DigitalKoans

What was new and interesting during the week of 11/27/06? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "2007 Digital Future Report"
  

  This year’s report contains a large module looking at on-line communities and social networking in great detail.

• "Creating a National Open Access Policy for Developing Countries"
  

  Held in India, in the first week of November, the Bangalore workshop on Electronic Publishing and Open Access (OA), was convened in order to agree a model National OA Policy for developing countries

• "Does My Digital Archives Need a Digital Repository System?"
  

  I have had this discussions with colleagues several times over the past couple of years. Somebody is getting ready to prototype a digital archives at their archival institution and the first question they ask is, "which open-source repository system should I use? Dspace? Fedora? Greenstone? Eprints?"

• "dotReader Is Out"
  

  dotReader, "an open source, cross-platform content reader/management system with an extensible, plug-in architecture," is available now in beta for Windows and Linux, and should be out for Mac any day now. For now, dotReader is just for reading but a content creation tool is promised for the very near future.

• "Duck Amuck and the Takedown Gun"
  

  Alice designs a spiffy new hot air balloon that everyone covets [in Second Life]. . . . What Alice needs is a takedown gun. When she sees an infringing balloon, she just points the takedown gun at it and pulls the trigger. The takedown gun does the rest, gathering the necessary information and sending a takedown notice, dooming the targeted balloon to eventual destruction.

• "Google on iPods and the Future of Digital Media"
  

  Arora said, by 2012, iPods could launch at similar prices to those on sale now and yet be capable of holding a whole year’s worth of video releases.

• "HighWire Press Launches Its 1000th Journal Site"
  

  HighWire Press celebrates the launch of its 1000th journal site, the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society.

• "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Creative Commons"
  

  On the personal side, lots of good things have come out of the fact that my cast-off photos are swimming around the internet with a CC license attached. People have written in checking to see if they can use them in textbooks, calendars, Ethiopian restaurant menus, novelty Amharic greeting cards.

• "Internet Archive Helps Secure Exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act"
  

  Thanks to the hard work of two great law school students of Peter Jaszi of American University, Jieun Kim and Doug Agopsowicz, the Internet Archive and other libraries may continue to preserve software and video game titles without fear of going to jail.

• " Judge Posner, Second Life, and Copyright"
  

  On December 7th, from 6 to 8 pm PST, in the Center Auditorium in Kula, Judge Posner, or more accurately, his avatar, will be interviewed. . . .
  The interview with Judge Posner is an important event in Second Life’s appeal outside of its original uses, and also is a window into why Judge Posner is our country’s most exciting legal figure: his curiosity and willingness to take the time to personally be involved in and learn about cutting edge of issues is awe inspiring

• "Library Delivery 2.0: Delivering Library Materials in the Age of NetFlix"
  

  This article discusses how Netflix and similar services are shaping expectations about product delivery, which in turn are driving libraries to rethink how items are delivered to their customers. Library Delivery 2.0 refers to the idea of delivering library materials into the user’s hands in a way that is personalized, convenient and fast.

• "MPAA Lobbying for Home Theater Regulations"
  

  The MPAA is lobbying congress to push through a new bill that would make unauthorized home theaters illegal. . . . The MPAA defines a home theater as any home with a television larger than 29 inch with stereo sound and at least two comfortable chairs, couch, or futon.

• "Open Access From the Publisher’s Viewpoint"
  

  Much has been said about open access (OA) in the past couple of years, with a large part of the debate from the viewpoint of the author or reader. So I was particularly interested in two presentations discussing OA from the other participants—the publishers. Jan Velterop, formerly at BioMedCentral and now Director of OA at Springer, represented a large publisher, and Paul Peters, Sr. Director of Publishing at Hindawi Publishing Corporation in Egypt, represented a smaller publisher.

• "Paramount, 20th Century Fox Embrace BitTorrent"
  

  Peer-to-peer company BitTorrent will begin distributing movies and TV shows for top entertainment companies starting this spring, the company is expected to announce Wednesday.

• "Random and Cold Medicine-Induced Thoughts on Screencasting"
  

  According to Jon Udell, the man who coined the term screencast (though the software has existed since the late 90s), "a screencast is a digital movie in which the setting is partly or wholly a computer screen, and in which audio narration describes the on-screen action."

• "Ray English, or: the Open Access Genie"
  

  Ray has been one of the leaders of two of the most active associations in open access, since their inception: SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Research Coalition, and the Association of College and Research Librarians (ACRL) Scholarly Communications Committee (currently co-chaired by Joyce Ogden and John Ober).

• "Repositories and Web 2.0"
  

  At a couple of meetings recently the relationship between digital repositories as we currently know them in the education sector and Web 2.0 has been discussed. . . . In both cases, I found myself asking "What would a Web 2.0 repository look like?"

• "Ripping DVDs May Never Be the Same Again"
  

  Just when you thought it might be safe to rip DVDs for use on your personal video player, the motion picture studios have filed a federal lawsuit in New York to put an end to such practices.

• "Stealing Fair Use, Selling It Back to You"
  

  "Apparently, Hollywood believes that you should have to re-purchase all your DVD movies a second time if you want to watch them on your iPod."

• "What Does Reed Elsevier Lobby for?"
  

  From January 1st through June 30th, Reed Elsevier spent $1,480,000 on U.S. lobbying activities.

• "What Podcasting Revolution?"
  

  No doubt about it, podcasting is growing in popularity. More people than ever are downloading audio files for listening on music players and other electronic devices. The question is: Are they doing it with much regularity? More to the point, how long before masses trade in the daily paper for the daily download? Not anytime soon, judging from a report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

• "Why an Abstract Model for Dublin Core Metadata?"
  

  It is perhaps more accurate to say that there were several such descriptions of "what Dublin Core metadata was," and those descriptions were not always completely consistent with each other. They often differed at least in their use of terminology, if not in the concepts they described.

• "XPath, XSLT, XQuery"
  

  XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 are now proposed recommendations.

• "Yahoo Rebuffs Google on Digital Books"
  

  Yahoo has rebuffed Google’s attempt to learn more about its efforts to create digital copies of books, dealing Google another setback as it prepares to fight a copyright infringement suit.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 11:04 am and is filed under Flashback: Weekly News. Comments closed here. Read and add comments at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/.