this this is my social network, and part of what makes it so valuable is that the voices, content and formats used by the many authors are so diverse and not restricted by the specifics of a portal. Sure, social networking services make it easy to connect to those within the network, but fairly impossible to connect to people outside of the service … and while I won’t downplay the value, ultimately it’s a world with possibilities limited by the captive population itself.

So will people continue to flock to social networking portals? Is the greatest value within these microworlds? (I wonder if there will ever be interoperability between such worlds?) Or, as individuals become increasingly tech and network-savvy, will the greater possibility lie outside these worlds, within open structures and between loose connections?

So what is the value of my loosely connected network of acquaintances, friends, academics, newswriters, bloggers, etc.? At least $580 million, and rising at every moment.

EdTech Posse Rides Again

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For simplicity’s sake, I’ll just repost this notice from Rick’s Cafe Canadien on the EdTech Posse Podcast #3.

The EdTech Posse Podcast #3 is finally available. Actually there is another one waiting in the wings (and for editing). In this podcast, Wall, Shareski, Couros and Schwier talk about Laura Turner’s list of “Twenty Essential Skills Every Educator Should Have“, as published on the THE Journal website. Hope you like it. We finally think we have the technology for recording conferences sorted out.

New Zealand Schools Go Open Source

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The National Business Review reports that New Zealand’s Ministry of Education and Novell have signed a national agreement0 “to provide all state and state-integrated schools ith a range of Novell software, including SUSE Linux operating systems.”

From the article,

Embracing open source offers many opportunities for New Zealand schools now and in the future. This agreement embodies all the advantages of Novell’s traditional offerings plus the advantages of Linux and open source – the provision of cost-effective, secure and reliable systems.

So yes, another national government openly accepts open source into education. Anyone keeping track?

And just in time for Open Source Day! Last year, Rick Schwier proclaimed July 16 open source day, and since I will be away from my email for the weekend, I thought I would announce early. So if anyone has some open source news to share over the next few days, do it in the spirit of the second annual, very unofficial Open Source Day.

Could Googling Become Illegal In Canada?

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There was an interesting article by Jack Kapica of the Globe & Mail yesterday which discusses the possibility of Internet search and archiving being an illegal activity which infringes against an ammendment to the Canadian Copyright Act (Bill C-60).

Section 40.3 (1) of the bill states that “the owner of copyright in a work or other subject-matter is not entitled to any remedy other than an injunction against a provider of information location tools who infringes that copyright by making or caching a reproduction of the work or other subject matter.”

That section, he says, implies that “information location tools” would infringe copyright if they archive any material that is copyright, not just material that is itself infringing.

The bill defines information location tools as “any instrument through which one can locate information that is available by means of the Internet or any other digital network.”

So in other words, Google or other search engines or archive services (e.g., the Internet Archive Wayback Machine) may be in infringement of copyright law due to the way they cache and archive copyrighted material. However, the author also notes that as Bill C60 is at the first stage of reading in parliament there is time to “fix” or remove the provision.

However, in today’s related news, it looks like the WayBack Machine, a service of the non-profit Internet Archive is being sued under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

It’s an amazing time to be alive as we are really experiencing a unique time in history as we have been given a wonderful, liberating tool for sharing information across cultures and geographic boundaries, but at the same time, witnessing the immense greed of certain corporate entities as they influence our legislative bodies.

Super Mario Physics Tutorial

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Newgrounds hosts an interesting Super Mario physics tutorial which has been remixed from scenes of the original 8-bit game (via Boing Boing). While the video as a pedagogical device likely lacks as it’s non-interactive and features a direct approach of information delivery (it was developed for entertainment, really), I think there are a couple of good ideas here.

First, the idea of remixing culture is nothing new, but the video is an example of what can be done when cultural artifacts are free to use and reuse (although in this case, the artifacts were likely ‘stolen’). Second, the idea that this tutorial is set in a virtual world that is relevant to potential students goes a long way in increasing the likelihood of meaningful learning. Environments such as WebCT, for instance, bear little relevance to a child’s world. Rather, they are born from adult’s ideas of how a learning environment should look. Whereas, if you can build an environment that is more relevant and meaningful to a child’s experience, the potential for learning could be much greater.

I’ve often wondered about social network environments such as hi5 that are so common to adolescents and teens. What would a learning environment look like if we utilized such a model as a starting point?

Update: People interested in this media might also be interested in the Mario Opera series. Brilliant.

Educating The Net Generation: New EduCause eBook

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This may have been out for a little bit, but if so, I hadn’t noticed it. Educating the Net Generation looks like a good, freely downloadable book that may be worth looking at if you are interested in better understanding the “Net Generation”. It looks like there might be a lot of terrific content.

On that note, I’d also love a book explaining the naming of this generation as I am quite sure is also termed Generation Y, Generation Why, the Millennial Generation, the Always On Generation and the Digital Natives. No wonder we don’t understand them … we spend more time on coining “cool” yet generalizable terminology than we may actually spend on trying to understand their unique circumstances, challenges, beliefs and online/offline activities. :-)

Update: Nate Lowell did an excellent commentary on this EduCause release back in March. I must have missed it, but I am sure glad it was brought to my attention. If you missed it, check out the post titled Double Duh!.