Some news is tweetworthy and some is bloggable but the Live train map for the London Underground is definitely both! Its a map that shows all trains on the London Underground network in approximately real time. How does it work Live departure data is fetched from the TfL API, and then it does a bit [...]

Social advances (albeit unequally distributed) have granted people the leisure time to focus on the production of non-essential products and services. Advances in technology have radically reduced the costs for preserving and communicating these cultural artifacts beyond the boundaries of time and space. However it was not until the last 150 years where we have [...]

The Gnu General Public License (GPL) holds an amazing position as the premier free and open source software license but this position may be slipping since its move to version 3 in 2007. In an article entitled Does GPL still matter? Yahoo Tech News reports: A June study conducted by Black Duck Software, an open source [...]

In less than three weeks from its launch Firefox 3.0 has been downloaded 28 million times (BBC report). Stop for a while and let that number sink in. 28 million downloads in three weeks. That translates to a lot of passionate users. But why? Why did so many people bother to download a new browser? [...]

This has been a busy week for books on Open Access. On Wednesday I blogged about the book Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors by Kylie Pappalardo. Today Open Access News wrote about two more new Open Access books: E. Canessa and M. Zennaro at the Science Dissemination Unit of [...]

The Oak Law project has produced an Open Access guide. The book Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors by Kylie Pappalardo (with the assistance of Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Scott Kiel-Chisholm, Jenny Georgiades and Anthony Austin) aims to provide practical guidance for academic authors interested in making their [...]

IFIP-TC9 HCC8 8th International Conference on Human Choice and Computers on Social Dimensions of ICT Policy University of Pretoria 25-26 September 2008 Thursday 25 September 9:00 – 9:30 Opening session Welcome speeches by conference organizers at the University of Pretoria 9:30 – 10:30 Plenary session: keynote speech Communication, Information and ICT Policy: Towards enabling research [...]

The French have gone and done it! Times Online reports: Anyone who persists in illicit downloading of music or films will be barred from broadband access under a controversial new law that makes France a pioneer in combating internet piracy. “There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone,” President Sarkozy told [...]

Stealing wifi is an old subject but it remains an interesting one. That some people have been prosecuted for stealing wifi in different parts of the world is also old news.* Still most of us have no problem checking for open networks when we need to access. I have also known users to be on [...]

I am almost ashamed for not blogging and discussing this in more detail. There have been plenty of media, discussions, and a blogging frenzy in the past two weeks… Short of actually doing the work myself I simplified life – or gave way to my laziness and re-post this post from the EFF A proposed [...]

Most of us (should) know that the net is not a particularly nice place. It is a neutral tool that allows all users to go out there and be themselves. Unfortunately the technology also offers people pseudo-anonymity or the illusion of real anonymity. I say unfortunately because this really brings the weirdos out of the [...]