So Amazon is now selling the Kindle in Japan, meaning they also have a Kindle store. I might be tempted to think this would enable Kindle-owning me to buy e-books from the Japanese Kindle store, seeing as I live in Japan and already have an account on amazon.co.jp to buy print books.

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Here's a short interview with Kal Raustiala, co-author of a very interesting new book called 'The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation'. Raustiala discusses how copyright is unnecessary in various creative industries. For instance, an absence of copyright protection encourages innovation in fashion, football, and cuisine. He also ( Read more... )

Here's a lovely video about why open access for academic articles is so important. It touches upon many key problems with academic publishing, and it's animated by the guy who makes the awesome PhD Comics.

Open access explained! (8min)

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It's Ada Lovelace Day! Here's a fascinating intro to the Countess, her work, and especially to how people have been trying to disparage and minimize her contribution to computer science for a century. The first sentences for anyone who's not familiar with this amazing woman:

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (known as Ada Lovelace) is probably ( Read more... )

Today my Twitter account managed to send out a phishing direct message to much of my follower list. That was terribly embarrassing and I have no idea how it happened, but Twitter apparently shut it down after a few minutes, and several alert and friendly people poked me so I could dive in and change my password. I felt very loved by this friendly ( Read more... )

"I don't mind that these fics with the serial numbers filed off get published commercially. I just wish they'd publish the good fic."

I've seen a lot of people react like that to Fifty Shades of Grey, and it seems to be bubbling up again with the news that a book based on a One Direction fic* called Me, Myself, and One Direction is also getting ( Read more... )

In The New Imperialism: Forcing Morality Shifts And Cultural Change Through Exported IP Laws, the always-informative Techdirt gives a rundown of recent incidents where pressure from US media companies forced countries to change their IP laws in ways that are against the interests of their own citizens. The whole thing is interesting and also ( Read more... )

There's a way to install comments functionality on a tumblr! I was working on the upcoming reboot of the good old Symposium blog today, and since the commenting system there seemed a bit clunky, I decided to try out Disqus. Disqus is a free commenting service widely used on blogs that lets people comment with their Twitter, Facebook, Google, and ( Read more... )

Addendum to that recent whine about how politicians have a responsibility to get educated about the internet: "mainstream" media need such education at least as badly. The internet has become crucial not just to many people's personal lives, but to the functioning of whole societies. There are very many people who don't have the time or the ( Read more... )

Distracting myself from a bigger post about the State of the Research. Here's an quick 101 about virtual economies in games, prompted by the fact that players in Diablo III get a store where they can sell virtual items. As the video explains, this is significant in part because it's a legitimization of a widespread fannish practice: exchanging ( Read more... )