Commission Suspends Content Guard Investigation
The acquisition by Thomson of a third of ContentGuard from Microsoft and Time Warner has had exactly the intended effect as the European Commission has effectively halted its investigation into the digital rights company. More...

Pulling Sense out of Today’s Informational Chaos: LiveJournal as a Site of Knowledge Creation and Sharing
When people think about blogging they usually think of Blogger. But that other blogging site - LiveJournal - has been around at least as long, has as many users, and is as viable a platform as Blogger. Perhaps more so - indeed, after Google took over Blogger it began to incorporate some of LiveJournal's features, such as the need to have a user ID in order to comment. More...

FirstLight
Scott Leslie points to and comments on FirstLight, a "Canadian example of digital rights managment for digital media." This is obviously a major collection and they've brought in a wide variety of suppliers - commercial content only, of course (we can't let the free content compete on an equal basis, now could we). More...

Cascades and Connectivity
eLearn Magazine has published my response to a column by Michael Feldstein in the same publication a month ago. In his column, Feldstein warned of the danger of 'cascade phenomena' in networks - things like following a fad or buying into a market bubble. He recommends that networks be managed in order to reduce the risk. More...

New Media Journalism Ethics And The Marqui Blog Paid Assignment
I am first of all going to give credit to Robin Good for calling it like he sees it. He is being paid for talking about Marqui (and has a nice little logo attesting to the fact) and is defending his credibility in doing it. And he's even getting a link out of me for the paid spot! But it's going to be the last. Let me explain. It's not that I doubt his credibility or his honesty in reporting, even though he is paid. No, not that. More...

RSS: Show Me the Money
More on the ongoing commercialization of RSS. This article looks at RSS advertisements, something that will be a tricky proposition for advertisers. The difficulty is, readers choose the content they want to read, which means it's a lot harder to put an ad in front of them. Too many ads, and the reader simply tunes out. More...

Quality Matters: Inter-Institutional Quality Assurance in Online Learning
Personally, I think that quality is best managed by a system of reviews and recommendations. This is because, as the article notes, everybody sees quality differently. That said, the authors here suggest that people "might not even know what to look for in assessing quality" and so have created a rubric of 40 elements alongside a quality management program. More...

Designing Courses: Learning Objects, SCOs, IMS Standards, XML, SGML
Nice comprehensive list of resources related to learning objects. The author flags Canadian resources (with a little flag) but readers should note that many Canadian resources (some by Rory McGreal and Norm Friesen stand out, among others) are not flagged as such. More...

WebCT: A Major Shift of Emphasis
You have to read all the way to the end of this summary of changes introduced in WebCT Vista to get to the zinger: "With so many comparable open source softwares emerging for course management, containing more varied features than WebCT, one has to wonder: how long can such costly proprietary products survive. More...