Will Fair Use now get a Fair Hearing?

The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) says that professional sports leagues, Hollywood, and book publishers are misrepresenting copyright law when they use over-restrictive language about their copyrights. CCIA has filed a complaint with the FTC. Google, Microsoft, and other heavyweights are behind this, in part, because they often get sued over these issues. I like the alternative language they're offering!

Link to story at arstechnica.com

RSS in Plain English

Lee Lefevre's cool intro and how-to make RSS and feeds work for you.

A Self-Publishing Tool Kit

Over on the Read/Write Web blog, Josh Catone has written a piece on tools that a writer might use to get the work done and get it in print and in distribution. His tongue is partly in his cheek, but he manages to articulate some useful hints and tools. Note especially, Lulu, for on-demand printing and distribution.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/self_publishing_tool_kit.php

David Weinberger says, "Everything is Miscellaneous"

YouTube on your own tube

YouTube now offers you the ability to design your own custom player/s that you load up with video from YouTube and can embed on your Website or blog.

Here are the simple instructions:
"Name and design your player, then fill it with videos from your videos or playlists. Once you've generated the embed code and saved the player, you can copy and paste the code to your website or blog."

http://www.youtube.com/custom_player

"One interface, not two." The coming of the Web OS

"One interface, not two." So says Blake Ross, co-founder of the Mozilla Firefox project, as he speaks of "a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do." He's been working on a project called Parakey that will make it really easy to store stuff and share it around the world.

How far off? Don't know, but Parakey has just been purchased by... Facebook.

IEEE Spectrum article on Parakey

Wired story on Parakey acquisition by Facebook

Vinyl-ly! I've been waiting for something like this!

Numark's TTUSB is a turntable with a USB connection that provides an easy way to reformat 331/3 and 45 RPM recordings into digital files on a PC or Mac. Besides the USB, other output options include stereo RCA and stereo mini.

Hey, I'm old enough to know what this is and why I need one.

http://www.numark.com/ttusb