In the "too funny" department, we have a klog apart noting that "Dave Woodbury's Weblog has the unintended honor of being Radio UserLand user 486. AKA RU-486."

If I was starting college these days, I would want to enter a program like the BA Media Studies one at the University of Teesside in the U.K. From the Timetable for their online resources, it looks fascinating and quite in line with my own interests. Consider it a complement to The Shifted Reading List, and I'm not just saying that because they link to me.  :-)

Jim W. was kind enough to send me a link to Visual Net for Libraries, which immediately piqued my curiousity and got me to order their demo CD.

Here's how they explain their product: "Antarcti.ca's Visual Net for Libraries addresses these challenges by creating large-scale data maps combining a superior navigation system with information-rich visuals. Library resources are organized into neighborhoods of information based on standard classification schemes such as LC or DDC, with visual metaphors used to convey holding attributes such as the name, author, size, age, holding type, and availability."

Here's how I explain it: pretty maps of information resources laid out in a visual representation. Look at the example Solutions and you'll see what I mean.

I tried to view the demo, but apparently I don't have Quicktime installed (even though I thought I did), so I'll try to run it at work tomorrow. How would I use this? I'd love to give it a whirl with the Virtual Illinois Catalog (VIC). After we go to the new version of VIC later this year, we're going to re-design the entry points so that you can figure out where you're searching geographically since we can't break out individual libraries from their Library Systems. It would also be interesting to test these types of visual maps for focused topical searches within VIC (say, resources for researching September 11) or better yet, thesaurus categories in Find-It! Illinois and the Illinois Government Information service (IGI).

In addition, I've been dreaming about an Illinois version of Cooler by the Lake for a couple of years now, and it would be neat to test this out in that resource as well (if we can ever get it off the ground).

Fellow VIC Development Team members... what do you think?

Today I installed Stapler (a scraping tool for Radio) and Kit (a suite of page script stuff for Radio). More when I know what I'm supposed to do with them. I also want to try rssDistiller so that I can make an "educated decision."

All My FAQs Wiki: CSS FAQs "Man, there's been an influx of superb CSS articles and resources appearing lately." [Meryl's Notes]

A great starter page for CSS information.

Pervasive Computing - Where's the Off Switch?

"Exactly how pervasive computing will become reality is not as important as the fact that it will become reality. In fact, the shift has already started (emphasis mine). We are becoming Borg.

Of course, that which can be used also can be abused, and this sort of technology is the stuff of nightmares for many of us who fear for our privacy and individuality. Ironically, those of us who most fear the technology are also those who most want it. We're the early adopters, and we fear it because we understand it....

So, there it stands. Everybody seems to want the same thing. It occurs to me, however, that there is one fundamental difference between what they want and what we want. Both government and citizens want pervasive computing; the difference is that citizens want to be able to turn it off." [at osOpinion, via C:PIRILLO.EXE]

This article encapsulates my thinking quite well. I love the idea of pervasive computing, but it scares me.

Behind the Grammys, Revolt in the Industry

"Many say that concern increased as Napster and its followers created a generation of music fans used to getting free songs on demand. Yet major label heads say that while attention has been focused on these services, a bigger worry is the practice of CD burning. Last year, sales of blank CD's are reported to have outnumbered recorded CD's.... (emphasis mine)

So the artists are taking matters into their own high-profile hands. The night before the Grammys, more than 15 superstars — including Billy Joel, the Eagles, Stevie Nicks, No Doubt and the Dixie Chicks — are to perform at four different concert halls in Southern California in a benefit for their own advocacy group, the Recording Artists Coalition. Their aim is to overturn legislation exempting artists from a California labor code that limits service contracts to seven years, but the long-term goal is to get adequate compensation from the labels. If an act sells a million albums and has a No. 1 hit, chances are that, on the books, they're still in debt to their label....

Mr. Joel, who is headlining the fund-raiser on Tuesday, is being toasted by the industry as its Man of the Year on Monday. Tori Amos, recently dropped by Atlantic, will be up for two awards, including best female rock vocal — for a song she recorded on Atlantic. She will be competing against Ms. Nicks, who will have performed in the artist benefit the night before. What will be interesting about this year's Grammy Awards will not be the anachronistic choices (nominations are, for the most part, on point compared to those of past years), but in the way the industry's escalating tensions and doomsday scenarios bubble to the surface on live TV." [at NY Times]

Heh, heh, heh. Here's what I think will be interesting to watch on Wednesday. Last year, Blue Man Group, Jill Scott, and Moby did an incredible performance of "Natural Blues," and within an hour, you could find it on Napster. This year, I may actually time how long it takes for a performance to show up on Morpheus.

And as a consumer, what am I supposed to do if I want a copy of that recording from last year but the record labels don't provide a way for me to legally buy it? Is it still stealing if I download it from Morpheus because there is no other way to get it?

This was a new term for me: What is Multimodality?

"Multimodality is 'a new concept that allows telephony subscribers to move seamlessly between different modes of interaction, from visual to voice to touch, according to changes in context or user preference,' officials from both companies said in a statement.

Multimodality on wireless devices also invokes visions of one of the more-overused words from the 1990's -- multitasking. With multimodality, users can speak into a wireless handset at the same time they're writing, reading or sending a message." [at Instant Messaging Planet]

The full results of the survey discussed in this article should be available in a few weeks.

Which One of the Trading Spaces Cast Are You? [via Daypop Top 40]

I'm not sure if I should be upset or not. I don't think I'd want to be any of them, except maybe Amy Wynn Pastor. FYI, it's a member site on AOL, and it's terribly slow at the moment.

Can AOL Make Money from IM?

"The most significant sign of AOL's plans for the IM infrastructure came when the company teamed up with New York-based ActiveBuddy to launch a comprehensive marketing campaign for New Line Cinema's The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Bob Woods, who closely covers the IM space for atNewYork sister site InstantMessagingPlanet believes the cross-promotional push associated with that announcement for The Lord of the Rings is exactly what AOL will do a lot more of. " [at AtNewYork, via C:PIRILLO.EXE]

No wonder AOL was so upset about Trillian and started blocking them in January. I've been using Trillian for a few months now, and I totally missed the LOTR promotion in AIM because of it. Cool!

Howto: Using Ogg Vorbis

"TuxPPC has done a small Ogg Vorbis HowTo on how to use the free audio codec to store and play your music data as an alternative to Mp3" [C:PIRILLO.EXE]

Ogg Vorbis is an open source alternative that is supposed to be even better than MP3s in terms of compression and quality. I remember a few years ago there was a big hulabaloo about royalty rates on MP3s. I don't think much has come of that big stink, but it's nice to know there's an alternative, even though it's not widely supported yet in terms of hardware.

Hey, Kate - EasyJet is offering free flights between Belfast and Glasgow for the rest of 2002, with "no 'book by', minimum or maximum stay conditions"! [via MeFi]

CNET Interviews John Perry Barlow

"I feel like we're in a condition where private totalitarianism is not out of the question because of the increasingly thickening matrix of channels of communication owned by the same companies that own content, that own Web properties, that own traditional media.

In essence, they're in a position to own the human mind itself. The possibility of getting a dissident voice through their channels is increasingly scarce, and the use of copyright as a means of suppressing freedom of expression is becoming more and more fashionable. You've got these interlocking systems of technology and law, where merely quoting something from a copyrighted piece is enough to bring down the system on you....

[Court challenges will] get rid of the DMCA because it's unconstitutional. And at some point, we'll get to a level where the courts agree with us. It's clearly a violation of the First Amendment, and it's being used to create all kinds of secondary violations. I just can't believe that a court could continue counting putting a link to a text file as a criminal act in the United States of America." [via Slashdot]

My commentary, which you should read after you've finished Lessig's article posted below.

A few years ago, I read an interesting article in Entertainment Weekly that I can't seem to dig up anywhere. It was about the new generation of film directors and how they think differently, which means they create differently. I really wish I had saved the article because the only director I can remember them mentioning specifically was Mike Figgis, the guy that directed Time Code. TC splits the screen into four different windows and follows different characters in each. Talk about multitasking!

And that was the point of the article - that these directors were growing up in the age of the computer and it was influencing their styles of filmmaking. They no longer thought of movies in terms of one linear sequence, a start to finish proposition. You can see the effects of this new, often frenetic, style very clearly in films like Memento, Run Lola Run, and Moulin Rouge. A lot of adults don't like these movies because they embody the new style, but they all take cliches from the past and re-invent them.

And to my mind, that's the type of creativity that Lessig warns we are losing every time we extend copyright. This new generation of directors will give way to the Net Gen directors, and who knows what they could create if given the opportunity, much like rap and hip hop became new genres inspired by reinventing earlier works. What if Baz Luhrmann couldn't have made his version of Romeo + Juliet because Shakespeare's work was still copyrighted? Of course, some of you are saying that might be a good thing, but the point is that it would have stifled innovation and creativity.

So by keeping artistic works out of the commons for longer and longer periods of time, we're taking away one of the major inputs for the next generation of artists. So even if you are not passionate about why the DMCA, SSSCA, and copyright law in general is hurting libraries, you should care about what our culture is losing.

Control & Creativity: The Future of Ideas Is in the Balance, an excellent commentary by Lawrence Lessig that includes a little history and some proposals for remedying the current situation. Apologies for the long excerpts, but I actually cut it down from what I originally wanted to quote, so I encourage you to read the whole thing yourself.

"Apple, of course, wants to sell computers. Yet their ad touches an ideal that runs very deep in our history. For the technology that they (and of course others) sell could enable this generation to do with our culture what generations have done from the very beginning of human society: to take what is our culture; to “rip” it—meaning to copy it; to “mix” it—meaning to re-form it however the user wants; and finally, and most important, to “burn” it—to publish it in a way that others can see and hear....

But just at the cusp of this future, at the same time that we are being pushed to the world where anyone can “rip, mix [and] burn,” a countermovement is raging all around. To ordinary people, this slogan from Apple seems benign enough; to the lawyers who prosecute the laws of copyright, the very idea that the music on “your” CD is “your music” is absurd. “Read the license,” they’re likely to demand. “Read the law,” they’ll say, piling on. This culture that you sing to yourself, or that swims all around you, this music that you pay for many times over—when you hear it on commercial radio, when you buy the CD, when you pay a surplus at a large restaurant so that they can play the same music on their speakers, when you purchase a movie ticket where the song is the theme—this music is not yours. You have no “rights” to rip it, or to mix it, or especially to burn it. You may have, the lawyers will insist, permission to do these things. But don’t confuse Hollywood’s grace with your rights. These parts of our culture, these lawyers will tell you, are the property of the few. The law of copyright makes it so, even though the law of copyright was never meant to create any such power....

The first real Napster case was cable television. Congress’s aim in part was to assure that the cable industry could develop free of the influence of the broadcasters. The broadcasters were a powerful industry; Congress felt—rightly—that cable would grow more quickly and innovate more broadly if it was not beholden to the power of broadcasters. So Congress cut any dependency that the cable industry might have, by assuring it could get access to content without yielding control....

The same solution—compensation without control—is available today. But instead, copyright interests are in effect getting more control over copyright in cyberspace than they had in real space, even though the need for more control is less clear. We are locking down the content layer, and handing over the keys to Hollywood....

Congress should empower file sharing by recognizing a similar system of compulsory licenses. These fees should not be set by an industry set on killing this new mode of distribution. They should be set, as they have always been set, by a policy maker keen on striking a balance. If only such a policy maker were somewhere to be found." [at Gilder.com, via Slashdot]

Forgot to mention that Eric suggests the following:

"Another relevant article on the KM logging concept is at the old Webtechniques site (now New Architect)

Self-organizing sites by Hisham Alam
Covers a few basics and contains some links."

It's always nice to start the day with poetry. I'll have to remember to use this as an icebreaker next time I talk about accessibility.

Web Accessibility Haikus. Web Accessibility Guidelines in Haiku. [via meryl's notes]