Month: March 2005

Categories
Digital Culture

WordPress Ethical issues

Bit of a buzz around the wordpress forums and such today regarding Matt Mullenweg (the originator of WordPress) and his psuedo-ethical adword scheme to help pay for wordpress hosting. From the waxy.org link above:

I discovered last week that since early February, he’s been quietly hosting at least 120,000 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. (Update: Google is actively removing every article from their results, but here’s a saved copy of the first page of results. You can still view about 25,000 results on Yahoo. Here’s an example of some results in MSN.)

Ok, so…scamming the adwords in google seems a tad slimy, but understandable. Hiding the adwords articles with odd CSS positioning tricks lends even more oddity to the issue.

As someone on the waxy thread says…why didn’t he just do a straightforward ad-words column on the page? WordPress.org has enough traffic to make that worth his time, I would think.

In any case, we’ll see what Matt has to say when he returns from Italy.

EDIT: Google and Yahoo have both already removed these from their results. MSN still lists them, and here’s a direct link showing what Matt did. Load the page, then view: source and check the last DIV.

Categories
Digital Culture Legal Issues Library Issues

Reading aloud allowed

Just days after Jessamyn’s post regarding DRM, my good friend Catherine emails me this DRM Rights statement from an e-book that she was helping a patron with.

———————————————————–
Adsorption: Theory, Modeling, and Analysis. By: Jozsef Toth
File Size: 6825KB
Published: 05/10/2002
E-ISBN: 0824744497

DRM Rights:
Copy 25 selections every 1 day(s)
Print 25 pages every 1 day(s)
Reading aloud allowed
Book expires 150 day(s) after download
Note that Adobe eBooks cannot be shared.
———————————————————–

I think the insanity speaks for itself. Oh how I hate thee, DRM…stupid, stupid media companies. I know that eventually the reasonable, intelligent media will overcome the stupid, dinosaur media, but I’m no longer confident it will happen in my lifetime. DRM does nothing to stop theft of IP, nor to delay or dissuade those who would traffic in media in infringing ways. It only prevents the average user from using media in the ways they wish.

I had a conversation with my good friend Barron just the other day about why it was that he couldn’t listen to his Velvet Revolver album on his shiny new iPod. After I explained to him that in order to do so he would have to break the law, his response was basically: That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

Indeed it is.

Note: I am giving explicit permission for the reading aloud of this post.

Categories
The Living Dead

This is all I’m saying about it

Get your War On - Zombie

Categories
Digital Culture

Library of Congress Digital Futures

I just discovered this a few days ago, but Audible has downloadable files of the Library of Congress Digital Future series. If you have a music player that supports audible, these are free downloads! I listened to Lessig today, and have Brewster Kahle on tap for my monday drive to work. Tons of good info here, and again…it’s free.

Categories
Library Issues Personal

Thoughts on Epistemology and Authority

In a recent interview, Cory Doctorow discussed ontology, so I feel ok about pulling out some philosophy for this particular discussion.

One of the thoughts that’s been rattling around in my head lately is for an article related to the issues that librarians have with digital sources, specifically things like Wikipedia. The cry of most librarians is that digital sources (things like wikis, webpages, blogs) have no authority, no one standing behind them that lends them credence. Wikis are created by the masses, and can often be changed by anyone, and so, the argument goes, will simply devolve into the least common denominator of information.

But that assumes that knowledge is best judged by it’s origins, which is a highly debatable position. My favored epistemological position is a coherence theory of knowledge that is grounded in ontological realism. Knowledge (or Truth, as philosophers like to talk about it) is judged real when it is supported by a network of like facts. That is, if I were to attempt to convince people that I was 25 years old (by posting it on my website, putting an entry into the Wikipedia, etc…) that would only last so long as the surrounding pieces of knowledge weren’t known (no one checked my birth certificate, no one asked my mom, or many other ways of checking my claim). As soon as you start checking the coherence of my statement with other statements, it falls apart (and is thus now neither Truth nor Knowledge).

This speaks to basic information literacy skills. Blindly trusting one source, even if that source is the Oxford Dictionary of Biography is probably not a good idea, and why authority would naturally lend itself to information evaluation as a central criterion has always been beyond me. A criterion, certainly, but no more or less important than the other things surrounding the positited knowledge.

At some point all of this will come out in a nice academic article relating coherence theory to information evaluation as it pertains to reference work and library instruction. But that will take work and research. So for now, just the basic idea, captured and (hopefully) commented on.

Categories
Digital Culture

More Cowbell

I must have this shirt.

Need more cowbell

Edit: Boooo..why is my animated gif not animating?

Edit^2: ahhhh…thanks guys. Browser issue, not gif issue.

Categories
Digital Culture

Importing old posts

For those of you that have been long-time readers (all 3 of you) of this blog, you’ve seen it go through three major restructurings, mainly having to do with my search for software that I liked. I started on Blogger, then moved to Radio Userland, and finally ended up at the nirvana that is WordPress 1.5. I had long ago imported my Blogger posts, but didn’t realize until today that there was a way (albeit clumsy) to import my Userland posts as well (or import any RSS entries, really).

And thus, a 6 month hole in the archives is filled!

Previously May 2003 – November 2003, my period of experimenting with Radio, had just been lost. But using the rss import abilities of WordPress I’ve got them in the right places. The import is very rough…there are no titles, and the presentation is quite poor (take a look and see what I mean). But at least the content is there, and I can work on making them pretty as I need. I’m just happy that they are there, and searchable.

With those old posts imported, WordPress tells me that this will be my 637th post. Crazy when you think about it that way.

Categories
Digital Culture

And my inner geek is revealed!

Ultimate Gamer!! GM says drop 2d10, aanndd… you roll 86% !
What, are you a first generation gamer? Did you own the brown box?! Whatever you do in your spare time, gaming seems to be your job. Either you looked up the answers or you’re the best of the best, the type that makes other gamers strive to know more. Just don’t let the knowledge overwhelm the newbies, it tends to push them from the hobby. We all bow before you. You are the living nat 20, congradulations. I’m going to flee the scene now đŸ˜‰

Link: The Real Gamers use Dice Test

Categories
Library Issues Personal

A blogging we will go…

Suddenly and without warning, yours truly has become the blog expert at MTSU. It began slowly enough, with doing a workshop on academic uses of blogs and wikis at the MTSU IT Conference. Then we decided that actually having a blog for the conference would be a good thing, so that fell to me as well (never mind the fact that the campus had never even turned on PHP on the webserver). Once over that hurdle, and a few days of struggle to get MySQL happy with talking to PHP, the blog was born. Now I’m in the middle of putting together instruction pages, since this is a very, very new thing for everyone here. In addition, I was just asked to write up an article for the on-campus IT publication about blogs/blogging, so there’s another 300 words or so to pump out on the subject.

EDIT: also, I was just contacted today by the Library here at MTSU…seems they have 3 blogs that they are interested in moving off of blogger and onto our servers. Guess who’s gonna get to help with that?

On top of all that, I’m helping LITA with their blogging efforts, attempting to evaluate different blog software and figure out what they want to settle on as the official LITA blog.

Who knew that this would be a valuable job skill way back when we all started these damn things?

Categories
Digital Culture

Open Student Television Network

Interesting stuff coming from the CampusEAI Consortium, where a group of Internet2 campuses are putting together a webcast student oriented video channel. You can see the stream here, if you are on an Internet2 pipeline.

This raises all sorts of interesting intellectual property questions. I can’t seem to find a copyright notice on the page in question, and my quick searches through the site didn’t help much either. I’m curious as to who owns the rights to the content…the organization? The students that produce it? The schools? It’s an interesting question which will only come to the forefront when something happens to the content that someone involved doesn’t like…the stream is captured and remixed, the audio content is stripped and podcast, or there is the appearance on screen of media that is copyrighted and clearances haven’t been given.

I find the labyrinth of this stuff fascinating, in a “animal eating its own young” kind of way. There is going to be an implosion of rights vs content sometime very soon.