Over at the American Open Technology Consortium Doc Searls is going deep about the metaphorical aspects of the Eldred case: Watch the language. While the one side talks about licenses with verbs like copy,distribute, play, share and perform, the other side talks about rights with verbs like own, protect, safeguard, protect, secure, authorize, buy, sell, infringe, pirate, infringe, and steal. This isn’t just a battle of words. It’s a battle of understandings.
Over at The Obvious? Euan is saying It’s all just stuff really …. I was sitting on the tube today looking at the people around me thinking that we were all just lumps of stuff. The stuff that makes up the world doesn’t increase or decrease – it just gets rearranged. Ashes to ashes dust to dust. Even on a daily basis the stuff that is us changes and gets recycled.
Lilia at Mathemagenic quotes George Siemens on the components needed for a Knowledge Sharing Environment and links to Denham Grey‘s wiki about knowledge sharing
In an earlier article I floated some ideas about applying the concepts of peer production to intellectual products in the fields of NLP and Neuro-Semantics. On a related but more general note, David Gammel links to Copyright Contradictions in Scholarly Publishing by John Willinsky. If his conclusions are correct then we should expect a large take-up of Creative Commons licences by academia…
Azeem points to this article in Nature from last summer that reports work by Adilson Motter and colleagues at Arizona State University. The researchers traced the links between 30,000 English words in an online thesaurus. For example, the word ‘actor’ can be connected to ‘universe’ through two intermediaries. The thesaurus lists ‘character’ as a synonym for ‘actor’; ‘character’ is also equated with ‘nature’; and ‘nature’ with ‘universe’. Moving from ‘actor’ to ‘universe’ in the network of words therefore takes three steps.
A long follow up to the previous article, linking ideas from Open Source and Creative Commons to development of the fields of NLP and Neuro-Semantics.
Context weblog quotes an extensive extract from Coases Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm [PDF] by Yochai Benkler. Benkler explains the growth of commons-based peer production, with particular reference to the Open Source movement, and identifies why this mode of production has significant advantages over property or contract based methods of organising production when the object of production is information or culture, and where the physical capital necessary for that production computers and communications capabilities is widely distributed instead of concentrated.
Internet Time Blog has an interesting article on Buckminster Fuller, including links to his work online, based on a talk by Bonnie DeVarco. Fuller is one of those people “we’ve all heard of”, yet I’ve never read his work. A quick taste of the links, plus Bonnie’s reported summary: Characterizations of the man Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th Century Poet of Industrialization Engineer Saint Anti-academician I Seem to be a Verb
Gary Lawrence Murphy picks up the thread about Bridges and Bubbles and asks some fundamental questions about how we should evaluate the value of each link on the graph: The bridge itself may be an accident of happenstance and bandwidth, but to grow ourselves, we’re enticed (or compelled) to test each path for inter-networked recommender bridges out from our own local space […] Seeking Matt’s glittering cave moments, we cross over those bridges we find, and some of us become (by accident or design) new bridges for others.
Euan at The Obvious sums up his view of the “blogroll or not blogroll” debate as “I just like following winding paths”. At the same time Ton Zijlstra picks up on various experiments with Social Network Analysis of the blogosphere and draws the important distinction between a map based on “who knows you” – i.e. an analysis of inbound links (and I would say by implication trackbacks and comments) and a map of “who you know” based on outbound links.