Record Industry Has No Plan to Seek Names of Students Trading Copyrighted Songs

"We may have lost a few games but I have complete confidence in the manager of our baseball team and we have no immediate plans to replace him." Yeah. Right. More...

US Tightens Net Copyright
"United States trade negotiators are pushing for Australia to sign up to a tough new copyright regime that could hold internet service providers liable for breaches." In particular, the U.S. would like to see Australia hold ISPs accounable for usage and to have Australia impose criminal sanctions against file sharing. More...

Campus Bookstores Have Best Buys, Study Says
This is one of those articles that could not possibly have any other headline. According to this study, sponsored by the National Association of College Stores (NACS), college stores give you the best bargains. Heh. More...

Not Your Father's Encyclopedia
What could be Britannica's major competition is not published by World Book or any other corporation. It's not published by anyone: it is the free and open source Wikipedia, a collection that has just reached its 100,000th article. The Wikipedia is the work of thousands of volunteer authors. More...

E-Commerce Standard Plans Made Public
This proposal gets a number of things right. It is royalty free. It is open. It meets a variety of clear needs. And it is widely endorsed. In a nutshell, "the Universal Business Language (UBL). UBL is a standard for XML document formats that encode business messages, such as purchase orders and invoices." Potential problems. More...

Several consumer products to get 'tagged'
By the end of the year, products are going to begin shipping with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags embedded in them. The chips are ting and can be attached to packages of razors, bottles of shampoo, or clothing. Most of the discussion on RFIDs centers around the commercial applications with some discussion of security. they will also be used in schools to track inventory and resource. More...

The Elements of Digital Storytelling
This important work offers a thorough analysis of the elements of online interactivity. While it doesn't contain everything it could or should, it is far-reaching and innovative. If you are interested in online communication, don't miss this work. More...

Ensuring a Free and Open (Source) Society
Quite simply, "Many governments have come to see proprietary software as a threat to their democratic institutions and have started crafting legislation to meet the challenge." The implications of the use of open source data and processing in a free society are profound. More...

The Information Railroad is Coming
You've probably read most of the points in this article before, but the railroad metaphor is compelling and the article is superbly written. Beginning with a closer look at the impact of technology on books and libraries, the author works nicely through an examination on the impact on teaching and the role of the university. More...

Voice Interfaces: Assessing the Potential
According to Jakob Nielsen, speech will not replace screens as the medium of choice for most user interfaces. And it won't, if we think of voice interface as consisting of selecting tasks, finding commands, or selecting from lists (think about how much you hate those automated answering systems). More...