WASHINGTON - Proposed telecommunications mergers between Verizon Communications and MCI and between SBC Communications and AT&T will limit consumer choices and could create a near duopoly that squeezes out smaller carriers, representatives of the American Antitrust Institute (AAI) and Consumers Union said Thursday. [InfoWorld: Top News]

"The dataBlogging application is to a small extent a reinvention of RDF in its extension of the (implied) RSS data model" in comparison to Structured Blogging - by Danny Ayers, 2005-03-24 [del.icio.us/tag/rss]

"DataBlogging is the notion that traditional blog entries have extended data fields appended to them to track various things" e.g. "you can immediately create custom graphs using it" [del.icio.us/tag/rss]

Technical executives have critical choices to make when building BI applications using transaction data managed by application packages. In this report, Colin compares and contrasts different approaches to developing business intelligence solutions, like those from Hyperion, using Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP transactional data [Extremetech]

(Cross posted to ETI.) Ok, so I know I have been on a wiki bender of late, but there's just so much that interests me about the technology, and I think I'm finally getting my brain around the potential. While wide open wikis may not make it in the classroom, creating sites with logins and passwords makes more and more sense to me. Especially when I see what Lawrence Lessig is doing.

Lessig is one of my few heroes out there right now. I am just in awe of the important changes he is championing regarding copyright and intellectual property. And there is no doubt that he "gets" what's happening with the Read/Write Web. The concept of putting your work out there to not only share with readers but to invite those readers to help edit and improve the work is pretty amazing. But that's what he's doing with his wiki. It's very cool.

And the other news with Lessig is that he walks his talk. His creation of the Creative Commons was intended to give content creators more power to decide how their content is used. And last week, he wrote on his blog that he will no longer write for the Minnesota Law Review because of their restrictive copyright policy.

But today, on the brink of publication, I had to confront the "Publication Agreement." In order to give the Minnesota Law Review my work, I have also to give them my copyright. In particular, they get the "exclusive right to authorize the publication, reproduction, and distribution" of my work. They have in turn sold that right to Lexis and Westlaw.

Never again. It has taken me too long to resolve myself about this, and it was too late in the process of this article to insist on something different. But from this moment on, I am committed to the Open Access pledge:

I will not agree to publish in any academic journal that does not permit me the freedoms of at least a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

Under that license, Lessig gives others the right "to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work" and "to make derivative works" as long as they give attribution and don't use it for commercial purposes. The implications of that are pretty profound, and it's in part the evolution of blogs and wikis and the like that are driving these changes. If you think about this idea just a little, you can't help but wonder what the shake out will be, in law and in education. [Weblogg-ed News]

From an interesting piece in the Washington Post on Creative Commons and how there is a groundswell of copyleft activity:

"There is this weird sense that the Internet is broken because it lets people make easy copies. . . The Internet is a machine for making copies, and artists need to come to grips with that," Doctorow said.

So here's my mix: take out "artists", put in "educators". I think we're at the point where we need to start coming to grips with the idea that the "problem" with students ripping other students' work is not going to get better, especially in the age of online portfolios and classroom blogs, and that it's the mixing part of the equation we need to start focusing on. I've been having this conversation more and more with teachers here at my school. It usually starts with "If my kids put all their work online for everyone else to see, what's going to stop others from using it?" The answer, obviously, is not much. Unless you really focus on the process, it's hard to stop kids who want to from downloading content and using it as their own. And as more and more process content goes online, well...

So what about focusing on the remix? What about saying to students "Look, here are some great pieces of content, and here's why they're great. Now what can you do with these pieces to make them your own, to inject your own ideas and experiences into them and interpret them in new ways that show you understand the concepts being presented?"

I mean, after all, isn't that what blogging (v.) does? Isn't that what I'm doing right now? I rip by reading what others write (or read) because they have allowed me to do so by publishing. I mix that content with my own ideas, partially to articulate what it means to me but also to test those ideas against a public audience. In the process, I learn. A lot.

This is just another part of the transformation, the rethinking that schools are going to have to undertake. The social, collaborative construction of content that the Read/Write Web facilitates is going to challenge us in many, many ways. [Weblogg-ed News]

For those of you who may still actually visit this site, I snagged one of the beautiful pictures from Wikipedia Commons and decided to change the look here. Who cares if the banner has absolutely no relvance to the topics discussed herein, right? That's an awesome bird.

Change is good... [Weblogg-ed News]

As I'm still immersed in wikimania I came across this amazing deconstruction by John Udell of the Wikipedia entry on "Heavy Metal Umlaut". If you really want to understand the inner workings of the collaborative construction of content revolution that we are watching happen right before our very eyes, run, don't walk, to his presentation and be amazed. Great stuff... [Weblogg-ed News]

Bud Gibson at Michigan State pointed me to his analysis of Weblog use in his classes last fall and it has some interesting insights into the dynamics of a blog classroom. What I like is that he shares the struggles and the solutions out in the open so we can all learn from his experience. Here's a snippet:

By design, blogging allows individuals to raise topics of interest and create threads of conversation without having to ask anyone's permission. That was an explicit design consideration for this course; I wanted to know what was going on with students...

Second, because blogging also produces XML-based feeds, it is very easy to aggregate all of the individual contributions in one place while still maintaining individual attribution.

Third, the XML-based feeds in blogs allow me to join people and resources to my group vs. having to get them to join me. Note, I did ask permission of everyone whose feed I aggregated into our site, but they did not have to go through a sign-on process and explicitly produce content for the site. By localizing content creation, blogs make it possible to ask permission and get a coherent stream of content.

Bud says that an analysis of student surveys about the class is upcoming. [Weblogg-ed News]

I know that I've been posting more narrative than usual lately, but it seems like all of a sudden, a lot more people want to talk about the implications of the Read/Write Web. Go figure.

Today's installment involves my colleague who menitoned his brother's problem with Internet sources a couple of weeks ago. The other day, we were talking about the Future of the World when he said "You know, I've been thinking a lot about this whole concept, and I think I've been looking at it from the '1984' angle where Big Brother comes in and shuts it down when it gets too threatening. But what I've come to wonder," he says, "is if this isn't more like 'Farenheit 451' where the problem is that people don't care enough to change society even though they have the opportunity to do so."

Maybe not.

The battle for the 'Net is about to be engaged... [Weblogg-ed News]

There more I look at the blogging "market" these days, I see things falling into fairly well defined places--at least in my head. There is a already a well defined split between the hosted services that offer blogging capabilities (Blogger, TypePad, Y! 360, LiveJournal, etc) and the "host it yourself" model. That second group is the ecosystem that MovableType and WordPress currently dominate and I think they'll continue to do so. If you further divide that into "corporate/enterprise" and "personal/non-profit"... [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

I keep reading all these speculative posts about Yahoo getting into the contextual advertising game, being "poised" to compete with AdSense, and so on. But what surprises me is how little chatter about Microsoft I read. If people really think that MSN Search is Microsoft's only assault on the cash cow in Mountain View, there's some really good crack getting smoked. Maybe it's time to review Google's financials and think like like the monoplist that Microsoft is. If you wanted... [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

Why?. Maybe I'm seriously missing something and you can help me out here. I've been known to drink the Google kool aid now and then, but their stuff is so... uneven. I know, I know. It's beta. And it has been for years. The "big news" is that you can now customize Google News and that's interesting I guess. But I use a few browsers and several computers. Without any sort of login or registration system, though, I have to make... [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

Forrester analyst and blogger Charlene Li spoke to a packed room of marketing, PR, and other interested folks today at Yahoo. Her hour-long talk covered many aspects of blogging, corporate marketing, PR, and what she believes Yahoo can do. Luckily, she was able to skip most of the intro material since blogs really aren't new to Yahoo at this point. Instead she focused on what works, what doesn't, and how blogging is a mindset--not a technology. Amen to that!... [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

I've noticed a funny thing in the last year or so. The vast majority of the time someone I know leaves a job (or is fired) two trends seem to recur: A sense of relief: "I'm so glad I'm not at that place anymore." A complete loss of "spare" time: "I'm busier now than when I was working full-time!" Maybe everyone should change jobs once or twice a decade? Maybe people should ask themselves a bit more often one question:... [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

"If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners." [Quotes of the Day]