May 2003

Technology companies are waking up to the opportunities opened by the music industry’s steadfast refusal to embrace online distribution of music files.

Here’s a nontechnical introduction to RSS from Michael Fagan. For a more technical introduction to RSS, see Mark Pilgrim’s explanation.

On a whim, I decided to pit MSN’s online version of the Encarta “encyclopedia” (part of MSN Learning and Research) against the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia available through Bartleby. The differences couldn’t be more stark.

Jonathan Rentzsch wrote a little JavaScript utility to help recover from 404:Page Not Found errors. It takes the current URL

A press release by Unix publisher SCO Group claims that “Linux is an unauthorized derivative of UNIX and that legal

A survey by Microdoc News shows that the most successful (and prolific) users of Google take an “experimental” approach to searching, first trying simple one-word or multi-word queries, then trying other, more complicated queries until they find what they’re looking for.

I edited the Spring 2003 issue of RLG News, which was recently published.

Rep. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) has introduced a “Freedom to Read” bill that would restore privacy to the patrons of bookstores and libraries. The ACLU supports it, and you should too.

From a blogjournal called eyeteeth run by Paul Schmelzer comes this interesting interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan, intellectual property expert and communications professor at NYU.