Rough Drafts

Bob Cringely has a sensible strategy for how to roll back the DMCA and its egregious limitations on technology and fair use: civil disobedience. “Everyone who hates the DMCA has to illegally copy a movie or a song, and then tell both the Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office exactly what they did.

Scientists have empirically established the world’s funniest joke.

The New Scientist interviews Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, about software and product design: “You don’t do good software design by committee. You do it best by having a dictator. … The person who’s done it best is Steve Jobs, and he’s well-known for being a tyrant.” Norman al

Tom Matrullo points out that Google News completes the commodification of the news business. It lumps every news organization’s article about a particular news story under a single umbrella, giving you the basic story while cutting through all the brand differentiation that those news organizations

Photographer drives across the country, taking one 35mm picture every mile. Very nifty Flash app lets you see the map of his journey and view the pictures as you go: Taken On The Road: American Mile Markers

Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Assn., writes on c|net about the new “copyspeak”. Why copyrights aren’t “property” — “Real property is subject to ownership taxes. Real property lasts forever and can be owned forever. A copyright can be owned only for a limited period of time. Indeed, t

As much as Google rocks,there is one area where it really sucks: Searching weblogs. That’s because it’s not particularly intelligent about separating or summarizing weblog entries, making it a pretty blunt tool for finding specific information on a blog.

David Weinberger has a very eloquent, pointed comment on the most recent academic plagiarism scandal. I love the disclaimer at the end. One comment, however: When you use the term “intellectual property,” you’ve already lost the argument. That term, by likening copyrights and patents to real propert

New workplace terminology, from “outplacement firm” Challenger, Gray, and Christmas: Righteous CEO (Chief Ethics Officer): Executive selected to review corporate operations and practices to ensure that ethical standards are being met. Sitting Bull: Retirement-age worker who, due to stock market and

Online media watcher Steve Outing says that Google News is “the best implementation of the global newsstand to date.” And he goes on to say: “I would argue that the service does use human news-editing intelligence. It collects and analyzes the news publishing decisions of the human editors at 4,000

INFORMATION SCIENCE: THE INVISIBLE SUBSTRATE, by Marcia J. Bates, UCLA From the abstract: “The mental activities of the professional practice of the field are seen to center around representation and organization of information rather than knowing information. It is argued that such representation e

The Digital Library: A Biography, by Daniel Greenstein, California Digital Library, and Suzanne E. Thorin, Indiana Univ. With 6 case studies of digital library evolution, including CDL, Indiana, Harvard, and others.