Monday, October 03, 2005

9 Planets? 12? What's a Planet, Anyway?. Trolling for definitions in a 21st-century solar system. By DENNIS OVERBYE. [NYT > Science] 10:19:02 PM    comment []

Keynote Slides. I’ve mounted all my presentations on the web at http://www.cdlib.org/inside/news/presentations/rtennant/2005lita/, including the “mini-movie” that preceded my keynote talk. The music is not included, however, so you will need to get your own copy of R.E.M.’s tune. [LITA Blog] 6:33:07 PM    comment []

Branding needs a new story. (From the October Fast Company) "Corporate America is obsessed with branding. But minus the hype, branding is really just commonsense strategy, rebranded." Perhaps due to the cowboy nature of many in marketing, "branding" is the worst business metaphor ever created. Never has a concept been so explained, yet so misunderstood. Anyway, wasn't branding declared dead a year ago? Why not come up with a new metaphor for business schools to obsess over for the next decade or so? I suggest Seth Godin's "storytelling" metaphor as a potential "branding" replacement. As a public service, here is the rexblog definition of corporate story telling: Your company has stories to tell. If the stories are true and you tell them well, people will listen and repeat your stories. They will make up their own version of your stories. Your stories will become legends. However, if you attempt to tell stories about your company that don't match up with reality, then people will ignore them and you'll wonder why that expensive logo and ad campaign failed. Your story will become a fable about how not to be a branding expert. [rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog] 6:32:49 PM    comment []

Useit.Com: Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005. There's value in reminding ourselves of past findings and raising their priority on the agenda of things to be fixed. Because these mistakes continue to be so common, it makes sense that people continue to complain about them the most. [Tomalak's Realm] 6:32:15 PM    comment []

Harriet Miers on Bush, Ashcroft, 9/11 and Barney. She may not have much of a legal paper trail, but Miers has had lots to say in "Ask the White House." [Salon.com] 6:31:50 PM    comment []

The Republicans react, unhappily. Outside the Senate and the president's public relations team, it's hard to find conservatives who are excited about the nomination of Harriet Miers. [Salon.com] 6:31:09 PM    comment []

Australians Receive Nobel for Bacterium Work. Two Australian scientists who discovered a bacterium that causes stomach inflammation, ulcers and cancer won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine today. By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN. [NYT > International] This has become a standard case for students in my philosophy of science classes. Good choice for the Prize. 6:30:53 PM    comment []

Longer listens: Neil Gaiman, plus the Prize Winner's daughter. It's a good time to be alive for people who can't get enough Neil Gaiman. The cult comic book writer turned literary giant's latest novel, "Anansi Boys" -- a cosmic rollick set in the same farcical universe he created in the award-winning "American Gods" -- was released on Sept. 20. (Click here to read our own Laura Miller's review.) Then last Friday, Sony released "Mirrormask," a lavish fantasy film co-written by Gaiman and his longtime creative partner Dave McKean. Still need more? Check out these selections from Salon's audio archive. Both are radio adaptations of short stories from Gaiman's 1998 "Smoke and Mirrors" collection, originally produced by the Sci-Fi Channel and Seeing Ear Theatre and now available in a two-disc set titled "Two Plays for Voices." The first, "Murder Mysteries" (Real Audio 11:40), features Brian Dennehy as the (now fallen) angel charged with the detective work on the first ever crime committed in the Kingdom of Heaven. Will Dennehy ever find a more perfect role? The second, "Snow Glass Apples" (Real Audio 9:40), features Bebe Neuwirth (aka Dr. Lilith Sternin-Crane from "Cheers" and "Frasier") as the wicked queen of "Snow White" fame telling her sordid version of the classic fairy tale. [Salon.com] 6:30:02 PM    comment []

Descriptive metadata for copyright status, by Karen Coyle, in First Monday. Abstract: The need to express the intellectual property rights of digital materials has focused on access and usage permissions which must be granted by the rights holder. A key set of permissions not acknowledged by these rights expressions is inherent in the legal copyright status of the item. Digital libraries can hold and provide access to many items for which copyright status is the sole governor of use. This article proposes a small set of descriptive data elements that should accompany digital materials to inform potential users of the copyright status of the item. 1:54:00 PM    comment []

From Publishers Lunch, more on the Yahoo book-scanning thing blinked this morning: Press Turns Online Text Venture into Yahoo v. Google A consortium called the Open Content Alliance has cannily seized upon negative press for Google's Print for Libaries program to grab much more prominent press coverage for themselves than they would have under other circumstances. The group comprises a variety of organizations--including the Internet Archive, the European Archive, the National Archive, libraries at the University of California and the University of Toronto, and the Prelinger Archives (a collection of industrial films)--helped by Yahoo and other tech companies that are donating equipment or services. (Where Google is estimated to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on scanning, this group is barely breaking seven figures for now.) From there, the details get fuzzy pretty quickly. Reuters indicates the long-term aim is to compile a digital archive of public domain and opt-in copyrighted books, audio and video, while the NYT says the focus is "historical works of fiction along with specialized technical papers." In the near-term, setting aside the lofty mission and the press's gullible gushing about competition for Google Print, the program will begin by digitizing 18,000 (Reuters' number) public domain works of American fiction which the University of California calls the "canon collection." Or is it "5,000 volumes of early American fiction at the outset, with the eventual goal of scanning another 5,000 to 15,000 volumes within the next year," as the NYT says? In any event, all texts scanned and posted as part of the initiative will be open to indexing by any search engine (including Google). Again, hardly revolutionary, except in contrast to Google's proprietary hosted scans in the Google Print programs. The Reuters report helpfully notes some of the other online text ventures--Project Gutenberg (with 7,390 items); a 20,000-book archive at the University of Pennsylvania; and the Internet Archive's Million Book Project, which aimed to "digitize a million books by 2005," but currently has 10,552 books online. (Other ventures not mentioned here include The Etext Center at the University of Virginia Library, with about 70,000 texts in multiple languages.) http://click.email-publisher.com/maad3G3abkSuVa5bmb1baeQxXH/ Reuters http://click.email-publisher.com/maad3G3abkSuWa5bmb1baeQxXH/ NYT http://click.email-publisher.com/maad3G3abkSuXa5bmb1baeQxXH/ 1:53:53 PM    comment []

Michael Geist: COMING CLEAN ON COPYRIGHT MYTHS My weekly Law Bytes column uncovers some of the myths associated with ratification of the WIPO Internet treaties. The column argues that Canada's decision to sign the treaties in 1997 did not create any obligations to ratify. Further, it notes that foreign interests stand to benefit most from ratification and cites an RIAA demand last year that Canada ratify the treaties within seven weeks. The demand was uncovered in an Access to Information request. Toronto Star version at Freely available hyperlinked version at In the event that last break en route: http://tinyurl.com/8rpoq 11:53:27 AM    comment []

BTD also has these great MOVIE TRAILERS RECUT, REMIXED AND RECONSTRUCTED Posted by Greg Via Viking Dude over at the BTD Forum come these wonderful recut movie trailers: The Shining (It's about family, and caring) Titanic (It's coming for you!) West Side Story (Officer Krupke and the undead) The Apparent Trap (Hayley Mills and the love that dare not speak its name) (click on "Paul Lacalandra," then "ordinary girls..."). 8:44:06 AM    comment []

DMCA 1201 Anti-circumvention rulemaking THIRD ROUND BEGINS. [Almost a scoop! But not a news echo! You heard it here first!] Here "we" go again ... U.S. Copyright Office - Anticircumvention Rulemaking: The purpose of this proceeding is to determine whether there are particular classes of works as to which users are, or are likely to be, adversely affected in their ability to make noninfringing uses due to the prohibition on circumvention of access controls. This page contains links to published documents in this proceeding. The Notice of Inquiry in this third anticircumvention rulemaking requests written comments from all interested parties, including representatives of copyright owners, educational institutions, libraries and archives, scholars, researchers and members of the public, in order to elicit evidence on whether noninfringing uses of certain classes of works are, or are likely to be, adversely affected by this prohibition on the circumvention of measures that control access to copyrighted works. My DMCA testimony, and almost single-handedly actually winning one of the few exemptions in the last round (which note, still must be re-argued this round!) was one the high points of my net activism. But sadly, personally it was a pyrrhic victory. [Infothought] 8:42:00 AM    comment []

On Crooks & Liars, ABC host George Stephanopoulous cites a source saying that Bush and Cheney were involved in Plamegate. [Scripting News] From the C&L link: Definitely a political problem but I wonder, George Will, do you think it’s a manageable one for the White House especially if we don’t know whether Fitzgerald is going to write a report or have indictments but if he is able to show as a source close to this told me this week, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions.                                                          Video-WMP                                                          Video-QT George said it so calmly. Clearly he knows what the ramifications are to this tidbit of information. 8:41:45 AM    comment []

In Challenge to Google, Yahoo Will Scan Books. An unusual alliance of corporations, nonprofit groups and universities plans to announce an ambitious plan to digitize hundreds of thousands of books over the next several years. By KATIE HAFNER. [NYT > Books] 8:36:47 AM    comment []

A History for Kids That Isn't Child's Play. The optimistic illusions of E. H. Gombrich's "A Little History of the World" may help explain why histories for children are now so hard to write. By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN. [NYT > Books] 8:36:36 AM    comment []

HARRIET MIERS FOR SCOTUS. Wait, who? President Bush calls her "a pit bull in size 6 shoes." That article, a brief written when she was picked to succeed Alberto Gonzales as White House chief counsel, shows her to be a woman whose discretion prevents her from answering questions in great detail. Not a harbinger of a fun Senate confirmation, I'll say. I never came across her name in the run-up to today's nomination, but Slate tossed her name around: White House Counsel Harriet Miers has been vetter-in-chief of the Supreme Court candidates. What if Bush selects her over them, in the Dick Cheney tradition? Before she got her current job, Miers was assistant to the president and his staff secretary. She was the person who knew where all the paper in the White House was coming and going. She never talked to reporters. She came with Bush from Texas, where she was chair of the state lottery commission and the first woman president of the Texas State Bar. But Miers isn't a skilled Supreme Court advocate. She has no reputation outside the insular Bush circle. Firepower-wise, she looks like a big gamble. "Stealth" is the word they were looking for, but that's far from a dispositive statement about her qualifications. [Begging To Differ] Longtime Confidante of Bush Has Never Been a Judge. Harriet Miers's positions on such ideologically charged issues as abortion and affirmative action are not clear. By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS. [NYT > Washington] Bush Chooses Miers for Supreme Court. WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush chose Harriet Miers, White House counsel and a loyal member of the president's inner circle, to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, senior administration officials said Monday. [WNYC New York Public Radio] But, really, what's with that "senior administration officials said" foolishness? 8:34:37 AM    comment []