Meta

Public Domain bowed to Stickman

Just like zheng said, a "radiculous" judgement on the case Nike v.s. Zhu Zhiqiang.

We never know whether Nike's agent copied ideas from Zhu's works. However, we know "Stickman" has existed in public domain for decades and widely used in different artworks and even technical fields(e.g. UML). Zhu did make some changes based on his skillsets. But how can the court judge it's from the guy's original creation, just using "stickman" and "line man" to cook a emotional judgement? ("stikcman" in google, "xiaoxiao's stickman" in Google)

I believe Nike's lawyers are also not internet savvy that can't provide enough materials as evidence to show how "stickman" can't be seperated from public domain. In the single case, they didn't work hard enough to defense themselves. And, I'm sure they are not law bloggers and never notice the gossips in blogosphere.

It's a case of misapplying intellectual laws. Another Chinese blogger, Plod(net name), also blogged to say "sigh" to this case.

IM device could work on flight?

There was a popup idea in my brain last week. If the aireplain can provide a small wired gadget that supports IM functions, it could generate more funs on plane especially for those long distance trips. The device can link up with the armrest just as smaller as the headset provided, but with a foldable keyboard for fast typing. Since it's a long distance trip, it can even show differnt time zones you are crosing to tell your friends where are you(some positioning technolgies could be employed).

The security, the usablity... should be well designed to let peopel really buy in this concept. But it's fun to think of it. How many can be affordable to passengers? I guess US$10 is ok for me.

eweek: SMS is Passing:Get Ready for the MIM Revolutio

Crooked Timber's blog inaccessible here. But accessible with a proxy server.

Mountain collected the actions and sympathy voices around Chinese blogosphere to S.E.Asia's disaster.

The interview program "Talk Blog" has published on cnblog for twice. Thanks to Kevin and Chedong for their support on my new grassroots journalism experiement.

To my surprise, almost all featured bloggers in China I listed to this program have accepted my invitation(including those Taiwan and Hongkong guys). So the program will last at least one year from this point. I'd say thanks to all those guys' support. I did have a plan to invite some other foreign bloggers to be interviewed in this program. But I will prepare the list first after several times of Chinese bloggers interview.

I also like to see there are more such experiment from other Chinese bloggers. Anyway, I can't interview thousands of bloggers, can I? :D.

Fons can access Mercurynews.com in the same city, while I still can't(obviously different ISPs). But I can access it with proxy this minute.

Mercurynews.com can't be accessed here, again.

China shuts down 1287 sites?

Many similar reports actually from one source, "China has shut down 1287 websites which spread "harmful information" on religious cults, superstition and pornography, a government internet watchdog said".

Yes, don't be skeptical about the number and the truth of the event itself. But it's not an important news at all. You know, the first thing is the definition of "websites". You can say "www.abc.com" a web site, "xyz.abc.com" also can be seen as a web site, even "www.abc.com/xyz" a website in broader definition. So even there are hundreds of "websites" up and down in China. Don't be cheated by the number game, too. It's a much minority part of all web sites in China now. The .cn domain names has reached 400k, not including many .com names registerred by Chinese. People now easily set up their web site even in one night with virtual hosting technologies. It means we can imagine how fast the 1287 web site resurvive.

Finally, don't be cheated by the title of the news too. It's not a censorship, it's a demonstrative action by government to show it's care to people's health. Please move your eyeball from it to other more meaningful news.

Shenzhen: 16,000 workers in a Japanese(Uniden) firm strikes

Just got the message from CNBlog post and a linked blog from it, but seems no report on China's big media. The stikers asked on some BBS whether anyone knows journalist or reporter in Nanfang Weekend or other newspapers, but Zheng questioned that even there are some reporters know the event, can the newspaper dare to publish the news without the permission from propaganda bureaus?

update: Fons' link days ago about this event, "Chinese employees vote with their feetl", and this one

Social ways to censorship?

Derek Bambauer and team are working on a project called "OpenNet Initialtive". We talked about censorship and anti-censorship in brief during the Harvard conference. I suggest they can employ some social technologies/methodologies to implement more trustworthy and usable proxy in the future. In censorship countries(actually many countries deployed censorship backdoors, even in US), common people doesn't know what they don't know if they are not technology savvy. So even basic proxy configuration seems too complext to mass population.

The social way is to enable people to see how many peers can't access one site when he wants to reach the site. Then automatically find a proxy for him from peer's database. The proxy lists are also dynamaically under social review to determine it's availability. The ideas are not easily implmented and widely deployed if not embeded in a wide spreaded software system. So a browser plugin or p2p software plugin could be a solution. Still need more arciluations...

I found two things yesterday: one is good that Firefox's "Auto proxy detection" really works in China; Another one is geocitygeocities is still inaccessible in China(Firefox reports operating overtime).

reference: Google Search & Cache Filtering Behind China's Great Firewall

The wetaste tool for del.icio.us has served over 900 pages from it's first launch 6 weeks ago. And there are already a hundred or so bookmarks in del.icio.us about the tool.

Forbes.com: Extreme Blogging

Actually, it's mostly about Wiki. "Will Wikis ever hit the mainstream of Web usage? Blogs, once considered for "geeks only," are now being created by corporations, major media outlets and universities. In many ways, these collaborative sites offer a better way to share knowledge than the Internet has yet had. Wikis go a step further in democratizing the Web, making it possible for all of the fragments that individuals would normally contribute through personal Web pages and blog entries to combine as continuous living documents rather than stagnating as dead ends" --[Forbes.com]

I appreciate Forbes.com's web page design. When you click the web page, it will show you some tool as a popup menu. I didn't image such effect with Wego's design.

Joshua interviewed, but a real man still low profile

An article shows the value of del.icio.us from del.icio.us(with hundreds of bookmarks). I was told by someone(acer?) weeks ago on this link but I forgot to bookmark it until today.

I do care that Joel on Software is gathering the Best Software Essays
of 2004. I'm also oddly interested in how to fold a shirt...free graph paper you say? Well, sure. These are topics I learn about from my anonymous del.icio.us peers....and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Each time Joshua writes me, just in words, but clear and easy understood. Just like his del.icio.us work, yummy enough.

MS push it's desktop search too eagerly

Microsoft Watch, "New MSN Desktop Search, Toolbar Suite Betas Expected Monday, Too ", by Mary Jo Foley. Seems the software tycoon is so eager to catch the search wagon he missed again since last internet wave. Comparing to Google's light weight product strategy, MS once again wants to fight with all his product lines to support one strategy. But remember, the more complex, the more sharp learning curve, the less user experience.

Weight of Words

Ross Mayfield looked up in delicious, flickr tags and wiki/wikipedia pages, on the top 10 words of the year. Interesting, bloggers become the world trend smeller. But hopefully, they can become the real positive driving power of the world. There are still billions of people are not blogger yet, after all.

Notes: Some blog hosting sites blocked in China

The following blog hosting sites are not accessible in China public internet without proxy, just for notes:
blogspot.com
typepad.com
blogs.com

Share conference photos with social software

I'd suggest that all "Votes, Bits & Bites" participants share their shots with Flickr. Thus we could collect photos in this conference in a social way. Both del.icio.us and Flickr are good social way to foster global interaction. (A small problem, it's somewhat difficult to tag this conference, I just use "berkman" and "harvard" as mine, http://www.flickr.com/photos/isaacmao/tags/berkman)

How Chinese bloggers participate to global conversations

In last two days in Harvard campus, two important issues was touched intensively: Grassroot Journalism and Gloabal Conversation. I've been more clear that Chinese blogosphere is an important part of the whole world. It's not just from the population side, but also from other contributions Chinese bloggers can do(actually, they are doing so in different ways).....

(I just realized I can compile the topic of "How Chinese bloggers participate to global conversation" into an ariticle, so stop here)

Creative Commons

A surprise yesterday was meeting with Shunling, the co-project lead of Creative Commons taiwan project. We talked about the Chinese edition of Creative Commons can well harness the power of blogosphere. There are also some possilbe collaborations between China mainland and Taiwan teams.

Seldom guys talk about Creative Commons in this conference(except Joi for a few words last afternoon). Seems CC should do more out-reach works in the future. No enough opportunities to introduce CC China project as well.

Today's conference brief wrap-up was posted on cnblog's "blog on blog", in Chinese. Let thousands of Chinese bloggers know the event, too.

Dan Gillmor, heading to a new frontier

Dan Gillmor announced today that he will leave Mercury News to create a new fascinating project on citizen-journalism. Dan is taking real actions to extend his book, "We the Media". Hopefully, he can talk more about his new project tommorow in our meeting. Now I can take minutes to imagine the media future along with Dan's vision.

Global voice

I'm now preparing some slides for the coming "Global Voice" workshop in Harvard Law School. The full name of the event is "Internet & Society conference", and GV is an activity in it.

Dan Gillmor will be there too. But I didn't find Joi's listed in Rebecca's email. Maybe he is busy on his business in this season.

updates: John Palfrey, "Over 400 people have registered to attend the Internet & Society conference." --- [via scripting news]

Mary's digital life

Wired News, "Her So-Called Digital Life "Internet consultant Mary Hodder spends most of her life online. She has gone almost entirely digital. It may not be long before you do, too. "

We are now living in a beginning of "Always On" age. The internet connections are overlapping anywhere. Thus people like Mary and many of us can live in a digital life around the clock. But I believe the life is not as virtual as those gamers live. People are still real in this new paradigm. They will still meet in those cafe, however, must have APs in. Many social software like blog can actually reflect or extend one's real life in a digital way, but not a virtual way. Blog, for example, can act as one's anchordesk and stand points in 'real' time. The audience of blog can make 'conversation' with the people behind while the guy can do other things. In such way, digital life means high effectiveness, high efficiency, while keeping people in high social existence. In philosophical words, the Ontology and Epistemology didn't change a lot.

Mary ever talked with me on social network service and blog in U.C. Berkeley. Now I know how she can get those insight, just from her called digital life.

Orkut?

I forgot to logon orkut for months. The one-engineer project seems no updates in these days. What's Google's ideas on it's future? I guess there is no clear roadmap till now. And I heard of "orkut media" days ago. But I'm still confused on it's concept. Seems it's heading to "Trusted Blog" like wealink.com is doing. Not very sure...

New Forms of Online Communication Spell End of Email Era in Korea

Recent research shows that dramatic chanages in Korea, "huge drop in email usage "

A poll conducted by Chungbuk University computer education professor Lee Ok-hwa on over 2,000 middle, high school and college students in Gyeonggi and Chungcheong provinces in October revealed that more than two-thirds of the respondents said, "I rarely use or don't use e-mail at all."

The same changes can be found around us, too, especially to consumer email users. In a social software session months ago, we ever talked about "Is email dying?" Many ideas were from blogging phenomenon that time. Blog can replace some functions of public sharing in email traffic before. I won't publish one of my blog posts again in email to some friends since they can now aggregate my ideas with RSS. Although some privacy-sensitive information still transferred in email, especially for business users, I think more alternative tools could steal email's role today in the future. Social networking based blogging, for example, could be more flexible to share information in a trust manner. People can easily publish a message to his/her trusted network(may includes hundreds of people) without concernning about the spam. In such case, subscription/publishing model will play. Instead of today's "send/receive" model in email world.

Other tools, including SMS, IM, P2P communications, chould share the body of email... :)