Blurts

It is not yet noon and I can claim the day as a success. I have learned something new. I now know about “sexting”.

I have been reading Baurlein’s book “The dumbest generation”. The Twitter version might be – technology offers so many opportunities, but look how adolescents and their younger peers use it. I don’t think he knew about sexting (I keep misspelling this term) or it would have been included.

Sexting appears to be the practice of sending sexually explicit images to boyfriends, girlfrients, and others. Now, it appears that authorities are addressing the problem under obscenity laws. Have a cell phone with camera – evidently it is difficult to resist. See this Slate story.

Lifehacker reports that Flickr has changed the provisions of its free account. Now, those without a Pro account can also upload two VIDEOS a month. I did check Flickr and there is a description of this new service. 

I still argue that the Pro account is a great value and find it well worth the $25 a year – even in this economy. Note the videos must be 90 second or less. 

Some Grabe photos.

This from the NY Times – excerpts from content sites are being challenged as copyright violations.

There are excerpts and then there are excerpts. You will see quoted material in many posts on this site. I tend to take quotes to capture a point made by someone else. Sometimes, I want to make it clear that someone else did say what I claim they said perhaps to make it clear I did not make up such a thing.

Other sites pretty much offer content originally presented by someone else. This practice, called scraping, is an easy way to generate a lot of content. Why create or even paraphrase when you can copy and paste?

The typical reaction by those who seek to change the interpretation of fair use is to bring up re-use, mashups, etc. – I disagree. There is little original contribution by those who pretty much repost. The fact that this has become a common practice does not, in my opinion, imply that fair use has not been adequately defined as has been claimed by some. Offer your comments and link. If you have no comments to offer, let the original post stand on its own.

I wonder just how far concern with this practice goes. Some aggregators basically scrape content – you can read the post from the aggregation site rather than use a summary to determine whether you might want to jump to the blogger’s site to read the post. This should be a factor a blogger considers when making the decision to register with an aggregator, but there should be a middle ground in which one can offer a RSS feed without granting another site the right to upload and present major segments of your content. I know that some blogging software allows the amount that can be automatically excerpted in an RSS feed to be limited (e.g., my WordPress blog, but not his Chyrp blog). Note that the NY Times article suggests even Google has come under scrutiny because the company adds ads to Google News feeds and is benefitting from content generated by others.

The money most folks invest in expensive web authoring software is probably wasted. Unfortunately, most companies no longer offer multiple products. Long gone are the days of Adobe Pagemill and Filemaker Home Page. The low end has now gone to open source or shareware products or cloud services generated through your browser (Google Sites).

I am taking another look at iWeb. While very professional looking (template based), I originally had two objections. First, the output of the design process was so complicated I would not rework anything unless I returned to iWeb. Second, the original versions were optimized for .Mac (mobileme) and while you could save your site the entire site had to be uploaded to a server after each change. My assumption here is that I was able to understand the process – if not and I am wrong about what was possible, I change my complaint to argue that it was far too complicated. The newest version has fixed the FTP upload issue. New and changed files are identified so uploading modifications to a site is fairly similar to Dreamweaver.

I am not likely to use iWeb to rework my existing sites, but as a personal or classroom web authoring program iWeb deserves a careful look.

You may have heard that there is an interesting copyright dispute between the street artist who created the red/white/blue poster of Pres. Obama and the AP photo service and photographer who generated the original image. The dispute bears on the right of an artist to create something new from an original source and is relevant to all of those interested in mashup type content creation. Tech&Learning is attempting to create a learning activity based on the case and offers both original information sources (the link to the pro position was messed up when I reviewed the lesson) and the opportunity to offer opinions of several case related questions. Aggregated data are made available through Google docs. Of course, the popular vote has no bearing on how the case will be decided. This is a good conversation starter.

ial networking sites and popular culture is creating a lack of the ability to sustain attention, process extended text, and focus on more than the trivial. This time the voice belongs to a Professor from Oxford.

As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity.

Read the comments – range from insightful to bizarre. Just the number of comments generated is interesting.

Again, the article offers no data in favor of the position taken. It seems very possible that both positions are over reaching – I am willing to say that kids are more socially focused and less educated in traditional skill areas. There are many scenarios that fit such outcomes ranging from things have gone terribly wrong to the skills being tested are less relevant than once may have been the case.