apple juice

I love a break from work. It is a chance to sit, reflect and think about things.

One thing I’ve been meaning to do is donate to the wikimedia foundation. Just a little bit, (but every little bit counts).

Wikipedia has become a part of my daily life, I can’t think of a day that goes by where I don’t look something up on wikipedia. I want this kind of access to knowledge available to my kids, my students, and people around the world.

By the way, this was the past few days of wikipedia:

Yinz (A second person plural pronoun regional to Pittsburg)

Lady Gaga (I admit it, I like her music)

Scallion (Same as a green onion)

Two things to know – 330 million people read the wikipedia each month, and they are a non-profit with 35 employees.

Think about how much you use the wikipedia and consider a donation as well.

Great news for anyone in hale-page-diamond lake who ready to be done with comcast, and doesn’t find the city wi-fi to be a great option… qwest spent all week at the end of my block laying new fiber for their highest speed internet service.

Inexplicably, qwest has been limited to 1.5mbps in my neighborhood. They offer much higher speeds less than a mile away.

So supposedly, by fall, we’ll be able to get 20mbps service!

The problem is… who owns it and what is it worth?

“This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.”

(Via Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others – Pogue’s Posts Blog – NYTimes.com)

The traditional media industry will be totally remade in the next ten years. Every major creative industry (music, movies and tv, words) is going to have to come to grips with what it is that they are really selling (or what it is that people are really interested in buying.)

In fact, it’s not only the traditional media companies that are being put through the blender, but also all of the pipe providers: comcast, Mark Cuban, Qwest, Verizon, AT&T, etc are going to have to come to grips with what they are really selling: Bits.

What is Amazon selling? Bits.

What are newspapers, magazines, albums, movies, sitcoms and books? Bits.

Does the value of the bits change depending on what they can be decoded in to?

What is the revenue to be made from making 1 more digital copy of something?

What is the incentive for people to create something that can be copied, if they aren’t compensated for every copy?

This is a big swirling topic, but I find it incredibly interesting. I’m confronted with this on a daily basis when it comes to student work, teacher use of copyrighted material, and my own media-consuming habits.

The two (copyrighted) books I purchased:

Free
by Chris Anderson (“In the digital marketplace, the most effective price is no price at all, argues Anderson”) and Remix
by Lawerence Lessig (“He frames the problem as a war between an old read-only culture, in which media megaliths sell copyrighted music and movies to passive consumers, and a dawning digital read-write culture, in which audiovisual products are freely downloaded and manipulated in an explosion of democratized creativity.”)

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable…

Sold!

Readability – An Arc90 Lab Experiment.

i just went through my facebook “friends” and removed some people. it’s nothing personal, i just think that friend should mean something… and maybe that something is that we’ve actually spoken in the past 10 years?

“spoken” could even mean that we chat with instant messaging.

spoken does not mean that we play status update racquetball on facebook.

anyway, it’s not that i don’t care to see your updates, or hear your comments on my updates, it’s just simply too much. too much info. all of these technological tools that we have are great at hoarding information, but what are you going to do with it?

or maybe we just need a new etiquette. for example, i post to facebook that i am making chicken soup. instead of receiving a bunch of “i love chicken soup” comments, perhaps i could receive a few great chicken soup recipies.

giving me a bunch of great recipes obviously takes more work on your part, my friends. but that’s what friends are for.

any person can tell me that they love soup. furthermore, any one can look up any recipe, ever. have you seen cooks.com?

but friends know that i love beans, lentils and other legumes. and friends give me the inside scoop on soups with beans.

so in conclusion, if we’re going to be friends on facebook, you’d better be willing to give me some good recipes, and I will reciprocate, because I know that you love different types of cured meats.

friends share recipes.

apparently not too many people know this:

you can subscribe to specific authors from the New York Times using RSS.

According to my Google Reader “Feed Details”, 2.1 million people subscribe to the Times’ home page.

but only 22 specifically subscribe to Thomas Friedman’s column.

I like information. But the Times homepage posts an average of 335 posts a week. That’s a lot of posts. I often can’t keep up.

But, zooming in a bit gets me exactly to what I am interested in.