“Watch your step: If you’ve ever exercised your cat by having it chase the reflected spot of a laser pointer, you and kitty may be in violation of a bona fide U.S. patent. Don’t believe it? Take a gander at Patent No. 5,443,036, Method of Exercising a Cat, issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark […]
Creative people now have far more choices about how to market what they produce. The New York Times yesterday reported about authors who have successfully self-published. One author, for just $99, had her book laid-out in a print-on-demand format, and on the basis of its succes shortly after got a large advance from a publisher. […]
Lion’s Gate, an independent film producer, is promoting its forthcoming film Rules of Attraction on the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing system KaZaa, as reported in this LA Times article (free registration required) . In Living Networks I noted how Capitol Records – part of EMI – had used the feared and hated P2P system Aimster […]
Blogs are at the heart of the shifting flow of information and ideas. Many people have been trying to find a business model by which they can make money from it. Clay Shirky’s recent article gives a realistic view of the situation. That is, there’s not a lot of money to be made, directly in […]
I am at the tail end of 6 days in the land of “Honk OK Please”. That is what is printed in large and jolly letters on the back of most trucks in India (or sometimes simply “Honk Please”), and many are only too glad to oblige. Too much intake to do a quick braindump, […]
The key to web services becoming the dominant underpinning infrastructure in the global networks is making them easily accessible and useable by smaller companies. At the moment they are mainly implemented by larger corporations, but their very nature lends itself to creating them in modules that can be easily taken up. IBM will shortly release […]
This article on Salon.com describes how Microsoft and China, after tough negotiations, came to a three-year $750 million “memorandum of understanding”. Despite the 92% software piracy rate in China, the agreement contained nothing about enforcing Microsoft’s intellectual property. In Chapter 8 of Living Networks I used the example of how Disney has become a dominant […]
The emergence of the “living web” In just the same way as the networks are coming to life, the language that we use to describe this new world is emerging and evolving. In the last few months, the blogging community has started using the term “living web” to describe the flow of information in the […]
