The Laszlo Soundblox seems like it might be an interesting toy for broadband bloggers…effectively just an embedded MP3 player, it allows people visiting your site to choose from things that you’ve uploaded and play them from a WinAmp or ITunes like system on your page. It’s also Open Source, using the Apache Open Source License.
Good example of the use for this thing over on John Perry Barlow’s blog, where you can listen to a couple of his talks on the Public Domain and Fair Use.
This weekend for me is the Carter Caves Crawlathon. I worked at Carter Caves in Olive Hill, KY, all the way through college as a summer job. The first year I was a busboy, mainly because the park manager was less than appreciative of hiring me (I played the political card, which in KY at the time was the only way to get a state job). The next 4 years, however, I worked as a cave guide/naturalist on the park, doing interpretive work both above and under the ground.
It was the best job ever. I got paid to do what people then paid to do. I spent 5-7 hours a day underground, leading tourists around and talking to them about the history of the area, the caves, the animals and even the rocks. It’s reminiscent of the reference desk…you’re the expert, and people come to you for the answers.
I’m nothing if not a sucker for a power trip. đŸ™‚
According to this story from the AP.
And on that note: happy new year, everyone!
Have been having a spirited discussion over on Confessions of a Mad Librarian with Eli Edwards, one of the more interesting people that I met at ALA Midwinter.
So, in answer to her latest question (and to drag some of the traffic onto my blog via trackback): Absolutely, I support Lessig and Eldred (and Creative Commons). These sorts of alternatives not only increase the public awareness of the overall absurdity of current copyright law, but give those who are already aware means of bypassing the lockdown completely. This blog (and all of my academic work here at UNC that is web-based) has been given an appropriate use license, and I go to great lengths to convince others that it is the right thing to do.
Now, that being said: I am well aware that Creative Commons and other licensing schemes of their ilk (GNU, OGL) rely on the power of the US Copyright law to function. This is an irony of which I am not ignorant. đŸ™‚ I think that the fairest implementation of a limit on copyright terms may be Lessig’s suggestion of trivial economic subscription, by asking copyright holders that are interested in maintaining their copyright to pay $1 a year to hold it.
From Daniel Dennett, author of Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea on libraries and scholarship.
“A scholar is a library’s way of making another library.”
From Bill: “to say that computers are tools for the analysis of networks is completely ignoring the study of sociology, which developed the idea of a social network long before TCP/IP was invented.”
This is certainly correct. However, we should also keep in mind that computer networks allow for very different interactions between people than traditional sociology was used to (they are certainly catching up). Ubiquitous computing, as Howard Rheingold has written copiously about, changes everything about social networking.
I would also argue, from a philosophical point of view, that it is entirely possible that there are properties that will arise from ubiquitous computing and always on networks that we do not, as yet, have a grasp of, and that may be completely seperate from the study of the people USING the network. The network ITSELF maybe have emergent properties, and sociology is poorly placed in the academy to talk intelligently about communication theory outside of that done by people.
Check out the cute little thing. The problem? Still too expensive…4 gigs, $249? Nah…they’re pretty, but I’ll save up for the 40gig.
Here’s Betsy’s favorite picture from our various Christmas visits. This is a monkey bobble-head that she got me. It’s a running gag with us…every Christmas, she asks me what I want, and I always answer “Peace on earth, good will towards men, and a monkey.” So nearly every year, she gets me a monkey.
Here’s the kicker: my father informs us that I’m probably actually remembering my great-grandfather from when I was very young. He actually HAD monkeys…two of them, Spider Monkeys. He had a cage for them, and would get them out one at a time to let them crawl around on him, and swing around the house…according to my dad, he was the only one that could handle them. His hands were so callused that when they bit him he didn’t even feel it. I don’t consciously remember this, but I suppose it may be buried somewhere and I’ve just incorporated it into my subconscious. That, or monkeys are just cool.
So…a couple of really brilliant guys who do a little online comic called Penny Arcade decided before Christmas that they were going to show the world that gamers weren’t a bunch of backwards introspective adolescents hiding in their parents basements, but instead were giving, fully-grown members of society who wanted to spread the joy of games.
To this end, they started Child’s Play, a site through which donations could be made for children in the Seattle Children’s Hospital.
Here’s where the Media royally screwed up. After they showed up with more toys than you could believe (actual figures in a minute) and local Seattle media picked up the story, somehow it was reported that the donations were from a “local catholic school” and that the toys were valued at “nearly a thousand dollars.”
Here’s the scoop…this couple of cartoonists and gamers raised over $200,000 worth of toys. Two. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. They had $16,000 worth of Game Boy Advance SP’s by themselves, not counting the rest of the toys.
Really impressive, and they aren’t making nearly as big a deal out of it as they should.
From BoingBoing, the Gollum Rap.