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Thursday, July 25, 2002

Lessig In Law Journal on Libraries and Copyright

Library Journal | Cahners - Copyright in the Balance: LJ Talks with Lawrence Lessig. Lawrence Lessig" title="Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace - by Lawrence Lessig" >

Stanford University professor Lawrence Lessig is certainly no stranger to the library community. Considered the nation's most eminent legal scholar on the nexus of copyright, technology, and the Constitution, he is the highly regarded author of the landmark works Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Bks.) and, most recently, The Future of Ideas (Random). In these works he eloquently defends the need to balance creators' rights with public benefits. Now, in a more direct way than ever before, Lessig carries the hopes of the library community, and by extension a largely unknowing public, squarely on his shoulders.

In a promising sign for libraries and the public, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed in February 2001 to review whether Congress overstepped its bounds in 1998 when it passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, extending copyright terms for another 20 years. Lessig will argue the case, Eldred v. Ashcroft, on behalf of a group of online publishers that offer digital editions of public domain books for free over the Internet. Two lower courts already ruled against the plaintiffs, but hopes are high in the library community that the third time could be the charm.

[ ... ]

This simplistic notion of what copyright is and how people think about it is weakening the debate substantially. We need to be much more aggressive in calling people on this rhetoric, because it's just wrong. It's just not the case that copyright has ever been understood to mean that if you use a copyrighted work in a way unintended by the copyright owner that's "theft." [Privacy Digest]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 12:15 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Klogging: Chapter and Verse

Blogs and Business, Take 3.

The BlogRoots authors are publishing their book on the Web, in its entirety. Chapter 8, Using Blogs in Business, is online now. Excellent. [Scripting News]

The birth of a meme. I've now counted at least five separate sources of info on the blogs and business topic. And I got my copy of Information Week today with the cover dedicated solely to blogs:

"Give individual employees within a company their own weblogs, encourage them to document their best ideas and personal experiences, link them, add search capabilities, and it's easy to imagine that at least some innovation will arise from the ordinary."

More on this later. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 12:07 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Wednesday, July 24, 2002

Business Weblogs and Their Uses

Web logging can serve many roles. Good article by Paul Andrews of the Seattle Times on "corporate weblogs" and their potential in organizations. [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 10:34 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Managing Subject Matter Experts

Beware: Mismanagement of SMEs can have serious consequences. Your project may:

• never be completed
• go over budget or be delayed
• result in training that lacks substance or, conversely, is too advanced for the target population
• create conflict between training and line management.

  Subject Matter Experts. Learning Circuits has posted an article on Getting the Most from Your SMEs, which talks about how to manage the [Column Two]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 12:19 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Tuesday, July 23, 2002

Business Use for Instant Messaging

Business Use for Instant Messaging?  - Yep, apparently Lands End uses it to answer customer questions as they browse the catalogue company's website.  The cheery representatives will even use IM to redirect the customer to a particular page on the website if necessary.

I see IM working its way into law firms too.  The other day was illustrative.  I was on the phone with an important client in one of those situations where I couldn't get off the phone no matter what happened.  A call came in on my other line, and I ignored it.  Thirty seconds later I was paged by the receptionist.  I had to E-mail her to let her know I was on the phone, and we traded E-mails so that I could (1) find out who was looking for me (2) tell her to tell the person to call back in 10 minutes.  All of this took more time than it should have.  Instant Messaging would have been much faster.  Of course, now I suspect most law firms will view IM as some sort of frilly toy. [Ernie the Attorney]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 9:21 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Self-publishing Firm Provides More Marketing Support

iUniverse Introduces Marketing Toolkit

07/23/2002

Answering a need voiced by thousands of authors worldwide, iUniverse, Inc., announced today the launch of its Author Marketing Toolkit, a complete, customized marketing guide that helps authors publicize their work, create demand and sell books. [iUniverse]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 8:09 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Broadcast Brouhaha

From the New York Times:

Hollywood studios have maintained that they will not send digital copies of movies and other programming over the airwaves unless safeguards are in place to prevent perfect copies from being redistributed online. That, in turn, is seen as holding back the market for digital televisions and the on-demand services that might come with them.

Legislators should be debating the extent of copyright protection, the applicable penalties for violation, and what -- if any -- changes should be made in the balance between spurring innovation and rewarding creators. Nothing more. As Ernie said in Ignorance is Bliss

Sometimes too many people working together on one thing do not create a bold new thing. Instead, they create a patchwork of compromise, where the whole is vastly less than the sum of the parts.

This happens in lawmaking too, but mostly because of the influence of lobbyists representing special interest groups. It's not just a problem of too many people, but rather it's a problem of people having too much information.

This whole episode shows how woefully ignorant most of our legislators are regarding basic economics, market theory, and basic technology. And my, how thinly they disguise their motives.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 2:35 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Flawless Consulting: How to Get Your Expertise Used

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 1:37 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Book: reviews

Permalnk Revisions Needed

Permalinks in categories point to those posts on the home page and home page archives, not to their instances on the category home page or in the category archive. Permalinks just don't understand their page's category. I explain further and with examples on the Radio UserLand discussion list.

[aka Blue Sky Radio]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 11:53 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Interesting BookBiz TidBits from M.J. Rose

Before 1998, it was rare for established publishing companies to bid on self-published fiction. But in the last 18 months, thanks in great part to authors' ability to use the Internet to market themselves, more than three dozen self-published novels have been picked up by major houses. [...]

The business of book clubs: From Good Morning America to the White House, book clubs are flourishing. And now businesses want them too.

Wells Fargo already has one. So do sales and marketing executives in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Chapter-a-Day, a Sarasota, Florida, company that builds and maintains online book clubs -- sending out daily book excerpts for libraries and book stores -- is getting as many as a dozen inquiries a week from corporations. [...]

I love this idea. It's a variant of the book summary/abstracting services offered by several companies. I think the bite-sized nature of this makes it very appealing. One of my favorite services comes from Audio-Tech Executive Summaries and is called Business Briefings.

It's on CD rather than e-mail, but every month they review some 300+ publications and send out a very interesting bite-sized summary of ideas, concepts, research, and publications that are or will affect business. It's one of the most interesting services I get, and I think it's because of the bite-sized nature of things.

Self-Publish Stigma Is Perishing. Major houses gobble up rights after authors create a buzz for their work. Also: Book clubs that work for business ... and more in M.J. Rose's notebook. [Wired News]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 10:55 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

K-log Implementation Challenges

More on Klog Implementation Challenges.

www.davidwatson.org wrote a piece back in June about the difficulties a klog implementation could face. Training and organizational culture again. This is worth checking out as another addition to a balanced view on klogging.

[High Context]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 10:45 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Weblogs die too..

FuckedWeblog catalogs distressed, absent or departed weblogs. See recent ones or submit an blog site's suicide note or obituary.

This might be useful in an intranet. Part of pruning the tree, finding successors, acknowledging the need for archival.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 10:41 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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