Month: November 2003

Not any surprise here…seen on ESR’s blog originally.

William Gibson wrote your book.
Technology terrifies and delights you.

Which Author’s Fiction are You?
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….it’s my first piece of blogspam. Isn’t it cute? I think I’ll name it George.

It looks like George is from Israel, and George is a ADSL user in Petach-Tikva. Or at least, that’s what this search shows…. if you were curious, “Petach Tikva is located in the center of Israel, seven miles east of the Mediterranean Sea. Petach Tikva is the country’s fifth largest city and its most highly industrialized area. ” It is also a sister-city to Chicago, all you Windy City types out there….say hi!

Perhaps George works at Intel. In any case, I think he’s cute…maybe I’ll keep him. None of the links seem active, and there’s no whois info on the URL’s in them…so I’m not quite sure what the point is. Anyone? Just someone with a fetish for odd prose and trademarked names of drugs?

And letting the whole blogsphere know JUST how he feels about CSS, and how he feels about WordPress among his other outspoken views. ESR never fails to entertain, and speak from the hip.

AND he’s hosted by everyone’s favorite digital library: Ibiblio

…if someone is linked to my Old Blog, please update your links to the blog you are reading.

Thank you.

🙂

So here’s my latest revelation about iTunes: it isn’t the Store, or the media playing capabilities. No, no, no. It’s all about the metadata. The usefulness of it comes almost entirely from the complete and utter ease of applying data about the songs to themselves, and then being able to use said data to organize and search your media.

MP3’s have supported metadata (id3 tags) since the standard’s inception, but most media players only use this metadata for informing the user: what song is playing, what song is coming up. They didn’t let you interact with the data, apply your own info to it, and search and sort based on it. This is really the strength of iTunes…from being able to set the “style” (rock, pop, rap) to being able to “rate” the songs with a star count, to being able to attach cover art to a song (as easy as dragging and dropping from a browser…I just search Amazon for the album cover, then yank it).

So that you, Apple, for finally allowing my metadata and media to mix. I love it.

Story from the Daily Yomiuri.

So…I’m trying to figure out how Wired managed to interview Paul for a feature, take pictures of campus, and no one decided to tell me about it? We even get pictures of some classmates in the story. Great publicity for Ibiblio, and here’s hoping it ends up in the print version (not likely, but would be excellent). Very cool stuff…congratulations, all you wacky Ibiblio guys….and great publicity for librarians as well (The title of the piece is “Freedom Fightin’ Librarians…Where sharing isn’t a dirty word”…you GO wired).

…I consider myself very familiar with the concerns put forth by Larry Lessig et al, as well as the Creative Commons and other sites attempting to create an Open Source/Open Culture vibe in the US. But what I can’t find is a site that discusses the general issues…what is it, specifically, that is the problem? How do Open Source software licenses and things like the GPL overlap with Lessig/Eldred and their issues with copyright? It isn’t actually very straighforward at all…which is one reason I’m trying to formulate this for my Master’s Paper. There’s a net of sites that all talk about the issues without really describing them in any concise way (the EFF, Eldred, and the ones previously mentioned).

So…does anyone out there in blog land know of a good “summary of issues” site for this stuff? Or is that what I should be doing? Because I really think it’s needed…..

Today was a good day for techie software….Go and check out MozCC, all you Creative Commons loving, Mozilla using types. It’s a plugin for Moz that reads the CC RDF info off of a webpage and gives you a synopsis of the chosen license. Pretty nifty.

…take a look at MyTunes.