The legal limits of creativity explored: Recut Reframe Recycle

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

Danah Boyd points out that the center for social media has released an informative paper entitled Recut Reframe Recycle concerning the boundaries of fair use (fair dealing in Canada) in digital media. Types of use they point out: • Parody and satire • Negative or critical commentary • Positive commentary • Quoting to trigger discussion • ...

The web as a pidgin internet language

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

or "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet" A disproportionate amount of brilliant stuff was written by Douglas Adams, who in 1999 had this to say about the internet: the biggest problem is that we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have ...

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 ...

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 ...

Visualization of cultural values

Monday, February 27th, 2006

Very interesting infographic, published in The Atlantic, mapping cultural values. Apparently the study is by Ronald Inglehart of the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Data seems to be collected via census, the last data available is from 2001. I suspect that there is a fair amount of ...

BlackBerry Service Shutdown

Friday, February 10th, 2006

Funny if you have a "crackberry" or know someone who has one:

ID – Impugning Darwin

Friday, October 7th, 2005

I've been watching the whole intelligent design (ID) controversy from the sidelines for some time with mixed feelings. My focus in university was evolutionary biology. I spent quite some time working in a laboratory for experimental evolution (working with microbes with no artificial genetic modifications - strictly natural processes were ...

Oh no, here we go again: Quebec to separate by 2010 according to ex-premier Landry

Saturday, October 2nd, 2004

Monsieur Landry recently brandished that age old tool of opportunistic Quebec politicians - the promise of sovereignty. This comes hot on the heels of reports that Landry's leadership of the Parti Quebecois is faltering and that Quebec sovereignty is a lost cause with a new generation. This situation called for bold ...

Catching up on Interesting News

Tuesday, September 14th, 2004

Technology Advances Sports Coverage Some of you may have noticed the innovative technology provided by the US Open coverage. Watching a few matches I was impressed by the computerized slow motion rendering of close calls that redrew the ball and the lines and eliminated everything else. Apparently they also had a ...