Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Perception Is Reality.
By Peter Coffee. Eweek,
December 1, 2003.

Coffee does not go quite as far as Edward Tufte in his dislike of Powerpoint. But he does go at least as far in his dislike of bad presentations.

Bad presentations result from people learning to write with a model of “topic sentence, body, conclusion,” instead of a journalistic model of “lead (conclusion), significance, supporting details.”

Secrecy News 03/30/04

Steven Aftergood reports on a new RAND study on
government information. The complete RAND report is available in PDF Mapping the Risks:
Assessing the Homeland Security Implications of Publicly Available Geospatial Information
by John C. Baker, Beth E. Lachman, David R. Frelinger, Kevin M. OÕConnell, Alex Hou, Michael S. Tseng, David Orletsky, Charles Yost,
and paper ($24.00 (paperback, 232 pp.)
ISBN: 0-8330-3547-9
MG-142-NGA, © 2004)

Broadband network neutrality: Advocates push for policy

Recently FCC Chairman Michael Copps advocated a market approach to preserving four Internet freedoms. (Preserving Internet Freedom: Guiding Principles For The Industry PDF. Remarks of
Michael K. Powell
Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
At the
Silicon Flatirons Symposium on
ÒThe Digital Broadband Migration:
Toward a Regulatory Regime for the Internet AgeÓ
University of Colorado School of Law
Boulder, Colorado
February 8, 2004).

• Freedom to Access Content.
• Freedom to Use Applications.
• Freedom to Attach Personal Devices.
• Freedom to Obtain Service Plan Information.

The debate over the need for a government policy continued at a recent Consumer Federation of America event.

“Entrenched interests are already jockeying to constrain the openness that has been the Internet’s defining hallmark, and they are lobbying the FCC to aid and abet them.” — FCC Commissioner Michael Copps.

The Internet’s philosophy is “bring your ideas and if your ideas are great we will allow them to flourish, not bring your lobbyists and if your lobbyists are powerful enough we will get the government to protect your particular business model.”
– Lawrence Lessig, Internet law professor and author of the new book Free Culture

Many examples of attempts to block Internet content exist, and in many cases, those trying to block content are focusing their efforts on the transmission capabilities of the Internet. — Vinton Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP

CFP 2004 / Computer Freedom & Privacy Conference.

Privacy. RFID. Constitutional Law in Cyberspace. Telecommunications Law. ‘Overseeing’ the Poor: Technology Privacy Invasions of Vulnerable Groups.
The Hidden Power of Search Engine Technology.
Nations vs. the Net: The UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Datamining the Unknown Unknowns. Organizing Online for Political Change. Open Source, Open Society. Fahrenheit 451.3: Using ISPs to Control Content on the Internet. FCC. P2P. Copyright. Hacktivista. Policy Laundering. Government Profiling. Online Chill.
Law and Ethics of Online Research. Security. Electronic Voting.

And much, much more…

Shrook 2 - RSS and Atom for Mac OS X

Shrook has several advantages over other news readers I’ve tried. First, it allows you to easily synchronize your news reading across more than one machine. This is super if you read news at work and home, for instance. No more weeding through the items you’ve already seen at work when you get home.

Second, it uses the Macintosh OS X Safari “rendering engine” to display the complete, original blog page within the shrook interface. This means you don’t even have to use a separate browser and you see the complete context of the origial post. (If you click on a link on the web page you’re viewing within Shrook, it does open your preferred browser.)
You can turn it this feature on or off for each feed — use it where it works best and don’t use it where it doesn’t. I like that a lot.

There are nice reviews of
Shrook
by Liz and
Cory Doctorow.

The Doc Searls Weblog : Monday, March 29, 2004

TNR Online | Dictatorship.com.
by Joshua Kurlantzick. The New Republic.
Post date: 03.25.04,
Issue date: 04.05.04.

This article discusses why the Internet is not
“naturally independent of the tyrannies [that governments] impose on us”
as John Perry Barlow and others have been hoping.
Why?

In part because, as a medium, the Web is in many ways ill-suited for expressing and organizing dissent. And, even more significantly, because, as a technology, it has proved surprisingly easy for authoritarian regimes to stifle, control, and co-opt.

With the help of American companies that sell the
latest censorship technology and others that willingly censor their own news content to appease
authoritarian regimes, the Internet has become, in some ways, more of a hinderance to than a promoter of progress.

Kurlantzick reviews the problems, cites examples and the little research that exists. He ends somewhat hopefully noting the ways in which “in the long run, the Internet may fulfill some of its hype as an engine of liberalization.”

Biblioserver.com : Home

This is an interesting concept, although a little limited at this point. It is a website that allows you to post a bibliography. The service supports browsing and searching of bibliographies and indexes of authors, keywords and sources. This will be a subscription service.

A prime area for libraries to explore. We have the databases and we have lots of users gaining experience with the contents of those databases. If we could make it easy for users to share what they learn about the books and article they find useful, it could enhance our catalogs and databases
in ways previously only imagined by theortical research in Information Retrieval… and Google and Amazon.

Thanks to LIS!

Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor’s eJournal - Some in Congress Working to Outlaw Uncontrolled P2P

Wired News reports a variety of efforts in Congress to ban peer to peer technology, or at least P2P that can’t be controlled by the copyright cartel and spied on by the police. If they succeed, you can kiss goodbye an entire generation of grassroots media, among other things, because the only feasible way to distribute this material is P2P.

Open Source > States Seek Common Ground On Open Source > March 23, 2004″ href=”http://internetweek.com/breakingNews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=18401422″>States Seek Common Ground On Open Source
Internet Week March 23, 2004.

Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and several other states next month will launch a software repository designed to let government agencies make more efficient use of open-source software. The repository will be managed by the Government Open Code Collaborative, a newly formed group of seven states and four municipalities that will contribute and download open-source code and proprietary software designed by and for government agencies.