Categories
General

Debunking Richard Florida

Richard Florida has been getting a lot of props, even in the Museum, especially since his visit to Sydney in 2003. I guess he has an appeal to us similarly middle-class creatives. Of course it helps that he rates Sydney as one of the ‘creative’ cities. But here’s a debunking of Florida from the New Republic.

These myths are particularly problematic when they become the basis for policy. And in many cities, that is exactly what is happening. Policies based on these myths aren’t just a waste of time and resources. They are also distracting cities from the real work of securing their future. After all, if you are being told that you are coming back–riding the wave of demographics and intelligence to an inevitably positive outcome–why deal with the hard issues like public education, job training, promoting small companies, and transportation?

The American metropolis can be more than a way station for the wealthy young and part-time destination for the nomadic rich. It can be a place where average people live, thrive, and build communities across lines of race and class.

Categories
Copyright/OCL General

More on Googlezon

Some of you might remember that great 8 minute Flash thing I sent around about Googlezon and a projection to 2015.

Here’s an interesting commentary on it.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hilden/20050524.html

And, more importantly, Googlezon doesn’t even have to run afoul of journalistic ethics here: Its fact-stripping robots could easily (and automatically) provide citations to all their sources – each accessible by a link. Thus, rather than being an engine of plagiarism, Googlezon’s fact-stripping bots might be better seen as an engine of compilation.

Making compilations like this illegal, as copyright infringement, would challenge the status of a lot of traditional research – such as virtually any doctoral thesis, nonfiction book, academic paper, and on and on. For this reason, I agree with Sloan and Taylor that the Supreme Court would likely rule for Googlezon – not “old media” – in its Supreme Court case.

But it’s also possible the Court – or, ultimately Congress, in the wake of the Court’s decision – would rework copyright in a way that better fits the Internet.

Copyright is meant, in large part, to protect the market for a given work, and thus to protect incentives to create new works. Yet allowing people to read (for free) a fact-stripping bot’s compilation of news might undermine the market for newspapers and their online outposts. And that may lead newspapers to fight back in Congress for a broader version of copyright that would end, or limit, the reign of fact-stripping bots.

Categories
Copyright/OCL General

Lessig on Collecting Societies

Lawrence Lessig – the king of Powerpoint, and Creative Commons guru – speaking at the Koppinor conference Norway about collecting societies. (I’ve mirrored the file here to save bandwidth)

Lessig is in fine form again and this is well worth taking some time out to watch. The video quality is good and as usual his slides and performance is ace.

Categories
General

Roadcasting!

Forget Podcasting . . .

Roadcasting is the way to go . . .

Categories
General

iPod, uPod, wePod

What is podcasting? RSS dissemination of (URIs for) MP3 content. Neat.

Can’t find a podcast ? Try http://www.podcast.net/

[… and no, you don’t need to splash out on an iPod]

Categories
Copyright/OCL General

The Attention Economy and the Net

“…the fight over intellectual property and rights to make copies is actually a struggle between the outlooks of the new economy and the old, a reason why they cannot both coexist forever, and thus a feature of the period of transition from old to new. ” Michael H. GoldHaber The Attention Economy and the Net

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/
http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/

Categories
General

share your screen

(JYBE seems to be no longer available – Oct 2007)

Maybe we could have a go at this sometime?

JYBE is a plug-in that enables people to surf the web and chat together all in real time. This is not a proxy service but turns your web browser into a de-facto IM client. Version 1.0 is the first but we anticipate putting out new releases so check back often.

JYBE was created to show how collaboration can be extended to the native internet browser because we wanted a new way to communicate with friends and family. Not only did we want to chat, we wanted to take our friends and family to neat websites and have an interactive surfing experience that was fun, fast and fee. The result was JYBE.

All we need is a valid email address and a user name. We use the email address to send you product update information. NOTE: We do not sell or distribute your email address or use it for any advertising at all. We protect your email addresses from all third parties and are committed to that policy.

Jybe adds a toolbar to Internet Explorer and Firefox. Using this toolbar, a JYBE session can be created and others can join in the browsing session. All traffic is routed through our servers and costs the users absolutely nothing.

Categories
General

Copyright Video Art

http://www.benhanbury.com/freeculture/index.html

There are some interesting projects here.

Categories
General

Advertising & The Future of TV

Quite interesting analysis of donwloading TV shows and potential new markets for advertising.

http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html

Categories
General

Google End Game

Intersting article that builds on the ideas in the GoogleZon animation and analyses the potential impact of Google’s Web Accelerator.

“If Google adds power to its part of the Accelerator, you don’t have to add power to your end, meaning your old PC can last longer. Part of that has to come from Google assuming a larger role over time, taking responsibility for rendering Flash, for example. And they’ll do it. And we’ll let them. At some point, Google might even offer its own hardware device, optimized for the Accelerator. At that point, you’ll buy your PC from Google, use Google as your ISP, surf an Internet that is really the Google cache, be fed ads and sold content from Google servers. Its a GoogleWorld that requires no AOL, no Microsoft, no Intel, no HP or Dell — only Google, cable companies, telephone companies, users, and of course advertisers and web page producers.”

And this on the Net in Asia –

“But in Asia, the web is a minor part of the internet user’s activities, and once you deduct Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail usage, it’s almost negligible. A typical Asian internet user is online to play LAN games and do instant messaging. In cafes, you’ll see “internet” promoted as a separate item below “Games” and “Chat” – almost as if it’s an afterthought. A PC in the East is a rather more colorful Minitel that hosts multiplayer games. Fetishizing the web has blinded many in the West, and not just techno-utopians, to what people really want from computer networks, as successful “closed” computer networks from Minitel, and possibly GSM with its SMS service prove. So while Western experts lose their minds to utopian fantasies such as “the web is now nature”, the Asian mind looks for rather more practical uses for technology. And it’s Asia that will be the largest influence on the computer networks in the next decade, with a billion Chinese being urbanized over the next decade, pulling Indo-China along behind it, and half a billion newly affluent on the Indian sub-continent. Will these billions of users want to rely on a GoogleNet?”

Check it here.