Category: Internet Culture and Technology

Mike Mallon sent me a link to Zipwise Geomap. They sell a geospatial Ip database so you can get long/lat based on IP addresses. They show how the Google Maps API can be used to map your site visitors and how to get your own Geotargeting, IP Geolocating.

This is madness. Ideas aren’t things. They’re much more valuable than that. Intellectual property – treating some ideas as if they were in some circumstances things that can be owned and traded – is itself no more than an idea that can be copied, modified and improved. It is this process of freely copying them and changing them that has given us the world of material abundance in which we live. If our ideas of intellectual property are wrong, we must change them, improve them and return them to their original purpose. When intellectual property rules diminish the supply of new ideas, they steal from all of us.

Thanks to Slash.dot I came across this Guardian article on intellectual property, Owning ideas (Andrew Brown, Nov. 19, 2005). The article provides different examples from software to genomics. One of the examples the article provides is Microsoft patenting XML related technology for packaging objects into XML, see Microsoft slammed over XML patent – ZDNet UK News.

Can we patent the idea of intellectual property? Or the process of frivolous patenting of business practices?
Continue reading The Maddness of Intellectual Property

M. E. Kabay has a paper in ACM Ubiquity about viruses, malaware and scumware, Some Notes on Malware. It is a long piece (about 21 printed pages) that introduces the subject of viruses, gives a history, and ends up with a discussion of “scumware.” What is scumware, you ask?

Scumware is any software that significantly changes the appearance and functions of Web pages without permission of Webmasters or copyright holders. For example, a number of products overlay banner advertisements with other ads, sometimes for competing products. Scumware may add unauthorized hyperlinks to a user’s view of a Web page – sometimes using links to possibly objectionable sites. Such programs can interfere with existing hyperlinks by adding other destinations to the intended target. In addition, some products install themselves without warning users of these functions; others bury the details of their Web-page modifications in the extensive legalise of end-user license agreements.

I guess the idea is that such software puts scum on the clear surface of your web pond.

The ESRC is running a Social Science Week Blog where there are invited talks online about research and learning online. In particular there are two papers around Social Sciences Online ª Research Methods. Neither of these papers deals with the topic I have previosly blogged, using blogs ethically, but they look at a parallel issue of online interviews and surveys.

Great Site Ranking in Google The Secret’s Out is an article on how Google ranks sites based on a reading of their US patent application which describes their approach to ranking and how they deal with spam. The article was suggested to me by Matt Patey and is worth reading. Darren Yates, the author, concludes with “Overall keep it ethical and you can’t go far wrong.” (Yates, 6/11/2005, in Buzzle.com)

Yahoo! Mindset is a search demo that lets you sort the results with a slider that lets you choose the weight of “commercial” against “research”. I assume they look at the source of the link. Thanks to Matt Patey for this.
Continue reading Yahoo Mindset

Google Homepage is a new service that lets you create a customized homepage with news, mail, weather and other stuff. So much for the simple google screen.

Thanks to Vika of words’ end for pointing me to unready.org. She pointed out that Ready.gov has been around for a while. (See my earlier post, The new cold-war: Ready.Gov.) I still wonder why they would be advertising so widely and in the Guardian of all places.

The BBC News has a story titled, ‘Infomania’ worse than marijuana (April 22, 2005.) A study for Hewlett Packard claims that some are getting addicted to messaging and that this reduced intelligence. The study was led by Dr Glenn Wilson, a psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College, London.
This was from Geoff T.
Continue reading Infomania: research on the loss of IQ from IT

From Humanist, two interesting links on the “digital divide”. The first is a report from the Morino Institute, From Access to Outcomes: Digital Divide Report and Dialogue. The report has 10 sensible premises starting with the obvious, “Focus on narrowing social – not digital divides”.
The second is from an issue on “The Digital Divide” (Spring 2001, Vol. 1, No. 2) which has articles of interest on, TCLA:. The Digital Divide:. Politics & Education:. Framing the Digital Divide. In particular there is an article by Randall D. Pinkett, Redefining the Digital Divide.