Harvard Weblogs: Weblogs at the Harvard Law School
For US presidential candidates:
"Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet."
Is the Internet becoming a "cyber-country"?
May 2004 Archives
|
Giving it away (for fun and profit) is an excellent article on Larry
Lessig's Creative Commons
published in the May 2004 issue of Business 2.0. Excerpt from the article: But what's really interesting is that as more and more artists use Creative Commons to tell the world that it's OK to copy, distribute, and build on their work, the first glimpses emerge of an economy based on the free exchange of digital content. The "sharing economy" is built on a supply-and-demand equation wholly alien to traditional media companies -- the record labels, Hollywood studios, and publishing houses that support strict copyright enforcement. It's powered instead by the Allan Vilhans of the world, digital artists who promote sharing as a means to obtain everything from 15 minutes of Internet fame to licensing deals, job offers, and mainstream publishing contracts. For these artists, rampant Internet file swapping isn't a threat, but a blessing: the cheapest way to move from unknown to known.
|
|||||||||||||||||
ATTRIBUTION:
Any reuse, such as inclusion of a song in a movie, must credit the original artist.
NONCOMMERCIAL USE:
Revenue-producing uses, such as advertising or corporate presentations, require negotiation with the artist.
NO DERIVATIVES:
The work may be shared but not modified, adapted, or changed in any way.
SHARE ALIKE:
It's OK to share the work, but only under the same licensing terms established by the original artist.
SAMPLING:
Others may sample, "mash up," or creatively transform the work, but it can't be used in advertising.
PUBLIC DOMAIN:
No rights reserved. Artists relinquish all rights to a work, making it public property.Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks a paper written by Lilia, Sebastian, Carla, and Andy (hey, I know them all!) gives a lot to think about regarding corporate blogging.
Embedding into existing processes: to succeed, weblogs have to fit in an employee daily routine, become a tool of choice for thinking and organizing ideas. It is also not always clear how use of weblogs could be correlated with other KM/learning initiatives in a company (Communities of practice and training programs)My post on blogs and Cops was about how blogs can generate communities of practice. But, unlike in universities and research centers, there is no "publish or perish" culture in big corporations. People only write e-mails, memos, powerpoints because they are inherently action (and not learning) driven.
However, there are some learning havens in corporations, and this is where blogging can develop. CPSquare's online workshops on communities of practice provide a personal learning space for all participants, which really are in essence weblogs. This is very useful to allow participants to call the attention of others on important ideas which are not currently debated in round table discussions or worked upon in project rooms, but are nevertheless very relevant to the community's domain. Along the same lines, the open source TikiWiki collaborative software (excellent, by the way) provides blogging spaces for users as well. A similar concept is used in the open source moodle e-learning software (excellent, too!), on which learners can comment on their learning experience for the benefit of other learners.
Communities of practice in corporations also need a community weblog published by the leader, and possibly members of the core group as well to keep the community and the company informed on an ongoing basis about the communities actions and publications. It is in essence the weblog replacing the invasive newsletter that is sent to all today by e-mail and is sometimes perceived as corporate spamming. We're going to try this in my company in the months to come.
apophenia: what i want in an RSS tool through Seb
If anyone wants to know why the early players get all of the attention, it's because RSS feeds focus on people, not ideas, and the early players are too overloaded with following the other early players to consider new people.True. Even though I have plenty of people on my blogroll, and many RSS feeds on my aggregator, I can only read a few of them each week. So I select the people I like best, i.e. the ones whose posts have proven interesting for me in the past, and I don't try to find others. But isn't that normal after all? You only change your habits when something important happens in your life.
The revolution will not be blogged of George Packer apparently caught a lot of attention in the blogosphere. For more, listen to the excellent broadcast of the Connection on wbur, my favorite radio station.
The constellation of opinion called the blogosphere consists, like the stars themselves, partly of gases. This is what makes blogs addictive — that is, both pleasurable and destructive: They're so easy to consume, and so endlessly available. Their second-by-second proliferation means that far more is written than needs to be said about any one thing.
Maybe George Packer mises the point. Blogging is not a new form of egomaniac journalism. When you're blogging, you're not broadcasting a post, hoping to be read by the entire world thus satisfying your ego. You are engaging -or trying to engage- into a conversation with a few like-minded people. You are sending ideas into the blogosphere like pollen in the wind to see whether they will fertilize others. It's all about making personal connections and build "communities of meaning", unbounded by geography.
Subject: "Targetting, harnessing and extracting the value of unstructured information"
Location: Marriott Hotel, Kensington, London
Date: April 26-27. 2004
Format: 15 presentations from practitioners and experts + related discussions. Small tradeshow booths by Factiva, Verity and Infolution, acting as sponsors of the event.
Note: I could only attend day 2.
I- Important Highlights of the Conference
Continue reading Report from Ark Group Conference of April 26/27.
From the Manifesto for Collaborative Tools by Eugene Eric Kim which I already quoted but just read again via Christophe Deschamps. This manifesto makes the case tha all collaborative tools that we use, from weblogs to e-mail and from PIM to social networking tools are more similar than we may think, that their real value lies in their interoperability. Thus they need a shared contextual framework to make them more interoperable. The conclusion is very powerful and to me resonates far beyond the scope of software development. It has to do with what Wenger calls "economies of meaning"
All of the conceptual and technical ideas I've proposed in this essay share one thing in common: They won't make a difference unless tool developers work on them together. Creating a shared conceptual framework is a truly collaborative problem. It will not be solved by a single person in an ivory tower and forced upon the rest of the community. It will require constructive, passionate dialog, open minds, and much experimentation. It will require respect for other people's work and ideas. Most importantly, it will require a shared desire to make the world a better place by improving the way we work together.Amen.
