Inside View

Acting against Broadcast Flag #copyright

UPDATED 15 OCTOBER 2021. Image from Electronic Freedom Foundation.

One-third of the readers of InsideView.ie come from the States where the Federal Communications Commission would have made it more difficult for librarians to share copies of broadcast television programs on the internet.  The American Librarian Association (ALA) successfully argued in court that the FCC had no authority to promulgate the Broadcast Flag rule. 

On August 22, 2011, the FCC officially eliminated the broadcast flag regulations.

Simply said, the ALA told the court that people were harmed by the Broadcast Flag harms them. Several relevant questions emerged in filed affadavits.

Big Heads in Flickr

FLICKR -- I like big heads in pictures and I plan to make my very own Flickrhead collection, starting with Martin Dougeamis. Jamie Zawinski also likes big heads: "I often scan through the wire service photos on Yahoo News, and over the years I started noticing a really strange trend. Many of the photos follow the same form: a picture of a person in the foreground, and on the background, a GIANT HEAD. For no particularly good reason, I spent a year collecting them. Here, then, are the big heads of 2004."

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John Walkenbach -- "Big heads"
Grow a Brain: bookmark it.
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Running the dish

Rate Me Teachers

RATE MY TEACHERS -- Several of the Transition Year students we taught in a week-long Schoolworks program understood that a database drove the results behind RateMyTeachers.ie and all of them knew there were issues about the site. Specifically, many teachers don't like the idea that they were being rated anonymously with the results published on the internet. There are data protection issues at the core of the site, which will leads to questions about its sustainability.

More than 15 years have elapsed since RateMyTeachers was in full flow.

The site is based on a stateside model with administrative support that promises to "We respond to subpoenas, court orders or legal process." The data protection laws differ in the two countries. It's a similar issue that has floated around in some third level colleges when comments about lecturers appeared in threads on boards.ie. Comments from Rate My Teachers users have attracted comebacks from teachers using the RMT forum.

Creative Commons Search

YAHOO -- A lot of our classroom notes are in the beta version of the Creative Commons search at Yahoo. I teach courses in media studies, mass communications, PHP, and public relations. The notes are registered with the Creative Commons for reuse with attribution. They appear in searches of the Creative Commons.

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Search for Creative Commons material at http://search.yahoo.com/cc
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Friday filings

KILKENNY -- All the Irish newspapers lead with the resurrection of Nigerian student Olunkunle Elunkanlo from Lagos and if the feeding frenzy continues, his arrival in Dublin Airport next week will receive column inches that could benefit the cases of dozens of others deported by the efficient Irish immigration system. This case has united politicians across party lines against heartless policies regarding the treatment of some of the least fortunate in society. It's as though some government ministers have no appreciation of the turmoil endured on a daily basis when living as a guest in another country. It's a turmoil passed down as stories among my Irish, German and Russian forebears in the States and the root of an important message that I learned as a pre-teen--be kind to those in need. That premise could not underpin a government's policy regarding asylum seekers where draconian measures and an air of omniscience seem to be the order of the day. [DISCLOSURE: I have been refused leave to land in Ireland before and benefit from a first-hand viewpoint of the process entailed in punting people out of the country.]

Yahoo context search

YAHOO -- I dabble with Yahoo! context search occasionally and like its relevance. So it's great to see there's a developer's program out with information about expanding the service to include a revenue stream and more controls on the presentation through use of JavaScript libraries open for tweaking. Jeremy Zawodny uses it religiously and whenever I visit his site I wonder how he's clipping the code into his blog posts. Adding it to a Typepad blog post takes some time. It's not something I'd be able to do when posting mail2blog.

IsoBuster to the rescue

The best thing about U2's music is that it is buy-once, play-everywhere. Not so with Kylie's music and more than 270 million CDs on the market. As soon as the Christmas iPod surge receded, people discovered they could not easily migrate their newly-purchased CDs to their personal media devices. Fortunately, there are work-arounds--like IsoBuster.

Pet Pillows

SEVERAL IRISH TALK show hosts have been filling the air waves with information about stuffing your dead pets. That sounds like a recurring topic whenever we approach feastdays like Easter. We have a faithful goldfish still swimming in circles at home who would look nice mounted on a powder blue wall following his last lap. Now we have an option for our huggable dogs--pet pillows from Jeanettes Taxidermy. "Each pet pillow is hand made from the fur of your pet and made into a pillow that you can display.  On one side of the pillow is your pet's fur and the other side of the pillow is your choice of fabric.  These soft, huggable pillows are a great way to enjoy your cherished pet and is an inexpensive alternitave to taxidermy."I reckon a Pom Pillow is ours for around €100. For those readers with horses and cows, special handling is required. But for small animals, it's as straightforward as making ice cubes--that's what they said on Irish national radio.

Lite Feeds

LITE FEEDS -- The URL www.litefeeds.com/mobile does what it says on the tin. You load your RSS feeds on the webside version and then happily download the first 40 words from the RSS feeds you nominate. This works faster than the mobile version of Bloglines.It ought to--it sends plain text information that it cached within the previous 60 minutes to your mobile device. You only get the first few lines. You leave behind no referrer strings because you've never visited the blog you read--this is pure XML feed service and it's fast.  Note to Robert Scoble: You could claw back quality family time if you grazed with lite feeds. You could make LiteFeed clippings into a link blog in one easy pass. However, if you plan to use a mobile phone for this process, you will miss having folders to manage the hundreds of feeds you consume each day.  Note to Brian Greene: This is a DART-certified way of getting your newsfeeds en route to work. Yours appears just fine in the feeds I've set up.