As someone who loathed Sense and Sensibility, mean Amazon comments about classic books make me laugh. Though mean-mouthing The Diary of Anne Frank seems a bit much.
Recognizing a book for its value capturing a time period or even what its being popular means is still important, but man, did I hate those S&S characters.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
The Anonymity of Comments on News Sites
When news sites, after years of hanging back, embraced the idea of allowing readers to post comments, the near-universal assumption was that anyone could weigh in and remain anonymous. But now, that idea is under attack from several directions, and journalists, more than ever, are questioning whether anonymity should be a given on news sites.
That's kind of a hard thing to crack down on. An identity is just a form and a gmail address away if the name sounds real enough.
William Gibson on Twitter
So somebody asked William Gibson if his latest book would've been written faster if Twitter didn't exist. (Is this blog going to need a Twitter tag? Ugh.)
That's a vote in favour of the Library of Congress keeping all tweets, right? I suppose for every person reporting on the kind of sandwich they had for lunch there's something a little more worthwhile. Or at least something I'd consider a little more worthwhile.
“Twitter, or the internet at large, feels to me like an automation of what I have to do, anyway, in order to write,” the Neuromancer and Spook Country novelist wrote on his official website. “Stare out window. Read a magazine. Gaze at shoe. Answer a letter. Think about something new (or newly). Access random novelty.”
That's a vote in favour of the Library of Congress keeping all tweets, right? I suppose for every person reporting on the kind of sandwich they had for lunch there's something a little more worthwhile. Or at least something I'd consider a little more worthwhile.
Downloading Stuff You Already Own
So if you download a free digital copy of a book you've bought, did you do anything wrong?
The More Things Change...
A guy named Wayne Bivens-Tatum found an article by Grace O. Kelley on the "The Democratic Function of Public Libraries".
Sound familiar? It was written in 1934.
The library, even more than other institutions, seems not to have been altogether a true part of the social process. In some way, it has been switched out of the current of social change, occupying a niche or eddy of its own. For a long time it seems to have been but slightly affected by the forces which have been changing the rest of the world. One looks in vain in histories of culture and education for studies of the modern library as an active force which is making its impress upon the social fabric. Due to the nature of its organization and of its service it has been possible for it to continue to function largely on its original indefinite ideals and, in a sense, to let the modern world go by....
Not only our knowledge of the world, but the world itself, keeps changing from day to day. "The inescapable drive of change under the accumulation of ideas and traditions, under the relentless impacts of science and invention," make a fixed regime impossible. "An industrial civilization founded on technology, science, invention, and expanding markets must of necessity change and change rapidly." Any institution which does not change too, adapt itself to the times, and become part of the onward "drive of change," will be pushed aside to be left perhaps for a time to make a harmless life of its own.
Sound familiar? It was written in 1934.
Library of Congress and Twitter
Every Tweet Will Be Preserved for History. Seriously?
I wonder what category tweets go under in the Library of Congress Classification system.
I wonder what category tweets go under in the Library of Congress Classification system.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
ACTA and the Internet
How ACTA Will Change the Internet, via Boing Boing.
ACTA Provisions on Injuctions and Damages, for reference.
...ACTA goes way, way beyond the TRIPS (the copyright/patent/trademark stuff in the World Trade Organization agreement), creating an entirely new realm of liability for people who provide services on the net. Since liability for service-providers determines what kind of services we get, increasing their liability for copyright infringement will make it harder to invent new tools like web-lockers, online video-hosting services, blogging services, and anything else that's capable of being used to infringe copyright.
ACTA Provisions on Injuctions and Damages, for reference.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)