On Web Culture

I love this photo. It comes from Andrew at TallSkinnyKiwi and there is a larger version available.

Now the madness of last week has subsided I’ve had some time to put together a post.

I follow Lessig a bit because I have an interest in the Creative Commons movement he started. Lessig’s team at Stanford have filed suit against the grandson of James Joyce for how he is controlling the intellectual property of his grandfather. I am keen to hear others’ comments on this.

If you missed Webstock 2006, never mind, because it’s all online and free in MPEG, MP3, MP4, and streaming audio/WMV. Nice work Webstock. Now I can see the sessions I missed like Andreas Giradet’s ‘…analysis of the struggle between Closed and Open Source Software’ and Rachel McAlpine’s ‘F-language: we’re ready for rules’.

Someone asked me the other day what Google was doing with their supersystem and my answer was “Um. Gmail, their chat program, Google Video and Google Book Search. Google Maps and Google Earth”. Despite an impressive list it felt like I was underselling Google. Perhaps I was if more computing centers the size of football fields is on Google’s list of to-do’s.

If you missed it, terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed two weeks ago. Judging by this information on Wikipedia, the USA didn’t like him very much (I love the way we get the map coordinates for the bombed safehouse we can then look up in Google Maps. I found myself looking at a road through some bushes next to what looks like a river or a pipeline):

“At 14:15 GMT two United States Air Force F-16C jets identified the house and the lead jet dropped two 500-pound (230kg) guided bombs, a laser-guided GBU-12 and GPS-guided GBU-38 on the building located at 33°48′02.83″N, 44°30′48.58″E.” [en.wikipedia.org]