Arne Olav Nygard's Public Library

19 Feb 09

t the importance of working on "stuff that matters." H
peech about the importance of working on "stuff that matters."
1 more annotations...
- stuff that matters." His point boiled down this: "We have some really big problems facing us. Let's apply our talent to solving them."

12 Feb 09

clark_e2.pdf - Google Docs

docs.google.com/fileview - Preview

The Kindle and the End of the End of History - O'Reilly Radar

radar.oreilly.com/...kindle-and-the-end-of-the.html - Preview

interesting article: there is a gap between two different worlds, interfaces or ontologies of knowledge, that of print and that of digitized matters. When we search today, we search largely within the last one, leaving very much of what is recorded the last few hundred years in the dust. - arneolav on 2009-02-12

"Google and the end of history... History is no longer a continuum. The pre-digital past doesn't exist, at least not unless I walk away from this computer, get all old school, and find an actual library."
The problem is that old books reference people and other stuff that a contemporary reader would have known immediately, but that are a mystery to me today - a mystery that needs solving if I want to understand what the author is trying to say, and to get that sense of how they saw the world.
2 more annotations...
- To cut to the chase, if you read old books you get a sense for how thin the searchable veneer of the web is on our world.
- Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff he references is really obscure today and today's search engines are hit and miss with it - they only know what a modern wikipedia editor or some other recent writer thinks is relevant today. Google is brilliant for things that have been invented or written about in the digital age, or that made enough of a splash in their day to still get digital now, but the rest of it just doesn't exist. It's B.G. (before Google) or P.D. (pre digital) or something like that.

08 Sep 08

demonbaby: When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

Article on the record industry, from a designer within

www.demonbaby.com/...ly-death-of-oink-birth-of.html - Preview

music napster record_company file_sharing mp3 radiohead download

So it grew, and it grew, and it started to grow into the mainstream, and that's when the labels woke up and realized something important was happening. At that point they could have seen it as either a threat or an opportunity, and they, without hesitation, determined it to be a threat. It was a threat because essentially someone had come up with a better, free distribution method for the labels' product. To be fair, you can imagine how confusing this must have been for them - is there even a historical precedent for an industry's products suddenly being able to replicate and distribute on their own, without cost?
Control had been taken away from everyone who used to have it
32 more annotations...
- It led to laughable hyperbole from bands like Metallica, instantly the poster-children of cry-baby rich rock stars, and the beginning of the image problem the industry has faced in its handling of the piracy issue.
- I want to flip through the pages, and hold the CD in my hand... Being a kid who got into music well past the days of vinyl, CDs were all I had, and they still felt important to me.
  
  It's all changed.
  
  In a few short years, the aggressive push of technology combined with the arrogant response from the record industry has rapidly worn away all of my noble intentions of clinging to the old system, and has now pushed me into full-on dissent.
- the rules and cultural perceptions regarding music have changed drastically
- and if I filled my shiny new 160gb iPod up legally, buying each track online at the 99 cents price that the industry has determined, it would cost me about $32,226.
- It's the ugly truth the record industry wants to ignore as they struggle to find ways to get people to pay for music in a culture that has already embraced the idea of music being something you collect in large volumes, and trade freely with your friends.
- They had a chance to move forward, to evolve with technology and address the changing needs of consumers - and they didn't.
- Instead, they panicked - they showed their hand as power-hungry dinosaurs, and they started to demonize their own customers, the people whose love of music had given them massive profits for decades.
- Why? Because freely-available music in large quantities is the new cultural norm, and the industry has given consumers no fair alternative.
- They didn't band together and create a flat monthly fee for downloading all the music you want. They didn't respond by drastically lowering the prices of CDs (which have been ludicrously overpriced since day one, and actually increased in price during the '90's), or by offering low-cost DRM-free legal MP3 purchases. Their entry into the digital marketplace was too little too late - a precedent of free, high-quality, DRM-free music had already been set.
- From personal experience I can tell you that the big labels are beyond clueless in the digital world - their ideas are out-dated, their methods make no sense,
- Trying to innovate with a major label is like trying to teach your Grandmother how to play Halo 3: frustrating and ultimately futile.
- he easiest example of this is how much of a fight it's been to get record companies to sell MP3s DRM-free. You're trying to explain a new technology to an old guy who made his fortune in the hair metal days. You're trying to tell him that when someone buys a CD, it has no DRM - people can encode it into their computer as DRM-free MP3s within seconds, and send it to all their friends. So why insult the consumer by making them pay the same price for copy-protected MP3s? It doesn't make any sense! It just frustrates people and drives them to piracy!
- like with any new industry, it's not the people from the previous generation who are going to step in and be the innovators. It's a new batch.
- Newspapers are a good example:
- And you know what? Now I can get live, up-to-the-minute news for free, on thousands of different sources across the internet - and The New York Times still exists.
- Unlike newspapers, record companies own the distribution and the product being distributed, so you can't just start your own website where you give out music that they own - and that's what this is all about: distribution.
- because they don't make any money off of merchandise, or concert tickets. Distribution and ownership are what they control, and those are the two things piracy threatens
- t's why record companies shove disposable pop crap down your throat instead of nurturing career artists: because they have CEOs and shareholders to answer to, and those people don't give a shit if a really great band has the potential to get really successful, if given the right support over the next decade
- At the top of all this is the rigged, outdated, and unfair structure of current intellectual property laws, all of them in need of massive reform in the wake of the digital era. These laws allow the labels to maintain their stranglehold on music copyrights, and they allow the RIAA to sue the pants off of any file-sharing grandmother they please.
- RIAA is able
- heir latest victim is Oink, a popular torrent site specializing in music.
  
  If you're not familiar with Oink, here's a quick summary:
- In this sense, Oink was not only an absolute paradise for music fans, but it was unquestionably the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known. I
- f the music industry had found a way to capitalize on the power, devotion, and innovation of its own fans the way Oink did, it would be thriving right now instead of withering. If intellectual property laws didn't make Oink illegal, the site's creator would be the new Steve Jobs right now.
- Here's an interesting aside: The RIAA loves to complain about music pirates leaking albums onto the internet before they're released in stores - painting the leakers as vicious pirates dead set on attacking their enemy, the music industry. But you know where music leaks from? From the fucking source, of course - the labels!
- For example, if a record company releases an album online but Wal-Mart won't have the CD in their stores for another two months (because it needs to be manufactured), Wal-Mart gets mad. Who cares if Wal-Mart gets mad, you ask? Well, record companies do, because Wal-Mart is, both mysteriously and tragically, the largest music retailer in the world. That means they have power, and they can say "if you sell Britney Spears' album online before we can sell it in our stores, we lose money. So if you do that, we're not going to stock her album at all, and then you'll lose a LOT of money."
- I never would have experienced otherwise. I'm now fans of their music, and I may not have bought their CDs, but I would have never bought their CD anyway, because I would have never heard of them! And now that I have heard of them, I go to their concerts, and I talk them up to my friends, and give my friends the music to listen to for themselves, so they can go to the concerts, and tell their friends, and so on.
- So the next question is, what now?
- or the major labels, it's over. It's fucking over. You're going to burn to the fucking ground, and we're all going to dance around the fire. And it's your own fault.
- It was able to exist because you controlled the distribution, but now that's back in the hands of the people, and you let the ball drop when you could have evolved.
- Radiohead was "experimenting," releasing a low-quality MP3 version of an album only to punish the fans who paid for it by later releasing a full-quality CD version with extra tracks.
- If we didn't believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD then we wouldn't do what we are doing."
- In any case, the artists own their own music.

03 Sep 08

Open Source Textbooks Challenge a Paradigm | Epicenter from Wired.com

blog.wired.com/...open-source-tex.html - Preview

open source free text book textbook digital publishing

A small, digital book startup thinks it has a solution to the age-old student lament: overpriced textbooks that have little value when the course is over. The answer? Make them open source -- and give them away.
Flat World's business plan aims to exploit the inefficiencies: Its books are online and free. Instead of charging for content it aims to make money by wrapping content up in "convenient" downloadable and print wrappers and selling those, along with study aides and related items.
2 more annotations...
- But a study released last week by the Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) noted that subscription-based digital books are just as unaffordable, considering that a used print book can at
  least be resold for a while.
- “The nice thing about open content is it gives faculty full control, creative control over the content of the book, full control over timing, and it give students a lot more control over how they want to consume it and how much they want to pay,”

Free digital texts begin to challenge costly college textbooks -- chicagotribune.com

www.chicagotribune.com/...extbooks-story,0,3462330.story - Preview

open source free text books publishing

California State University runs Merlot, a searchable collection of peer-reviewed, online multimedia materials. Connexions, from Rice University in Houston, stores free, open-licensed educational materials in fields such as music, electrical engineering and psychology.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare has placed virtually its entire curricula online -- video lectures, problems sets and exams for more than 1,800 courses in 33 disciplines.

Other open-source textbook projects have a subversive edge. Founders or advocates refer to themselves as "co-conspirators," profess a do-it-yourself ethic and declare an intent to overthrow the textbook industry.

Wikibooks, a collection of textbooks "anyone can edit," is based on the popular Wikipedia model, which invites users to make and correct entries.
More recently, academics have started embracing open- source resources as a way to reduce students' textbook bills. More than 1,400 faculty last year signed on to a pledge drive supporting open educational resources. (The drive was organized by Public Interest Research Groups from about 20 states.)

Free digital texts begin to challenge costly college textbooks -- chicagotribune.com

www.chicagotribune.com/...extbooks-story,0,3462330.story - Preview

free text books open source publishing

What McAfee is not is anti-capitalist.

"I'm a right-wing economist, so they can't call me a communist," McAfee said.

Yet he turned down $100,000 to turn over his open-source textbook "Introduction to Economic Analysis" to a commercial publisher.
"Anything that stands in the way of the dissemination of knowledge is a real problem."
2 more annotations...
- Open educational resources is an amorphous category for publishers, but basically it includes e-textbooks, courses, videos, taped lectures, tests, software and other materials released online free to the public without restriction on use.
- Universities for more than a decade have experimented with open-source educational sites and online libraries as a way to spread knowledge more equitably. Some seek to change the nature of the textbook by offering "chunks" of instruction that professors can mix and match to create their own content "collections."

25 Jun 08

BBC NEWS | Technology | Changing the way we think

news.bbc.co.uk/...7459182.stm - Preview

After all, the ability to read a text is as much a learned behaviour as knowing how to use a mouse to control a cursor on screen, and it is claimed that the Venerable Bede, the monk who lived in Jarrow in the seventh century, was the first person to read without moving his lips.
Today's internet presents information in bite-sized chunks, linked together into a rich tapestry where the connections often carry as much meaning as the words themselves.

The fact that a blog post recommended by one of the A-list bloggers may matter more than what it says; and often the accumulation of small references to a topic is vital to build up our understanding.

29 May 08

forskning.no > Liten sonde på stor slette

Dette er ein interessant artikkel om eitt eller anna i rommet.

www.forskning.no/...183203 - Preview

rom romsonde sonde verdsrommet forskning.no naturfag

den Phoenix har laget sin første værmelding fra Mars, og er snart klar til å grave i bakken.
- Dette er særleg viktig, jamfør det eg sa i timen to.29.05.08.09;47 - on 2008-05-29
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07 Apr 08

Organisasjonsnettsider

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eksempler organisasjoner
Dette forholdet forteller oss at de som står bak nettstedet, kanskje ikke legger særlig vekt på å signalisere tydelig hva nettsiden handler om, eller at de rett og slett ikke har klart denne oppgaven.
1 more annotations...
- I tilfellet Norsk Form brukes det svært sparsommelige virkemidler for å fortelle hva nettsiden faktisk handler om.

Bedriftsnettsider

fag.utdanning.no/...bedriftsnettsider - Preview

nettsider vil
Det siste eksemplet

06 Apr 08

Vox publica

fag.utdanning.no/...vox_public - Preview

Vox publica
våks públika

D2 | Nasjonal digital læringsarena

fag.utdanning.no/...d2 - Preview

deadline -,

Nettaviser

osv.

fag.utdanning.no/...nettaviser - Preview

ndla korrektur

reportasjer osv.

Redaksjonelle nettsteder

fag.utdanning.no/...redaksjonelle_nettsteder - Preview

"uheldig"

29 Mar 08

– Vi mister autoriteten

www.aftenbladet.no/...article615790.ece - Preview

ikt skole

– Ett av problemene er at denne generasjonen elever er vant til å bli
underholdt hele tiden, og mye av denne underholdningen foregår ved
datamaskinen. Vi som lærere har ingen mulighet til, og heller ingen
interesse av, å konkurrere med de mulighetene som data og internett kan
tilby.
– Jeg mener lærerne burde hatt mer å si før politikerne bestemte seg.

Lærere ber om innskjerping

www.aftenbladet.no/...article617345.ece - Preview

ikt lærarforbundet skole vidaregåande

Sigrund Haaland i Utdanningsforbundet mener det bør være klare
retningslinjer for pc-bruk og etterlyser også tydeligere sanksjonsmuligheter
mot elever som ødelegger undervisningen ved å leve seg inn i verdensveven,
istedenfor å følge med på lærerens undervisning.
- Dette er nokså latterleg. Retorikken i dette er at "nokre" utanfrå har påført skulen eit problem, som verken elevane eller lærarane taklar. Get a grip! - on 2008-03-29
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Ole Jan Olsen ved opplæringsavdelingen i Rogaland fylkeskommune sier at det
er opp til skolens rektorer å utarbeide retningslinjer og eventuelle
sanksjonsmuligheter.

– Vi har lagt opp til at pc i skolene skal brukes i opplæringsøyemed. Skolen
og den rektorer er selv ansvarlige til å organisere pc-bruken, sier Olsen.
- Godt sagt, den einaste naturlege kommentaren til slikt vrøvl - on 2008-03-29
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3 more annotations...
- – Mitt inntrykk er at dette blir løst forskjellig ved skolene, og dette er
  nok en hverdag som kom litt brått på, og det blir en omstilling, sier Olsen.
- Hugo Rode Berntsen, sentralstyremedlem i Utdanningsforbundet seksjon for
  videregående skoler, mener dette er et problem for lærerne.
- – Vi vet at pc-en er ypperlig på kommunikasjon og henting av informasjon.
  Den er ikke like nyttig i den pedagogiske læringen. Å bygge opp kompetanse
  ligger fortsatt i hodet til eleven, sier han.
  - Herregud. Kva er dette? - on 2008-03-29
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28 Mar 08

For the young, TV's passivity is passé next to the Internet

blabla

arstechnica.com/...-to-enhance-tv-experience.html - Preview

internett tv ungdom

Grunwald surveyed 1,277 kids and young adults between 9 and 17, 1,039 parents, and 250 school districts across the US. 64 percent of those surveyed told the consulting firm that they go online as they watch TV, and almost three-quarters of that group (73 percent) said they considered themselves to be actively multitasking when they're watching TV and using the 'Net at the same time. 42 percent reported that their attention is split between the TV and Internet equally, while another 47 percent said that once they start using the computer, the Internet becomes the focus of their attention.

14 Mar 08

VintageGitar - Kontakt informasjon

www.vintagegitar.no/...40 - Preview

POST@vintagegitar.no

06 Mar 08

Märtha ble ikke hørt - VG Nett

www.vg.no/...artikkel.php - Preview

- Dette er eg heilt usamd i. eg synest Carl-Erik er dum. - on 2008-03-06
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Arne Olav Nygard's Public Library

Big, Hairy Audacious Work - Forbes.com

clark_e2.pdf - Google Docs

The Kindle and the End of the End of History - O'Reilly Radar

demonbaby: When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

Open Source Textbooks Challenge a Paradigm | Epicenter from Wired.com

Free digital texts begin to challenge costly college textbooks -- chicagotribune.com

Free digital texts begin to challenge costly college textbooks -- chicagotribune.com

BBC NEWS | Technology | Changing the way we think

forskning.no > Liten sonde på stor slette

Organisasjonsnettsider

Bedriftsnettsider

Vox publica

D2 | Nasjonal digital læringsarena

Nettaviser

Redaksjonelle nettsteder

– Vi mister autoriteten

Lærere ber om innskjerping

For the young, TV's passivity is passé next to the Internet

VintageGitar - Kontakt informasjon

Märtha ble ikke hørt - VG Nett

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