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MSFT Joins Open Content Alliance

Microsoft announced Tuesday that it planned to join the online book-search movement with a new service called MSN Book Search.
And in a nod to the growing influence of a recently formed group called the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft announced its plans to join it. The group is working to digitize the contents of millions of books and put them on the Internet, with full text accessible to anyone, while respecting the rights of copyright holders.

Microsoft to Offer Online Book-Content Searches – New York Times

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Creating Windows Media Enhanced Podcasts

To create a Windows Media enhanced podcast, you need an app with support for Windows Media script editing. The free choice is Windows Media File Editor, which is bundled in the Windows Media Encoder download.

Windows Media Enhanced Podcast

Things to do to make those podcasts even more exciting.  Requires the audio be in .WMA format.  Should come out much like the enhanced podcasts favored by Apple and iTunes.  via Make. 

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TinyDisk 1.0

TinyDisk is a file system that runs on top of link the TinyURL shortening service and similar services such as Nanourl. It provides a write-once-read-many anonymous, persistent, and globally shared filesystem. Once something is uploaded, only the database admin can delete it, everyone can read it, and no-one can know who created it.

freshmeat.net: Project details for TinyDisk

Stuff like this is why you can’t stop folks from downloading the latest Britney song:)  There are some interesting possibilities with this sort of software.  Think of one time drop boxes, etc.

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Podcasting Gaining Steam in Higher Ed

Students in the designated classes subscribe to the lectures by going to the CSS Web site and copying a link into their iTunes or a similar program. After that, the program automatically picks up each lecture after it’s recorded. The student simply goes to his or her personal computer, opens iTunes and either listens to it there or transfers it to a portable MP3 player.

uwnews.org | University of Washington News and Information

Add U of Washington to the growing list of colleges and universities that are using podcasting as a tool for distributing course material to students.  It makes a lot of sense.  Here’s my question: what about law schools?  CALI is trying to provide law schools with tools to do this, but uptake seems to be limited.  I’m not sure why folks don’t want to try this technology now before they start getting battered by students and faculty who want it.  It is a bit frustrating.

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CALI Calls It Classcaster

The Chronicle has a great article (5 day link) on what it refers to as ‘coursecasting’. Those of you who have been following along will recognize many of the things mentioned in the article as central to the ideas that led us to develop Classcaster. With Classcaster, law faculty are able to try out podcasting right now without having to go through all the hassle usually associated with trying something new. All you need to do is log in, dial up, and podcast.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Lectures on the Go
More and more professors are turning to iPods and other digital audio devices to record their lectures and send them to their students, in what many are calling “coursecasting.” The portability of coursecasting, its proponents say, makes the technology ideal for students who fall behind in class or those for whom English is a second language.

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Minix 3 Released

Slashdot | Andy Tanenbaum Releases Minix 3
“MINIX 3 is a new open-source operating system designed to be highly reliable and secure. This new OS is extremely small, with the part that runs in kernel mode under 4000 lines of executable code. The parts that run in user mode are divided into small modules, well insulated from one another. For example, each device driver runs as a separate user-mode process so a bug in a driver (by far the biggest source of bugs in any operating system), cannot bring down the entire OS.“

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XML Latest Front in Software Patent War

This stuff never seems to stop. I find it hard to beleive that IBM or Microsoft would stand still for something like this. Face it, XML is a straight derivative of SGML and it pre-dates 1997, so how exactly could you get a apply for a patent in 1997 and expect it to hold up?

Small company makes big claims on XML patents | Tech News on ZDNet
Charlotte, N.C.-based Scientigo owns two patents (No. 5,842,213 and No. 6,393,426) covering the transfer of “data in neutral forms.” These patents, one of which was applied for in 1997, are infringed upon by the data-formatting standard XML, Scientigo executives assert.

Scientigo intends to “monetize” this intellectual property, Scientigo CEO Doyal Bryant said this week.

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