Excellent article by Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard’s Berkman Center, titled The Copyright Cage. It’s a terrific overview of some of the insanely twisty legalities of copyright law. [link via Online Learning Daily]
I’ve been slightly annoyed recently by the minor outbreak of inane comments posted by the intellectually inept who wind their way to some years old post via a search engine. Comments of this nature tend to be more annoying than offensive, and sometimes are just pathetic in their lack of basic reading comprehension.
But more disconcerting is the recent outbreak of comment spam. In the last week, I’ve deleted at least a half dozen or more advertisements for penis enlargement pills, viagra, and other questionable products that were posted to comments on random blog entries. Seems like I’m not alone either [1, 2, 3, 4, etc.].
I’ve seen a few methods [1, 2] for stopping this that involve multiple customizations to Movable Type.
For the time being, though, I’ve finally converted the backend of my Movable Type installation to MySQL* and used this close comments script (which you actually have to get here now) to close comments on all posts older than 21 days. Not only does this decrease the annoying crufty responses, but I hope that it will also limit some of the targets for the vulgar spam.
I’m seriously considering changing my policy of having open comments on every new post. I might just open up comments for the posts that I want people’s feedback on. That seems a shame, but I spend enough time filtering spam from my email inboxes. I don’t want to have to do the same with my weblog.
* That also explains why the Last Modified date for every post on this weblog is now 5:53pm yesterday. Argh.
Last week, the blogosphere was all atwitter over Skype, a P2P VoIP (”peer-to-peer voice over IP” for the acronym-challenged) application.
This week, several weblogs pointed to the New York Times today about Dartmouth transitioning to Internet telephony:
This week, as classes begin, the 1,000 students entering the class of 2007 will be given the option of downloading software, generically known as softphones, onto Windows-based computers.
Using the software together with a headset, which can be plugged into a computer’s U.S.B. port, the students can make local or long-distance telephone calls free. Each student is assigned a traditional seven-digit phone number.
Of this Dartmouth development, Stephen Downes wrote about an article that
says students will be able to make long distance calls for free – but neither indicates what software is used and whether the institution is paying additional (and post-Skype, unnecessary) charges.
Nope, nope, and nope. Skype doesn’t make the telcos unnecessary at all. I think Stephen and the bazillion other people writing about Skype and Dartmouth are conflating computer-to-computer VoIP with real internet telephony.
Read more…
Daniel Neely writes
Mixing one acronym with another, is just asking for puzzled looks by your readers. It’s bad enough that a person still looking for the “Any” key needs to associate just one acronym with content. I think it’s quite absurd to tell people to “click the XML button to get the RSS feed!” It leaves too many people scratching their heads and saying, “Huh?” Not a good thing if you’re trying to reach a not-so-tech-savvy demographic. [link via Lockergnome's RSS Resource]
Absolutely! I think Neeley is identifying the problem appropriately, particularly the idiocy of misleading orange acronym button. Although, I don’t think his solution (replace the acronym soup with the term “feed”) is the best solution.
It’s amazing that we have a perfectly good term — subscribe — that the mainstream understands to mean “receive regular updates to this publication,” but we don’t use it for content syndication via XML formats. Perhaps it has too many connotations related to subscribing to email ists?
“Subscribe” is a term that is much more accessible than “RSS” or “XML.”
Will Richardson writes:
Forget all that stuff I said about moving too fast. I’ve decided I’m going to create one Web log a day as a surprise “gift” to various clubs and teams and teachers.
Great idea for a school! Eighty percent of them will never get used, but the twenty percent that do will probably use them really well.
The Invisible Adjunct points to an excellent op-ed article in the New York Times on higher ed costs [free registration with NYtimes.com required] by one of my favorite thinkers, Stanley Fish. Fish writes:
If there is a crisis in college costs it has not been caused by price-gouging or bureaucratic incompetence on the part of universities; a better analogy would be the mass circulation magazines of the 1950’s like Collier’s and Look, which folded at the very point when they had more readers than ever. The problem was that production costs far outpaced the revenues from subscriptions and advertisers, and every new reader actually cost them money.
Well worth the read.
I also heartily recommend Fish’s collection of essays, , which I just recently re-read.
After the Sobig virus debacle last month, cries about the death of email made their usual circuit. Some RSS advocatesstarted hammering away at nails with their saw, trying to figure out how their New Thing would replace the much maligned Old Thing.
Jon Udell wrote a piece, titled RSS to replace email? Nah., which prompted this response from Stephen Downes:
Jon Udell expresses doubt that RSS will replace email. His mail argument is that his current combination of spam filters work fine (though his email account is groaning under the volume). “It would be nuts,” he writes, “to throw out the SMTP baby with the spam bathwater,” though some tweaking (to verify that the sender is allow to send from that address) amy be needed. I don’t agree, and here’s why. In general, it seems to me, technologies that allow other people to put content into your space are unstable. On the other hand, technologies that allow you to get what you want from remote locations have been much more successful. SMTP is a put-type technology, while RSS is a get-type technology. It doesn’t mean that RSS will replace email. But something will.
While Stephen is more or less correct about the put/get difference, I can’t agree with his estimation of their comparitive value.
As opposed to the put/get dichotomy, I prefer to think of it as the difference between sender-initiated communication and recipient-initiated communication.
What Stephen calls “put-type technologies” are successful and useful because they allow the sender/caller to initiate communication. For example, IM and phones are put-type communication mediums, although synchronous forms, as opposed to the asynchronous put-type communications of email and the traditional letter. Sender-initiated communication is valuable because it generates a much higher likelihood of response than a medium where the individual who wants to get information out has to wait for his or her recipient has to request the communication because it eliminates the discovery component of recipient-initiated communication. E.g. if I want to subscribe to your RSS feed, I have to know where to find that feed first. If I want to check out a book from the library, I have to be able to find the book in the stacks (and find the library!)
Of course, the risk associated with sender-initiated communication is that sometimes senders we don’t want to communicate with will initiate communication with us — phone solicitations, email spam, etc. However, people accept this risk because the inconvenience of filtering out the unsolicited communication is less than the inconvenience of the discovery component of recipient-initiated communication. When I need to share a bit of important business information with a colleague, I want the additional security of putting it in their inbox instead of waiting for them to come to me. When my loved one is in the hospital, I want my phone to ring — I don’t want to wait five hours or five days to check to see if I’m needed.
Jon Udell’s more recent follow up column on the subject, E-mail’s special power points out another value of email that I hadn’t considered, it’s instantaneous group-forming capabilities:
Every interpersonal e-mail message creates, or sustains, or alters the membership of a group. It happens so naturally that we don’t even think about it. When you’re writing a message to Sally, you cc: Joe and Beth. Joe adds Mark to the cc: list on his reply. You and Sally work for one department of your company, Joe for another, Beth is a customer, and Mark is an outside contractor. These subtle and spontaneous acts of group formation and adjustments of group membership are the source of e-mail’s special power. Without any help from an administrator, we transcend the boundaries not only of time and space but also of organizational trust.
Will RSS replace email? I’m with Udell; not a chance. I don’t think Stephen believes RSS (or whatever content syndication mechanism we wind up with)will replace email, but I suspect we agree that it will become an effective alternative for a narrow band of email functions, like newsletters.
However, I do believe our best geeks will escalate the cold war with spammers to provide better software code for filtering . . . and eventually the government will alos step in to attempt better legal code. I’m not saying it’s easy, but I am saying that sender-initiated communication mechanisms, including email, will not be replaced by recipient-initiated get-type technology.
You heard it here first. ;)
Interesting resource with some good links worth following up on: Collaborative Learning Environments Sourcebook.
John Kruper writes a remarkably well-balanced entry, Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille’s heel?, on his weblog, The Electric Lyceum:
The moral of the story? While blogs and other “lightweight” community publishing systems will surely find their way into the motivated educator’s hands, their impact will remain limited until they are married to the more mundane (and decidedly not pedagogically-valued) class management features that are the bread and butter of “traditional” course management systems.
The interesting question then becomes, from which end of the spectrum will this post-revolution revolution emerge? Will blogs grow class management wings? Or will commercial course management systems shove blogs inside the courses alongside their documents and folders? Of course, don’t count out the possibility that an entirely new species may emerge, one that is natively optimized along both dimensions!
I’ve always thought that the idea of replacing course management systems with weblogs just illustrated that the person making the suggestion didn’t understand the role of course management systems at the institutional level. Kruper hits the nail on the head, though.
FWIW, weblogs won’t take on course management functionality because weblog vendors aren’t going to be competitive in that vertical (and they know it). Course management system will eventually integrate with existing weblog tools or incorporate blog-like publishing, though.