Redefining Open →
“In my mind, there are four kinds of open.”
“This fragmentation has diluted the word open to the point where it almost has no value.”
“It’s time to re-define the word open.”
My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement →
“There’s a theory that labels and publishers deliberately avoid creating the transparent accounting systems today’s technology enables. Because accurately accounting to my silly little band would mean accurately accounting to the less silly bands that are recouped, and paying them more money as a result…”
Identity Wars: Google & Yahoo! Bow to Facebook & Twitter →
“People have always said that Google does what’s good for the web, because what’s good for the web is good for Google. In this case I’m worried that the Royalty of the web’s last generation has crowned these two leading social networks as the Royalty of the current generation in a deal that offers traffic and money but that could suffocate the most creative developments of the open, distributed web. That could be called the web’s next generation.”
“Identity is a very important matter online, particularly as everything becomes more social. Online identity is your address book, it’s your wallet, it’s your reputation and it could become a lot more. Increasingly, you take that Identity from site to site, leveraging on the next site what you did on the last one. If a particular company provides that Identity for you, it sets the rules, regulations, “interest rates” (eg. use of your info for advertising) and determines things like what parts of your identity you can use on different sites and what parts you can’t…”
Open Source as a Model for Business Is Elusive →
“there is an open-source alternative, and usually a pretty good one, to just about every major commercial software product. In the last decade, these open-source wares have put tremendous pricing pressure on their proprietary rivals. Governments and corporations have welcomed this competition.”
“Whether open-source firms are practical as long-term businesses, however, is a much murkier question.”
Is Twitter more open than News Corp? →
“My chin fell to the floor this morning as I read a BBC article quoting Twitter co-CEO Biz Stone advising Rupert Murdoch to be more open.”
Twitter urges Murdoch to be open →
“Newspapers should become “radically open” if they want to make money in the online world, the co-founder of social networking site Twitter has said.”
BNP’s BuddyPress-based social network →
“But one UK political party has been quietly developing its own social network for a few months now, with a membership now well in excess of 4,000 - and impressive open-source technology to boot. It’s the BNP…”
OpenStreetMap helps free Ordnance Survey data with suicide bombing mission →
“People have different motivations for contributing to OpenStreetMap. Some do it just because they think it’s fun, and they like mapping their local area. For many people there is motivation around the fact that they believe it’s important to have freely available and open map data. Suddenly at a stroke, the second motivation is seriously diminished (in the UK), as this aim has been achieved if the Ordnance Survey makes a high quality and very complete dataset freely available. Now we don’t know for sure yet what Ordnance Survey will release - it is possible that it could just make raster map data available (like Google does). But it seems likely to me that they will probably make the small scale vector data available too - there is certainly lots of demand for this.”
Gordon Brown announces OS maps to be free online →
“Oh, and – this “free” will extend to being free for commercial use. That’s right, you’ll be able to build a business with it. Though it’s not clear yet whether you’d be able to take the maps and create *printed* ones. Must ask about that.”
Ordnance Survey maps to go online →
“Ordnance Survey map data will be freely available online to everybody from 2010, the Government has announced.”
