FirstLight
Scott Leslie points to and comments on FirstLight, a "Canadian example of digital rights managment for digital media." This is obviously a major collection and they've brought in a wide variety of suppliers - commercial content only, of course (we can't let the free content compete on an equal basis, now could we). More...

RSS: Show Me the Money
More on the ongoing commercialization of RSS. This article looks at RSS advertisements, something that will be a tricky proposition for advertisers. The difficulty is, readers choose the content they want to read, which means it's a lot harder to put an ad in front of them. Too many ads, and the reader simply tunes out. More...

Firefox Spread Leads to Design Scrutiny, Built-In RSS Feeds
Good review of the new Firefox web browser with a balanced assessment of how the experience differs for those used to using Internet Explorer. Firefox is forcing web site designers to code to standards, argues the author (of course, if you do this then you have to fix the site to adjust to Internet Explorer's breaking of those standards). Also contains a short review of AOL's version of the Mozilla browser. More...

Blink
Some people call it intuition. Some people call it making a snap judgement. Whatever it's called, it seems clear that the human mind has the capacity to reach correct decisions quickly on the basis of very little information. Well - decision, at any rate. Not always correct; it depends on the circumstances. More...

A Typology of Virtual Communities: A Multi-Disciplinary Foundation for Future Research
I'm not really a big fan of taxonomies - their main use seems to be to give professors something to name after themselves. A taxonomy - being an organization of entities by keying on particular properties - is always relative to a use (and one would hope - but not always find - the properties relevant to the use). The only use identified for this particular taxonomy is that it is "useful to researchers who seek to pursue programmatic research and theoretical advancement from a variety of disciplinary areas," and is is so by virtue of being simple and universally applicable (or so says the author). It would help researchers form research questions. But (in my mind) not very good ones - we could ask, 'Does a member initiated or commercially sponsored community better foster collaboration?' And maybe even get an answer. More...

Creative Commons Licensed Library Launches - Delivering Mobile Editions Of Books To Phones
This item showed up in the Creative Commons feed today and was worth a look. The reference is to a site called WINK, which (as the headline promised) is launching a Creative Commons library of books for mobile phones. Following the site to the home page, however, I found something even more interesting - a service that will convert your RSS feed to mobile phone content. More...

Shibboleth Update a.k.a. shibble-ware
This is a great presentation, the clearest dscription of Shibboleth - a system that shares user authentication between participating universities - that I've seen. Especially useful is Slide 7 (be sure to view this in presentation mode) which shows step by step how the parts of Shibboleth interact. More...

Thunderbird RC1
Once we've got you all switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox, there's another treat for you. Thunderbird, the open source email client made by the people who make Firebird, is just a hiccup away from its formal release; the RC (release candidate) is the final version before the official release, expected in mid-December. More...

Pierre Berton
When I was young my father and I split a membership in the Book of the Month Club. I read quite a lot about the Second World War (Shirer, Churchill, Speer) and read the complete Sherlock Holmes, among other things. But the books I remember most of all had titles like 'The National Dream' and 'Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush'. I may have studied Canadian history in school, but it was Pierre Berton who made it come alive for me. More...

The Daring Dozen
They're all American, so we'll call this a national perspective. That notwithstanding, it is worthwhile to pause and look at some of the examples we find in our community of people who go above aand beyond to serve the needs of education. And it occurs to me - maybe an international 'online learning Hall of Fame' might be a good idea. Or maybe not. More...