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Category: Information Commons (Page 6 of 26)

Information Commons, Copyright, Censorship and/or withdrawal of public information, Libraries: Digital and other

Tibetan-mania from Xeni

Xeni hasn’t posted about everyone I know in the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, but nearly everyone. I’ve put her in touch with the Volunter Tibet folks so that may appear on her Xeni.net/trek blog or in Wired News or in Boingboing or National Public Radio or whereever else Xeni publishes next.
Besides finally seeing pictures of all these folks, it’s great to see them getting great press in the tech community from Xeni and her editors. In many cases, the Tibetans have been at tech projects for a long time working hard and cleverly with not many resources but with great determination.
It’s been a blast being part of their tech growth through ibiblio.org
Looking forward to seeing as many of them (you if you are reading this in Dharamsala) next week.

Volunteer for Tibet (and get them off visual basic!)

VolunteerTibet

Brick Thorton of Volunteers for Tibet writes to ask for help from techies heading up into the Himalayas to McLeod Ganj and Dharamsala.

He says:

if you happen to know any programmers that would be interested in making a long stay in mcleod ganj, please let me know! we’re looking to upgrade our custom volunteer tracking app… (originally programmed in visual basic).

Go to their site and lettem know you can help.

Stutzman v Metcalfe

Ethernet inventor and failed predictor of Internet Collapses, Bob Metcalfe has taken on Fred Stutzman’s and others’ takes on the failings of Metcalfe’s Law as a visiting blogger on VCMike’s blog. Fred, like David P. Reed who corrected Metcalfe’s Law with Reed’s Law way back, has observed some serious failings in the Metcalfe formulation.
Fred’s original article is here. His follow up to Metcalfe’s is here.
Metcalfe’s response reminds me of the time he had to literally eat his words at the Inet conference. Metcalfe is always interesting combatative funny and most of the time so close to being right without quite getting there that it hurts when in the end he is decidedly wrong.

Tibetans in Wired and Slashdot and more

Xeni Jardin has followed her NPR coverage of Wireless Exiled Tibetans to Wired News with an expanded story featuring Yael Ben-David and Phuntsok Dorjee.

That’s been picked up at SlashDot in the Hardware area where there is a lot of discussion of the wireless and of dealing with Bad Monkeys.

And of course she always covers her own articles over on boing boing which helps me find them.

By the time I get there they’ll be too famous to talk with me ;->

Red Hat Magazine covers BarCampRDU (and shares ibiblio love)

Red Hat Magazine
Bascha Harris has the best coverage of BarCampRDU that I’ve seen yet in Red Hat Magazine. And not just because I get quoted a lot either. She gets the essence and the background of it all:

160 attendees, 49 sessions, many hours, and several glowing reviews later… the camp was a success.

Glad she counted ;-> It seems so massive but with such a great community giving support it was pretty easy. Fred certainly busted ass to make BarCampRDU happen and it happened very well.

YouTube killed the net.Radio star?

YouTube will have “every music video ever made” [if they don’t already ;->] “in 18 months” founder Steve Chen tells Reuters news agency (as reported by BBC).

Already I look for music on YouTube before I look anywhere else. I can’t find a listening copy of “Urban Spaceman” by the Bonzo Do Dah Dog Band, but I can find about 10 videos on YouTube, promos, TV appearances, and live shows!
I can even explain how and where Death Cab for Cutie got their name. [note George Harrison and John Lennon in the audience].

SunSITE.za Rest in Peace

The un-updated box that was sunsite.za down in Jo’burg is dying and being put out of its misery — on pretty short notice.

The Sunsite web server is to be shut down in the near future. We regret to inform you that we are no longer able to host your web site http://www.[xxxx].za/ and alternative arrangements will have to be
made for your web hosting. Your site will be removed from the server as of this Friday (18th August). Please reply if you would like a backup of your web site files to be provided for you.

Jones in Business Line (India)

Just took a couple of questions from a reporter at Business Line (India) about intellectual property as part of the conference build up for the “Owning the Future” Symposium. Sample questions and answers below:

1. What is the relevance of IP rights to the layman – not a scientist or an IT bureaucrat?

Every layman has an investment in IP and in innovation. Not just an upstream investment that provides reduced costs of products and increased speed of innovation, but — as Eric von Hippel details in his 2005 MIT
Press book “Democratizing Innovation” — every purchaser is a potential innovator, a part of the final and unpredictable design and redesign of products. You want to be able to use the hammer you just bought to crack
nuts as well as pound nails. You want to add features to your car or to a skateboard. You also want to add to software, to electronics and to other products and images in ways that the original designer could not have
possibly anticipated. Without legal access to the means of innovation, your choices are reduced or even erased.

2. Also comment on this slogan of the fast-growing online faction of IP skeptics, “Ideas exist in air, and that is where they should be.”

I searched for this phrase on Google and it wasn’t found. Our IP skeptics must not be making much headway with it ;-> More seriously and from a slightly US point of view, I am a Jeffersonian when it comes to ideas and
property. This phrase echoes that of Thomas Jefferson writing to Isaac McPherson in 1813 [see
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html for a more lengthy quote from that letter]

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”

Jones is History (Channel)

Joe Newberry, great banjoist and NC Department of Cultural Resources bureaucrat, asked me to be part of a set of interviews with the History Channel next week. So’s on Wednesday just before lunch, I’ll head over to the American Tobacco Historic District and tape a discussion with them. We’ll talk about NC’s early showing on the Internet, NC related history projects on ibiblio.org like DocSouth, volunteer history projects like the Pearl Harbor Archives and HyperWar, music collections including the folk music index and perhaps the FolkDen and Folkstreams.net (since both have an NC part to them).

If you have other suggestions, lemme know.

Doc on Airports today; Google on Cali Libraries; BBC on Media Use

Three quick links to posts of interest, highly unrelated.

Doc is writing live from the Logan Airport about the state of emergency at US and UK airports.

The Official Google Blog
blogs their side of the University of California Libraries announcement about joining the Google Book Project in a posting by John [Price]Wilkin, Interim Co-University Librarian, University of Michigan.

BBC reports “Young adults are moving away from traditional media” in an article titled “Young drive ‘radical media shift’ : The “networked generation” is driving a radical shift in media consumption, says UK telecoms regulator Ofcom”

In the footsteps of Xeni

Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing has a blog, radio show segments on NPR and more about her trip from Delhi to Dharamsala (and beyond).

I’ll be on the first leg of pretty much the same trip in only two weeks.

I appreciate any traveler’s hints or must-sees that you list — email me, AIM, Gtalk, Gizmo, Skype or leave a comment.

Part of my time will be visiting with the folks from the Tibetan Technology Center, the Tibetan Children’s Villages, Tibetan Multi-Education Center and Tibetan sites hosted at ibiblio.org.

In Delhi, I’ll be at the Red Hat (India) and Indian Institute of Technology Symposium “Owning the Future” about Open Source etc as you might have guessed.

Streaming from MCNC

We’ve moved about half the ibiblio bandwidth over to our new servers at our new location at MCNC. Ken and Don really did a fine job on the move and in the process did a lot of cleaning up of streaming set ups and the like. All in all, the move went fairly smoothly. All the stations and all the ibiblio sites that rely on streaming are working reliably and we should be able to even handle additional listeners and perhaps another radio station now.
We’ve moved up the connection stream which should have some positive effects for our various listeners. Local access points are peered in the same room as our servers! Not to mention the cost savings that we are already realizing.
We have some changes in the network set up to be done at MCNC that could prove to be interesting. And some collaboration on mesh and peer-to-peer streaming experiments in the wings.
We’ll also be among the first using National Lambda Rail in a service as well as research capacity.
Woo Woo! And much thanks to Ken and Don who were up late last night.

Courtney at Wired’s Al Gore Event

I couldn’t take Chris Anderson up on his invite to run up to NY City for Wired‘s showing of Inconvenient Truth. I needed to be in Ames, Iowa for the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals. So’s I passed my invite on to the lovely and talented Courtney Pulitzer who wrote up the event on her Cyber Scene blog. It’s a great write up so check it out. Her newsletter today reminded me to check back up on her report and see her pictures.

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