First the French, now the Aussies: Reports are the Australians will legalize taping shows from television, and ripping CDs to MP3 players.

source: Sanity breaking out all over

[news.bbc.co.uk]

Businessman wins e-mail spam case

A businessman has won what is believed to be the first victory of its
kind by claiming damages from a company which sent him e-mail spam.
Nigel Roberts, who lives in Alderney in the Channel Islands, took
action against Media Logistics UK over junk e-mails in his personal
account.

Under new European laws, companies can be sued for sending unwanted
e-mails.

The Stirlingshire-based firm has agreed to pay £270 compensation
to Mr Roberts, who runs an internet business.

‘Tiny victory’

Three years ago the EU passed an anti-spam law, the directive on
privacy and telecommunications, which gave individuals the right to
fight the growing tide of unwanted e-mail by allowing them to claim
damages.

Mr Roberts received unwanted e-mail adverts for a contract car firm
and a fax broadcasting business and decided to take action against the
company.

The company filed an acknowledgement of the claim at Colchester County
Court but did not defend it and a judge ruled in favour of Mr Roberts.

In an out-of-court agreement Media Logistics agreed to pay Mr Roberts
damages of £270 plus his £30 filing fee.

Mr Roberts said he had limited his claim to a maximum of £300 in
order to qualify to file it as a small claim.

He said: “This may be a tiny victory but perhaps now spammers will
begin to realise that people don’t have to put up with their e-mail
inboxes being filled with unwanted junk.”

No-one from Media Logistics UK was available for comment.

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s Office, the watchdog
who oversees the Data Protection Act, said it was the first case of
its kind he had heard of.

He said: “What I can say is that I haven’t heard of anyone doing so
and we haven’t taken a case under that legislation.”

[Comment Link for RSS]

source: security

Via 37 Signals, this side-splittingly funny faux pharmaceutical ad: Panexa (Acidachrome Promanganate). I laughed ‘til I cried.

source: caution: this medication spoof may cause serious laughter

I’ve been hearing a bit lately about the Performancing for Firefox plugin, but my threshhold for new apps is pretty high right now, and it took until today for me to decide to install it. First impressions? Niiiiiiice. The short version of what it does is on their website:

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.

The longer version is that’s it’s a very slick AJAX implementation that gives you a very useful split-screen approach to blogging the page you’re on. Instead of replacing the current page with your editor, or popping up a useless small window, you get the page you were viewing on the top (scrollable), and the Performancing window on the bottom. Decent formatting options, too (though not quite Ecto-quality). Setting up my blog was very simple; the account wizard was straightforward and quick—and I was able to do that after I’d already started writing, which was really nice.

What I really like, though, are two features not listed on their page. First, if I select text on the page I want to blog and right-click, I get a contextual menu that allows me to blog it using Performancing—that brings up the editing window with the page name hyperlinked at the top of the entry window, and the selected text in a blockquote tag below. Very useful. Second, if I don’t publish that entry, and just close up the window, the next time I do the same thing on another page it appends the text to the entry in progress—excellent for blogging a series of sites for a single post.

I suspect I’ll find other nice bells-and-whistles…I haven’t yet tried the “save as note” option on the screen, for example. But I don’t often find tools that are this useful after only 2 minutes of setup, so I thought I’d blog it while my delight was still fresh!

—

Update: Ooooo…after I published this entry, I realized that Peformancing also shows me a list of recent entries, and lets me edit them easily. Very nice.

source: peformancing review

This very funny movie was, with 34 Flickr photos that were CC-d. Simple, legal, building the Read-Write Internet. 34 out more than 7,000,000 CC-d photos on Flickr.

source: Made with CC

As usual, Dave Pollard posts a well-thought-out, thorough piece on “Social Networking Tools & Knowledge Management: What You Can Do Now“. This was presented at the KMWorld and Intranets 2005 Conference. It includes an overview what was wrong with the traditional siloed social network model (Friendster, etc.), and what you can do within the context of a large corporation to take advantage of these technologies for better Knowledge Management.

This post was written by David Teten, source: Social Networking Tools and Knowledge Management

A hotly debated topic in the blogosphere lately has been, what exactly is Web 2.0? Probably the most concise and comprehensible overview I’v seen is from Adaptive Path: Crucial DNA of Web 2.0

Another must-read piece if you’re interested in this subject is Clay Shirky’s “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags“. I also recommend Social Bookmarking Tools: A General Review, by Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott.

This post was written by David Teten, source: What is Web 2.0?

Renu Vinod, Open access to information, New Delhi Business Standard, December 27, 2005. Excerpt:

India has finally passed an information legislation, and much to the government’s credit, it has kept its promise of making the newly formulated Right to Information (RTI) Act participatory, progressive and meaningful. Now, however, is the time to move as efficiently and effectively as possible from a duty to furnish information regime to a duty to publish one….The RTI portal of the National Informatics Centre…could be the starting point for the move towards a participatory and proactive flow of information. According to the officials at the National Informatics Centre, the RTI portal has been set up to create a central repository of information for citizens to access information through a user-friendly search engine. An efficient and easy-to-use proactive disclosure system would provide many benefits to both government officials as well as the public. Instead of the work being wholly shouldered by the government, as it currently is, even private individuals can participate. This would not only reduce the burden on the government, there also won’t be repetitive information requests. In countries like the US, the government has already placed a lot of information in the public domain. This information relates to what people need to know on a daily basis. The idea is that people should have to put minimum effort to access what is their right, and no government should shy away from its duty to fulfil that right.

source: OA to government info in India

source: TWAS Prize for OA-friendly Chinese biologist

Grants Will Give Developing World Access to Scientific Research, a press release from Yale University, December 22, 2005. Excerpt:

Two grants totaling $500,000 will support Yale University participation in an international consortium to make prestigious scientific journals in the environment sciences available online to the developing world at little or no cost. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation gave $250,000 to Yale to help establish Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE). A digital internet library for developing countries, OARE, will provide access to peer-reviewed scientific literature of leading international publishing houses. Organizations eligible to use OARE include approximately 1,000 public, nonprofit institutions in more than 100 underdeveloped nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. Literature in environmental chemistry, economics, law and policy, and other environmental subjects such as botany, conservation biology, ecology and zoology will be available through a portal presented in world languages, including Arabic, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish. Yale’s OARE activities will be directed by Oswald Schmitz, professor of population and community ecology and associate dean of academic affairs for the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and Ann Okerson, associate university librarian for collections and international programs….Published in the United States and Europe under copyright and with annual subscription fees averaging $1,000, the prestigious journals in which a majority of scientific research is published are too costly for purchase in most developing nations. OARE will enable countries to build their own higher education programs in the environmental sciences, educate their own leaders, conduct their own research, publish their own scientific findings and disseminate information to policy makers and the public. Next year in the first phase of the project’s implementation, OARE will be offered to users in 70 developing nations with a per capita gross national product (GNP) of $1,000 or less. In the project’s second phase, approximately 45 more countries with GNP per capita between $1,000 and $3,000 will be enrolled. Yale will develop OARE in cooperation with the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, Cornell University and leading scientific publishers around the world. Yale will create software for OARE’s secure internet portal, organize and update its database of scientific literature, recruit publishers to the consortium, and develop partnerships between the consortium and American and European institutions to expand internet connectivity and offer training. Paul-Bendiks Walberg, a recent graduate of the Yale School of Management and Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and Kimberly Parker, head of the university library’s electronic collections, conceived the OARE project. The project is inspired by the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative, a World Heath Organization program in which Yale has played a leading role and that has strengthened public health services in developing countries by providing access to research in the medical sciences.

source: OARE will improve access to environmental journals for developing countries

UNESCO supports training for building digital libraries in Africa, UNESCO News, December 20, 2005. A brief report on the Greenstone workshop at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, November 30 - 1 December 2005. Excerpt:

The meeting that was co-organized by UNESCO, the Coalition of South African Library Consortia (COSALC) and Sivulile, a South African open access initiative, brought together 30 participants from Ethiopia, Lesotho, Namibia, New Zealand, Swaziland, Sudan and host country South Africa.

This workshop was the third in a series of activities organized by COSALC and Sivulile (“we are open” in isiXhosa) aimed at raising awareness on open access models for information exchange, and ICT capacity building of information professionals in Africa institutions. These efforts are aimed at supporting the creation of digital libraries and providing archivists, librarians in Africa with skills to utilize electronic information tools and resources in their work and enhance access to online resources.

(PS: I can’t find a web site for the workshop itself.)

source: African workshop on OA repositories and libraries

source: Digital library for Bangalore Medical College to launch this week

Klaus Graf has posted his comments for the EU’s i2010 consultation on digitization. Excerpt:

1) What additional measures could be taken at national and European level to encourage digitisation and online accessibility of material in all European languages?…

5) How could public domain material and other material available for general use (voluntary sharing) be made more transparent and widely known in order to facilitate its online availability for subsequent use?…

7) Is there a risk that national legal deposit schemes lead to a multiplication of requirements on internationally active companies? Would European legislation help avoiding this?…

All interested individuals and organisations - from the private and from the public sector - are encouraged to provide their views on some or all of these questions. Replies and comments should be sent to the following address before 20 January 2006: European Commission, Attn. Mr. Hernández-Ros, Head of Unit DG INFSO E4, Information Market, Bâtiment EUROFORUM, Office 1174, Rue Alcide de Gasperi, L-2920 Luxembourg, ec-digital-libraries@cec.eu.int….

Here are my opinions to the questions above.

1) Let me say first that I support “Open Access” (OA) and not “Toll Access” to cultural heritage items. All digitized materials should be free of cost and without permission barriers available in the internet. States and funding agencies should pay that all citizens with internet access can enjoy for free the treasure of knowledge. Public funded scholarly research results should be OA. Libraries should not digitize historical items without cooperation with the potential users and especially the scholars in the relevant thematic field. There should be more support for and more cooperation with grassroot digitization made by NGO projects like Project Gutenberg or Wikisource (sister project of Wikipedia). See…a recent initiative of distributed scanning. National and other libraries should cooperative with initiatives like the Open Content Alliance and donate scanned Public Domain books to them….

5) There are some ways to make digitized material more widely known. Library should have the duty (and the money) to cataloge digitized items worldwide in a cooperative manner according to international standards like Dublin Core or the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). There should be freely accessible meta-data from each digitized single book or other items (including table of contents). There should be more cooperation with NGO initiatives (see above ad 1) who can e.g. contribute meta-data. There should be more support for free full text search engines and OAI harvester beside of the large commercial search engines.

7) I do not see such a risk. A company which is a global player can deposit in any national library worldwide without any disprofit. No private company can ensure long-term preservation which is a legitimate public office. Maybe it would be a good idea to invent “knowledge taxes” for profit making companies as a compensation for the public costs for making the knowledge available e.g. in libraries and for ensuring long-term preservation.

source: Klaus Graf response to i2010 consultation

Christian Wagner, Breaking the Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck Through Conversational Knowledge Management, Information Resoures Management Journal, January/March 2006. (Thanks to John Daly.)

Abstract: Much of today’s organizational knowledge still exists outside of formal information repositories and often only in people’s heads. While organizations are eager to capture this knowledge, existing acquisition methods are not up to the task. Neither traditional artificial intelligence based approaches nor more recent, less-structured knowledge management techniques have overcome the knowledge acquisition challenges. This article investigates knowledge acquisition bottlenecks and proposes the use of collaborative, conversational knowledge management to remove them. The article demonstrates the opportunity for more effective knowledge acquisition through the application of the principles of Bazaar style, open-source development. The article introduces wikis as software that enables this type of knowledge acquisition. It empirically analyzes the Wikipedia to produce evidence for the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

source: Wiki-style strategies to improve knowledge acquisition

source: “The creative industry is the reuse of ideas”

It was a slow, if happy day. But now we need $7,800 a day. Please spread the word. Please supportx CC.

source: We’ve got 7 days, and we need $55,000

Like me, my kids are growing up in a mixed religion household. So our Christmas dinner tonight consisted of way too many latkes (potato pancakes), made with my father’s traditional recipe.

The kids opened their presents this morning—Santa (and their grandparents) were very, very good to them. They’ve spent the day playing with their new Nintendo DS’s and games, as well as their Fly Pens (which I think will be extremely useful in making homeschooling a little more fun).

I got a combo charger/FM transmitter for the video iPod that Gerald got me a few weeks ago, some Happy Bunny slippers, a nifty wind-up flashlight to keep in my car, and something that I scoffed at when I first saw advertised, but which we’ve used three times today and promises to be a very useful addition to our appliances—a combination egg-and-muffin cooker. It’s easy and safe enough for the kids to operate, which makes it better than many alternatives, and it’s super easy to clean (just one tiny non-stick pan that has to be washed, and it can be done in about 20 seconds). As ridiculous at it seems, I rather like it. I also got a new cast iron skillet (pre-seasoned!) to use for cooking latkes, since we left my much loved and well-seasoned pan at home in Rochester.

Since tonight’s also the first night of hanukkah, the latkes seemed appropriate for dinner (when the holidays don’t overlap, we often get chinese takeout for Christmas dinner, another modern Jewish tradition). Cooking the latkes takes several hours (if you factor in peeling and grating potatos and onions, and getting the batter and oil temperature exactly right…) So now I’ve collapsed onto the couch, stomach full-to-bursting with those oh-so-unhealthy treats, and I’m off to Azeroth to try to level my character up a bit tonight.

Merry/happy hanukkah/christmas to you all!

(Oh…and many, many thanks to all the people who helped us out on yesterdays wifi question—you all rock!)

source: christmas latkes

Here’s the draft of an article we’re working on about how to raise capital with online networks. We welcome feedback!

Raising Capital with Online Networks

by David Teten and Harish Venkatesh

Imagine Roger Nusbaum’s surprise when he returned to his Prescott, Arizona home to find several unsolicited messages from potential investors on his voice mail. Nusbaum, a portfolio manager at Your Source Financial in Arizona, received those phone calls because of a "blog", a journal published on the Internet.

Nusbaum is a frequent contributor to many online blogs. When Barron’s magazine recently profiled David Jackson’s network of finance blogs (including SeekingAlpha.com, ETFinvestor.com, and various industry specific blogs), they mentioned Nusbaum’s contributions about exchange-traded funds. That mention directly resulted in phone calls from some highly qualified investors, and Nusbaum is currently discussing investment terms with some of those leads. “My blog really has evolved into a good source of leads, which is more than I expected when I first started,” Nusbaum commented in an e-mail to us.

Success stories like Nusbaum’s are becoming a common phenomenon as blogs and online networks are becoming a more and more important part of the business world. Using this technology, professional money managers are finding sources of capital from the far corners of the Web.

Of course, many investment vehicles are only open to accredited investors, and managers of these vehicles should not be perceived as advertising to unaccredited investors. However, there is nothing wrong with opining on market-related issues, and increasing your own visibility and investability in the process.

With new blogs appearing at the rate of 30,000 a day, and the increasing popularity of social network sites such as LinkedIn, more and more business relationships are being started and deals are being closed online. Even money managers, members of an industry known for its discretion, have been taking advantage of this new technology. LinkedIn reports numerous success stories from companies using the tool for due diligence.

Blogging (the activity of updating a blog) can significantly increase your professional profile. Greater Internet visibility results in you meeting more people, some of them potential investors. Another major advantage to blogging is that it provides a digital trail establishing your professional competence. Money managers who document their opinions of the capital markets and individual companies have made their opinions public knowledge. A potential investor is able to evaluate the ideas put forth and can determine his confidence in the money manager.

Consider the August 17^th, 2005 edition of "Power Lunch" on CNBC. Jeff Matthews, a hedge fund manager at Ram Partners, and Patrick Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com, faced off over Mr. Matthew’s criticism of Overstock.com’s strategy on his blog. Mr. Byrne has been in the media lately over his allegations that certain segments of the media, specifically the online community, are conspiring to devalue Overstock. This example shows the perceived (and actual) power of the Internet in the investment community. Mr. Matthews, by writing his opinions in a blog, is able to discuss business strategy, news and company behavior without needing one of the few scarce speaking platforms in the mainstream news media. Mr. Matthews said in an e-mail to us that, “I view my job as being to bring interesting facts to light, positive or negative, in order to generate intelligent discussion and feedback that might be useful to investors as they look for ways to make money.” Mr. Matthews plan is working, as his blog has become very popular in the online investment community.

“Social software” – the family of software that people use to analyze, leverage, and enable communication in their networks – isn’t limited to just blogs. Online network tools such as LinkedIn allow business professionals to increase the scope of their network by adding second and third degree connections they might not have known existed. Without these tools, you would not know that your friend’s friend works at a fund of funds. These social network sites allow you to search a database of people you have some connection with through your own contacts. This allows you to approach people with a warm introduction instead of a cold one.

Being more visible to the right type of people increases your chances of finding people who can be relevant to your goals. Also, making yourself easily accessible allows you to be approached by potential business partners with no marginal effort, once you create a strong online presence.

Online communities are another affective way of increasing your online presence. For example, Albourne Village and the Value Investors Club are both valuable resources for professional investors.

Albourne Village, run by hedge fund consultancy Albourne Partners, is an unusual example of an online community successfully serving a busy, time-sensitive group: hedge fund investors and others interested in the sector. About 25% of their members visit the site at least once a day, which is an extremely high usage rate versus other online communities. About 85% of their members visit the site at least once per month.

The Value Investors Club (“VIC”) is another example of an online community with extremely high quality content and an intensely engaged audience. Founded in 1999 by hedge-fund managers Joel Greenblatt and John Petry of Gotham Capital, Value Investors Club is a highly exclusive club for discussion of value-based investment ideas and of “special situations” (ie. spin-offs and recapitalizations). It currently has 220 members out of a maximum allowed of 250. It is free to join, and the club management even pays a $5,000 reward every week to the member with the top investment idea.

The requirements for entry are twofold: first, write an “A+” description of an investment idea, in keeping with the site’s Buffett/Graham investment style. VIC is primarily interested in opportunities based on value or special situations. VIC receives about 100 member applications per month, of which only about 1 in 15 are accepted. Second, assuming you are accepted, you must provide between two and six investment ideas per year. The reason for the six-idea maximum is that VIC only wants your very best investment ideas.

The advantages of being known and trusted by relevant people are well documented in the academic literature. Online networks and social software are an extension of the traditional ways in which people have connected with one another face to face. Something as simple as blogging is helping Roger Nusbaum to raise capital and allowed Jeff Matthews to gain national exposure. You can do the same.

For definitions of terms related to social software please visit http://www.thevirtualhandshake.com/glossary.htm.

David Teten is CEO of Nitron Advisors (www.nitronadvisors.com), which helps hedge funds and other institutional investors make profitable decisions by giving them direct access to industry experts. You can access our Circle of Experts by phone, survey, or in-person meetings, and talk with industry executives, front-line managers, researchers, regulatory advisors, customers, and competitors from a wide range of industries, particularly technology and energy. To qualify for a free initial expert consultation, contact us at NitronAdvisors.com. David is coauthor of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, the first book on how to use online networks to find your next investor, business partner, next client, or next job. He runs a detailed blog and resource site about online networks at TheVirtualHandshake.com, and his personal blog is "Brain Food" (www.Teten.com/blog).

Harish Venkatesh is currently a student at the Richard Ivey School of Business, Canada’s top-ranked business school. He recently interned as a research analyst with Nitron Advisors. At Ivey, Harish is actively involved in the University Student’s Council, Investment Club, and is an avid tennis player.

This post was written by David Teten, source: Raising Capital with Online Network

Just about $7500 a day needed. Spread the word. Spread CC. Support here.

source: We’ve got 8 days, and we need $57,000

My son’s aging Powerbook G4 (an original TiBook) has been having problems with wifi connectivity over the past several months. He gets only an intermittent signal from our Airport Express. I’ve isolated the problem to his machine—other laptops in the same place at the same time have no connectivity problems.

I’ve opened the machine and reseated the Airport card, and checked the antenna cable—I don’t see any obvious cable problems, or oxidation, but there may well be problems with the cables going from the card up into the antennas in the screen.

I really don’t want to put a lot of money into this machine, so I’m trying to figure out how to easily put a wired connection in his room. What’s the easiest, cheapest way to do that? It seems like there must be something that will pick up the wifi signal from our network and send it over an ethernet cable to his computer—but I don’t know what they’d be called, and thus can’t search for them effectively.

(Oh…and merry christmas to all of you, especially those who, like me, serve as family sysadmin over the holidays!)

source: powerbook wifi woes