I find it mildly amusing that in the Berkshires, the names of the two candidates for District Attorney sound like characters in a rejected Marvel Comics line: Knight vs. Capeless.

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The audio (ogg) of my keynote at the Wikimania conference has been posted. It picks up after my little (and loving) parody of Larry Lessig — actually, it’s more self-mocking than Lessig-mocking. Fortunately, Josheph Bancroft videoed the last half of the opening. [Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia lawrence_lessig]

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Want to create your own Stephen Colbert “You’re on Notice!” board? You can, thanks tol Jamais Cascio… [Tags: stephen_colbert jamais_cascio humor]

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Bill McGeveran and William “Terry” Fisher of the Berkman Center have published a paper about how copyright gets in the way of education. From the abstract:

Drawing on research, interviews, two participatory workshops with experts in the field, and the lessons drawn from four detailed case studies, the white paper identifies four obstacles as particularly serious ones:

* Unclear or inadequate copyright law relating to crucial provisions such as fair use and educational use;* Extensive adoption of digital rights management technology to lock up content;* Practical difficulties obtaining rights to use content when licenses are necessary;* Undue caution by gatekeepers such as publishers or educational administrators.

The white paper concludes with some discussion of paths toward reform that might improve the situation, including certain types of legal reform, technological improvements in the rights clearance process, educator agreement on best practices, and increased use of open access distribution.

The full paper is here.

[Tags: education copyright]

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A German podcast — Vier Nasen tanken Super (yes, four nose super tanker, which makes me think I may be missing the idiom) — interviews me for 25 minutes. In English, natürlich! I begin with a rambling, pointless response to a question about identity on the Web that should be fast-forwarded over, and then we talk about blogging and politics, in which what I say isn’t so much pointless as obviously wrong. [Tags: podcast politics]

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Tim Spalding has taken discussion forums a big step forward over at LibraryThing. The concept is simple but could make a real difference because it allows forum msgs to be aggregated in multiple ways. When you’re entering a msg at a forum, you can put a title or author in brackets and LibraryThing will take a stab at identifying what you have in mind. Think of it as in-line tagging. You can thus easily find all the posts about a book. And all the references to a book or author will be lilsted on that book or author’s page.

Because LibraryThing knows which books you own (because you’ve told it), it can feed you msgs about any of them. And, as Tim points out, this unhiding of msgs will change the temporality of posts: Rather than msgs fading into obscurity a few days or weeks after they’re posted, they’ll be easily findable and reply-able.

Very cool. [Tags: librarything tagging everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy forums folksonomy tim_spalding ]

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Jon Udell blogs about Lorcan Dempsey’s blogging of the OCLC’s fuzzy matching service that searches the Library of Congress Name Authority File, finding misspelled authors’ names, etc. Jon discovered that his own name was misspelled in the Authority File, and he explains the process for getting it corrected. And, Jon says, we should be making provenance and ways to correct provenance more explicit. [Tags: jon_udell john_udell jon_edull john_youdell libary_of_congress lorcan_dempsey taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous libraries]

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From the Open Net Initiative (Berkman, Cambridge, U of Toronto, Oxford):

Drawing from technical, legal, and political sources, ONI’s research finds that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is focusing its filtering on sites considered threatening to its one-party system. Furthermore, the technical sophistication, breadth, and effectiveness of Vietnam’s filtering are increasing with time. Similar to China, Vietnam has taken a multi-layered approach to controlling the Internet; Vietnam applies technical controls, the law, and education to restrict its citizens’ access to and use of information. Vietnam is carrying out this filtering with a notable lack of transparency – while Vietnam claims its blocking efforts are aimed at safeguarding the country against obscene or sexually explicit content, most of its filtering efforts are aimed at blocking sites with politically or religiously sensitive material that could undermine Vietnam’s one-party system. This is the latest in a series of case studies that address Internet filtering by states worldwide.

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We’ve been coming to Shakespeare & Co.’s performances for over twenty years, I believe. We have rarely been disappointed — their attempt to get around the inconvenient sexism of The Taming of the Shrew didn’t work — and we’ve been delighted this year. Hamlet and The Merry Wives of Windsor were both excellent, although The Merry Wives was — surprise! — funnier.

The Hamlet had some stunt casting: Jason Asprey in the lead, with his real-life mother (and company founder) Tina Packer as his mother. It would have been a mere stunt except both are wonderful actors, and Asprey played a resolute, believable Hamlet. He’s grieving, angry, and set on revenge. This was a more visceral and affecting version, not as mannered and self-conscious as many of the other Hamlets I’ve seen. It was also not as funny as some of them: Polonius is often played as more of a fool, which can lessen the obviousness of the of love holding that doomed family together. But the visibility of the love among the various and overlapping families made this a more moving version.

In an inspired change, which also lowered the number of required players, the traveling troupe of actors consists of a single thespian who enlists the king and queen to act in the play within the play. The folded over inwardness and outwardness was fascinating. And there was another benefit: Asprey gets to instruct Gertrude — his real mother and one of the great Shakespeare directors — in the basics of acting.

Last night we saw The Merry Wives, and it was hilarious, full of the funny business Shakespeare & Co. brings to the comedies. Malcolm Ingram was a fine Falstaff, full of himself and, given his stage girth, there’s lots to fill. Jonathan Croy chewed the scenery appropriately as the French Dr. Caius, and Dave Demke pushed pink-plumed foppery as far as it would go. But Corinna May and especially Elizabeth Aspenlieder really shined as the merry wives. The play is a trifle — the love interest is resolved pretty much offstage — but it is a trifle with the women firmly control.

(By the way, Harold Bloom’s chapter on Merry Wives in Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human is unintentionally funny because he is so besotted with Falstaff that Shakespeare’s use of the character as a buffoon drives him apoplectic.)

[Tags: shakespeare reviews]

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Jason Toal is researching people’s relationships to their tape collections by aggregating photos at flickr. A weird but wonderful idea. [Tags: jason_toal flickr research tapes everything_is_miscellaneous]

Jason also mentions Gene Smith’s collection of photos of name tags at the Information Architecture Summit, which is several degrees of meta.

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