The first in a series of three short videos from the Digital Natives project of U of St. Gallen and the Berkman Center that tells the story of Zack McCune, a Brown student (and Berkman intern) who “won the DMCA lottery” and was sued by the RIAA. It’s nicely done product by summer interns Nikki Leon and John Randall, and it’s a cliff-hanger…

[Tags: berkman st_gallen riaa dmca digital_nativescopyright zack_mccune ]

Apart from becoming more and more unpleasant, recently business travel is also becoming far less necessary. With videoconferencing technologies improving and fuel prices rising, more businessmen and women seem to be choosing the option to stay put and use new technology to cut down on travel.

My session did go better than I expected and I was happy to finally get to meet Quincy Smith of CBS Interactive who was the moderator for our panel.

I did manage to shoot some photos, but not too many. I've posted them as a Flickr set. If I get any tomorrow, I'll post them as well.

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for SF for a brief visit.

Nobel laureate and former US vice-president Al Gore recently made a speech advocating that Americans abandon fossil fuels completely over the next ten years. His solution is ???that the price of carbon-based energy include the costs of the environmental damage it causes. I have long supported a sharp reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made up in CO2 taxes. We should tax what we burn, not what we earn. This is the single most important policy change we can make.

The 4th iCommons Summit is being held in Sapporo, Japan from 29 July to 1 August, 2008. The summit originally started as a gathering of Creative Commons country leads, but had evolved over the years into a global conference of people interested in social, educational, business, technical, creative, legal and other aspects of sharing, collaborative and open models for doing just about everything. I think it is the most interdisciplinary and global meeting of its kind.

The usual suspects will be there. This year, we have substantial participation from Sapporo City and should have interesting cultural programs as well as local Japanese participation.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone next week. Although there's only one week left, it's not too late to sign up and join. If you think Japan's too far away, you're not thinking globally.

Jon Udell talks about his interview of Dan Bricklin in which about Dan talks about his experience entering the world of audio. Jon says:

When I embarked on my personal audio adventure a few years ago, I naively thought that our fancy new digital technologies would make the whole process very simple. Boy, was I wrong about that.

As a coda, Jon uses the story of the production of of that very interview as an example of the routine complexities of audio.

Too true. I’m often tempted to record an interview but then I remember just what a pain in the butt it would be to edit it, even with my very low standards for audio quality.

So, is there something wrong with the idea of writing software that:

1. Converts spoken audio into text (presumably using existing tools)

2. Lets you use an editor to delete pieces of the text and move other pieces around, as you would with a low-end word processor

3. Uses the edited text to edit and output the audio

Even if Step 1 worked only moderately well, this application would turn editing spoken audio into a trivial task, no harder than (in fact, exactly the same as) editing a text file.

Does this software exist? Is there a good reason why it doesn’t, shouldn’t or couldn’t?

[Tags: jon_udell dan_bricklin podcasting ]

When you walk around the Bangalore campus of technology-outsourcing giant Wipro, something feels familiar. Sure, it's India, so the sun is too hot and the women float by in a rainbow of saris. But there's still a sense of d??j?? vu. At lunchtime, young employees (average age: 27) swarm into cafeteria cliques, or stream into computer labs, or exit en masse from one three-story lecture hall into another. Oh, that's right. It feels like college.

I just arrived at FORTUNE Brainstorm: TECH and noticed that they linked to my blog on the site. (Thanks!) However, I'm having some difficulty trying to figure out what to write about or what "voice" to use.

Compared to when I blogged this event back in 2002, there are a lot of bloggers here now. Personally, I blog a lot less. Blogging had become "work" and my blog had begun to attract such a broad audience that I had to write in an increasingly self-controlled and measured voice, which was boring.

Also, the tools have changed. I get more comments on Flickr than on my blog. My Twitter feed possibly has as many readers as my blog.

I probably can't write much about the conference sitting here in my room though, so I better sling my camera and head over.

UPDATE: Twitter feed of the event.

On a prematurely springlike day in Cincinnati, Len Sauers's workday begins as it often does -- with a meeting. On the 11th floor of Procter & Gamble's corporate offices, seven members of its Sustainability Leadership Council huddle around a table in a small conference room. Ten others listen in by phone from P&G offices around the world. The topic at hand is the company's commitment to develop $20 billion worth of "sustainable innovation products" in the next five years, a significant addition to P&G's current $76 billion in annual sales.

Although Toyota's Prius has peaked interest, SUVs are still selling. "Surprisingly, there is still a good majority of people buying full-sized pickups and SUVs," Mark Bruschi, general manager at Shore Toyota, told The Press of Atlantic City. "We are off about 15 percent for those vehicles from where we were."

Apart from the incentives offered, Bruschi reports that SUVs are doing well because people have kids, they're going skiing, or to the beach, or towing their trailers.

When I read something like today’s news that only 10% of American newspaper editors consider foreign news to be “very essential” to their coverage, I instinctively turn to the bloggers who I know will have something enlightening, thoughtful and sometimes profound to say. And that by itself says a lot about how news is changing.

Of course, I did read that particular news in a newspaper, although I was referred there by a blog aggregator. So, I’m not saying that professional news media are unnecessary or add nothing. Not at all. But the news ecology in just a few years has become 100% mixed.

Tags: news media participatory_media ethan_zuckerman

Mygazines.com is an interesting idea. Currently in beta, it’s designed to let anyone upload any magazine or magazine article, and then share the content, using the familiar elements of content-based social networking sites (or, more accurately, the social networking elements of content-based sites).

The site unfortunately has little information about itself, so I don’t know what they think they’re going to do about the obvious copyright issues. The existing content includes the magazines’ ads, so maybe the site hopes publishers will see some benefit in being scanned ‘n’ read. (As an example, here’s a link to the complete contents of the current issue of The New Yorker.)

While the tool for reading is pretty slick, the process of posting to enable said slickness seems pretty onerous.

I’m interested to see what becomes of it… [Tags: copyright magazines publishing media everything_is_miscellaneous ]