DigitalKoans

Video Presentations from 2008 Code4lib Conference Now Available

Posted in Coding, Open Source Software, Techie on June 3rd, 2008

Video presentations from the 2008 code4lib conference are now available from the Internet Archive.

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Google Book Search Book Viewability API Released

Posted in Coding, E-Books, Google and Other Search Engines, Mass Digitization on March 13th, 2008

Google has released the Google Book Search Book Viewability API.

Here's an excerpt from the API home page:

The Google Book Search Book Viewability API enables developers to:

Link to Books in Google Book Search using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers

Know whether Google Book Search has a specific title and what the viewability of that title is

Generate links to a thumbnail of the cover of a book

Generate links to an informational page about a book

Generate links to a preview of a book

Read more about it at "Book Info Where You Need It, When You Need It."

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Infringement Nation: Does Typical Digital Technology Use Made Us All Infringers?

Posted in Coding, Digital Copyright Wars on November 20th, 2007

John Tehranian, Professor of Law at the University of Utah, has written a paper for the Utah Law Review titled "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap."

Here's an excerpt from the paper where Tehranian summarizes the infringement activity of a hypothetical U.S. law professor during a single day:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges).

If copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

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Web/Web 2.0 Tools

Posted in Coding, Techie, Web 2.0/Social Networking on October 12th, 2007

Here’s a list of a few Web/Web 2.0 resources and tools that developers may find useful.

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Web/Web 2.0 Resources and Tools

Posted in Coding, Techie on October 5th, 2007

Here’s a list of a few Web/Web 2.0 resources and tools that developers may find useful.

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Web/Web 2.0 Tools

Posted in Coding, Web 2.0/Social Networking on September 28th, 2007

Here’s a list of a few Web/Web 2.0 resources and tools that developers may find useful.

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Web/Web 2.0 Tools

Posted in Coding, Techie, Web 2.0/Social Networking on August 17th, 2007

Here’s a list of a few Web/Web 2.0 resources and tools that developers may find useful.

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CommentPress 1.0 Theme Released: Paragraph-Level Commenting in WordPress

Posted in Coding, Open Source Software, Web 2.0/Social Networking on July 25th, 2007

After a year-and-a-half of development effort, the Institute for the Future of the Book has released the open-source CommentPress 1.0 theme for WordPress, which allows paragraph-level comments that are displayed side-by-side with the associated paragraph.

Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

This little tool is the happy byproduct of a year and a half spent hacking WordPress to see whether a popular net-native publishing form, the blog, which, most would agree, is very good at covering the present moment in pithy, conversational bursts but lousy at handling larger, slow-developing works requiring more than chronological organization—whether this form might be refashioned to enable social interaction around long-form texts. Out of this emerged a series of publishing experiments loosely grouped under the heading "networked books." . . .

In the course of our tinkering, we achieved one small but important innovation. Placing the comments next to rather than below the text turned out to be a powerful subversion of the discussion hierarchy of blogs, transforming the page into a visual representation of dialog, and re-imagining the book itself as a conversation. Several readers remarked that it was no longer solely the author speaking, but the book as a whole (author and reader, in concert). . . .

We can imagine a number of possibilities:

— scholarly contexts: working papers, conferences, annotation projects, journals, collaborative glosses
— educational: virtual classroom discussion around readings, study groups
— journalism/public advocacy/networked democracy: social assessment and public dissection of government or corporate documents, cutting through opaque language and spin (like our version of the Iraq Study Group Report, or a copy of the federal budget, or a Walmart press release)
— creative writing: workshopping story drafts, collaborative storytelling
— recreational: social reading, book clubs

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