Collection of badges from conferences/workshops I’ve attended. These are generally ones with lanyards, which I kept hanging over a hook in my office. It was getting a little messy, so I decided to clean it out, and see if I can start an ultra-nerdy Flickr meme at the same time.
Over at Unit Structures, this has been the week of linking out. Don’t fear, overlong psuedo-academic ramblings on social software will come back next week, but for right now I’ve got a few pointers for you.
First and foremost, a reminder to register for the HASTAC II conference. The conference will be held at UCI and UCLA May 22-24; the fee is a very reasonable $100, and for those in LA, it is right in your backyard. I’ll be heading out to meet some of my new coworkers, if you’re planning on attending, please drop me a line!
Via the Carolina Center for Public Service, news of a new, insteresting grant program “to support the facilitation of better engagement of college students in service through social media.” Run by the Corporation for National and Community Service, these are federal funds open to individuals affiliated with educational institutions. The grant pool is $2.3MM, and CFP date is 5/7/08.
Finally, news from Micah Laaker that MyBlogLog now supports MicroID. I’m a proud MBL user and I’m happy to see they’re supporting MicroID (and a bunch of other open-socialy kind of things).
Today’s recommended post comes from Wendy Seltzer, law professor and fellow at the Berkman Center. In it, Wendy spends some time analyzing the intellectual property aspects of games. With the release of the official Scrabble Facebook application, and numerous C&D’s sent to Scrabulous’ creators, why does Scrabulous remain online? Seltzer states: “Scrabulous remains online, probably because the threats’ legal merits are murky: there are few rights to “a game” as such.”
Seltzer goes on:
Three kinds of intellectual property might protect aspects of a game — patent, trademark, and copyright — but each has limits that leave plenty of room for imitators and emulators.
…
Moreover, the board design for Scrabble contains only de minimis separable expression. The arrangement of double-letter and triple-word scores is part of the method of play — like tennis’s “if you cross the fault line while serving, the serve is no good,” it merges with the unprotectable idea.
Page 3 of the national Sunday NYT featured an interesting article on research being conducted on the Iranian blogosphere by Harvard’s Berkman Center. Featured prominently in the piece is John Kelly, whose research I encountered when he showcased his analysis at the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program. John also demonstrated some of his work here at UNC-Chapel Hill, and I hope he’ll come back and show his great work again. The Times reports:
Over all, a new study by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School shows that Iran’s blogosphere mirrors the erratic, fickle and often startling qualities of life in the Islamic republic itself. The rules of what is permissible fluctuate with maddening imprecision, so people test the limits.
The full study is available from the Berkman Center’s website.
I’ve recently started listening to podcasts of the PRI program To The Best Of Our Knowledge. Unfortunately our affiliate doesn’t get the program, so the podcast is one of my favorite discoveries in recent memory. The March 9 edition of the show, Learning Outside the Box, was particularly compelling. Featuring a discussion with Jonathan Mooney, the “learning disabled” author of The Short Bus, the show forces you to confront notions of “normalcy” in societal and educational contexts. Very thought provoking, and some of the best radio I’ve heard in a while. Listen to the stream here.
Fred Stutzman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, where he studies privacy and social media. He is the designer of the productivity software Freedom and Anti-Social, and co-founder of the identity management service ClaimID.com.
