The first widespread use of syndication was aggregation for personal
use, but syndication also enables headlines or actual content from one
site to be republished in different places. (You can see this at work
on my front page, where I use Alan's most excellent Feed2JS.)
Of course the question of copyright arises here, as some people don't
want their feeds to serve for anything other than personal use.
(Personally, I'd be happy to see my headlines being published wide and
far, but I'm not selling advertising.)
Feed rights issues also arise in the context of splicing
(combining two or more feeds to make an aggregate feed and publishing
it). Here are a couple pointers to recent talk about this:
RobbInteractive: "Rolling up those particular feeds (linkblogs from Anil Dash, Waxy, and Jason Kottke)
was in contravention of the terms by which at least two of those lists
are made available, particularly on a page which included some
advertising. This is true so I have removed the rollup, and I owe Anil Dash, Waxy and Jason Kottke an apology."
Burning Questions: "as more and more meta-feeds and hybrid feeds are created from multiple
source feeds, it will be important for publishers to declare licensing
intentions for their content. Our new Creative Commons service is a
step in that direction."
Now, Robin Good wants to build a directory of reusable webfeeds.
My question is, why separate it? I think copyright information ought to
be just one more field in a global directory that enables searches to
be limited to reusable feeds. Robin says none of the 104 feed
directories he knows about tabulates rights information. Pretty
astonishing.
(english follows) Michel Dumais, qui a organisé les événements Constellation W3, offre
son temps et ses ressources
pour prendre en charge la logistique
entourant la conférence dont on jase depuis un moment, à titre
d'"organisateur en chef" (j'imagine). Je me disais justement ce matin
qu'on aurait besoin de quelqu'un pour coordonner l'ensemble... Étant
donné l'excellent boulot qu'il a fait avec Constellation, je n'aurais
pas de crainte à lui mettre ça entre les mains, pour autant que la mise
au point du programme de la conférence relève de l'ensemble des
organisateurs. Qu'en pensez-vous?
Michel Dumais, who put together the Constellation W3 events, has offered his time and resources
to take charge of the logistics of the conference we've been chatting
about, in a capacity of "main organizer" (I guess). I think it would
make sense to have some kind of general coordinator, and given the
excellent work he did with Constellation, I wouldn't be afraid to put
this aspect into his capable hands, as long as the program itself is
organized in a grassroots manner. What do you think?
I attended the Semantic Web Interest Group meeting in Montreal
last week and got to learn a bit about the work being done by Tony
Bailetti and Michael Weiss of Carleton University and Glen McInnis
of
ICHU Learning. Among other things, they're writing wrappers for various
pieces of open source software to enable them to integrate well
together. If I understood correctly they do this in the context of the Open Source Courseware Initiative NZ,
which is managed within Eduforge. Digging a little bit on that site I
was able to find two practical and reference-laden tutorials by Bailetti that may interest the developers and
businesspeople among my readers:
Upon completion of this tutorial you will
know about the factors that drive organizations to replace proprietary
LCMS (e.g., WebCT and Blackboard) for off-the-shelf open source LCMS
(e.g., Moodle and ATutor).
TARGET AUDIENCE
This tutorial may benefit non-technical and technical individuals interested in making a case for their institutions:
to switch from proprietary to open source software systems
Upon completion of this tutorial you will
know about the various sources of income available to individuals with
expertise in free open source software (FOSS) in e-learning and you
will be able to identify the specific sources of income that are
available to these individuals in your region.
TARGET AUDIENCE
This tutorial will benefit non-technical
individuals interested in building capability in FOSS for e-learning in
their communities.
