Dave
Slow weekend for The Closed Circle
In that it stopped. Sorry. Was playing with my new toy:
It’s pretty good. It can send emails, which is great, and means I can post to this blog on the move. Using Flickr I can even post pictures straight onto here which I take with the camera! Wonders will never cease.
Had stacks of feeds to get through this morning. Plenty of stuff been posted on the link blog.
Lawrence Lessig on Creative Commons
Lawrence Lessig on Creative Commons:
Creative Commons offers free copyright licenses to artists and creators. The purpose of the license is to enable the artist or creator to mark his or her copyrighted work with the freedom he or she intends the work to carry. Those “freedoms” are the exclusive rights that copyright grants the copyright holder which the law permits the copyright holder to waive. The design of the system is to be automatic. No contract, or meeting of the minds, is intended. It is simply a license that says “if you use my copyrighted work in ways that would otherwise infringe my exclusive rights, I won’t sue you if you have abided by this license.” (The law makes everything ugly, but anyway, that’s what it does.)
Feedview
I must have a look at Feedview, an RSS reading Firefox extension.
As linked to by Steve Rubel.
Blogging Blah Blah Blah
Ken Leebow links to this article by Radley Balko (!) on Fox News.
U.S. News & World Report reported last week that several senior Republican senators — upon hearing that “blogs” had uncovered the Dan Rather scandal, helped to defeat Tom Daschle and pushed for the resignation of CNN executive Eason Jordan — demanded that “blogs” be added to their official Web sites.
Even though, as a Capitol Hill Web consultant told the magazine, most of them hadn’t the slightest idea of what a “blog” actually is.
It’s an amusing story, but the more I read about the weblogging phenomenon from traditional media sources — the more I hear about it from talk show hosts and pundits, and the more triumphalism, tribalism, and group hurt we’re starting to see from the “blogosphere” — the more I’m convinced that even “hip” reporters and tech-savvy bloggers themselves don’t really “get” blogs any more than those senior Republican senators do.
In truth, “blogs” are nothing more than a relatively new way of distributing information, just as radio, television, newsprint, and conventional Web sites once were. Blogs differ from other media in that they provide links for easy referencing, they’re more easily and quickly updated (and, consequently, many times less carefully edited), they allow for more interaction between reader and publisher, and there’s virtually no barrier to entry — meaning just about anyone can start his or her own blog. You don’t need to win the approval of an editor. You don’t need start-up money from a publisher. You don’t need a radio tower.