Thoughts on Technology and Society

In the middle of the night Diana told me I need to write or teach. I agree. I need more time.

I really hate when people lie. And I hate it even more when the press reproduces those lies. For example Bryce Johnson of Fourteen40 in a press release about selling his company to Folletts is quoted as saying he came up with the idea about a year ago. Well they pitched my employer about a year ago so I did some research and discovered that they have been failing in the ebook space. http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=41458 Many of the pages I found at that time seem to have disappeared, or are buried under the new stories about the acquisition. But here is one. http://www.vcsmart.com/2006/02/fourteen40.html Not that the product being over a year old makes it bad. But why lie.

Trip Report: Google and Libraries: An international Conference From Timothy Murray On March 10 th I attended Google and Libraries An international Conference Held at Columbia University in New York City . The Key note was delivered by Yakov Shraiber of International Library Information and Analytical Center http://www.iliac.org/ This talk highlighted the rapid growth of Google in Russia . Google has only been in Russia for two years and now is the second most used search in Russia and has 30% of all searches in the Russian language. The national libraies of Russia are engaged in large scale digitization projects and are making content freely available online. These projects are complicated by Russia ’s recent decision to conform their copyright law to those of the EU. Jill Cirasella of Brooklyn College Library gave a presentation on the use of online tools in the library. The presentation is available: http://userhome.brook...

Last week I was in the UK talking with a colleague about what the future of electronic books will be. I believe that this paper is addressing in a more abstract way than my talk about an abstract page for books or book-parts, one of my key points. The point is that scholarly works need to be citable and addressable. (I am hugely antagonistic of IRs which are mentioned and seem to be foundational to the ORE technology) And I think this is in some ways on on the topic of what he thinks is important about updates to a book.

I just read an interesting case study for metered access to online content in Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community Pay-per-view article access: a viable replacement for subscriptions? Apparently Trinity saved more money than they planned to save. Some people who I respect have for a number of years now held the belief that a shift to use based pricing for online journals. But the community of libraries and publishers know that the short term outcome of such a shift would need to be relatively revenue neutral. (As the shift from print to online was. And some publishers created insurance of this during the transition by basing online pricing on past print spend at least for the transition.) The Trinity case shows an example where the total spend with Elsevier declined by even more than was intended. They attribute this in part to who at Trinity was authorized (students has to ask a librarian). This was not a revenue neutral transition. And it was also not access neutra...

First of all I can not believe how much attention goes to copyright as opposed to war mongering in Iran. It is all out of proportion. So there is a house bill " The College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 " Which got some play in the tech-press here and here. But this was actually a sad sort of spin off of a different weird and totally wrong idea. Which was on the mp3 insider podcast in late summer 2007 as a rumor. The rumor was that the RIAA would get government to force the makers of mp3 players to pay a fee to the RIAA. (sort of like what the BBC does in the UK where everyone who owns a TV is supposed to pay some fee annually.) The COAA even got on to some academic news with Digital Campus Episode 16 - Steal This E-Book. But there is a real war going on. Today Declan McCullagh writes about a second piece of legislation . A couple of things about my media. I own and iPod and a Samsung Yepp 256mb mp3 player. I spent a month ripping CDs to the iPod fo...

I know this post is a year old but I could not find a description of WOWIO on the WOWIO site Wowio: It All Ads Up So a book with adds. I was thinking about this and all of the ad supported business models being floated lately (reminds me a bit of 1999 before the dot com crash) and I was thinking about the previous post I made today. Advertising has no future. Machines will do what they do and they will chose what we buy and there will be no point in fighting for our attention because we will have no money because why pay people to do thing a machine can do.

I just read a post on the Oxford University Press Blog which is typically non-committal on privacy. Privacy in Peril? Then I clicked to the author page for James B. Rule and saw that he also wrote �Bait and Switch� (on the alleged WMDs in Iraq), Dissent, Spring 2004. So why the title of this post. Well, I am one of those who feel a connection and (maybe some are making it more intellectually than I) between the illegal warrantless wiretaps Ad networks and the credit rating agencies. TRW etc. As James Rule points out, it is not that any specific step in the tracking is so objectionable it is that the tracking is so pervasive and systematic. I had this vision as I read of an 18 year old at the shoe store glancing at a screen on the cash register to find out a bit about me before coming to offer me help. And I though well that migh be good. Then I saw some things wrong with that picture. First the word 'Cash' attached machine for paying. Second training an 18 ...

http://www.marketintellnowstore.com/anebsurean.html

This article is a bit tongue in cheek, but it include some numbers from a real polling firm, and if the numbers are real then Colbert has lots of myspace friends. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003663830

On election night 2004 I was following the results hopefully clicking from site to site. Seeing news about polls being kept open by a judge in Missouri and voting machine malfunctioning Ohio. The the signature experience of the evening (other than the deep morbidity that set in the next morning when the results sank in) was registration required newspaper websites. I kept following links from blogs to this or that story and many sites required registration. This was frustrating as my primary email was not webmail. My hard drive based emails were set up on different PCs all over the house. And the speed of these emails was a problem. By election night 2006 I had a plan. and I had set up accounts with major regional papers. This helped, in addition I read a lot on the web about Intellectual property and technology, and have registered with countless sites. (meaning I stopped counting). I understand that these sites need to know a little about me before they give me the content f...

Everything you’ve read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 1) by ZDNet 's Ed Bott -- Self-described "professional paranoid" Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland has become the most widely quoted source of information on DRM and content protection in Windows Vista. The trouble is, Gutmann's work is riddled with factual errors, distortions, contradictions, and outright untruths, and his conclusions are equally wrong. In this three-part series, I'll show you why Gutmann's outrageous and inflamatory arguments don't stand up to close scrutiny.

Fair use is not a consumer right | Perspectives | CNET News.com http://news.com.com/2010-1030-6205977.html?tag=tb I'll Start with a quote from the article: Still others, including some uses within the home, may not be specifically designated fair use by a court, and may or may not qualify if put to the test, but are generally not the subject of legal challenges by a copyright owner. Mr. Ross is saying in this one sentence that: 1. Watch what you do in your home we are watching you! 2. There is no way to know if you have a right to anything unless you get sued. Because as he said earlier there is no affirmative right. 3. Just because people have not historically generally been sued for what they do int their homes doesn't mean we won't come after you now. Wow! I make a living in the the publishing industry and believe strongly in copyright but this is absurd, belligerent and threatening. And Ok it is a response to a lawsuit so maybe that is why it is so bellicose in tone. ...

I once heard a C level executive at an international publishing company describe the platform hosting the online version of over 1800 of his journals as simply a fulfillment system. In fact it is but in the online world the publishers role is much larger. Librarians, publishers, and Google all claim as part of their mission organizing information. When an end user goes to a university library and uses a z39.50 enable federated search gateway to find content the holdings knowledge base will direct them to the appropriate copy on some platform where the IP address is recognized as coming from a university and the user is given access to the content they have found. and in that content there are scholarly citations to other content and the platform builds an OpenURL link back to the Library's link resolver which again looks in the holdings database and directs the user to the appropriate copy of the second conten item. I have spent a good part of the last ten years getting this sy...