Hollywood and the hackers

My pal John Perry Barlow (boingboing.net) - Grateful Dead lyricist, copyfighter, and co-founder of EFF - conducted an electronic debate with ex-congressman Dan Glickman, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America on the BBC’s website. The results are a hoot.

These are aging industries run by aging men, and they’re up against 17-year-olds who have turned themselves into electronic Hezbollah because they resent the content industry for its proprietary practices. And I don’t have a question about who’s going to win that one eventually.

There are a lot of kids out there copying and distributing movies not because they care about seeing the movies or sharing them with their friends but because they want to stick it to the movie business.

Link (Thanks, Chris!

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

“I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves.” So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop’s dream.
New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming “semantic web” championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals …

Der BrainStore

Klasse Konzept aus der Schweiz!

Drafi Deutscher ist tot

Der Hit “Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht” machte ihn vor 40 Jahren berühmt. Einen Monat nach seinem 60. Geburtstag ist der Schlagersänger in einer Frankfurter Klinik gestorben. Er erlag einem akuten Herz-Kreislaufversagen.

Der 60-Jährige sei „friedlich“ gestorben, sagte sein Manager Gebhard Rothermich. Seit etwa zwei Wochen habe Deutscher im künstlichen Koma gelegen. Mit seinem Lied „Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht“ schuf der Sänger 1965 einen Klassiker des Schlager-Genres. Es folgten Dutzende weitere Hits, als Produzent für andere Künstler feierte er ebenfalls Erfolge. Auch mit Skandal- und Exzessgeschichten machte Deutscher auf sich aufmerksam.

Mit Drafi Deutschers Gesundheit war es in den vergangenen Jahren bergab gegangen. Bereits 1998 hatte er einen Schlaganfall erlitten. Er trat aber weiter auf. 2003 feierte er sein 40-jähriges Bühnenjubiläum. Kurz nach seinem 60. Geburtstag am 9. Mai verschlimmerten sich Deutschers Probleme. Nach einer Lungenentzündung und Kreislaufschwäche sei es zu einem multiplen Organversagen gekommen, sagte sein Sohn Drafi jr. Ende Mai der Bild-Zeitung. Leber und Nieren hätten versagt.

New report identifies drivers of innovation

“Renee Hopkins Callahan, editor of the Corante Innovation Hub, and two of her coworkers have written a very interesting white paper entitled, “What Drives Innovation? A Heuristic Framework for Corporate Innovation.” It attempts to identify common innovation drivers that can be linked to the successes and failures of corporate innovation initiatives.

To conduct this research, Callahan, Gwen Smith Ishmael and Leyla Namiranian conducted interviews with executives from across a wide range of industries about recent innovation projects at their organizations. What they discovered was the outcome of these initiatives was not based on specific drivers, but rather that projects were often derailed because of oversights at the front end of the projects, including issues such as: …”

Operation Times Square

Man nehme eine Strasse, ein paar Gamer, Geotags und … das ist erst der Anfang: “Operation Times Square is an urban game and a large-scale experiment on mobile sensing. The game will bridge global and local, physical and virtual worlds through a novel combination of an asynchronous web site-based access, GSM-based locationing and camera-phone based player inputs.”

How to report a news story online

“The interactive nature of the Internet allows online writers to involve readers in news reporting in ways that print and broadcast journalists never could before. Online writers can solicit leads and advice from readers through open source reporting, or even ask readers to report a story themselves, through a distributed reporting project. Still, the vast majority of online reporting is done the old-fashioned way, through interviews, observations and record checks done by the writers themselves …”

Rocketboom rocks: Amanda & George Soros

What Bill French has to say about Intranet 2.0

MyST founder Bill French wrote to me regarding the Intranet 2.0 paper I recently published. He is working on some interesting infrastructure pieces for the next generation Intranets. Here’s what he said: …listen

Corporate e-learning trend

A UK research on corporate e-learning adopters show that the e-learning procurement is maturing. Four key findings are:

* Greater focus on driving high recurrent usage around a narrow set of generic titles; often linked to specific major business projects or changes, which may cycled over time
* Rapid growth in adoption of non-traditional forms of e-learning content, particularly on-line reference material, driven by significant increases in perceived relevance and value from an often e-learning skeptical audience
* More focus on industry-specific (vertical) or job-role-specific (horizontal) content, often from niche providers with a proven understanding and brand in their niche
* Increased desire for flexible adoption of e-learning content, embedded within mainstream learning programmes (the so-called ‘trend to blend’)

The researcher concluded that corporate are focusing on the value proposition of e-learning …