Several news sites have reported an interesting copyright case involving the Wikimedia Foundation and the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Britain. The NPG undertook a £1 million GBP digitisation exercise, and placed high-definition versions of their pictures in a database Read more
So, a teenager intern at Morgan Stanley wrote a report categorically stating that teens don’t do Twitter, and you could hear thousands of social media hype-meisters screaming bloody murder. It’s almost as if a million Twitter feeds cried out in Read more
A common argument used by those opposed to maximalist copyright reform and excessive copyright enforcement is that the answer to the problem of illegal downloads is not to sue customers and enact more restrictive legislation, but to seek out new Read more
An advantage of being abroad is having access to a wide range of TV stations from Latin America. I’ve been watching news reports from the excellent TV Chile about the rise of sexting amongst urban teenagers in emerging economies. While Read more
Whenever I travel back to my native Costa Rica I feel like I am going back in time. I know this may sound condescending, but having experienced the efficiency of developed societies for more than a decade, some of the Read more
Who could have guessed? Social networking sites have proved to be a serious privacy threat. The new MI6 chief (who looks nothing like Dame Judi Dench), has been involved in a bit of a scandal because his wife had posted Read more
Much digital ink has already been spent on commenting on Judge Richard Posner’s bizarrely reactionary proposal that the only solution to save newspapers is to ban linking. I usually try to avoid stories already heavily covered because most of the Read more
The Open Knowledge Foundation has announced the release of the version 1.0 of the Open Database Licence (ODbL). As the name implies, the ODbL is an open licence which protects data contained in databases, and allows the modification, redistribution, use Read more
Last month I presented a paper about Web 2.0 broken expectations at a conference in Sweden. It seems relevant as there is once more talk of the death of blogging. Last year’s Technorati report first raised the alarm when it Read more
Feargal Sharkey has taken on one of those jobs that attract almost universal derision. The former vocalist for The Undertones has become the spokesperson for the UK music industry, a job akin to serving as the front for a kitten Read more