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Highlights from APE 2009 – Day 1
The first day of the APE conference in Berlin, which, as mentioned before, focused on the impact of publishing in the digital age, started with a keynote by Georg Winkler from the European University Association (EUA), entitled Universities in the 21st century. Winkler started off by asking the question of what makes an university unique,…
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The Full Monty – For Free!
Two updates on things I wrote about in previous posts. First of all, The New York Times picked up the discussion on the use of You Tube as a search engine, or better yet, as the NYT calls it, as a reference tool. They wrote a very nice article (published in print on January…
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Highlights from APE 2009 – Preconference Day
From the 19th to the 21st of January I was in Berlin to visit this magnificent city and to go to the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference. From their website: “APE Conferences encourage the debate about the future of scientific publications, information dissemination and access to scientific results. They offer an independent forum for ‘open…
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Nails and Books
Happy days for Creative Commons and NIN! Trent Reznor managed to make a huge profit selling his bands 2008 album Ghosts I-IV online, topping Amazon’s best selling list for 2008. Strange enough, the album was legally available for free at the same time (even on the same website). This nice article over at Ars Technica…
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Video Surfing
As a follow up on my post on the Reading and Watching conference a few weeks ago, I recently came about this very nice post by Michael Bhaskar over at The Digitalist. In his post Bhaskar talks about a blog post from ReadWriteWeb in which a trend amongst the new YouTube generation is discussed.…
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Remix Manifesto
RiP: A remix manifesto, is the first Open Source documentary, in which film maker Brett Gaylor (founder of www.opensourcecinema.org) invites the public to remix his footage in his participatory media experiment. The documentary ‘explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall…
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Science Commons Video
Today Science Commons, a subdivision of the larger Creative Commons non-profit organization, launched a short video explaining what Science Commons stands for. Science Commons, headed by John Wilbanks, is a project that tries to improve scientific communication and research by making a plea to lower access barriers and to free locked-up research results. They want…
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Lesesucht
Two weeks ago I went to a conference organized by Stichting Lezen, the Dutch organization for reading promotion. The conference was entitled Reading and watching and focused on the differences between the written word and the image: what does the written word have that images don’t? The keynote speaker was Hungarian writer György Konrád, who…
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The Universal Library
With the launch a few days ago of Europeana, the new European digital library which serves as a portal to the rich diversity of European cultural heritage (from archival materials to books, movies, photographs and much more), the ideal of the universal library seems to be gaining ground again (not withstanding the fact that Europeana…
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Text Comparison and Digital Creativity – Day II
Long overdue, here are my notes on the second day of the colloquium Text Comparison and Digital Creativity. The day started with key note speaker Bella Hass Weinberg who stressed the point that even in the digital era the creativity of text comparison still lies with the researcher. She states: much of the…
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Future Visions
I recently encountered some very nice speculative movies, giving their future visions on the development of the Internet and social media. Go check out the emergence of EPIC, Prometeus and Spirit! “Experience is the new reality” (Thanks to Bernardo and Brave New World) PROMETEUS – THE NEW MEDIA REVOLUTION [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj8ZadKgdC0] EPIC 2014 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s]