Napster Gags University Over RIAA's Student Tax
Napster is taking action after Ohio University gave some indication of how much it charges universities to offer music access - a survey distributed by the university suggested the cost would be $3 per person per month. More...

Microsoft Unveils Digital Rights Management Software
As discussed before in these pages, the Microsoft DRM system, named 'Janus', supports the 'rental' of multimedia software, including songs and movies, to be played on portable players, cellular phones and other devices. More...

Patterns in Unstructured Data
The future, say some (well, me and William Gibson, at least), lies in pattern matching. This is a very nice twelve page article that gets into the details of how pattern matching is used to generate search results using latent semantic indexing. It's worth taking some time to read this, because this is the secret recipe behind such things as Google News. More...

Grow with Google provides opportunity for all Canadians
Sabrina Geremia, Google Official Canada Blog, 2018/09/17
According to this announcement, Google is "furthering our commitment to helping Canadians prepare for the future of work by launching Grow with Google, an initiative to help Canadians acquire the digital skills they need to grow their business or get a job." They're "partnering with Canada Learning Code to provide Canadians with free tools and training." And they're "bringing our Professional IT Support Certification Program to Canada." There's a list of events associated with the initiative, including one in Iqaluit. More...

The problem with Harvard Business School case studies
Lila MacLellan, Quartz, 2018/09/24
The Harvard Business School method of using case studies is well known to management students. The cases are drawn from real-world examples and students are asked to imagine themselves in the position of a protagonist (usually the CEO) and to argue for what ought to be done. More...

Introducing Blackboard Open LMS – the New Face of Our Moodle-based SaaS Product
Kathy Vieira, Blackboard Blog, 2018/09/19
The next act in the Blackboard versus Moodle saga is finally playing out as the former has announced that 'Moodlerooms' is now 'Blackboard Open LMS'. No expense was spared picking the new name. Here's the new website. More...

Official: Google Chrome 69 kills off the World Wide Web (in URLs)
Shaun Nichols, The Register, 2018/09/10
This, I think, is going to become a bigger issue, and it has a lot to do with the way the underlying structure of the web is beginning to change. On the surface, web browsers (specifically, Safari and Chrome) have begun to obscure the URL. The URL identifies the web site address of the page you're looking at (and usually, but not always, corresponds to a specific IP address, which is the site's numerical address). More...

The Nature of Meaning in The Age of Google
Interesting link sent to me by the author, Terrence A. Brooks, describing some of the tricks and tactics used to register content in the Google search service. The author employs the term 'lay indexing' to describe the 'plebiscites' used to organize and rank pages by link freuqency and page rank. More...

The Once and Future King
Reaction to the Sun agreement with Microsoft. Government does not have the will to roll back Microsoft's monopoly and the company has the money to pay off any sufficiently strong corporate competitor, as it has Time Warner and Sun. More...

Google IPO Could Re-energize Valley
Everyone is going ga-ga over the possibility of a Google IPO. Let me go on the record as being (possibly the only person in the world to be) opposed to the idea. Sure, an IPO would generate a whack of cash. But Google makes money now, good money. More...