By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. eBay Bans Auctions of Virtual Goods
eBay makes the right call here. Forget the dire prediction offered by this article, that "eBay may be effectively forcing players who participate in such trades into the hands of giant third-party operations that buy and sell virtual goods." The demand is created by the ease of selling on eBay and the ready market that the online sales site provides. Take that away and you take away a lot of the market as well. And although Second Life customers are not affected by the ban, eBay was probably looking at reports like this: The Liquidity Event (via Mark Oehlert). Basically, Second Life "land will likely become completely devalued and possibly even inaccessible except for further expenditure... because of a choice Linden Lab itself has already made, which is to open-source the server code and create the possibility for people to host their own virtual worlds." How much is virtual land worth if it's no longer scarce. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Buying Vista? Get a Guarantee
Microsoft Vista comes out tomorrow but I would certainly not recommend that you run out and buy it. And not simply because of the very dodgy licensing, as outlined by Michael Geist (including "extensive provisions granting Microsoft the right to regularly check the legitimacy of the software and holds the prospect of deleting certain programs without the user's knowledge"). No, because you can't even know it will run on your computer. "Cherry recommends against modifications and says consumers should instead purchase a new machine." And that's the thing, isn't it. You just can't buy a new computer without buying Vista. All that talk, all those court cases, and you still can't buy a computer without buying Vista. And our anti-trust laws? Waste paper. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Grid Computing, Facebook, and YouTube
Still working on the site, including some email issues. Hang in there. This link is to a handly list of the EDUCAUSE guides that have been published over the last year or so on a variety of online learning topics. Good reference. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Seb Schmoller[Edit][Delete]: Google's Patent Search, Fortnightly Mailing [Edit][Delete] December 15, 2006
Google has launched a new patent search tool and of course the first thing everybody in our field has done is to look up learning. Here's a patent for roles-based access control from 1997 - this is one of the things Blackboard claimed in its patent. And 'learning'? A search reveals 1147 patents - and a lot of work for someone, I guess. I think we need to get a handle on this, though I must confess, I preferred my earlier strategy - ignoring the U.S. Patent Office as irrelevant. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Michael Feldstein[Edit][Delete]: Blackboard Patent Celebrity Death Match, E-Literate [Edit][Delete] December 11, 2006
Michael Feldstein opines about the recent debate between Blackboard's Matthew Small and the Free Software Foundation's Eben Moglen's (see the coverage from Seb Schmoller about the Blackboard patent and lawsuit. Feldstein is unhappy. "Some audience members were offended by Moglen," he writes, "describing him variously as 'a bully', 'a pimple', and 'our side's version of Rush Limbaugh'." Maybe so. But when you launch a war you need to expect to sometimes be attacked. And make no mistake about it, Blackboard launched a war. Mattyhew Small may be good at making people like Michael Feldstein feel sorry for him, but it's all tactic, not reality. The reality is that his company is trying to destroy Desire2Learn and that it is pandering to a court's basest sentiments to do it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Beginning of the End For Open Web Data APIs?
Google is abandoning the Google search API (glad I never built anything that depended on it) and replacing it with an AJAX widget, which "forces you to hand over part of your web page to Google so that Google can display the search box and show the results the way they want." Just remember - when there is centralized ownership and control, there will eventually be limitations and restrictions intended solely for the benefit of that ownership, at your expense. It's true in the realm of world government, which is why we oppose fascism. It's also true in software. More...