book

Glowing Review

I came across a glowing review on Amazon for Human Rights in the Digital Age (edited by Andrew Murray and myself). Getting a glowing review is a very nice feeling! So good that I naturally feel the need to reprint it here!

I read this book following Conor Gearty’s advice in his 2005 Hamlyn Lecture Series “Can Human Rights Survive?” that this book “should be required reading for all those interested in the future good health of our subject”. Although it drew on a wide variety of contributors, some better than others, overall I found the book filled a void in the current literature and for this reason alone it would be a must read. That aside though I found the contributions to be thought provoking and useful. Some of the better chapters come from Mathias Klang who discusses Cyber-activism and online civil disobedience, Douglas Vick who puts US and European views of free expression to the test and Andrew Murray who challenges the orthodox views that government should look after itself – at least when it comes to controlling the information flow about itself.

This is an excellent collection of essays and I simply echo Conor Gearty’s words – buy it if you are interested in the future good health of the discourse on human rights.

Posted on by mklang

Subtitles

Today I saw a book in my colleagues office. The cool title was interesting enough to make me pick it up. Book is Peter Morvilleâ??s Ambient Findability which is a thoughtful approach to searching, finding and dealing with information (in particular information overload). It didnâ??t take long for me to convince myself that I needed to read this book.

Now me buying a book is not really the point of this post â?? even if book recommendations are worth posting. What I wanted to write about came out of the very cool subtitle to the book in question â?? â??What We Find Changes Who We Becomeâ??

Read that slowly again – â??What We Find Changes Who We Becomeâ??.

Very cool subtitle. Many non-fiction books include subtitles but few, in my opinion, (well it is my blog) actually seem to spend time on the subtitle but tend to be more explanatory. The model seems to be think of a snappy, catchy title then add subtitle so people will understand the title. Even though Morville follows this model I still think his subtitle is great. It has become my instant favourite.

Whatâ??s your favourite subtitle? Oh no â?? itâ??s a new memeâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

Book Mooch

I am particularly fond of ideas where old ideas can be supported by new technology. If you add to this ideas which include books then I am sold. An example of this is Book Crossings whose idea was to share books with strangers by leaving them in public spaces a clear notice of the Book Crossing idea.

The Book Mooch is another of these great ideas.

Itâ??s a community for exchanging used books. It lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want. It is many other features but in its simplest forms the idea is:

Give & receive: Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you’ve read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.

(via Boing Boing)

Posted on by mklang

CC Books Wiki

Looking for books distributed under a CC license? Then here is a wiki for you. Actually these kinds of pages are really good unless they become too popular and all of a sudden they implode because of their own success â?? information overload, too many books make the search for the book you want impossible.

But letâ??s not get carried away with early Sunday morning pessimism. If you know of a book which belongs on this wiki â?? add it. If the concept of book confuses you (which all concepts have done since the great Plato/Aristotle disagreement on the theory of forms) then you might be helped by the wiki definition.

By “book” we generally mean works over 35,000 words that are or have been commercially available in hardcopy and have an ISBN. We’ve expanded the definition in two added sections below, however, to include the most popular books published through do-it-yourself press Lulu, and “books” published on websites of established organizations or notable blogs.

(via Open Access News)

Posted on by mklang

Offline in London

If you have noticed that it has been quite from this corner of the Internet its because I have been offline in London. Partly I was there lecturing about Copyleft, Free Software and Creative Commons on an intellectual property course organised by Andrew Murray at the LSE. I naturally found time for shopping and culture.

The main cultural event was the Victoria and Albert Museum in general and the Che Guevara exhibition in particular. In addition to graffiti spotting (results will be online on flickr soon).

The shopping was mainly books (I really should try to cut down a little). I frequented mainly second hand stores and ended up with a dozen booksâ?¦ here are some highlights: Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom, Loretta Napoleoni’s Terror Inc, Peter Drahos & John Braithwaite â?? Information Feudalism. Two books by Paul Virilio (The Information Bomb and Negative Horizon) and Val Dusekâ??s The Philosophy of Technology.

Posted on by mklang

Web 2.0 Licentiate thesis

Does the term Web 2.0 confuse or annoy you? Is there anything beyond the flashy buzzword? Well I guess the best way to begin to understand Web 2.0 is to experience it (insert your Matrix jokes here!) but if you prefer to be guided by someone else then I can recommend Peter Gigerâ??s (2006) Licentiate Thesis on the topic. The title is â??Participation Literacyâ?? and it is an interesting exploration in the termâ??s growth and meaning.

From the abstract:

The thesis concerns the Web 2.0 concept construction. Web 2.0 is a new mindset on the Internet. The main characteristics include â??Web as a Platformâ??, Collective Intelligence, Folksonomy and interfaces build with lightweight technologiesâ?¦Web 2.0 is not only a technique, but also an ideology â?? an ideology of participation. A Web 2.0 service is completely web based and generally draws on open access. It includes tools for people to interact within areas such as encyclopaedias, bookmarks, photos, books or research articles. All Web 2.0 services are web communities. A web community is a group of individuals, linked together by a network of social relations with some degree of continuity. Community members learn from each other and the knowledge base of the community grows for every interaction. The core values of Web 2.0 are democracy and participation.

Download it here or visit Peter’s research blog.

Posted on by mklang

Serendipity

Serendipity is making fortunate discoveries by accident. It is also one of those words that both sounds good and denotes a good thing.

While looking for the bibliographic data on Lawrence Rosenâ??s book â??Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Lawâ?? (itâ??s the best on FOSS licensing and it’s also online here), I came across another Lawrence Rosen and his new book â??Law as Cultureâ??. The title was enough â?? I bought it.

Now that I have the book I read the front flap of the dust jacket:

Law is integral to culture, and culture to law. Often considered a distinctive domain with strange rules and stranger language, law is actually a part of a cultureâ??s way of expressing its sense of the order of things.

Rosen is a legal anthropologist and he presents a nice intro to the area of law and culture. All this is good stuff and I am looking forward to reading the rest. How did this book end up in my library and on my â??must readâ?? list? A case of mixed identity, two authors with the same name, an interest in software licensingâ?¦

Serendipity isnâ??t it great?

Posted on by mklang

Summer progress

It’s a hot summer. Brains are melting and work is sluggish. Despite this deadlines loom over us the unrelenting sunshine. My PhD thesis defence is on the 2 October. The book goes to the publishers in the last week of August.

The title of the work is “Disruptive Technology – Effects of Technology Regulation on Democracy” and it will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. The blurb on the back cover will have this text:

Social interaction is partly shaped by technology being used. Therefore technological innovation affects modes of social interaction. While gradual technological innovation is often assimilated, some changes can be more disruptive. This research examines the democratic impact of attempts to control disruptive technology through regulation. This is done by studying attempts to regulate the phenomena of online civil disobedience, viruses, spyware, online games, software standards and Internet censorship â?? in particular the affect of these regulatory attempts on the core democratic values of Participation, Communication, Integrity, Property, Access and Autonomy. By studying the attempts to regulate the disruptive effects of Internet technology and the consequences of these regulatory attempts on the IT-based participatory democracy this work shows that the regulation of technology is the regulation of democracy.

If anyone wants to read an advance version it’s available here. If you send me comments before end of August then I can make changes in the text.

Other facts about the book:

It’s 272 pages long
It’s 103027 words long
It will have a cover design by Jähling.

Posted on by mklang

La Stampa goes (partly) CC

In an act which is begins to show that some mainstream media is begining to get it! La Stampa, a leading Italien daily has just released its two cultural supplements, TuttoScienze (science) and TuttoLibri (books), under a Creative Commons license (Att-NC-ND 2.5).

Ok so the license is one of the less permissable, but at least it shows that they are thinking and acting with an awareness of what is really happinging rather than attempting to fight against the current legal-technical developments online.

Posted on by mklang

300 000 free ebooks

Between July 4th-August 4, 2006 the World eBook Fair makes it possible to download 1/3 million free eBooks.

July 4th to August 4, 2006 marks a month long celebration of the 35th anniversary of the first step taken towards today’s eBooks, when the United States Declaration of Independence was the first file placed online for downloading in what was destined to be an electronic library of the Internet. Today’s eBook library has a total of over 100 languages represented.

This event is brought to you by the oldest and largest free eBook source on the Internet, Project Gutenberg, with the assistance of the World eBook Library, the providers of the largest collection, and a number of other eBook efforts around the world. The World eBook Library normally charges $8.95 per year for online access, and allows unlimited personal downloading. During The World eBook Fair all these books are available free of charge through a gateway at http://www.gutenberg.org and http://WorldeBookFair.com.

(via bibl.se)

Posted on by mklang