StreamCast Vows Peer-to-peer Protest
What happens when the power of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is applied to political lobbying. It's hard to say, exactly, but we could hazard a guess as Streamcast launches its campaign against the RIAA in the U.S. Congress. More...

IDC: WLAN Coming to Almost All Notebooks
Forrester may be predicting a WiFi crash, but with wireless LAN chipsets becoming standard for laptops, as this article suggests, it's pretty hard to agree with that prediction. The Forrester prediction is based on the fact that people won't want to pay for wireless internet access, especially in places where they may spend only a few hours, such as coffee shops and railway stations. More...

BLOG SPACE: Public Storage For Wisdom, Ignorance, and Everything in Between
I have talked recently in a couple on online seminars about the changing role of teachers. This article hints at the direction in which that role will evolve. "What happens when you start seeing the Web as a matrix of minds, not documents? Networks based on trust become an essential tool. More...

Popular Culture, Textual Practice and Identity
The author opines, "If literacy is changing, in the context of the new technologies, schools and teachers need to find ways to work productively with students to help them become critical users and producers of new texts and literacies." And given the analysis found in the body of the paper - analyses of text-based communication in the context of online gaming environments - it may well be that literacy is changing. More...

My Conversation With Mr. Safe
More on the potential successor to RSS, Echo. What strikes me as the most interesting about this is that the best way to design the specification seems to be to use the online equivalent of a blackboard with fifty writers. But, "Like I said, this is politically necessary. More...

The Echo Project
This is very interesting, and either the harbinger of peace in the RSS and content syndication communities (unlikely) or of open conflict (more likely) between those who support Dave Winer's approach to syndication, and those who don't. More...

LoJack for Your Stradivarius
RFID tags - small, passive radio frequency identification tags embedded in objects - can be used to track inventory or, as this story suggests, help trace stolen musical instruments. The obvious next killer application: lapel-pin RFIDs broadcasting information (marital status, business card, sponsored personal advertising) to listening handhelds and other mobile devices. More...

The RIAA Boycott Is On
The recording industry declares war against its customers, announcing plans for thousands of lawsuits, and its customers fight back, urging a boycott of all purchases of recorded music. Of course, we won't hear much (if anything) about this boycott through the taditional media, since it's owned by the same companies (which also explains much of the press coverage surrounding this issue). More...

Interactive Training for a Better Future: eLearning for the Socially Excluded
In the discussions of the effectiveness of e-learning we rarely hear about its use to extend access to those previously denied the opportunity to learn (the cynic in me thinks that this is because you rarely find the socially excluded working for corporations). But in my mind, this is one of the potentially most powerful impacts of the technology, reaching beyond the gainfully employed (or supported) and enfranchised. More...

Inter-Organizational Communities of Practice
This detailed article is a good look at the use of communities of practice to facilitate knowledge management and sharing between organizations. Though a reasonable practice (since there may not be sufficient mass in a given discipline within a single organization), inter-organizational communities of practice carry with them particular difficulties. More...