Recent Articles

Free Copy of "The Macintosh Way"

October 07, 2011 18:02

Guy Kawasaki (yes, that one) posted that the rights to his book The Macintosh Way have reverted to him and as part of his effort to remember Steve Jobs he is making a PDF of the book available for free.

Day's Way Continues

October 07, 2011 14:10

Another quick update on a story: back in early August I noted that Felicia Day was making something of a trailblazing path through Web video production and how that allowed her to retain creative control. In a new interview with Kotaku she talks about her next Web series, a production done in the...

Mediashift on Apple E-Book Collusion Lawsuit

October 04, 2011 14:45

A nice piece showed up yesterday from Barbara Hernandez on the charge that Apple colluded with e-book publishers. You may recall I wrote about this back in August; Hernandez's piece covers the same basic ground, and goes into a bit more depth on the question of whether or not an agency model is...

Are Mathematical Communities Unique?

October 04, 2011 14:18

Contrary to my off-hand assertion about the replicability of community models from mathematical sharing groups a couple of items came to my attention today that argue the opposite case: that these communities are not like others. The blog entry on m-phi is initially concerned with discussing how a...

We're Not Following You, We Just Patented A Method For It

October 03, 2011 19:28

Slashdot is reporting that Facebook has filed a patent application (titled "Communicating Information in a Social Network System about Activities from Another Domain") that describes methods for tracking Facebook users while they're on other sites. I've not yet read the patent app (it's long). ...

Sharing is Awesome, Two Years In

September 30, 2011 13:40

Over at The Big Questions blog, my friend Steve Landsburg (who is himself no slouch at economic math) gives a shout-out to MathOverflow on the occasion of its second year. MathOverflow, and its companion site MathStackExchange, are breaking new ground in public collaboration and shared...

CBLDF Takes Possession of CCA Seal

September 29, 2011 16:21

CBLDF (the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund) sent out an announcement saying that they have taken over the intellectual property - including design, merchandising, and promotion - rights around the Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval. This is mostly a free-speech and intellectual freedom story, as...

How to Get Self-Published, How To Get Loaned

September 27, 2011 17:20

Mark Glaser, whom I just started following on Google+, linked to a couple of Mediashift stories of interest to Copyfighters, I think. In the first story Audrey Watters takes up a particular instance of the problem with lending libraries and e-books: school libraries. These libraries, like others,...

SCOTUSblog Goes Big, Stays Free

September 26, 2011 18:58

Fred von Lohmann pointed to this announcement of the new, improved SCOTUSblog. The blog has always been a go-to site for professionals and amateurs like myself who are trying to puzzle out what the various Supreme Court pronouncements and goings-on actually mean. The blog now is big enough to...

How Many E-Books?

September 20, 2011 14:50

A quick bit of follow-up to yesterday's thought question on ebooks vs poverty: Data from Publisher's Weekly and the site Galleycat show a huge jump (167%) in ebook sales in June as print book sales continue to slump: In that month they estimate that ebook sales are within a few percentage points...