Wired's article on gadgets for gifts, including:
L33t replacement tiles for Scrabble
Roboraptor--the killing robot dinosaur
A $200,000 grand piano
Google is pilot testing free internet at Heathrow Airport:
According to Google, the average airline passenger spends over 9 hours a year waiting for flights. Half of British passengers surveyed said they typically spent this time eating, drinking or shopping, while 71 per cent of respondents said they would like to use this time to find out more information, such as maps and weather forecasts, about their destinations.
The Google Space terminals, in addition to internet access, provide additional tools such as a digital photo editor. A sample of the Google Space terminal features is available online at www.google.co.uk/googlespace.
,,,via Smart Mobs
Google is being sued by the Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers (and possibly some other people by now since it took me awhile to put this article together) over a new project called Google Print (whose name appears to have recently changed to Google Book Search). What is Google Print/Google Book Search and why are author and publisher groups suing them over it?
There seem to be as many ideas about Google Print --what it is, why it is, what it wants to be as there are opinions about whether the idea is good, wrong-headed, evil, legal, promising, or civilization-ending.
What is Google Print?
Just as Google helps you find sites you might not have found any other way by indexing the full text of web pages, Google Print, like an electronic card catalog, indexes book content to help users find, and perhaps buy, books. This ability to introduce millions of users to millions of titles can only expand the market for authors' books, which is precisely what copyright law is intended to foster.
The purpose of Google Print is to provide the means to search not just the information in web pages (which is what Google itself provides), but also the information in books. In order to make these books available for searching, Google has initiated two projects: Google Print Publisher Program (now called the Partner Program) and Google Print Library Project .
The Google Print Publisher Program (now called the Partner Program) allows publishers to supply their books to the program, to reap a percentage of ad revenue, and to set specifics about how their books can be viewed (the entire book is searchable, but users may only be able to look at a certain number of pages).
The Google Library Project works to "index the book collections of several major research libraries and make this content searchable through Google Print alongside books provided by publishers through our Publisher Program." Libraries involved include Unviersity of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, the New York Public Library, and Oxford University.
For books obtained through the Google Library Project, which are still under copyright, searchers can see only bibliographic information and a few sentences directly related to their search criteria. For books in the public domain, searchers will be able to see as much of the book as they need.
Google also offered publishers the opportunity to opt completely out of the Google Library Project. If a publisher says, 'don't scan my books,' those books won't be scanned.
The controversy around this project generally encompasses two main arguments: that people might be able to get a complete copy of a book without paying for it and that Google has no right to scan books that are still under copyright and must obtain permission for each and every book they scan. There are additional complexities to both these issues, but, in the main, these are the objections.
Without considering copyright issues yet--or, more specifically, without considering the rights of the books' creators--could Google Print be a good thing? Absolutely. Imagine being able to search every book or some reasonable cross-section thereof. You can get bibliographic information, quotes, and pointers to books you want to buy.
Tim O'Reilly, a publisher, says:
A search engine for books will be revolutionary in its benefits. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors than copyright infringement, or even outright piracy. While publishers invest in each of their books, they depend on bestsellers to keep afloat. They typically throw their products into the market to see what sticks and cease supporting what doesn't, so an author has had just one chance to reach readers. Until now.Google promises an alternative to the obscurity imposed on most books. It makes that great corpus of less-than-bestsellers accessible to all. By pointing to a huge body of print works online, Google will offer a way to promote books that publishers have thrown away, creating an opportunity for readers to track them down and buy them. Even online sellers like Amazon offer only a small fraction of the university libraries' titles. While there are many unanswered questions about how businesses will help consumers buy the books they've found through a search engine for printed materials that is as powerful as Google's current Web search, there's great likelihood that Google Print's Library Project will create new markets for forgotten content. In one bold stroke, Google will give new value to millions of orphaned works.
Meghan Marco, an author, who unsuccessfully tried to persuade her publisher to include her book on Google Print says:
I asked my publisher, Simon and Schuster, for my book to be included in Google Print. I was told they did not do that....
Someone asked me recently, "Meghann, how can you say you don't mind people reading parts of your book for free? What if someone xeroxed your book and was handing it out for free on street corners?"
I replied, "Well, it seems to be working for Jesus."
Regarding the copyright issue--there are two questions that come up fairly frequently. First, why does Google need to scan the whole book? Wouldn't a bibliography--all encompassing--with really, really (no, I mean really) good--like perfect--key word capability work just as well?
No. I mean, really, there's no other answer to this question. How do keywords work for web page searches? Well, pretty much not at all. Keywords never work unless you have people entering keywords for each web page who have perfect knowledge (and a very high boredom threshold), unless you know what you’re looking for, unless all the people who enter keywords for web pages and all the people who search for web pages using keywords, view the world from pretty much the same basic angle, unless you already pretty much know how to find what you want. Keywords can help you find some things that are similar in a certain way, but they rarely help you find things you didn't know you were looking for or narrow in on a topic you're not at all familiar with when you begin. In addition, keyword searches are rife with cultural and language assumptions guaranteeing that some people will never find anything they want and that you will probably never find everything you want.
...continued in Part 2.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger talks about supporting innovation in open communities. In particular, some of the issues of intellectual property:
IP management is fairly well understood if you are a business, but how do you manage IP with a dispersed community of individuals like those supporting Linux and other open source projects, which generally have no entity charged with managing IP and collecting patents? We are all learning in this area. One approach is for individual businesses to pledge patents in support of open communities. We in IBM did this with our patent pledge earlier this year, which granted access to over 500 software patents to individuals and groups working on open source software like Linux. More recently we pledged access to our patent portfolio for the development of selected open healthcare and education software standards. Other companies like Red Hat, Novell, Nokia and Sun have also made patent pledges in various forms in support of open communities.
Still another way to support these open communities is to work not just company by company, but collectively. An example of this approach is the Patent Commons Project established by OSDL to provide a central location where software patents and patent pledges from a variety of sources are housed for the benefit of open source communities.
A project to condense great classics of literature to a text message:
FeudTween 2hses- Montague&Capulet. RomeoMfalls_<3w/_JulietC@mary Secretly Bt R kils J's Coz &&is banishd. J fakes Death. As Part of Plan2b-w/R Bt_leter Bt It Nvr Reachs Him. Evry1confuzd-bothLuvrs kil Emselves
...Romeo and Juliet
Interesting Wired News article on outsourcing IT to rural US communities rather than over seas:
Today Rural Sourcing claims 20 clients, including Mattel and Cardinal Health, $1 million in revenue and 50 full-time employees at five IT centers in Arkansas, North Carolina and Missouri.
White started the company two years ago with $2 million of her own money in partnership with her alma mater, Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, where she earned a bachelor's degree and MBA while raising two small children. She hopes to employ 100 full-time consultants by the end of next year, and 1,000 within five to seven years.
The company charges $35 to $50 per hour for IT expertise, which may cost around $100 in New York City. While this is no match for outsourcing rates in India, clients benefit from local accents and similar time zones -- not to mention the absence of stigma sometimes attached to farming jobs out to foreign countries.
...via Slashdot
Inside Knowledge talks about blogs and wikis and their tendency to enter organizations at the bottom-up level:
If you think that your organisation does not use blogs or wikis, then you may need to think again. Just as instant messaging appeared informally a few years ago, blogs and wikis are appearing as skunkworks projects across a large number of organisations. A blog is a good method of distributing information but its value really ends there. A wiki, however, provides facilities for a much more sophisticated exchange of information, since a wiki is a website where readers are able to contribute content and edit existing content.
Jakob Neilsen talks about enterprise usability:
Usability goes beyond the level of individual users interacting with screens. It's also a question of how easy or cumbersome it is for the entire organization to use a system.
An interesting case study on the major adoption of wiki software in a large organization (Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, an international investment bank):
One of the biggest users of Socialtext in DrKW is the Equity Delta1 equity financing team -- led by Darren Lennard, Global Co-Head -- which deals with stock loans, equity swaps, and structured equity-like financing.
The team suffered from having too much email to deal with, which made communication clumsy and difficult. They neededed a collaborative working methodology for the development of business plans and for process analysis. They also needed to have some way of storing commonly-used information that was more usable than a simple file dump.
Equity Delta1 uses the Socialtext workspace in a number of ways.
As new topics come up, such as which clients they cover or how they analyse their business, they create an open forum where anyone can post views, comments and questions on given subjects. When it matures, the discussion becomes a formal page. They also use the wiki to publish and share white papers and bulletins, coordinating sales and marketing activities, and discussing and organizing critical team tasks.
Because discussion is now happening on the wiki, email usage has dropped significantly. The Equity Delta1 team's intention is to make Socialtext their sole means of communication and indeed they are already using it daily.
However, the team are still learning how best to use Socialtext, and still see it as an equivalent to shared folders and files rather than as a more versatile collaboration tool. There has also been resistance to the openness of the wiki. The Delta1 workspace is separate to the DrKWikipedia (which is accessible to any employee of DrKW), and without this privacy, Lennard believes that his team would not have adopted it so rapidly. But once use of the Delta1 wiki matures, it will be ported over to the DrKWikipedia wiki.
...via Many-to-Many
A new portal that provides easy access to freely available educational resources:
A new Web initiative launched today at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), will connect anyone with Internet access and the desire to learn to a world of free, high-quality open educational materials. The Development Gateway Foundation’s “Open Educational Resources” portal aims to equalize access to education and help people in developing countries improve their chances for a better life.
The portal features free course materials and other educational content offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Chinese Open Resources for Education and other institutions around the world. The initiative is launched in partnership by the Development Gateway Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
...via
From the Belfast Telegraph:
A small but growing segment of today's dearly departed are preparing themselves for the afterlife with the latest electronic gadgets, with mobiles at the top of the list, according to funeral director Seamas Griffin of Kirwan's funeral homes in Dublin.
...
"I've seen it a few times. It's not a big trend but it is going on. I've seen people buried with all kinds of things, even a pager," he said.
...
"Some other people may be terrified they'll wake up in the coffin, so they take along a mobile to ring for help to get them out," he said. However, certain rules would apply, including making sure the mobile is switched off or on silent before it accompanies the deceased.
IBM is developing an application that to analyze how online discussions and blogs are affecting a company's image:
IBM originally developed OmniFind to index and search information that resides within corporate networks. But it found that some customers were keen on learning what outsiders were saying on the Web about a given corporation, said Marc Andrews, IBM's director of strategy and business development for unstructured information.
"Organisations are struggling to understand what people are saying about them in public," said Andrews. "That ends up having an impact on opinion and buying decisions."
...via Smart Mobs
eBay's founders are donating money to start a microfinance fund at Tufts University:
EBay Inc. founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pamela on Friday said they gave $100 million in eBay stock to Tufts University to create a fund that will invest in international microfinance, or lending to people who are too poor to qualify for traditional loans.
...via Smart Mobs
A new Pew Internet & American Life report talks about American teenagers as content creators and consumers:
American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.
Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. Teen bloggers are more fervent internet users than non-bloggers and have more experience with almost every online activity in the survey.
The Highest Points in all 50 States
Dig to the Other Side (if you actually dug that hole through the center of the earth, where would you end up)
at Wikipedia:
The World Futures Studies Federation is the organizing force behind The Great Wiki Raid. WFSF “raiders” will endeavor to add as much information as they can, in multiple languages, regarding the topic “futures studies” over the course of one day. Choosing Wikipedia as their “target” acknowledges the dramatic way in which digital technology is transforming knowledge creation and distribution.
...via JoHo the Blog
...doesn't mean you don't know they're there.
A recent study indicates that despite fears that text messaging is ruining, the teenaged mind, young people are more literate than ever:
Teenagers are ten times more likely to use non-standard English in written exams than in 1980, using colloquial words, informal phrases and text-messaging shorthand — such as m8 for ‘mate’, 2 instead of ‘too’ and u for ‘you’.
Despite this, the two-year study found that today’s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling.
...via Smart Mobs