Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Question du jour
Trish Snyder: It will be interesting to see if “Relationship Economy” goes viral and promotes to common usage. She points to Building a Relationship Economy, which I wrote more than a year ago. She points to what Deb Schultz and Jerry Michalski say here.
What if we're really at Web 0.2?
Renee Blodgett wonders about the Web 2.0 Echo Chamber. there are always other realities and choices when we think there is only one.
Chris Nolan takes the long view of women and publishing online. The penultimate paragraph:
The tremendous interest in blogging—on the part of readers and writers—was the first wave. For some, it was a great experiment. For others, it's become an avocation. For some like me, a job. There's more out there to be discovered beyond the world of blogging, because what we have now—no matter how technically sophisticated it may seem, no matter how editorially appealing, no matter how popular—is temporary.
Quote du jour
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. — The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.
Looking north
More Hebridean Blues. Nice shots on the ground of what I shot from a plane last week.
In aught-oh-three we took a little trip...
Battle of New Baghdad is a video by my old pal Jan Lewis (who gave me my first writing/consulting gig on the West Coast, in 1985). In addition to Jan, it features Jerry Miller, founding guitarist of Moby Grape. Jerry treats us to what he calls his "Mesopotamian Lick", which Jan says he's been waiting more than 40 years to use. Jan adds that she wrote the lyrics (the tune is Johnny Horton's) at the beginning of the war, which is why it's surrealistically upbeat.
Toward copyright sanity in Hong Kong
The Intellectual Property Department of the Hong Kong government has called for public consultation toward "strengthening copyright protection in the digital environment". Responses were due by 30 April.
One response was DIGITAL COPYRIGHT REFORM IN HONG KONG: PROMOTING CREATIVITY WITHOUT SACRIFICING FREE SPEECH, a position paper commissioned by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of the University of Hong Kong and written by Peter K. Yu, a Hong Kong native, Associate Professor of Law at Michigan State University and research fellow with the Center for Studies of Intellectual Property Rights at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, China.
His document is sensible, readable and useful. It begins by urging the government to refrain from creating new criminal penalties for uploading or downloading of copyrighted works (something that appears likely to happen), and goes on to provide an excellent list of measures that would support creativity, economic participation, competitiveness and growth:
Introduce a format shifting exception that would allow copyright holders to reproduce legitimately purchased copyrighted works in different formats....
Introduce a ‘safe harbour' for innovators to develop products that are capable of substantial non-infringing use....
Introduce a special exception for the use of online materials by educational and research institutions.
Broaden the privilege for unauthorized use of online materials for news reporting purposes. In developing this privilege, ‘news' should be broadly defined to cover all newsworthy issues, while those who cover the news should not be narrowed to only traditional journalists or mainstream media...
Facilitate the use of orphan works on the Internet. Orphaned works
Introduce a format shifting exception that would allow copyright holders to reproduce legitimately purchased copyrighted works in different formats.
And many more.
The IP Department has a strong "anti-piracy" bias, but also claims to have an open mind. Professor Wu's consultation is a good test of just how open that mind really is.
And thanks to Rebecca for the lead (and much more: go there).