Archive for November, 2006

Freeconomics and the copybot: consequences for intellectual property

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame "cheekily" coins freeconomics as shorthand for his more recent thesis on "economics of abundance". (I should mention that he does so with apologies to Freakonomics) Anderson points out how technology that was once scarce is fast becoming a cheap enough commodity to be offered ...

Visualize This!

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

Visualization can be a powerful tool, not only for education but also for exploring information and generating new ideas. Hans Rosling from the impressive Gapminder project gives an excellent presentation exposing how powerful visualization tools combined with public domain data could be important drivers of social change. One of the barriers ...

Intellectual Property absurdisms

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

There is a gold rush on intellectual property, testing the coherence of IP law. Many are bordering on the absurd, here is an example reported at Techdirt: more bizarre is the lawsuit the company is facing down in Chile where Microsoft dared to offer a version of its software in the ...

DMCA exceptions granted

Monday, November 27th, 2006

The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a law in the United States which criminalizes technology which circumvents copyright. It has been widely criticized. Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker reports some exceptions to the DMCA were recently granted: six exemptions were granted, the most ever: * Professors ...

Cover this, Hey Ya…

Monday, November 20th, 2006

powered by ODEO Why are music covers and movie remakes so popular? Assuming you can manage to get it out there with all the copyright licensing issues, its much more likely for a new take on an old success to become rapidly popular, so its a much safer investment. The population ...

Travel time heatmap visualization

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006

Some very interesting work happening in the UK by mysociety.org studying travel time related to mode of transport (particularly rail versus car). I really hope such studies will happen in North America, I suspect it would highlight where it would be efficient to invest in rail infrastructure for commuter and cargo ...

Visualization of social networks among “Web 2.0” startups

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006

The folks at Groupscope give us some fascinating looks into, among other things, the relationships behind some successful so-called "Web 2.0" startup ventures: From the Linksviewer blog. I wonder how severe the survivorship bias is. It would be more interesting to see all ventures that these individuals were involved with (perhaps the ...

Lest we forget

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

Remember.

Welcome to the jungle: finding quality in the internet content ecosystem and why editors are so important

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

I agree vehemently with Alistair that folks who spent time decrying the lack of general quality in the blogosphere or on Flickr or the internet in general are missing the point. Average quality doesn't matter. Who cares if my free stock photo site has mostly crap on it, the question ...

Web 2.0 nomenclature – a flash in the pan or real gold nuggets?

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

Austin at Billions with Zero Knowledge is blogging at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference. This got me thinking again about all this of web nomenclature hoopla which seems to have spread like the Code Red worm (see below) with monikers such as "office 2.0," "enterprise 2.0," "identity 2.0," etc.... Anytime ...