Practicing the Liberty He Preaches
It's at the end of the article, and you have to be looking for it, but it's nice to see this little bit of honesty from Lawrence Lessig as "he was gratified that remixes of his book had popped up (free-culture.org/remixes), although it took some getting used to. 'I confess when it first happened, I had to take a deep breath and reconvince myself of the principles here,' he said." This is well worth noting. More...

The Online Presence Spiral
Interesting article on the potential and current limitations of audio visual communication over the internet, based in practical experience. The author identifies two major issues: voice quality and image lag. Both of these are caused by lack of bandwidth and lack of processing power, both of which will ease over time. More...

The RSS Bubble
Another RSS bubble article, this one looking at the business potential for the format. "The conventional wisdom is a Bubble. The Bubble isn't back—it never left. We are still surfing along on this mass hallucination called the Internet. Virtual reality? Give me a break. Mass customization? Dynamic real-time always-on always-connected mall in the sky? Free phone calls and video chats? Tablet PC? WiFi? What are you smoking?" But still, "I've yet to see anyone move to RSS and then abandon it. If that's a Bubble, bring it on. But if hype turns out to be true, is it hype?" What Gillmor misses, though, is that RSS could do everything it promises and still be called a disappointment if nobody makes a pile of money from it. More...

Essay About Trends
Joi Ito: "It may seem unintuitive to argue that packaged commercial content can co-exist alongside consumer content while concurrently stimulating content creation and sharing. In order to understand how this can work, it is crucial to understand how the current system of copyright is broken and can be fixed." Right. Exactly right. More...

Taking the Public Out of Education
This article contains a reasonably good assessment toward the spread of private schools - as founded on what may be called 'marketplace democracy' in which dollars, rather than votes, determine public policy. More...

School Reaps Profits From Corporate Naming Rights
More evidence of the increasing incursion of commercial media into schools as we read of the "ShopRite (Gym) of Brooklawn Center and the Flowers Library and Media Center." I certainly agree that corporations should support schools. Only I think they should do it the same way the rest of us have to: through their taxes, and without what amounts to free advertising. This is an issue of fairness: if a corporation can spend its money to get its message into schools, then why can't I? My taxes pay for, at least, a locker. More...

A Prescription for Business Innovation
Pollard's essay (in three parts: Part One, Part Two, Part Three) are chock-full of good insights, like this one: "With the advent of the near-perfect consumer information these tools provide, traditional marketing has no remaining role, and the knowledge-driven transition of power from producer to consumer is complete." But more to the point, his overall conclusions regarding the nature and structure of innovation and business are very similar to my own. More...

ISO Approves MPEG REL
ISO has formally approved the MPEG Rights Expression Language (MPEG REL), formerly known as ContentGuard's XrML, the cumulation of what this short article calls an "inevitable" processs. This is by no means the end of the story, however, as the competing ODRL has also been widely adopted, including by the Open Mobile Alliance and our own eduSource project. More...

Metadata Quality in e-Learning: Garbage In – Garbage Out?
Overall, a good article which challenges the idea that authors ought to be exclusively responsible for the completion of metadata. The author describes the creation of 'collaborative metadata' in which the author provides some data and an expert in classification (say) provides additional metadata. More...

The Social Life of Echo Chambers
The capacity to personalize the web, or at the very least to locate smaller and smaller content niches on the web, has led to the sort of criticism described in this article, that "The Internet is a set of echo chambers in which people get together to talk with people who believe exactly the same thing as they do." The problem with this observation, notes the author, is that it's probably false. More...