DigitalKoans

What was new and interesting during the week of 8/6/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Amazon on Demand"
  

  CustomFlix, Amazon's on-demand DVD distribution service, has just been rebranded as CreateSpace, and will now serve up self-published media of all types.

• " Book Circulation per U.S. Public Library User Since 1856"
  

  From 1978 to 2004, book circulation per user declined approximately 50%. The growth of audiovisuals circulation, estimated at 25% of total circulation in 2004, accounts for about half of this decline.

• "Eric Schmidt Defines Web 3.0"
  

  He said that while Web 2.0 was based on Ajax, Web 3.0 will be "applications that are pieced together"—with the characteristics that the apps are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, the apps can run on any device (PC or mobile), the apps are very fast and very customizable, and are distributed virally (social networks, email, etc).

• "Flattening of the U.S. Output of Scientific Articles: 1988–2003"
  

  As reported in the Aug. 3 Science, a recent NSF analysis of U.S. scientific publishing output during the time period 1988-2003 shows that the number of articles produced has remained fairly constant in all areas of science.

• "Google News Rolling Out Expert User Comments"
  

  Users of the U.S. version of Google News will now be able to comment on a story, that is assuming they're somehow involved in it. The process is not for everyone, and in fact requires a lengthy verification process of sending off your comment and credentials to a special Google e-mail address, and later verifying your identity via domain name and an e-mail follow-up from Google staff.

• "Internet Radio Equality Act: Not Dead Yet, Could Be Revived This Fall"
  

  July 15 did not prove to be the "day the music died," as royalty—collection entity SoundExchange neglected to enforce the new royalty rates on Internet radio set by the Copyright Royalty Board earlier this year. Instead, after versions of IREA had been introduced in both the House and the Senate to strike down the new rates, SoundExchange opted to negotiate with webcasters instead.

• "Just Before Recess, Senate Approves FOIA Reform Bill"
  

  The day before adjourning for August recess, the Senate unanimously approved S.849, the OPEN Government Act, a bipartisan bill that is the first significant update to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in more than a decade.

• "Legal Code Is More Like the Windows Kernel Than Project Gutenberg"
  

  The law has more structural similarities to software code than to the prose in Gutenberg's 17,000 books:

• "More Publishers Jump into YouTube Infringement Lawsuit"
  

  Just recently, the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) joined an ongoing, class-action lawsuit against YouTube, one triggered in part by publisher Bourne Co.

• "A New Way to Mix PowerPoint and Audio"
  

  On the Web 2.0 Teaching Tools blog, Alan A. Lew, a professor at Northern Arizona University, points to another solution. The Web site Slideshare, where people can upload and share PowerPoint presentations, has a new feature called Slidecasts.

• "New Zealand ISPs Fight Back against Proposed DMCA-Like Takedown Policy"
  

  However, the good news is that ISPs there are fighting back against the proposal, questioning why they should need to waste their time on this. Instead, they suggest a much more reasonable "notice and notice" process, whereby the ISP would pass on notification to the user responsible and give them a chance to respond, contest the charge, remove or change the content in question.

• "On the Necessity of Open Access and Open Data"
  

  As this report was being prepared, the publishing service Crossref announced that it would begin a pilot program to index the contents of the journals produced by a number of academic publishers in order to expose them for the verification of originality.

• "Printer Health Risk Report Triggers Response from HP, Researchers"
  

  HP is presumably correct in indicating that its printers comply with all regulations that are currently in place to limit known hazards. But the study has identified a previously unknown source of pollution that may also be a hazard, one that cannot possibly have triggered a regulatory response yet.

• "Report Tracks Search Engine Privacy"
  

  A report published recently by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) tracks the efforts of the leading Internet search companies as they begin to compete aggressively with one another to offer stronger privacy protections.

• "Researchers at MITH Partner to Preserve Virtual Worlds"
  

  The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games, interactive fiction, and shared realtime virtual spaces. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games and electronic literature, as well as Second Life, the popular and influential multi-user online world.

• "RIAA Lobbying Expenses Cross $650,000 During First Half"
  

  The RIAA spent $658,000 on lobbying efforts during the first half of 2007, according to public documents unearthed by the Associated Press. The expenses covered opinion-swaying efforts related to copyright protection and funding for enforcement campaigns, among other issues.

• "The State of Broadband in the US"
  

  The short takeaway is that the US is a second-tier country— at best—as far as information infrastructure. That is largely due to the fact that the market for broadband is not competitive in the US.

• "Survey Says: Only DRM-Free Music Is Worth Paying for"
  

  What makes this survey important is the fact that it was aimed squarely at the music-buying public, not the anti-RIAA crowd, not the techno-libertarians, and not our general readership.

• "Too Old for Facebook?"
  

  Those born in the 1970s and earlier are discovering that the social-networking site can be a compelling way to communicate.

• "U.S. Senate Approves FOIA Amendments"
  

  The most notable aspect of the draft legislation from our perspective is its expansive definition of "the news media," which appears to encompass bloggers and other online journalists.

• "Web-Based Collection Plans Help Libraries Build Digital Collections"
  

  The California Digital Library has recently published a selection of Web Collection Plans that will help libraries build collections in the digital age.

• "Yale vs. BMC"
  

  For around $65K, Yale gets about 40 articles published OA, that is,available free to everyone everywhere forever, plus a "subscription" (that is, Open Access, like everyone else) to 179 journals. The average biomed journal subscription is around $1000-1500/yr; choosing the lower figure to be conservative, those subscription-equivalents are worth $179K/yr. Even if Yale only wanted to subscribe to around a third of the BMC journals, that would still cost about the same as the OA charges—and this comparison ignores the page, color and miscellaneous charges that many journals levy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 10:50 pm and is filed under Flashback: Weekly News. Comments closed here. Read and add comments at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/.