Big Vendors Reaffirm Commitment to Standards
More coverage from the eLearningresults conference in Sestri Levante, Italy, as major companies outline their plans for standards compliance in e-learning. Microsoft endorses the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF). More...

Blog Eats Blog
Last week's O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference demonstrated the power of a few 'elite' bloggers (thus confirmed by link counts and Google page-rank) and a mass of chaotic, confused and contradictory coverage, complains the author, "a seamless and essentially author-free porridge of commentary - lacking substance, structure or meaning." What is needed, he argues, is the controlling and mediating influence of journalists - and correspondingly, some means of holding the blogging elites to account. More...

Search Results Clogged by Blogs
There is increasing concern about the influence blogs are having on search results in, say, Google. "With no deliberate effort, many dedicated weblog publishers are finding their blogs rank high on search results for topics that, oftentimes, they claim to know practically nothing about. Bloggers attribute prominent placement to the frequency with which they publish new material and the fact that other sites often link to their blogs." On the one hand, one may argue that the proper search results are being skewed. More...

Soda Constructor
I can't open this the way my desktop is currently configured (I need Java and Flash and all that working together). But this link sounds too interesting to pass by. More...

SCO Faces Hurdles in Linux Claims
The big weakness in SCO's case against everyone? The proprietary code it claims to own it released under a Gnu Public License. More...

Lessons From Afar
The Economist takes a look at distance learning and concludes that it didn't take. "The market for online-only programmes," argues the author, "is shaky at best." The article then lists a series of failed or failing ventures, most familiar to readers of this newsletter - Cardean, Fathom, NYU Online - and talks about the shift toward blended learning. More...

EducaNext
Portal for learning resources. I received the following email today: "Building interoperability among educational systems is an issue relevant to many of us. Allow us to inform you that a group of people, which started in the context of the Universal consortium has expanded to a much wider initiative in the meantime and is now partly funded by the Elena project. This group has recently reached a first milestone of its work agenda. More...

A President Tries to Settle the Controversy Over File Sharing
Penn State's Graham Spanier asks the music industry, "Why not pay a record-industry-approved music service a yearly, blanket fee, Mr. Spanier wonders, and let students download songs as they please?" Here's why: the music industry gets unfairly high prices for its music. More...