By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social Networking for Kids - Young Kids
It's pretty easy to miss these services targeted at young kids because we are outside the marketing window. But Will Richardson notes that both Nickelodeon and Disney are entering the social networking market, aiming their services at young children, joining established players such as Neopets and Club Penguin. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blackboard Inter Partes Determination Published
The nice clear version: "The USPTO found 13 of Desire2Learn's 14 claims to raise substantial new questions of patentability." (Aside: it is interesting to note that the use of a tag, in this case 'edupatents', imposes a requirement on the part of the writer - hence Feldstein's note in this post. This is why I use regular expressions rather than tags - a regular expression captures the words that would notmally be used in a post, rather than requiring that the author use a word that doesn't even exist. The Blackboard patent page uses a regular expression, which is why I don't even need to think about it). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Second Life&Voice - It Will Happen!
They can't handle more than 38,000 people at a time, forcing them to kick 'non-paying' customers off the service at peak loads, but they're going to have voice chat integrated by June, 2007? You know, what this reminds me of is AOL's original strategy - advertising like crazy, offering a service that they couldn't sustain, then turning around and using the hype money to buy a real business, which in their case turned out to be Time-Warner. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blackboard Announces New 'Institutional Effectiveness Platform'; Patents Pending
I guess it shouldn't surprise me that Blackboard's vision of the future of e-learning is exactly the opposite of my own. No loss; it leaves more room at the top for the successful companies. Thomson Learning, meanwhile, traditionally a close Blackboard partner, announces that it is adopting Sakai (though not cutting its connections with other LMS vendors). They write, in their press release, "In addition, Thomson Learning is glad to see one of its key business partners, Blackboard, Inc., making a move in the right direction to engage the open source community." Yeah. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Microsoft Hit with $1.5 Billion Patent Verdict
I would be more sympathetic to Microsoft had the company not just threatened lawsuits against Linux users. Even so, this verdict shows how ridiculous patent law has become. And, of course, it is the end user who pays for these verdicts. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Could Yahoo Pipes Make Repository Interoperability Obsolete?
So far as I am concerned, repository interoperability has always been obsolete, since the potential for Yahoo Pipes (and Edu_RSS, I might add, which does the same thing) has been apparent since the beginning of RSS. Note as well Scotte Leslie's comment, pointing to other applications that perform siliar functions. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google to Sell Online Software Suite
As the story says, "Google Inc. will begin selling corporate America an online suite of software that includes e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar management, escalating the Internet search leader's invasion on technological turf traditionally dominated by Microsoft and IBM." The real weakness of these applications is that, because they are online, they can run slowly. That's not a problem on a corporate intranet, and in addition, they become much easier to maintain. More...