For a set of reasons that I will explain later, “the opposite of property” is a concept that is much more important when we come to the world of ideas, information, expression, and invention. We want a lot of material to be in the public domain, material that can be spread without property rights. “The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.”12 Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property. The third goal of this book is to explore property’s outside, property’s various antonyms, and to show how we are undervaluing the public domain and the information commons at the very moment in history when we need them most. Academic articles and clever legal briefs cannot solve this problem alone.

Instead, I argue that precisely because we are in the information age, we need a movement—akin to the environmental movement—to preserve the public domain. The explosion of industrial technologies that threatened the environment also taught us to recognize its value. The explosion of information technologies has precipitated an intellectual land grab; it must also teach us about both the existence and the value of the public domain. This enlightenment does not happen by itself. The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently, to see that there was such a thing as “the environment” rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment.

We have to “invent” the public domain before we can save it. . . .

Online collaboration often consists of little more than forwarding links or snippets from a Web page to a friend or colleague with a few comments dropped in. IBM is hoping to change this by letting people share the browser itself. This is the idea behind Blue Spruce, an experimental browser project that IBM hopes may change the way many people use the Web.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, November 26, 2008

IBM Reveals Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years

Unveiled today, the third annual “IBM Next Five in Five” is a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years: Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows; You will have a crystal ball for your health; You will talk to the Web… and the Web will talk back; You will have your own digital shopping assistants; Forgetting will become a distant memory.
Source: IBM Press Release, November 25, 2008

Collective solution to accessing the internet via satellite

In many rural areas of Europe, getting on the internet means putting up with sluggish dial-up connections or, at best, erratic mobile services. A new satellite-based solution developed by European researchers promises to change that.
Source: ICT Results, November 26, 2008

Semantic desktop paves the way for the semantic web

European researchers have developed innovative software to make finding information on your computer and sharing it with others considerably easier. In the process, they may have solved the chicken and egg problem that has held back development of the semantic web.
Source: ICT Results, November 25, 2008

Restaurateur tracks down bill dodgers on Facebook

An Australian restaurateur left holding a hefty unpaid bill when five young diners bolted used the popular social network website Facebook to track them down — and they got their just deserts.
Source: Belinda Goldsmith, Reuters, November 27, 2008

Nokia robots take over the home

Finnish handset vendor Nokia unveiled some blue skies technology on Thursday, in the shape of its Home Control Centre. The world’s biggest handset manufacturer claims that the platform will be the basis for next generation security, smart home solutions and household energy management systems. What this means is that Nokia sees its gadgets eventually taking full control of your home.
Source: telecoms.com, November 27, 2008

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

. . . In a way that even e-mailed photos never could, the Web cam promises to transcend both distance and the inability of toddlers to hold up their end of a phone conversation.

Some grandparent enthusiasts say this latest form of virtual communication makes the actual separation harder. Others are so sustained by Web cam visits with services like Skype and iChat that they visit less in person. And no one quite knows what it means to a generation of 2-year-olds to have slightly pixelated versions of their grandparents as regular fixtures in their lives. . . .

Howard Rheingold recounts on his popular SmartMobs blog the University of random twittering that he is experiencing on twitter, with “increasing frequency and accuracy.”

“Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures” is a three-year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Carried out by researchers at the University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, the digital youth project explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives.

For a summary of this research project and to read the full report please visit: Digital Youth Research.

This insight from Eisner about the current internet scene is strong stuff:

“It’s always the content that defines the platform,” he says. Now the platform owners are “being arrogant and saying, ‘we’re it,’” he adds. “But eventually exclusive content wins out.”

Then he gives an important caveat: The content must be professionally produced as well as exclusive. “How many skateboarding cats can there be?” he says.

Cryptographers from around the world have laid their best work on the line in a contest to find a new algorithm that will become a critical part of future communications across the Internet. The winning code will become a building block of a wide variety of Internet protocols, including those used to safeguard communications between banks and their customers. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) organized the competition and plans to release a short list of the best entries by the end of this month, beginning a four-year process of painstaking analysis to find the overall winner.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, November 18, 2008

Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs

As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover. Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.
Source: Richard Pérez-Peña, The New York Times, November 17, 2008

‘Interplanetary internet’ passes first test

NASA has finished its first deep-space test of what could become an ‘interplanetary internet’. The new networking commands could one day be used to automatically relay information between Earth, spacecraft, and astronauts, without the need for humans to schedule transmissions at each point.
Source: Rachel Courtland, New Scientist, November 19, 2008

Monty Python launches its own YouTube channel

The comedy troupe said they wanted to “get their own back” on people who had been illegally uploading their sketches onto the site by taking matters into their own hands. “We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell,” they wrote in a light-hearted message introducing the channel.
[Note: This channel is at http://www.youtube.com/user/MontyPython.]
Source: Matthew Moore, The Telegraph, November 20, 2008

Track your fitness, environmental impact with new cell phone applications

Researchers at the University of Washington and Intel have created two new cell phone applications, dubbed UbiFit and UbiGreen, to automatically track workouts and green transportation. The programs display motivational pictures on the phone’s background screen that change the more the user works out or uses eco-friendly means of transportation.
Source: University of Washington News, November 19, 2008

Google SearchWiki brings custom search results

Disagree with Google’s search results? You’ll be able to do something about it with a change the company plans to release starting Thursday. Google’s SearchWiki is a feature that lets people elevate, delete, add, and annotate search results. Google remembers the changes a person made to search results, so repeat searches will show the same customizations and notes.
Source: Stephen Shankland, CNET’s Webware, November 20, 2008

YouTube videos go HD with a simple hack

Wired, with the help of users on the VR-Zone forums, has uncovered a simple way to get high-quality uploaded videos to display in 1280×720–also known as 720p.
YouTube has long been expected to roll out high-definition video playback, and this appears to be the first viable way to do it. The hack in question is similar to the one that was first used to toggle on the “high quality” mode. It is done simply by adding “&fmt=22” to the end of the video URL.
Source: Josh Lowensohn, CNET’s Webware, November 20, 2008

New European online library crashes under weight of interest

The EU’s new Europeana digital library has swiftly become a victim of its own success, forced to shut down for weeks within hours of its launch due to the enormous amount of interest. The Europeana digital library, an online collection of Europe’s cultural heritage, was launched to great fanfare on Thursday. Immediately after the europeana.eu website got up and running it was swamped by an unexpected 10 million user hits per hour, swiftly bringing the system to a crashing halt.
[Note: The site is at http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ and will be unavailable until mid-December.]
Source: AFP, November 21, 2008

Links: ZDNet, Primidi