Recent Blog Posts

October 20-22, 2011

David Meurer will be attending and presenting a paper at the 2011 Second International Conference on Culture and Computing at Kyoto University, Japan, Oct. 20-22, 2011. The paper is entitled "Towards a Dialogic Archive: Canadian Copyright Law, Digital Archives, and Fair Dealing." He will be part of a session on Digital Archives chaired by Geoffrey Rockwell.

The Canadian ISP Tucows recently commissioned David Weinberger to articulate their position as part of the Canadian Copyright Consultations, which ended yesterday.

The original can be found here - http://tucowsinc.com/news/2009/08/copyrights-creative-disincentive/ - and is reproduced in its entirety here.

Bill Kennedy and I had the opportunity to meet with archivists from around the world at the 2009 Association of Canadian Archivists conference "Rights, Responsibilities, Trust: Archives and Public Affairs".

Google is defending users rights in response to New Zealand's proposed section 92A amendments.

Statistics provided by Google suggest that the erosion of users rights is occurring in a multitude of ways at the intersections of business and communications technologies. The ease with which allegedly infringing uses are surfaced, and unsubstantiated takedown notices issued for the purpose of advancing a commercial position demonstrates the perils of an information culture oriented around restrictive interpretations of copyright and intellectual property law.

An engaging interview with Marissa Mayer, VP of Google.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/06/marissa-mayer-on-charlie-rose-the-f...

Google had a lawsuit on their hands because of their book scan project (entire content available, not just fair use). Now, Google released their site for the settlement they made with the author guild.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/11/google-book-settlement-site-is-up-p...

Google's claim site http://www.googlebooksettlement.com

For those of you interested in ICT policy here is an interesting investigative news story. GoDaddy (the biggest domain name company) uses "Standard Tactics LLC " to farm domains.

http://domainnamewire.com/2008/12/03/standard-tactics-llc-how-godaddy-pr...

Now with strike going into its 2nd week I finally got to many things on the To-Do list. Less yellow post-its on my wall - I hope I will be doing more blogging now being less busy.

Below is a tiny article I just read on techcrunch about open social turning 1.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/13/open-social-turns-one-my-how-youve-...

For you who don't know open social, it is a platform for social networking that was released by Google and adopted by all the Facebook-type social networks. Facebook was to support it but dropped it the night that open social was released.

Preserving Carnival

York University and Dr. Christopher Innes, the Canada Research Chair in Performance and Culture, recently hosted the international conference “Carnival, ‘A People’s Art’, and ‘Taking Back the Streets’”. As chair of the “Preserving Carnival” panel I had the opportunity to meet with a small group of international scholars and archivists to discuss preservation methods, strategies and challenges relating to carnival.

Timeline was developed by MIT's SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments) project. It interfaces data from an XML file with javascript and css for a visually rich, scrollable and draggable chronology interface. The tool is open source and potentially deployable within or in connection with Artmob archives for arts partners with an interest in visual chronologies.