Recent Blog Posts

The Canadian ISP Tucows recently commissioned David Weinberger to articulate their position as part of the Canadian Copyright Consultations, which ended yesterday.

The original can be found here - http://tucowsinc.com/news/2009/08/copyrights-creative-disincentive/ - and is reproduced in its entirety here.

Google is defending users rights in response to New Zealand's proposed section 92A amendments.

Statistics provided by Google suggest that the erosion of users rights is occurring in a multitude of ways at the intersections of business and communications technologies. The ease with which allegedly infringing uses are surfaced, and unsubstantiated takedown notices issued for the purpose of advancing a commercial position demonstrates the perils of an information culture oriented around restrictive interpretations of copyright and intellectual property law.

An engaging interview with Marissa Mayer, VP of Google.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/06/marissa-mayer-on-charlie-rose-the-f...

Google had a lawsuit on their hands because of their book scan project (entire content available, not just fair use). Now, Google released their site for the settlement they made with the author guild.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/11/google-book-settlement-site-is-up-p...

Google's claim site http://www.googlebooksettlement.com

For those of you interested in ICT policy here is an interesting investigative news story. GoDaddy (the biggest domain name company) uses "Standard Tactics LLC " to farm domains.

http://domainnamewire.com/2008/12/03/standard-tactics-llc-how-godaddy-pr...

Now with strike going into its 2nd week I finally got to many things on the To-Do list. Less yellow post-its on my wall - I hope I will be doing more blogging now being less busy.

Below is a tiny article I just read on techcrunch about open social turning 1.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/13/open-social-turns-one-my-how-youve-...

For you who don't know open social, it is a platform for social networking that was released by Google and adopted by all the Facebook-type social networks. Facebook was to support it but dropped it the night that open social was released.

Preserving Carnival

York University and Dr. Christopher Innes, the Canada Research Chair in Performance and Culture, recently hosted the international conference “Carnival, ‘A People’s Art’, and ‘Taking Back the Streets’”. As chair of the “Preserving Carnival” panel I had the opportunity to meet with a small group of international scholars and archivists to discuss preservation methods, strategies and challenges relating to carnival.

Timeline was developed by MIT's SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments) project. It interfaces data from an XML file with javascript and css for a visually rich, scrollable and draggable chronology interface. The tool is open source and potentially deployable within or in connection with Artmob archives for arts partners with an interest in visual chronologies.

A juried selection of rarely seen, difficult to find European films will soon be available online, for free. European Film Treasures, as the site will be known, is projected to include a collection of approximately 100 films at the time of its initial launch in April.

Catalogue Update Form
A mechanism on the Amazon.ca website that enables users to submit updated product information. Modifications to the title, author(s), publication dates, binding, publisher, pages, language, format and edition. Some fields you fill in yourself, others are drop down menus (such as format). Sent to the Amazon.ca webmasters

Image Feedback
A drop down menu that allows customers to report a problem with the image show onscreen, i.e. wrong product, poor quality. No feedback form available to submit.