Woody Guthrie:

“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

—Written by Guthrie in the late 1930s on a songbook distributed to listeners who wanted the words to his recordings

[Thanks to Mike Saunders for the link.] [Tags: copyright woody_guthrie digital_rights]

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According to the Oklahoma Gazette, the state legislature has passed a bill that Microsoft helped write that gives vendors of software the right to check around you computer, delete files they consider unauthorized, and turn you into the local authorities if they don’t like the way your computer smells.

This is all being done to keep you secure.

Yes, you can refuse to agree to the end user license agreement, but more likely you’ll just click on it without reading the fine print. And if you refuse to sign the EULA, you don’t get to use the software.

OK not OK. [Ultimately, this link came through Dave Farber’s list.] [Tags: spyware digitalRights digital_rights microsoft oklahoma eula we_are_screwed]

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McAfee acquired SiteAdvisor last week. I’m a big fan of SiteAdvisor (Disclosure: I’m also a stock-owning advisor), and I’m pleased that it seems like McAfee is going to keep it going in its current direction as a free service and a good citizen.(I’m an advisor because I feel this way, not vice versa.)

If you haven’t downloaded the SiteAdvisor browser plugin, I recommend that you do so. I use its evaluations at least several times a day. [Tags: siteadvisor mcafee spyware malware]

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux are publishing Robert Frenay’s Pulse (about systems that model themselves on living things) as a “network book.” It seems to be Web 2.0 compliant: It’s available via RSS, is redistributable, and open to discussion. It’ll be interesting to see how readable it is in this form, but it is certainly bold. [Tags: pulse robert_frenay books web20]

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Ryan Lizza at The New Republic writes:

The centrist revolt against the war in Iraq is caused by shame. Americans are angry at Bush not for toppling Saddam without U.N. permission, but for turning Iraq into a symbol of humiliation for the United States. The analogy is not so much LBJ and Vietnam, but Carter and the hostage crisis. It’s not the neo-imperialism. It’s the embarrassing incompetence.

Interesting. Sounds plausible, but I have no way of telling if it’s true or not. [Tags: bush iraq ryan_lizza tnr politics]

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Yesterday I talked at a meeting of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a library association in Ohio. (Librarians are so much fun to hang out with. Plus, library associations are one of the few groups I address where there are more women than women, except, of course, when the family is home for dinner.)

I heard two presentations, both excellent. One was by Carole Palmer who teaches in the grad program in libary science the U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Palmer has been researching how scholars in the humanities and sciencies actually use resources when they work. Among other findings: Neuroscientists spend the most time exploring outside their domain — 54% of their time. She argued that “contextual mass” — relatively small collections that provide context — can be as important as critical mass. [I am of course not doing justice to her presentation. Nor will I with the following:]

Francis Jacobson Harris, author of I Found It on the Internet: Coming of Age Online, said kids tend to take in lots and lots of information and then eliminate what they don’t need, as opposed to doing highly targeted searces. She went through screen captures of a library catalog system that has zero tolerance for differences in how we think about topics: “Cooking” gives only a handful of hits while “cookery” gives thousands.

Francis also talked about her efforts to help students figure out the sources of Web pages and has the killer example: www.MartinLutherKing.org looks like a legit site but is actually run by the white supremacist group, Storm Front. Sites like About.com (see their Folkmusic page) continue to be taken in by this. It’s also about the fifth hit at Google on “Martin luther king” (no quotes), perhaps because people don’t know to use “nofollow” links: If you add “rel=nofollow” to your link markup, Google won’t count the link as a sign of the site’s popularity.

Anyway, both were excellent presentations. I wish I had taken better notes. [Tags: research libraries taxonomy nofollow multitasking]

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I’m giving the closing keynote at the Digital Insight customer conference in Orlando today, staying at the continentally-misnamed Royal Pacific Hotel — there’s no ocean nearby, and if there were, it wouldn’t be the Pacific. I got in late last night and I leave this afternoon, so I don’t have a lot of (= any) time to see the sights, but this morning I made the mistake of taking a 6 a.m. walk along the river. Or is it a river simulacrum? It was a mistake only because I find the artificiality of the environment so disquieting. The grass has been engineered to be as close as organisms get to Astroturf. The shrubbery is placed at measured intervals. The dirt’s nudity has been clothed in wood chips. The river probably has a drain plug somewhere. It’s all too planned and perfectly executed. As an indoor Jew with no sense of nature, I found it disturbing that even I was disturbed.

But now I’m safely back within the overtly controlled bosom of the hotel cum themepark, mopping the dew from brow, and discovering that the dew has been lightly scented with lemon essence and Sucra™.

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Jakob Voss has published a paper on Wikipedia’s category system and how it compares with tag-based folksonomies and the Dewey Decimal Classification system. At the time he did the research (Jan., 2006), there were 923,196 articles in the Gnlish version, and a full 94% of them had at least one category tag. There were a 91,502 unique categories. Then the paper gets statistical beyond my understanding, but that’s my problem, not the paper’s… [Tags: wikipedia tagging taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Steve Johnson has finished a draft of his new book, The Ghost Map. It sounds like it will be wonderful…what Michael Crichton might write if he were as talented a writer as Steve. [Tags: books steven_johnson]

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The OPLAN Foundation wants to be a central watering hole for those enthusiastic about the possibilities of “open public local access networks,” from wifi hotposts to city-wide fiber. The site points to www.ftthcouncil.org and www.wifi-forum.com as organizations working on elements of this; OPLAN wants to be the “canopy.”

Any organization working toward spreading connectivity bottom up has my support. (Note: If the KKK adopts open wifi as a plank in its platform, I will regret that sentence.)

Perhaps you wonder how I, as a member of the board of advisors of FON, can also support open wifi hotspots [disclosure]? That’s because FON is not in competition with open wifi. FON is intended for the 99.999% of the world that doesn’t know a WEP from a hole in the security. For them, FON provides: 1. A mix of incentives (either roam for free or make a buck or two from people using your router); 2. Ease and security; 3. A case to be made to the ISPs about why sharing broadband is good for them. 4. Eventually, some very interesting, and possibly transformative, community apps.

If the world woke up one day and decided to wrap itself in a snuggly blanket of free, open wifi spots, FON’s founders and advisors would weep with joy. (Some of the investors might have more complex reactions.) In the meantime, FON’s mixed incentives may help spread truly low cost coverage, especially in poorer parts of the world. [Tags: wifi muniwifi oplan fon]

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