The IBM Center for the Business of Government has issued a report called “The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0” by Donald Wyld at Southeastern Louisiana University. It’s a nicely done 70-page report, although only the first thirty pages are really on the topic announced in the title. The rest is a more generic backgrounder on blogging.

(Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.)

Just a generic whine: The report is a PDF. Why oh why? Is there a format more hostile to on-screen reading?* This corporate infatuation with PDF is one of the great Not Getting It’s of the age.

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*Yes, there are formats more hostile. Still, PDF is usually a poor choice for reading on a screen. [Tags: blogging e-government ibm pdf]

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And many, many more to you, my friend.

Personally, I’ve been finding there’s a lot to be said for being in your fifties. Welcome to the decade. I look forward to many more years of learning from you and from your example. [Tags: akma]

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Oxfam is collecting money for the victims of the horrendous earthquake in Peru. That’s where my family is giving.

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Interesting interview with Sharon Gillett, Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Cable in the Boston Globe.

Q The big news is the state’s $25 million broadband incentive fund, which will help bring broadband access to 32 towns that don’t have high-speed Internet. What are the details?

A [The fund] is to be used to invest in hard capital assets with long lives — things like conduits, fiber, wireless towers. Those are big parts of the up-front capital required to serve communities, and the idea is having the state invest in those assets lowers the cost for private companies to come in and do the rest of the job. The state is not a service provider . . . We’re also technology neutral — whatever works.

This sounds like Boston’s admirable plan of providing access to the backbone to anyone who wants to be an ISP, although I don’t know if it’s as aggressive as Boston’s plan. In any case, the state’s map of how many providers there are in each region (to which Gillett refers) seems to me to promote the idea that if you have a couple of big incumbents duking it out in your town, that counts as a competitive market. Boston’s plan may show us what it’s like when anyone from big businesses to non-profits can try to entice you to sign up with them.

Brookline, where I live, is rolling out its muni wifi. I occasionally get a signal in my house. It’ll be free in public parks, and there will be a relatively low fee ($20/month — but they don’t say what the speed will be, and they don’t say how much the daily or hourly fee will be) for access elsewhere. It’s being installed and managed by Galaxy Internet Services [Tags: brookline wifi muniwifi broadband massachusetts sharon+gillett net+neutrality ]

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I just tried to post a comment to one of my own recent posts. It came back with the page that announces that the comment has been put into a moderation queue, which is only supposed to happen if you’re commenting on a post of a certain age, and if you aren’t on the cleared list of commenters. Worse, it didn’t even put the comment into the queue. It just threw it out.
I apologize if you’ve tried commenting here over the past few days. I’m afraid your comment was tossed aside like mere fish wrap. Truly sorry :(

I think it was a problem with one of my spam filters. I think it’s fixed now.

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Consuming Experience tells the long story of how the BBC came to demand that YouTube remove the video she had posted. The take-away: The DMCA is an abuse magnet.

The short version of the story: The anonymous author of Consuming Experience was in the beta program for a BBC media player. After carefully reading the agreement she’d signed with the BBC and figuring that the player had already been pretty widely publicized, she posted a clip of it. The BBC asserted that the clip violated its copyright and demanded that YouTube remove it under the terms of the DMCA. YouTube complied, as it always does. If YouTube doesn’t comply, it’s legally liable if the material is found to infringe copyright. Hence, complying with take-down notices is a legal reflex action.

The Consuming Experience blogger eventually was put in touch with the right people at the BBC. They apologized. It is, to the BBC’s credit, the first take down notice they’ve ever sent to YouTube. Someone at the BBC — we don’t know who — apparently had panicked, thinking the clip gave away trade secrets. Or maybe they just regretted not having written the beta agreements more carefully.

This is not just yet another case of a big media company sending out takedown notices for material that it turns out does not violate copyright. This represents a temptation to abuse the DMCA in a different way. The DMCA isn’t about trade secrets. There are other remedies for that. The DMCA is about copyright. But it’s so easy to send out take down notices that its use will inevitably expand in every dimension. Don’t like a clip for whatever reason? Send a take-down notice. And, although victims can send a counter-notification if they think their stuff was taken down inappropriately, they are Davids facing well-heeled Goliaths.

The DMCA does allow hefty penalties to be levied against those who knowingly abuse it. I hope we’ll see some judgments. [Tags: copyright dmca bbc ]

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Jeneane begins her reflections on Disney’s acquisition of Club Penguin with, if I may quote, “HOLY CRAP.” “The Internet’s getting younger every day, friends,” she says.

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PC World has combed through Google Maps’ satellite images of the earth and have found some very cool ones….

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I posted at HuffingtonPost about why I think the YouTube debate was a bigger deal than much of the media is claiming.

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The recording industry group that is responsible for collecting the new outrageous fees from Internet radio stations – they pay per channel, as if “channels” made a lot of sense for build-your-own-stream sites like Pandora – has decided not to start collecting the stated fees, subject to negotiations. (See Salon.)

Good news…except how comfortable are you with Congress handing his power to the recording industry? On the other hand, Pandora’s Tim Westergren sees this as a victory for the people: Congress stepped in (and Ed Markey’s the guy, which is a good thing) because you and I complained so loudly.

We’ll see. In any case, it’s better than the shutdown we were facing. [Tags: internet_radio pandora politics media ]

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