The Power Of Twitter

-I am using RSS less and less lately. Mostly due to FriendFeed, but also because of Twitter ...

-People worry about companies starting to use Twitter for marketing. If companies misuse Twitter, block or unfollow them. Problem solved. Remember, it's who you follow that defines you...

-Twitter is the public square. Lots of noise, little signal. Blogs are like a speech. Signal, but little noise ...

A group of folks, led by Wendy Seltzer, Geoff Goodell and Steve Schultze, has filed a comment on the FCC’s proposal that it give away some public spectrum to be used for national Internet access, with the requirement that the provider censor it down to what’s safe for a five year old. Wendy and her friends produced what I think is an outstanding, thorough, and legally-based criticism of this plan. (I’m proud to be one of the many signatories.) [Tags: fcc censorship wendy_seltzer ]

I choked up merely reading a transcript of it on my cellphone on a bus.

[Tags: obama berlin ]

Must-see photo, shared by Dave Winer. Click on the largest size your bandwidth allows…

David Recordon just announced the Open Web Foundation at OSCON. The OWF will be a non-profit organization focused on supporting the development of open, non-proprietary web specifications.

Clearly, the last thing we/I want is yet ANOTHER foundation, but we're hoping that this foundation will reduce foundation proliferation in the long run by making it a home for a number of projects that can be supported with single organization. The key functions of the OWF will be to incubate new specifications, help with licensing and non-assertion agreements, copyright (Creative Commons) for the specifications and community building and management.

We have an interesting list of individuals and companies already on board to support this initiative.

The organization will not compete with existing standards organizations. The focus will be on specifications and on the smaller, faster, more ad-hoc projects that need help sorting out the licensing and copyright issues and hope to feed many of these projects to the standards bodies as they become ready.

If you want to participate, join the OWF discussion group.

Congratulations to everyone who worked to get this started and thanks for letting me tag along. Hopefully, I'll have more to contribute as get going.

Other posts about this:

Brady Forrest
Scott Kveton
Dawn Foster
Open Web Foundation Blog
David Recordon's Blog
TechCrunch

HuffingtonPost today announced that, in addition to its usual front-page layout, it’s aggregating its content around 75 (so far) top-level topics. For example, here’s the Barack Obama page. This takes a page (so to speak) from the NY Times Topic pages, which pull together the NYT’s topic on something like 3,000 topics. The NYT Topic pages not only give a centralized place to read about something, they also give people a place to link to, which apparently happens a lot given the strength of those pages in Google rankings. Likewise, the Huffpo “Big News” pages can be linked to and are widgetized.

I’m not sure how the new HuffPo pages differ from the old pages you’d see when you clicked on a tag. Presumably, there’s been some level of hand editing, but I’m not sure

[Tags: huffington_post huffpo ny_times media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

More links that have come up at the Berkman discussion about keeping hard journalism sustainable:

snagfilms.com

reelchanges.org

glam.com

Some sites that have come up at a confab in progress at the Berkman Center about sustainable models for journalism:

Spot.us for public support of particular stories

Jay Rosen’sKiyoshi Martinez’s journalism.me

Dan Gillmor on helping the almost-journalists

The “iTunes of journalism”: Mochila

[Tags: berkman journalism media ]

President Bush has continually expressed his opposition to a housing bill that proposes to include $4 billion in grants for local governments to buy and refurbish foreclosed properties.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

By DeWitt Clinton, Google Developer Programs

The Google Code team is pleased to announce the availability of content licenses for projects hosted on code.google.com. Projects owners may now select from either the Creative Commons Attribution license or the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license to indicate the terms under which their non-source code materials may be distributed.

While this may seem like a minor change, it reflects the continued evolution of our mission to support best practices in open source software development. As the open web increasingly relies on protocols and formats that reach beyond source code, we encourage authors to apply an explicit copyright license to the data, documentation, and related media that complements their work.

Please join us in the project hosting discussion group if you have any questions.

Using free and open source software licenses for the code and Creative Commons licenses for the content makes total sense and I'm really happy that Google Code has decided to include CC licenses as a default. Thanks to DeWitt and crew for this.

Update:

Google Knol opened today, intended to be a platform for authoritative articles about a specific topics, also known as knols, by a created single author or collaboratively. The default license for a new knol is CC Attribution. A creator can also choose CC Attribution-NonCommercial or All Rights Reserved.

More on the CC Blog.

The first in a series of three short videos from the Digital Natives project of U of St. Gallen and the Berkman Center that tells the story of Zack McCune, a Brown student (and Berkman intern) who “won the DMCA lottery” and was sued by the RIAA. It’s nicely done product by summer interns Nikki Leon and John Randall, and it’s a cliff-hanger…

[Tags: berkman st_gallen riaa dmca digital_nativescopyright zack_mccune ]

Apart from becoming more and more unpleasant, recently business travel is also becoming far less necessary. With videoconferencing technologies improving and fuel prices rising, more businessmen and women seem to be choosing the option to stay put and use new technology to cut down on travel.

My session did go better than I expected and I was happy to finally get to meet Quincy Smith of CBS Interactive who was the moderator for our panel.

I did manage to shoot some photos, but not too many. I've posted them as a Flickr set. If I get any tomorrow, I'll post them as well.

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for SF for a brief visit.

Nobel laureate and former US vice-president Al Gore recently made a speech advocating that Americans abandon fossil fuels completely over the next ten years. His solution is ???that the price of carbon-based energy include the costs of the environmental damage it causes. I have long supported a sharp reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made up in CO2 taxes. We should tax what we burn, not what we earn. This is the single most important policy change we can make.

The 4th iCommons Summit is being held in Sapporo, Japan from 29 July to 1 August, 2008. The summit originally started as a gathering of Creative Commons country leads, but had evolved over the years into a global conference of people interested in social, educational, business, technical, creative, legal and other aspects of sharing, collaborative and open models for doing just about everything. I think it is the most interdisciplinary and global meeting of its kind.

The usual suspects will be there. This year, we have substantial participation from Sapporo City and should have interesting cultural programs as well as local Japanese participation.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone next week. Although there's only one week left, it's not too late to sign up and join. If you think Japan's too far away, you're not thinking globally.

Jon Udell talks about his interview of Dan Bricklin in which about Dan talks about his experience entering the world of audio. Jon says:

When I embarked on my personal audio adventure a few years ago, I naively thought that our fancy new digital technologies would make the whole process very simple. Boy, was I wrong about that.

As a coda, Jon uses the story of the production of of that very interview as an example of the routine complexities of audio.

Too true. I’m often tempted to record an interview but then I remember just what a pain in the butt it would be to edit it, even with my very low standards for audio quality.

So, is there something wrong with the idea of writing software that:

1. Converts spoken audio into text (presumably using existing tools)

2. Lets you use an editor to delete pieces of the text and move other pieces around, as you would with a low-end word processor

3. Uses the edited text to edit and output the audio

Even if Step 1 worked only moderately well, this application would turn editing spoken audio into a trivial task, no harder than (in fact, exactly the same as) editing a text file.

Does this software exist? Is there a good reason why it doesn’t, shouldn’t or couldn’t?

[Tags: jon_udell dan_bricklin podcasting ]

When you walk around the Bangalore campus of technology-outsourcing giant Wipro, something feels familiar. Sure, it's India, so the sun is too hot and the women float by in a rainbow of saris. But there's still a sense of d??j?? vu. At lunchtime, young employees (average age: 27) swarm into cafeteria cliques, or stream into computer labs, or exit en masse from one three-story lecture hall into another. Oh, that's right. It feels like college.