Tuesday, June 08, 2004

Microsoft Patents The Task List [Slashdot] 10:56:51 PM      Google It!.

OpenGL in PHP [Slashdot] 5:36:12 PM      Google It!.

Ontario Schools License StarOffice [Slashdot] 10:16:05 AM      Google It!.

eBay announcement board and system announcements via RSS. from InternetNews.com: Senior manager of developer relations at eBay, Jeffrey McManus, announced the RSS rollout on his weblog and said the feeds would be used to push special offers, promotions and system status messages via RSS. "[There are] highly recommended if you use a Weblog reader and are the least bit serious about using eBay," McManus said. ... The RSS feeds, which appear to be targeting the hardcore eBay buyer and shopper, are available here: General Announcements and System Announcements. We'll we haven't gone as far as Phil Wolf is thinking but eBay is finally embracing RSS. Yeh! Other 3rd party developers are out in front leveraging eBay and RSS in other innovative ways. [Micah's Weblog] 10:15:18 AM      Google It!.

Hey, Your RSS Is in My OAI! No, Your OAI Is in My RSS!. RSS: Grassroots Support Leads to Mass Appeal "Operating parallel to RSS, and using a slightly different format, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) operates on the same principle. Instead of using RSS, OAI feeds list resources using (typically) Dublin Core, which while providing the same type of information as may be found in an RSS channel, offers more detailed information about authorship and publication data. An OAI site typically requires the installation of an OAI server, which in addition to supporting plain harvesting allows for a site-specific search (though recently OAI has released a harvest-only version of the format. The OAI initiative has been widely embraced by the academic community and has supported several spin-offs, the most notable being MIT’s DSpace open archiving service. The Institutional Archives Registry now lists about 180 feeds containing many thousands of academic articles. Another aggregation service, OAIster reports as of this writing to have collected 3,063,884 records from 277 institutions. It is only a matter of time before the RSS and OAI worlds merge...." [Learning Circuits, via Lockergnome's RSS & Atom Tips] It's good to see Stephen Downes start this discussion ball rolling! [The Shifted Librarian] 10:06:52 AM      Google It!.

New search service creates 'Google for scholars' - Cara Branigan, eSchool News. Internet searches might become faster and more fruitful for students, scholars, and other academics as early as this year, thanks to a pilot program being developed as a free service spearheaded by Google, the world's leading internet search engine. T [Online Learning Update] 10:02:59 AM      Google It!.

Orange squashes SPV smartphone. C500 is 'World's smallest', network claims By Tony Smith . [The Register] 10:01:36 AM      Google It!.

Open source and visible source. Zope Corp.'s layered strategy of engagement with open source and visible-source communities is a compelling blend of the strengths of free and commercial software development. In two previous columns, Open source citizenship and Giving back to open source, I explored the tendency of enterprises to fork open source projects rather than join them. Pedhazur suggests that a commercial entity supporting both an open source base and a visible-source layered product can reduce the need to fork. By outsourcing code enhancements, the argument goes, an enterprise can enjoy single-throat-to-choke control without seceding from a project's community. It remains to be seen how broadly this model can apply, but in cases where it does, what's not to like? [Full story at InfoWorld.com] In this two-minute clip, Zope Corp.'s Chairman Hadar Pedhazur describes the visible source model as a middle-ground option between the few large open source projects, whose direction an enterprise cannot easily influence, and the many smaller ones that enterprises can influence, but typically fork in order to do so. ... [Jon's Radio] 9:59:24 AM      Google It!.

Australia wants to make govt-funded research more accessible. The presentations from the conference, Changing Research Practices in the Digital Information and Communication Environment (Canberra, June 1, 2004) are now online. Quoting from the June 5 press release on the conference: "The Government believes that it has a major policy interest in improving the accessibility of research. It is therefore decided to pursue the agendas of making research quality more apparent, and research results more accessible, in parallel....In terms of accessibility of research the NSCF [National Scholarly Communications Forum] constituents will work with international partners on a number of fronts especially to develop the concept of 'public funding, public knowledge, public access'." [Open Access News] 9:57:06 AM      Google It!.

A related question, though. Last night I downloaded Mercora, a new P2P (peer-to-peer) app that lets you stream the music you own to other registered users. From the FAQ: "Can I share music files on the network through peer-to-peer downloads? No. We are not a music downloading service and you will not be able to download music files from other's computers. However, you can listen to others' music through webcasting (streaming).... Is broadcasting music on the Mercora network legal? Yes. Mercora has obtained the necessary licenses so that you can broadcast music on the Mercora Network legally.... What can I broadcast on the Mercora Network? You can broadcast any music that you own legally. These recordings must originate from an authorized source (either created originally by the artist or record label that owns the copyright), and are not unlawful copies that have been downloaded illegally or obtained from an unauthorized third party. Can I broadcast music that is ripped from CDs or downloaded from an online music store? Yes. Music that is ripped from CDs that you purchased is considered an authorized source and so is music bought from online music stores like iTunes." So why couldn't a library use the Mercora network to stream its physical music collection? You could make the content available only to your patrons, and you don't have to worry about file sharing. You could even use some of the built-in social networking and IM tools to communicate with those patrons, while ignoring the irrelevant pieces like picture sharing. Theoretically, it should be completely legal, although it means the library is dependent on Mercora, its resources, and the ad-based revenue model on which it will most likely be based. So I suppose a better question is can library hackers build an open source solution that does essentially the same thing, and can libraries pool resources to pay the webcasting fees? [The Shifted Librarian] 9:53:19 AM      Google It!.

Text Messages in the Courts [Slashdot] 9:49:21 AM      Google It!.