Competition in the Digital Age
What do you know about Creative Commons, the legal frameworks that support many web-based activities, such as Wikipedia, Flickr, or YouTube? You probably do not know too much, if you are like most people. Most users do not know the legal details behind the web – and that is a fact, as you will see …
Continue reading "What does the average surfer know about Creative Commons?"
Last week I commented in this space about the Tea Party's desire to make a symbolic cut in government by eliminating the American Community Survey and the Economic Census at the US Census. This would change economic statistics in the US, upending a system that has been in place since the end of World War …
Continue reading "A dumb compromise to save the ACS and Economic Census"
The House Republicans recently voted to remove funding from the US Census. According to news reports, this action was motivated by a mix of Tea-Party symbolism and the legacy of a long-standing fight with the Census. This post will present a short editorial. While I have sympathy for part of the motivation for this action …
Continue reading "Do not cut the American Community Survey: an editorial."
Google and Apple are two of the most profitable companies on the globe today. They seem to share little in common except that achievement. They took very different paths to the stratosphere. Google, after all, is less than a decade and a half old, a child of the web with a successful approach to advertising, …
Let's discuss the Craigslist killer, online privacy, and police procedures. Why has this old case from 2009 gotten new attention? The murder itself was rather gruesome and unusual, and the events grabbed considerable attention at the time, especially in the Boston area where they took place. However, it all happened several years ago. Why remember …
Encyclopedia Britannica recently announced that it will cease publication of its books. This kicked up a range of sentimental reactions from those who grew up with the books. I would prefer to accentuate the positive: we are watching the end of a rather civilized economic transformation. This transformation is notable for the degree of civility …
Continue reading "Encyclopedia Britannica folds its hand with class"
I've written about OnLive desktop before; the iPad app that gives you Windows and, most importantly, Microsoft Office on your iPad (for free). Yesterday, OnLive launched a paid version that added Internet Explorer and with it Flash to their platform. In the process, that gave users a 1Gbps connection to the Internet right on an …
Continue reading "Everything but the monitor and keyboard in the cloud"
After more than a decade of successful growth, Wikipedia continues to defy easy characterization. It receives more than 400 million viewers per month. Close to four million articles grace its web pages in English alone. Volunteers built the entire corpus of text. This experience suggests that Wikipedia has done something right, but begs the question: …
It was just a little skirmish, a mere tit-for-tat in the presidential race. It made headlines for a day and it also made Wikipedia just a little bit better. To be sure, Romney and Obama infrequently appear in the same sentence as Wikipedia, so this is worth a look. How did the-encyclopedia-that-anyone-can-edit get mixed up …
Continue reading "Wikipedia, Mitt, Barack, and a Hand over the Heart"
Why was Google invented in the US and not the UK? Jonathan Haskell, Professor at Imperial College in London, asked that question in his most recent blog post. What motivated him to ask it? He got a little nudge from his Prime Minister, David Cameron, who asked the same question. Haskell justifiably hesitates to put …
Continue reading "What would you say to David Cameron about Google?"
Digitopoly 