Educause is offering a free online seminar about narrowcasting:
Narrowcasting 101: Using Blogs, Podcasts, and Videoblogs in Higher Education,
Date: July 21, 2005,
Time: 1:00 p.m. EDT. Registration is required. They have
nice pages about podcasting and blogs, too:
Common-place: Blogging in the Early Republic
This is an interesting article by W. Caleb McDaniel, a graduate student in the department of history at The Johns Hopkins University, in this month’s Common Place. McDaniel posits that blogs have their beginnings in the 1750s when innovations in printing gave access to literature to a broader base of people. The burgeoning amount of literature in the form of journals and newspapers began being referenced and/or clipped for scrapbooks and diaries. Innovations in printing also allowed more people to self-publish their own journals, in similar fashion — if with different technologies — to the way that modern-day bloggers work.
NARA is struggling to preserve born digital materials. “NARA is confronting thousands of incompatible ditigal data formats cooked up by the computer industry over the past several decades, not to mention the limited lifespan of electronic storage media themselves. The most famous documents in NARA’s possession–the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights–were written on durable calfskin parchment and can safely recline for decades behind glass in a bath of argon gas. It will take a technological miracle to make digital data last that long.” ….NARA has hired two contractors–Harris Corporation and Lockheed Martin–to attempt that miracle. More at Technology Review
The Forum on Privatization and the Public Domain
The goals of the Forum are to:
Create a public voice on the issues raised by the relentless expansion of what are considered to be patentable products, processes, discoveries, inventions and appropriated goods, or what is commonly referred to as intellectual property…
Thanks to Librarian Activist!
Some interesting and important developments related to the Internet
have been going on lately, but you won’t see this unless you follow the
tech-press or use non-U.S. sources.
The big news is that the US government “has said it intends to maintain
its role in overseeing how the internet is run” and “European internet
registries are preparing a fight-back.” See:
The BBC notes that the US had previously indicated that it would transfer this
responsibility to ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers) but had changed its policy “in response to growing security
threats and the importance of the internet for business.”
The BBC also says, “While most people will not notice any
difference when they use the internet, the declaration puts the Bush
administration at odds with those who want to reduce US influence on the
net.”
The Register article reports that, at a meeting of worldwide
top-level domain owners, half indicated that they wished to have the ability to make
changes to their own domains by themselves and none expressed a willingness
to let the US government authorise those changes on their behalf.
For backgound, see:
ICANNWatch has a nice background
document on why this is important. It says
in part:
Despite being famously decentralized and un-hierarchical, the Internet
relies on an underlying centralized hierarchy built into the domain name
system (DNS). Domain names (such as “www.icannwatch.org”) are the unique
identifiers that people depend on to route e-mail, find web pages, and
connect to other Internet resources. The need to enforce uniqueness,
that is, to prevent two people from attempting to use the exact same
domain name, creates a need for some sort of body to monitor or allocate
naming. However, control over the DNS confers substantial power over the
Internet. Whoever controls the DNS decides what new families of
“top-level” domain names can exist (e.g., new suffixes like .xxx or
.union) and how names and essential routing numbers will be assigned to
websites and other Internet resources.
Bill puts page limit on California textbooks
By JIM SANDERS, Sacramento Bee, May 26, 2005.
California lawmakers have voted “to ban school districts from purchasing textbooks longer than 200 pages.”
Can they be serious? Apparently they are. Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, a Los Angeles Democrat and chair of the Assembly Education Committee, said that schools are teaching kids with the same kinds of massive books that were used generations ago, though the world has changed significantly. Publishers and Republicans oppose this bill. Gov. Schwarzenegger has not yet taken a position on the bill.
AB 756 would force publishers to condense key ideas, basic problems and basic knowledge into 200 pages, then to provide a rich appendix with Web sites where students can go for more information.
Thanks to InfoWarrior!
The Triangle unwired by Fiona Morgan, Independent Weekly. The article describes the Internet access is not a luxury but a public utility and the need of WiFi. It provides various examples of WiFi programs around the country.
“In 2003, abortion opponents took a calculated gamble and pushed through the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, a federal law very similar to a state law ruled unconstitutional just three years before. Critics asserted they were defying the court and doomed to fail in any legal challenge.” New York Times (WASHINGTON, July 9) (Register required).
Feds blacklist ‘illegal’ Cuban Web sites By Anne Broache, CNET News.com, July 8, 2005.
In a lengthy regulation (”Alphabetical Listing of Blocked Persons, Specially Designated Nationals, Specially Designated Terrorists, Specially Designated Global Terrorists, Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and Specially Designated
Narcotics Traffickers“) published in the Federal Register, the
Office of Foreign Assets Control, lists web sites that facilitate
travel to Cuba. (Federal Register
July 1, 2005 (Volume 70, Number 126)]
[Rules and Regulations]
[Page 38255-38499])
“The U.S. Treasury Department has blacklisted more than 60 Cuba-centric sites, many maintained by a travel company…because they provide easy access to Cuba for Americans who choose to break the law, the OFAC says. While visiting the sites may be permitted, downloading software from them probably isn’t.”
“The problem, really, with the OFAC regulations and export controls generally is they weren’t designed for the Internet,” said Douglas Jacobson, a sanctions lawyer in Washington, D.C.
Stevan Harnad, the long time evangelist of open access to scholarly literature, has started a new blog,
Open Access Archivangelism
“Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Research Access” (http://openaccess.eprints.org/).
He says,
As of this date, I will begin branching my own substantive
American Scientist Open Access Forum postings
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/ archives/ American- Scientist- Open- Access- Forum.html
to the OAA blog as well. I may also blog selected AmSci comments by others
there too, but OAA is not meant to replace the AmSci Forum by any means, only
to mirror it.