RSS to replace email? Nah.
Jon Udell expresses doubt that RSS will replace email. His mail argument is that his current combination of spam filters work fine (though his email account is groaning under the volume). "It would be nuts," he writes, "to throw out the SMTP baby with the spam bathwater," though some tweaking (to verify that the sender is allow to send from that address) amy be needed. I don't agree, and here's why. More...

The EU Fight Against Yuck ePatents
More coverage, with links to several articles and discussion (of varying quality) following. More...

The Iron Fist, The Invisible Hand, And The Battle For The Soul of Open Source
Bruce Sterling warns, "The denizens of Open Cultures want their connected collectivism to liberate the world from regulations, markets, and intellectual property. But what if victory only clears the way for corruption of their beloved culture?" But aside from the limp observation that a gangster won't be receiving any money for recording an average album, I don't see the grim consequences here. More...

Dollar Benefits of E-Learning
The evidence is this: "We launched a complex product a year ago, and we found that sales folks who'd completed all four e-learning modules had sold 25 units in a 30 day period while those who hadn't averaged 17 units in the same period of time." Sales folk? Oh well. More...

Cut-and-Paste, Turn It In -- You Call That Cheating?
According to this article, "Nearly 40 percent of college students have plagiarized papers by using the cut-and-paste function on their computers to lift text from the Internet, according to a new nationwide cheating study." The definition of plagiarism (apparently) used is "by either paraphrasing or copying a few sentences of material off the Internet without citing the source." It should be no surprise that "Business majors admitted to the most cheating, with 63 percent saying they cheated at least once in the last year." Interestingly, the report takes care not to blame the internet for the cheating. More...

Personal and Collaborative Publishing: Facilitating the Advancement of Online Communication and Expression Within a University
PCP "is the system by which an individual or group of individuals can simply own and publish to a web space." The most straightforward example of PCP is the weblog, but many other examples (such as wikis) exist. More...