OLDaily

By Stephen Downes
May 30, 2005

Dialcom Launches Video-call Plug-in for Skype
It was only a matter of time: Skype can now be used (by some people) as a video phone. The "Spontania video4skype plug-in offers high quality full-screen video, videoconferencing using the user's Skype contact list, and video P2P capabilities." By Leigh Phillips, Digital Media Europe, May 30, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Facilitating the Social Annotation and Commentary of Web Pages
The idea behind digital annotation is that readers of a web page or document can place comments into the context of the article, like footnotes or marginalia, rather than at the end. It's a good idea and as you read this article you'll see how much thought has gobe into it over the years. But you'll also see that none of these solutions has really caught on. I think that, on a web with billions of documents, there may be a minimal granularity of reference. It may be that referring by page is as precise as readers are willing to get. Via James Farmer. By Ulises Ali Mejias, Ideant, May 20, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

The Role of Digital Rights Management in Open Access
Good article discussion the relation between digital rioghts management (DRM) and open access (OA) publushing. While OA advocates eschew DRM because it has the potential to impose access restrictions, there may be a role for DRM in the management of minimal rights, such as attribution, through a declaration of those rights in metadata. Moreover, OA advocates need to be wary of the DRM in PDFs provided by publishers to authors for self-archiving. Via EDUCAUSE. By Richard Poynder, Indicare, April 22, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Apple Digital Campus Exchange
The Apple Digital Campus Exchange is an online community for educational technologists using Apple products and features weblogs by noted developers. It crossed my radar screen through the D'Arcy Norman, who was invited to blog for the site a couple of weeks ago. Against common wisdom, however, the people at Apple decided to require a login to view the posts. No worry; Norman simply took the RSS feed and created an open version of the weblogs. By D'Arcy Norman, May, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Broadcast Machine
User-produced media takes another step forward with the release of Broadcast Machine, an open source application that streams your video as a BitTorrent from your web server. A viewer is also being released. The software is beta and not ready for prime time yet, but it just shows how close we are to bypassing traditional media altogether. Via Alec Couros. By Various Authors, Participatory Culture Foundation, May, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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