OLDaily
By Stephen Downes
August 17, 2004

EC Mulls MS DRM Monopoly Trawl
It's about time somebody looked into this. According to this short article, the European Community is looking at the monopoly inplications of Microsoft's and Time Warner's ownership of ContentGuard, the backer of the XrML digital rights language that has since been adopeted by MPEG as MPEG-REL. More, in the form of a PDF. By Andrew Orlowski, The Register, August 16, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Virtual Community
TechSoup is hosting an online forum about the use of blogs in non-profit organizations all week this week. The event is free and open to the public. By Various Authors, TechSoup, August 16, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Multiply's Spam-O-matic UI
I got my first invite from yet another social network (YASN) called Multiply (if you want an invitation, send me an email). What makes this site different is the much more obvious capacity to create blog content (still a centralized silo mode, but still, one step closer to the semantic social network). But as one writer comments, Multiply took the worst feature of Google's Orkut and made it worse. "Unfortunately, 'save' actually means SEND and 'view' actually means EMAIL. And so, I sent, rather than merely posted, the journal entry to everyone on my contacts list - as an email." By Unattributed, chandrasutra, August 17, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Internet publishing attracting academics
An odd quirk in the headline, as open access publishing is described as 'internet publishing'. But, truth be told, there is a lot in common. The idea of the internet - as I remind everyone who will listen, and even some who won't - is free and open access to information. So in my mind, internet publishing just is open publishing. By Julie Bell, Baltimore Sun, August 16, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

It's Just the 'internet' Now
Somebody else in the world finally agrees with me. I have been resolutely using the lower case i and w to spell internet and web since, well, ever. Now Wired News finally agrees. "Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was." By Tony Long, Wired News, August 17, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

EaZy RSS reader
An RSS reader for Microsoft Excel. Now, if we can feed RSS into Excel, we can use the same sort of technique in order to feed learning objects into Excel. I mean, after all, why should you have to go somewhere in order to learn? By Masaru Kaji, Colo's Excel Junk Room, August 17, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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Copyright © 2003 Stephen Downes
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