It’s finally starting to happen: Technology companies are waking up to the opportunities opened by the music industry’s steadfast refusal to embrace online distribution of music files. First, Apple opens its iTunes Music Store with a simple proposition: 99 cents per song with a catalog of 200,000 tunes.… Read the rest
Month: May 2003
Awhile back, I complained that I couldn’t find a clear, straightforward, non-technical explanation of RSS. Well, here’s a good one from Michael Fagan. For a more technical introduction to RSS, see Mark Pilgrim’s explanation.
Fagan’s site, incidentally, has a handy general search page that lets you target a couple dozen online search engines and information resources from a single search field, plus a blog search that targets weblogs and RSS feeds.… Read the rest
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.
A search for “Abelard and Heloise” on MSN turned up a few results, most accessible only to MSN subscribers.… Read the rest
Jonathan Rentzsch wrote a little JavaScript utility to help recover from 404:Page Not Found errors. It takes the current URL in your browser, and uses it to retrieve the archived version of that page from Google’s cache. Here’s Rentzsch’s discussion on Google cache hacking.… Read the rest
A press release by Unix publisher SCO Group claims that “Linux is an unauthorized derivative of UNIX and that legal liability for the use of Linux may extend to commercial users. SCO issued this alert based on its findings of illegal inclusions of SCO UNIX intellectual property in Linux.”… Read the rest
Microdoc News recently commissioned a one-week study of 545 university students who were, relatively speaking, experts in information retrieval (they all had received some kind of training in information seeking and said they used Google more than 3 hours/week).
The results?… Read the rest
I edited the Spring 2003 issue of RLG News, a semiannual magazine published by RLG that covers issues of interest to that organization’s membership: research libraries, museums, and archives. Articles in this issue cover RLG’s “RedLightGreen” project (an effort to make it easier to find authoritative sources of research information online); efforts to preserve digital information; the development of a new, P2P model for interlibrary lending; and more.… Read the rest
The first amendment guarantees freedom of expression, but that’s not worth much if you don’t have a corresponding right to read, listen, and watch whomever’s expressions you want. This is why librarians have long been jealous guardians of their patrons’ privacy: Monitoring people’s reading habits is the first step towards circumscribing, or even censoring, specific works.… Read the rest
From a blogjournal called eyeteeth run by Paul Schmelzer comes this interesting interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan, intellectual property expert and communications professor at NYU. SV paints a pretty grim picture of how much the landscape of copyright has changed in the last 15-20 years, from one that fostered cultural exchange and development to an arena where the supposed “intellectual property” rights of a few giant corporations take precedence over everything else.… Read the rest