Oy! Getting here from DC was an ordeal, but I made it.
Suggestions to the airline industry: most passengers would willingly provide you with height and weight information if it meant that you could analyze the data to assure that you don’t seat three men, each over 6′ tall and 200 lbs, in the same row in coach. At least assure that the 6′5″, three hundred pounder can sit somewhere besides the center seat next to my window seat. I think I still have the impression of the plane window on the left side of my face.
The good news is I managed to re-jigger my flights to leave on Saturday instead of Friday, so at least now I’m not missing the last day of the conference. Happy, D’Arcy? ;-)
Tomorrow, the conference. For now, sweet sleep and luscious elbow room!
MERLOT Conference
I’m off a little later today to the MERLOT learning objects conference in Vancouver. Stephen Downs has written code to automatically aggregate MERLOT-related posts from RSS feeds. Will be interesting to see how effective it is.
Unfortunately I’m missing the opening stuff and reception today and most of Friday because of crappy flight schedules and conflicting commitments. Sigh. It’s hardly worth flying across the contintent to miss almost 1/3 of the conference.
MERLOT Conference
TypePad, the new hosted weblog service from Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, was launched at 11:59 PM on Monday, August 4.
To quote Matt Haughey for a second time this week:
You know what I call 11:59 PM on August 4th? Tuesday.
Unlike Blogger, the service which TypePad’s business model most closely resembles, TypePad isn’t free, although with the basic plan starting at $4.95 per month it is relatively cheap. I say relatively, because I only pay $5 per month to ICDsoft, my web hosting provider. ICDsoft doesn’t provide me with nifty weblog authoring software, so I had to install Movable Type myself, but for that five bucks I get a heck of a lot more space (333 MB) than TypePad is offering, plus a lot more flexibility.
But I’m a power user. Even more so than Blogger, TypePad is a service aimed at the Aunt Mabels of the world — the non-technical consumer who doesn’t place any importance on a webhost having MySQL and PHP support or whatever. They want a tool that has a good interface and accomplishes the desired task. And they’re probably willing to pay the price of a vente mocha frappucino for it each month.
I don’t think the competition for TypePad will come from Blogger or Userland. From what I’ve seen of TypePad, the interface outstrips both of those products. TypePad will eventually have to compete with AOL Journals and whatever weblogging tool MSN eventually releases (oh, c’mon, you know they will). Since the Aunt Mabels are already paying for AOL or MSN, Six Apart will either need to grab those users and make them good customers right now or have a convincing story to differentiate TypePad from the weblog tools that will be rolled into the consumer online services. Just having a better interface may not be enough to dislodge Aunt Mabel.
Weblogs
From this morning’s Washington Post, A Fight for Free Access To Medical Research:
[T]he vast majority of the 50,000 to 60,000 research articles published each year as a result of federally funded science ends up in the hands of for-profit publishers — the largest of them based overseas — that charge as much as $50 to view the results of a single study online. . . .
Why is it, a growing number of people are asking, that anyone can download medical nonsense from the Web for free, but citizens must pay to see the results of carefully conducted biomedical research that was financed by their taxes?
The Public Library of Science aims to change that. The organization, founded by a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and two colleagues, is plotting the overthrow of the system by which scientific results are made known to the world — a $9 billion publishing juggernaut with subscription charges that range into thousands of dollars per year.
In its place the organization is constructing a system that would put scientific findings on the Web — for free.
The Public Library of Science is using a Creative Commons license, although Creative Commons is never mentioned in the article.
Intellectual Property
More on simplicity vs. complexity in RSS in Battle of the blog, an article on C|net.
Syndication & Aggregation
Vis a vis the discussion taking place around this earlier post, here are comments from Robin Good on The Death Of The Webmaster: Why Weblogs Bring A True Revolution To Internet Publishing [link via Doc Searls]:
It has never been to no-one enjoyment to have to go through through lengthy, and not intuitive procedures to simply make some new text appear on a certain page of your site.
Robin goes on to list all the advantages of using content management technology to make the tag-level formatting irrelevant to content author . . . and, by doing so, bring about the demise of the traditional “webmaster” whose role was to take all the content provided by authors and massage it into something presentable via the web.
Provides good fodder for the previous discussion of why “human readability” of formats and expectations of hand-coding by typical consumers (not necessarily developers) should go the way of the dinosaurs and Commodores. Well worth a read.
Syndication & Aggregation
Matt Haughey, posting on Metafilter, about the difference between stealing and copyright infringment
Stealing is walking into a Art Gallery and taking a painting under your arm and leaving.
Copyright Infringement is going to a national gallery and taking a digital photograph of a painting, then going home and printing it for placement on your wall.
One involves the theft of property, making it so there is 1 less painting in a gallery, the other does not. In either case, no money exchanges hands with the gallery, but in the second case there was potential for a sale of a painting.
It’s a thorny issue, and neither side is completely in the right, but there is a difference between “stealing” and “copyright infringement” that is worth noting, and perhaps, worth thinking about when drafting new laws to deal with it (please, please, please don’t use old property laws for copyright infringement).
About as good an explanation fo the difference as I’ve read.
Part of the problem with the whole debate over file-sharing, MP3s, et al is that “intellectual property” is a term that misleads people into believe that the creative works must be treated the same as physical “property.” In fact, they simply aren’t. Don’t believe me? Try this experiment:
Give someone your blender. Let them take it home with them. Now sit in your house, and try to make a smoothie in your blender.
Now, give someone your idea. Let them take it home with them. Now sit in your house, and try to make use of your idea.
You can’t do the former because physical property is “rivalrous.” It is a limited resource and can’t be owned or consumed concurrently. If I steal the Mona Lisa, you can’t go to the museum and see it. If you take my blender, I can no longer use it. Intellectual property is a “non-rivalrous” resource. My consumption of it doesn’t impact yours. If I take a photo of the Mona Lisa, the original is still hanging on the wall of the museum. You can take my idea, but I haven’t lost it by you taking it.
Intellectual Property
I’ve slightly revised the draft for this weblog’s editorial policy. I doubt there will be many more changes, but as before, any feedback is appreciated.
Read more…
Weblogs