J. Boyle on the 2nd Enclosure Movement. I came across this article as I was putting together the reading list for TP5: The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain.(pdf file) This is a terribly interesting article that uses a fair amount of the history of intellectual property thought and economics to raise the … [Furdlog]
More for my reading pile on intellectual property. Maybe I should have gone to law school after all.
Lego fabrication, stylishly explained.
Check out this amazing Flash pased pixelart/video-clip interactive tutorial explaining Lego fabrication: the perfect marriage of style and substance. Link (via Kottke)
[Boing Boing Blog]
A factory tour without leaving your browser.
Information on the Assembly Line. Rats…it’s a class night, and I’ve got to catch up on a couple chapters. So I can’t do much more than make a quick blog entry for Jason Nichols’ very intriguing looking masters thesis called Information on the Assembly Line (subtitled A review of Information Design and its Implications for… [IDblog]
Looks to be a useful resource.
Jonathan Zittrain, law professor at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center, authors “The Copyright Cage” in Darwin Magazine. Recommended reading. Thanks to Ten Reasons Why.
Very helpful to understanding today’s copyright environment
Mom passed away last week. I've gone back and forth over whether to post something here or not. What finally tipped it was this write up from yesterday's memorial service that my Dad put together.
Thank you all for coming today and thank you all for your loving care and support. Ruth is delighted.
She firmly believed that we are all created in the image and likeness of Christ so she was convinced that He too was a collector (pack-rat?) of memorabilia (Crayola art, cards, pictures, “Good” report cards, awards, diplomas, knick-knacks, various “can't live without” items from her many travels, etc.). As a result she believed her first assignment would be to clean out all His closets and storage spaces before she could set up bridge games and our rooms. So if you see muddy rain and hear noisy thunder don't be surprised. It's Ruth organizing the clean-up crews. Wear a hard hat. The hail may be rather heavy and odd-shaped.
Thank you again for everything and listen for her infectious laugh.
So now you have a sense for where my occasionally off-center perspective comes from. We're all doing ok. And my hard hat is close at hand.
Jeff Jarvis discovers
North Americauser created contentOK, his post-9/11 postings were the direct inspiration for my blogging, and I find his old journo crossover views on this medium fascinating. But occasionally Jeff Jarvis fluffs one, so I’m going to have to diss my blog-daddy. In this case, he happens upon the revelation that about 2/3 of AOL users’ time is spent with other users’ contributions, and riffs from there. Fine to speculate on the implications, but I’m here to tell you this is old news. Similar distributions of user time date well back into the proprietary days of AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. Remember, I used to read usage time and income reports from the entrails of the CompuServe accounting system. This isn’t anything novel, nor does it have to do with the advent of blogs, social software, or anything else trendy. Same thing happened with crappy old ASCII forums, CB, and proprietary e-mail. It’s related to human nature, not the specific technology – so long as it’s two-way – and that in many ways is very good news.
We now return you to your previously scheduled new media speculation. [Due Diligence]
Glad to see someone out there who has been paying attention all along. You have to be very careful not to get caught up in the news business’s need to pretend there’s something new every day. Couple that with most people’s aversion to anything resembling a sense of history and you get breathless commentary on old news.
I once had the chance to hear the late Herb Simon give a speech on what constituted news. He walked the audience through a funny sketch of his gradual abandonment of the daily newspaper, the nightly news broadcast, the weekly newsmagazine, and monthly magazines as devoid of anything that resembled news. He finally settled on reading the annual update volume to the Encyclopedia Brittanica as being about the right frequency and perspective for his getting updated on what had happened that mattered during the year.
Staying in this context, I’m quite certain that Simon’s primary sources of information about stuff that mattered to him was his network of colleagues and friends, not “content providers” offering to keep him up to date.
What I think may be relevant today is that new tools (weblogs, wikis, etc) are pushing forward along the dimension of context management instead of content. Perhaps what we are building with weblogs, RSS, and the rest is the infrastructure for personalizing and managing context on a new scale.
Just took the political compass test. I am right between the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. Nice company. [John Robb's Weblog]
Looks like John and I are in the same general vicinity, as is Dave Winer. Certainly a more interesting way to think about things than a one-dimensional left-right analysis which always feels overly limiting. For another look at a richer way of thinking about political orientations you might want to look at Jerry Pournelle's “All Ends fo the Spectrum.”
DM Review – The Link is the Thing, Part 3
By Richard HackathornA partial list of references mentioned in this three part series:
Valdis Krebs :: Post-Merger Integration, Scale-Free Networks, The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia, Small World Project – Columbia University, Norah Jones, Citations: Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications – Wasserman, Faust (ResearchIndex), DM Review – Farming Web Resources for the Data Warehouse , The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web – Page, Brin, Motwani, Winograd (ResearchIndex), Pagerank Explained Correctly with Examples, Pagerank Explained. Google’s PageRank and how to make the most of it., SIENA, Associative Link Analysis resource site.
…Part 1 of this article (August 2003 issue of DM Review) reviews the work in network analysis of complex systems, particularly the recent research into the small-world (SW) property, aristocratic-egalitarian (A-E) distinction and tipping points. Part 2 (September 2003 issue of DM Review) applies these concepts to the business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) fields with a new methodology called Associative Link Analysis (ALA) by discussing the translation of typical warehouse schema into an associative graph form. This article, Part 3, the final in the series, describes several metrics for analyzing graphs, strategies and tactics based on the SW property, and implementation issues…
Additional reading on a few of the concepts introduced in this three part series:
“Small World Property”: Locality, Hierarchy, and Bidirectionality in the Web (ResearchIndex),
“Small World Architectures”: Multiple Scales in Small-World Networks (ResearchIndex),
“Tipping Points”: Tipping Points,
“ER Schema”: A Formal Framework for ER Schema Transformation – McBrien, Poulovassilis (ResearchIndex).
Great collection of substantive resources on network analysis. I wish that more of the designers of services like Ryze, LinkedIn, and the like had read and absorbed these lessons before launching into software development. I see little evidence that they have and with the lemming like rush of VC money into this space, I’m betting on a mini-bubble popping in the not too distant future.
Just returned to the office from a thoroughly engagaing lunch with Jim McGee. Jim is every bit as smart and engaging as his weblog would have you think he is.
As has become the norm in first-time meetings with fellow bloggers, all of the ordinary “getting to know you” stuff is gone. We already know each other, we already have an idea of what interests each other, and we jump right into a completely thought-provoking discussion. It was true when I met Chris & Joy, Ernie, Buzz, Matt, Denise, Jonas, Ross and many others.
John Robb wrote about this last year too. With “social software” getting so much attention lately, I think we would be wise to recognize that weblogs have become one of the best ways to get to know people you should know. You decide which people to associate with in part based on what they know — and blogs help establish that.
I’ve been fortunate enough to meet several of my friends face to face, but the most surprising thing is that after meeting them face to face it only reaffirmed what I already knew: they’re interesting, thoughtful people who I’m lucky to know.
By Rick Klau. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
Rick skips over the importance of two to an excellent conversation. After almost two years of reading each other's blogs, several phone conversations, and multiple last-minute lunch cancellations, Rick and I finally managed to break bread together.
We did indeed dive right into several conversations that were both challenging and entertaining. Something that would not be possible, by the way, simply as a side effect of several of the various networking websites such as Ryze or LinkedIn. While these sites may have a role to play, the picture you can build of someone on the basis of following their blog on a sustained basis (preferably in your aggregator) is not something that can be replaced by the dry recitation of resume tidbits and interests that make up the relatively static content of these networking sites.
Looking forward to future lunches with Rick.
After mass, I went to lunch with the adult education coordinator of the parish (St. Elizabeth’s, Glencoe — which always makes me think of Scotland’s infamous massacre) that’s invited me out to talk about The DaVinci Code. She and I traded ideas about the panel discussion, which includes Prof. Barbara Newman of Northwestern University and Brian Hastings of Church of Our Savior, over an Indian buffet. She’s rather more sympathetic to Gnosticism than I am, but we held a lively and wide-ranging converstion. It sounds as though the church will be packed; she’s estimating three to four hundred people will attend, overflowing the sanctuary and spilling into an adjacent parish room. If you’re coming, come early, I guess.
When I got back to my office, the Dean rang me up; the Board of Trustees had voted to promote me to full Professor. It sounded as though he said “effective immediately,” but I got lost in a jumble of subsequent topics. To be on the safe side, you may kneel and call me “Full Professor Adam” when you address me. [emphasis added]
Then, alas! I had to drop Margaret off on the train. Pip did her Halloween bit, Si is off at a (church) all-night lock-in, and I’m exhausted. I didn’t sleep well last night; tonight, I’m about to crumple altogether.
So typical of AKMA to try to bury the news about himself in this post. Even Boards of Trustees do eventually get things right sometimes. Congratulations on your promotion!