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December 23, 2008

Radio Berkman podcast: Are we-media doing what they-media used to do?

On the Radio Berkman podcast this week, Persephone Miel, lead author on the Media Re:Public paper series, talks about what’s missing from the new journalism landscape. Then, Patricia Aufderheide, Director of the Center for Social Media, discusses the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. Finally, Jessica Clark, Director of the Future of Public Media Project gives her top five predictions for digital media in 2009. All in 25 minutes.

Radio Berkman will be back next year, thanks to Daniel Jones, the producer, who has been doing a fantastic job with it.

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Newton TAB publisher sues New York Times Co. over Web site

The national media syndicate GateHouse Media owns 125 local newspapers in Massachusetts, and runs the Wicked Local local news sites. The Boston Globe is not part of GateHouse Media. The Globe has started its own local sites, such as this one in Newton, MA. The Globe’s local sites run lots of news from the Globe, but they also aggregate local headlines from other sources, including from GateHouse. Those headlines link to the original sites, of course.

So, GateHouse now has sued the Globe‘s parent for copyright and trademark infringement, because GateHouse would prefer that no one know about or care about what it writes.

GateHouse is apparently unsure of how this whole Web thang works. Plus, the company’s lawyers skipped class the day Fair Use was discussed. Bad combination. Bad for GateHouse. Bad for the Web.

By the way, the title of this post is the headline from the Newton Tab, a GateHouse publication.

PS: There’s some feisty coverage of this in Cape Cod Today. [Tags: ]

Later: Dan Gillmor raises good points, unsurprisingly. He usefully complicates the issue.

Later: Berkman’s Citizen Media Law Project has written up some preliminary thoughts. These are some topnotch lawyers and legal writers, so that’s the pond in which you’ll want to do your initial dives.

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Free the metadata!

The University of Huddersfield is making publicly available the metadata about the circulation of its books — 3 million transactions — over the past thirteen years. This includes a book’s ISBN, number of times it’s been checked out, by which academic department. (It does not include information about individual borrowers.)

BTW, the library used LibraryThing‘s ISBN lookup service to derive some of the ISBNs, and it includes “FRBR-ish” data, i.e., other books that may be closely related.

(Thanks to Seb Schmoller’s post for the tip.)

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December 22, 2008

Four hands one guitar

Two of the hands are especially good. This is a fun video.

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BugVonHippel

BugLabs has named a breakout board after Eric von Hippel, open innovation guru and Berkman Fellow. Here’s an interview with Eric, in which he says, among other things: “Users are becoming the dominant innovators”:

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December 21, 2008

Trippi on Obama’s direction connection

Joe Trippi is doing a chat at FireDogLake. Here’s one of his responses:

I think we are about to see the first “Connected” presidency. JFK was the first Television president — Obama will be first “connected” president — and congress is going to be the big loser in all this — because I think we are going to see a President directly connected to more Americans than any other President in history — and when 25 members of Congress are standing in the way of health care reform — they are going to find themselves standing between Barack and a hard place — between the President and millions of Americans organizing to pass his agenda. On the other hand the Obama administration is the Wright Brothers now — no one has ever done this before and there is a lot they could get wrong — being too careful and listening too much to the Washington establishment.

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Those darn squirrels

Here’s a cute photo of the squirrels in our neighbor’s house, which is quite adorable for him except for the squirrels.

three squirrels

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Dead Chumby

Here’s what my Chumby looked like last Channukah when I got it:

new chumby

It was sort of fun, but priced about three times higher than its worth, at least to me. And, amazingly, the single most obvious widget — the one that might make it price competitive — doesn’t exist: Plug in a USB drive and have it show the photos that are on it. (It does show photos from your Flickr account.)

Anyway, my Chumby died yesterday, almost a year to the day I got it. I performed a Chumbectomy but was unable to resuscitate it. Here are its innards, for those of you who’ve wondered:

chumby insides

chumby insides

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December 20, 2008

Tic Tac Two

Did I ever mention Tic Tac Two? It’s a version of Tic Tac Toe I invented about ten years ago (which probably means 15 years ago), that has only two twists on the original. First, you have to have two counters in a square to own it. Second, once per game each player can deploy two counters in a single turn. I suppose there’s a variant in which you can deploy the two in separate boxes.

Anyway, Tic Tac Two is more fun than Tic Tac Toe, although so is counting.

(Way back when, I wrote a program to let a computer play against a human. The only interesting thing about it — and I was very proud of this — was that the computer automatically played 10,000 random games with itself to determine what the winning moves are in every situation. Purely for flash, when it was going through this data-building exercise, I had it display its moves, so that it looked like that scene from WarGames, except in this version, Global Thermonuclear War looked a lot like Tic Tac Toe.)

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On air: My love-hate relationship with my Kindle

Well, hate is too strong a word. But so is love.

Anyway, here’s a segment I did for the public radio show [Tags: ]

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