New sites and Chrome extensions of interest

I continue to be amazed at the amount of innovation still happening on the Web. I make a real effort to kick-the-tires on new sites, but like all people I get busy and comfortable and distracted and miss things. This weekend I've found three new sites that I have found interesting, and wanted to share them.

Miio  

You say what you like. I say what I like. And Miio makes it easy for us to find, share and chat with each other about the stuff that interests us. That's it. That's Miio.

You may think this sounds like a lot of sites you're already using, and at its most basic level that is true. What is different is the way they handle filtering. It is filtering on steroids. This is an example of the kind of tool coming to help us deal with information overload. It's definitely worth watching.

Mendeley

Mendeley Web lets you access your research paper library from anywhere, share documents in closed groups, and collaborate on research projects online. It connects you to like-minded academics and puts the latest research trend statistics at your fingertips.

Most of what Mendeley does will be of no interest to you if you are not a researcher. So why am I mentioning it? It does one thing you have to see: research collections.  This is an aggregation by discipline of research papers that other scientists find of interest. This is basically a trend-spotter. Ignore everything else at Mendely, but checkout the collections-- fascinating.

FeedSquares 

FeedSquares provides a cool, entertaining way to read your favorite feeds.

As most of you know I'm a big fan of Feedly as an alternative interface to Google Reader. FeedSquares works in this same space and provides yet another alternative to the bland Reader native interface. You use it by installing a browser extension.  I've been using FeedSquares a fair bit, and can definitely recommend it. I know many of you have told me that you just don't get Feedly. FeedSquares provides a slightly less filtered view of your feeds, and it just might feel a tad bit more comfortable. I'm not sure I'll completely make the switch to FeedSquares just yet, but it does have a Chrome app (Feedly does not) and that may be enough to make it my feed reader of choice.

How about you? Seen anything new and interesting of late you'd like to share?

Machinimas and copyright

Yesterday during my web session on copyright someone asked a question about machinimas, avatars, and permissions. The first thing I thought of were the various skins worn by avatars, and the artists who created them. These skins are created in a fixed and tangible medium, and to me would absolutely be protected by copyright.

This got me to looking around to see what others have said on this topic. I found this: Second Life Terms Of Service Changes:

Prior to TOS 2.0, many Machinimatographers felt that they were completely within their rights to film content they had purchased from creators. Things such as Animations, clothing, buildings or sets, props, hair, skin or attachments. In Linden Lab's new TOS 2.0, they explicitly state that it's okay to use their own content, but if you incorporate content from other users, you must obtain licensing or permissions from the creator before including said content in your production.

That the machinimatographers would assume they had permission strikes me as particularly naive.  I'd think that not only would you need the written permission of the avatars, but also the artists who created each avatar's skin, the programmers who created the gestures, and on and on...  Sounds impossible to manage.

To my thinking,  the copyright laws render this entire new art form as illegal, or at best totally impractical to pursue. We could fix this ourselves if everyone would license their "stuff" using completely compatible open licenses; e.g. Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution (with no other restrictions). That's not going to happen.

It makes me very sad.

You know you're going to fail...

I was at a conference this week where the speaker was touting the organization's shiny new web site that would be rolled-out very soon. Of course, it was going to solve all of the problems the organization was having with people not working together. At the conference I was at the week-before-last I heard someone saying the same thing, "We're are totally revamping our Web site so that people will work together better." If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say that some new tool was going to solve their collaboration problems, I could treat you all to a round of drinks.

I came across a great blog post this morning at Inkling Markets where Nate makes a great point-- Enterprise 2.0 - Tiger Woods would kick your ass with 3 golf clubs:

Tiger Woods could walk into Kmart, grab 3 clubs from the cheapest, shittiest bag of golf clubs in the store and still kick your ass on the course.

Why?

Because it's not about the tools.

If you're having trouble getting people to work together no tool is going to fix that. People who are truly motivated to work together will find a way to get it done no matter the tool. If your groups are not working together now they're never going to work together unless you solve your people problems first. Before you spend a ton of time and money on technology-- invest a lot of time in conversation.

Who will win the College World Series?

Please jump into the prediction market:

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Open Education: University of Michigan shows how it is done

What a great initiative coming from the University of Michigan: open.michigan

Open.Michigan is a University of Michigan initiative that enables faculty, students, staff and others to share their educational resources and research with the global learning community.

That this effort isn't being initiated by Michigan's land-grant university is sad. When the history is written, that the nation's land-grant universities were so slow to get on the right side of the open education movement is going to be seen as a blunder of epic proportion. The open education movement should have been an idea birthed and totally embraced by the land-grants. Instead we've seen it resisted. It's very very sad to see such an opportunity to have gone totally missed.

BTW, I have written Michigan State University twice now asking for an explanation for the copyright statement attached to their OpenCourseWare site. Compare Michigan State's all-rights-reserved licensing to the Creative Commons statement found at the University of Michigan. Shameful!

Opting-out of Google Analytics

Google has released a new browser extension that will stop your browsing information from being sent to Google Analytics. I hope this takes off, and gets Web site owners to stop thinking about meaningless metrics like pageviews.


You can get the extension here: Google Analytics opt-out extension

Good stuff Google!

HighTouch Book Club: Update

I've finished reading The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. I will work on getting my book notes put up in the next couple of days. If you haven't read this book I highly recommend it.

I have no other new book club reads in the queue at the moment. Your suggestions are most welcome.

I am stepping back in the interim to enjoy a couple of older books sent to me by @ethnobot (Thank you so much!) These are: The Pursuit of Wow! by Tom Peters, and Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Richardo Semler.

Regular book club reads will continue when I have finished these two books.