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Copyright for Canada

There’s been a lot of discussion in the papers about the newly-tabled Bill on Canadian Copyright; suffice to say there are lots of issues with it and it needs to be sent back and turned into something that meets the needs of the citizens and residents of this country. If you’re living in Canada, I’d recommend you read some of Michael Geist’s blog, particularly the summary of last week, and then email your MP about the issues that concern you the most. For me, it’s the potential that playing DVDs from a region other than Canada could violate the law. If I’ve bought the DVDs legally, or had them given to me, why should playing them violate the law? Why should getting a cell phone unlocked violate the law? Why should backing up my CDs violate the law? This is one of the few issues I can remember where it seems that every newspaper has the same tone to the editorial - and it isn’t complimentary to the government.

Mind you, my local MP isn’t exactly known for listening to his constituents (there’s still a lot of local anger at his crossing the floor after being elected), so who knows how much good my email (a heavily edited version of the one at Copyright for Canadians) will do.

Update: it looks like the Minister supposedly in charge, isn’t - Canadian Industry Minister lies about his Canadian DMCA on national radio, then hangs up - Boing Boing.

2008 06 19 Family
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Spreading the Word

I’m not the first person to notice the duplication of posts, as people post what’s happening to Twitter and Facebook and Plurk, and blog about it if they feel like writing something a little longer. Which means that when you really want to keep up with what someone is up to, you subscribe to them on all those channels, and FriendFeed as well, and put up with the duplication (spiced up by the time lag between things appearing on one channel and when they appear on the other; ain’t latency fun?).

The problem comes when you want to respond, or join in the conversation. Do you reply to the tweet? Or comment on the blog posting? Or respond to the person individually by email or chat? Or all of the above?

In the concrete case that made me think about this, I sent off a chat message, and now I’m going to also blog it: congratulations to Edd and family on the new arrival; may he sleep peacefully and grow vigorously, and not fight too much with his older siblings.

And maybe that’s the answer: take each case as it comes, depending on which audience you think might (or should) be involved, and how ephemeral the conversation should be.

2008 06 12 General Comments (0) Permalink

Toddler Books

My daughter is now two, and likes some different books to the set I reviewed six months ago, although she still likes the Boynton books and Mother, May I? by Grace Maccarone (I suspect because it has a picture of a truck in it, and features a hug at the end).

In no particular order, we have Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb by Al Perkins and Eric Gurney, There’s a Nightmare in My Closet by Mercer Mayer, Dog In, Cat Out by Gillian Rubinstein and Ann James (lots of scope for making up stories about what’s happening in the pictures), Waves in the Bathtub by Eugenie Fernandes (make up your own music for the song, it will sound much better than the tune in the book), and Where’s My Teddy? by Jez Alborough (ours is bundled with It’s the Bear!, which gets nearly equal billing in the toddler appreciation list). These are all books my son liked as well, so chances are good that other toddlers will enjoy them just as much. My son didn’t have Monkey and Me by Emily Gravett, but my daughter likes it.

And, of course, she also likes anything with a picture of a truck in it.

2008 06 12 Books
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Girls and Trucks

My toddler daughter loves trucks; she’ll gleefully point them out on the street and in books until you’re sick of the word. So just before her birthday, there was me in the toy store looking at truck-related toys for her (trucks, trains, cars, other assorted toy vehicles) trying to pick out something that didn’t entirely duplicate what she already has. Behind me, I heard a customer ask the clerk for help. The conversation ran along these lines:

Customer: Hi, I’m looking for a toy for a two-year-old.
Clerk: boy or girl? Not that it should matter, of course.
Customer: it’s a girl.

At which the customer was taken over to some other aisle, far away from the trucks and trains and related toys, despite the claim that “it shouldn’t matter”. I was in the toy store for a while, and she never did make it over to what I guess was considered the “boy” side of the store. My daughter loved the trucks we got her, and likes having the truck book that her grandmother gave her for her birthday read to her (to cries of “truck! truck!”). I just hope she doesn’t notice that every driver of every truck in the book is a man.

2008 06 09 Family Comments (9) Permalink

Managing Distractions

It’s all too easy to get sucked in to checking your Twitter and your Plurk and your Brightkite and your Facebook and whatever other services you use; in my case I can claim I need to know something about how these things work for a project. In theory I’m making useful observations of how people interact with services and what value they get from them, but in reality I spend a bit more time watching and reading than is needed for that. It’s very easy to follow tweeted links and then find myself web-surfing, just like it was in the early days of the web, when we all watched what came up next on NCSA Mosaic’s “What’s New” page. So it’s a little ironic that John tweeted a link that made me more aware of the slippery slope of online distractions, and potential ways to combat them. Thanks, John!

2008 06 05 Technology Comments (0) Permalink

Communities and Circles

Someone asked me the other day whether blogs were communities. This got me to thinking about how we define communities in the online space. And friends, and followers, and how some social networking sites encourage enlarging the social circle while others concentrate on people you already know through other means. “Social circle” being extremely loosely defined, of course, just as the term “friend” is much more loosely defined in the online space than in the physical, face-to-face world.

So let’s play with some ideas for a definition of community. If you have other ideas, please add them to the comments and if you think I’m wrong, tell me why; maybe we can come up with a community definition of community. Which leads of course to the realisation that I do think blogs (some blogs, anyway) constitute a community.

A community is a group of people who interact with each other in some forum. How’s that for a beginning? Not too bad, but it doesn’t really nail down very much; the line-up in your local coffee shop could be seen as a community under this definition. We need to add a temporal aspect: members of the community interact with each other over a period of time (this rules out the coffee shop line-up). And at least some members of the community have to be active within the community (a social forum where nobody posts anything is not a community by this definition). This last is more fuzzy (what does “active” mean?) but I think is necessary.

The definition of community needs an “active” aspect since in my opinion for a blog to be considered a community, people reading it have to comment on it. Otherwise it isn’t a community, it’s a publishing method. We could get into discussions about whether a spoke-and-hub interaction model where readers comment on the posts but not on each others’ comments is still interaction, or whether you neeed a many-to-many interaction model (which is closer to what most people think of in the physical world as a community), but I think that’s a detail. What’s important is that the communication in the community flows in more than one direction. Mind you, the word “interact” is a verb, which implies an action, so adding the adverb “actively” to it is a tautology, which I try to avoid.

This leaves: A community is a group of people who interact with each other over a period of time in some forum. Not perfect, but not bad for a start.

2008 06 04 General Comments (3) Permalink

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