Cisco Becomes Infected by the GNU GPL

When it was first announced that the FSF had filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Cisco, some were predicting that this was going to be the definitive test of the power and legality of the GNU GPL. I was more sceptical...

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Story of Our Lives

TechCrunch notes the rise of a new class of services:

part blogging, part genealogy and part something unique. They are focused on the very long term - getting and then keeping customers for decades, and encouraging friends and especially family members to join, too. Once they’re hooked, they’ve spent so much time building content that they are very unlikely to ever leave.

Nicely viral, obviously, but what really interests me is the potential of making all of this information freely available across the Net, rather than just locking it in silos (as I imagine much will be). Imagine an intelligent spider, searching, sifting and correlating the information: it would allow a tapestry of life to be spun across the entire planet (or at least those parts using such sites). Tricky privacy issues, of course....

Cool Earth Meltdown

I was going to write about Cool Earth before, but the site went down. This is both good and bad news. Bad, because it suggests a lack of planning on the part of the people behind the site, and good because it was caused by the unexpectedly large influx of people wanting to visit and participate.

That's a particularly good sign because the whole idea is about letting ordinary people make a difference to global warming by helping to keep carbon sequestered in the rainforests. Agreed, this is not as good as actually taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but given all the collateral benefits of preserving rainforests, it would be churlish to complain.

Moreover, Cool Earth seems to be recognise that preserving the rainforests is not about surrounding it with barbed wire to keep the baddies out: the local people - the goodies - must not only be taken into account, but actively involved so that they feel it is in their interests to protect rather than exploit by cutting down. Sustainability of this kind is hard to do well, but better than the current alternative.

The other key thing about Cool Earth is that it allows people who chip in to monitor their "bit" of the rainforest using Google Earth (and what a godsend that is in this context). This is absolutely crucial - not so much in terms of checking whether somebody's about to cut it down, since by then it's probably too late, but in allowing donors to feel connected. Without that feedback loop, you don't generate engagement, and the whole thing will just fizzle out.

I've no idea whether Cool Earth will make a difference or turn out to be a total flop. But it's an idea worth supporting (I'm certainly going to sign up for a few trees) - for everyone's sake.

Gene Geni

This is quite clever - although it's a pity it uses Flash. You start to build your family tree on-screen, adding emails to the names where available. These are then sent info about the site, and obviously encouraged to add their own local knowledge of the tree. So the system is viral, and is based on two networks: that of family connections, and that of the Internet.

It's easy to foresee the day when we know all our public genealogical connections in this way - a stage before our genomes are used to show all the private ones, too.... (Via TechCrunch.)

Sharing: As Natural as Childhood

Children are increasingly swapping music via mobile phones, often without realising they can be breaking the law.

A survey of almost 1,500 eight to 13-year-olds found almost a third shared music via their mobiles.

...

Almost a half (45%) of children who said they did not swap music via their phones said they would like to.

Inevitably this story is provoking howls from the music industry. But it teaches us two things.

First, that - just as RMS has always said - sharing is natural, part of our genetic make-up that allows us to function as social beings. And secondly, that this is an opportunity, not a threat: these children are doing free marketing for the music companies, spreading the word about cool music. Copyright owners should rejoice, not fret about it - and move on to coming up with a way to make some money selling more music off the back of all this fantastic viral distribution.