Much blogging

Cameron Barrett: Online Community Technologies and Concepts

Winer says Balderdash to Lessig. Lessig is arguing that the present copyright protections on software is excessive.

Is DHTML Dead? [link from Lawrence Lee]

Our Favorite Charities (Slate) "I don't feel comfortable endorsing a favorite cause or causes; every year I pick two or three or four charitable organizations and give about two-thirds of my contributions to ones that operate nationally or internationally (abortion rights, human rights, etc.), and the other third to a local one (aiding the homeless, for instance). This year, on the theory that most people are thinking globally, I plan to do all my giving locally. I do feel comfortable encouraging others to at least keep this in mind."

Karin asks about Deborah Tannen, someone that Isaac and I mentioned to her yesterday.

Jon Udell on hybrid storage models will be helpful when I get down to prototyping how to mix data found in the file system and data I'll have in databases. He uses Zope as a case study.

A NYT article on Duncan Watts, who is using email to study the "six degrees theory" of social-connectedness reminds me of my favorite piece by New Yorker staffer Malcolm Gladwell, "The Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg"

Thanks to Dave Winer for pointing out Library News Daily, which does look good. However, I'm not sure how well I'll be able to keep up with library-related stories. The lastest CurrentCites is out, and, as usual, has excellent references. The archives of CurrentCites will be an excellent source to come back to when I do some focused research next year.

Infoworld: "AN INFORMAL SURVEY of IT decision-makers whose companies are getting an early start at building Web services suggested that most developers are choosing Java-based tools over Microsoft's .Net, a research company said this."

Chron of Higher Ed. "An online publisher [Biomed Central] that offers its science journals free on the Internet announced this week that it would soon ask authors to pay a $500 fee to have their articles published....The company's ultimate goal is to alter the whole scholarly publishing system, so that the administrative costs of running journals are paid upfront and articles are freely available for anyone to read. Under the traditional system, institutions pay subscription fees to support commercial journals, and only subscribers have access to the articles. "

Another copyright article, this time telling the story of Dan Bricklin's experience with wanting to share Visicalc, which had been copy-protected. [link from Tomalak.]

Looking back and looking ahead

Today is the last day before my vacation and that of the vast majority of staff on the Berkeley campus. I'm trying to wrap things up before I rest, although this year's pre-vacation wrap-up will not be as stressful as in normal years, when I travel to visit family. This year, I am staying put in Berkeley. Not having to travel already puts me in a vacation frame of mind.

My ideal accomplishment today would be to organize my work to facilitate "hitting the ground running" when I get back to my office on January 2. I'll try but there are many loose ends. I've been wanting to write about what Isaac and I learned from Ruth Tringham and Michael Ashley-Lopez two days ago. Fred Beshears and I had a good discussion about IMS after he learned that I'm planning to write an article about the IMS standards for BC&C. I also need to write a slew of email...and I need to cook dinner tonight. Now, the fact that I am actually going to be in town over the vacation break means that I can work a bit -- but I decided that I need to stop.

So what about this blog during that period? I think that a low-key way to keep blogging would be do offer some reflections of this past year (the looking back) and think about the next year (looking ahead). And if keeping the blog stresses me out over the next few days, then I won't blog. I'm not addicted to blogging. I can stop at anytime.

Metadata, IMS tools, and Microsoft LRN

In looking for a comparison between METS and IMS, I found this nice write-up on metadata in the Oxford University Library.

Fred pointed CETIS out to me as an important source of information about IMS and related standards. Indeed, the site has information that will be useful for my BC&C article. The site actually has a pointer to a Microsoft add-in for Office to produce IMS-compliant course materials. (Alas, the pointer is a broken link, but google has a cache of the page.) So where did the add-in go? With more searching with google, I finally managed to find the new Microsoft E-learn page and a download page for the LRN Toolkit 3.0. Does this toolkit do as much as the add-in?

Nov Jan

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