Sunday, April 22, 2012


Perhaps this was as odoriferous as I thought it was...
"As Megaupload's Kim Dotcom's megafarce trial continues, the New Zealand Herald reports that his alleged offense not only falls below the threshold for extradition, but also that the warrant may not be properly served. 'My understanding as to why they haven't done that is because they can't. We don't believe Megaupload can be served in a criminal matter because it is not located within the jurisdiction of the United States,' says Megaupload's lawyer Ira Rothken. Not surprisingly, Kim Dotcom has a few choice words to say about having his business trashed this way, with 220 jobs lost, and millions left without access to their legitimate data."
[Perhaps the first comment sums it up?
Trial and extradition were never the goal
He was put out of business and lost tens of millions of dollars from the raid. His punishment has already been served, without trial, and without due process.


An interesting rant worth reading. Early on, the Internet was accused of disintermediation. Today my students have never heard the word.
Voldemort’s Got Nothing On Jeff Bezos
E-books. Again. Amazon and the DOJ vs. Apple and “The Big Six.” The future of reading. A breathtakingly stupid David Carr piece in the New York Times, which thankfully someone else took down paragraph-by-paragraph, so I don’t have to. Elsewhere, an awesome quote which I want to cheer with the force of a million choirs of angels:
I am completely unmoved by the argument that if Amazon forces traditional publishers to sell books at lower costs, then the publishers will go away and we won’t have books anymore. Hogwash. The publishers built for a printed books world may go away, but their digital native versions will replace them.
Yes, it’s time to trot out that obligatory William Gibson quote again:
A middleman’s business is to make himself a necessary evil.
Neuromancer


Interesting
"An analysis of software licenses shows usage of GPL and other copyleft licenses declining at an accelerating rate. In their place, developers are choosing permissive licenses such as BSD, MIT, and ASL. One theory for the decline is that GPL usage was primarily driven by vendor-led projects, and with the shift to community-led projects, permissive licenses are becoming more common."


Amusing, but I'm not sure it rises to the point of Interesting, let alone useful.
Why Internet/GDP Ratios Make No Sense
On Monday, the Economist reprinted a chart from a BCG report, which purported to show the contribution of “the internet” to the total GDP of various different countries. Britain comes out on top, with an internet-to-GDP ratio of 8.3%; it’s followed by Korea, China, Japan, USA, India, and Australia. After the UK, the highest-ranking European country is Germany, on just 3.3%, while Canada lags far behind the US.
… Zwillenberg did say that in ten years or so, “you won’t need to measure the internet economy because it will be totally pervasive.” But for the time being, he’s determined to measure the internet. And the way he’s doing it is very web 1.0.
Remember the dot-com boom of the 1990s, when everybody got excited about the internet because it was a new way to buy stuff? That’s basically what BCG is measuring here. They’re taking total consumer expenditure in each country, and working out how much of that expenditure is online. As in, buying a hardback from Amazon, or a Beanie Baby from eBay. Then they add in the amount you pay your ISP to get online each month. And then they add a certain amount for investment by private enterprise in internet infrastructure, and a bit more for what they call “net exports” — the Czech Republic, for instance, apparently has a big internet security software sector.
The exports bit helps to explain why Canada’s number is low: a lot of Canadians, for obvious reasons, like to buy things on Amazon and other U.S.-based e-commerce sites. And every time they do, under BCG’s methodology, the Canadian internet economy is decreased by that amount. (It’s an export of the U.S., and an import of Canada, and the calculations add up net, rather than gross, exports.) As a result, it’s theoretically possible, in BCG World, for the internet to account for a negative proportion of GDP, in some countries. [Okay, that's interesting... Bob]


For those who were once addicted (you know who you are)
With only $50,000 to go, the gang at Replay Games is looking forward to receiving funding, and is asking fans to provide some direction with how to use any excess money received.
Not every Kickstarter project can be a Double Fine Adventure Game, making millions of dollars more than initial goals. The game that started the firestorm of community funding for video games will go down as a rarity, with most projects chugging along at a steady, if not remarkable, pace toward their goals. Thus is the case with the Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards update.
Still, with more than 10 days to go, it looks like the original goal of $500,000 will be surpassed.


Creating a Blog is easy. Filling it with useful information every day is a bit more complicated.
One of my go-to places for learning Blogger tips, tricks, and hacks is Blogger Buster. For the last year or so it was fairly dormant. In the last couple of weeks, it has come back to life with a bunch of new tips and tutorials. It's also a good place to find custom templates to use with your Blogger blog.
Applications for Education
If you're having students use Blogger to maintain their own blogs or digital portfolios, you may have some students who want to customize the look of their blogs to make them stand-out from the crowd. For those students, Blogger Buster could be a great place for them to find hacks to customize their blogs in their own unique style. In trying these hacks your students will also learn a bit about HTML and CSS.

(Related)
How Niche Content Sites Can Build And Keep Audiences

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