OpenLife

I have always had this aversion against the 68′er generation of left-wingers. You know these righteous guys who believed in all the good ideas back in the late sixties and early seventies. The same people who were willing to sell us to Pol Pot or Enver Hoxha and who today are sucking out the last drop of blood of our welfare state from their entrenched positions in universities and government institutions.

Maybe my antipathy dates back from my days as a kid in Danish public school when I was taught a bunch of mostly irrelevant stuff about such thing as Russian peninsulas and Guinea-Bissau freedom fighters by mostly incompetent radical teachers.

However, enough of these bad vibes. One of the people who has really been able to make appreciate all the good things coming out of that period way back and really have me look at my own generation in a more critical way is Danish writer and commentator Ole Grünbaum. I liked very much his books on the digital darwinism and tekno-fetichisme. Now Ole is releasing his new book titled (in Danish) “Farvel til Krønikesamfundet - fortællinger fra den danske metropolis“. I am recommending it even before I have had a chance to read it!

Chris Anderson has a very insightful article “The Long Tail” in Wired Magazine 12.10. The article gives further credit to the claim that eCommerce is alive and kicking despite rumours of its death originating from the dotcom crash.

During my recent vacation at Gran Canaria I manage by the swimming pool to reread Lawrence Lessig’s “The Future of Ideas” and to read for the first time Siva Vaidhyanathan’s “The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System”.

Both books are highly recommended. They both emphasize the need for a large pool of information to be available freely from some sort of information commons in order to promote innovation and creativity both commercially and from a democratic perspective. And both books point to the fact that intellectual property rights have been more and more “propertized” largely by big multinational at the expenses of users and artists.

I want so much to write a book on these subjects for the Danish public!

Novell vows patent defense of open source: “Software maker says it will defend customers’ open-source packages as vigorously as it would defend its own products.”

(Via CNET News.com.)

I will be spending the next week vacationing in Gran Canaria with Jeanne and Vilhelm.

Just finished reading Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” .

It is a fascinating rather short book (only about 110 pages) written in 1840 describing 3 previous financial bubbles: The Tulipmania that took place in the Netherlands in 1636, the French Mississippi Scheme from around 1720 and the English South Sea Bubble some decades later. The similarities to the dotcom bubble are so striking!

Funny comment on the infamous practise by certain web-sites to tie linking to their web-site to accepting certain “license terms”:

Boing Boing has a linking policy: “Cory Doctorow:
After years of making fun of “linking policies” that set out the terms under which a website can be linked to, Boing Boing has decided to create a linking policy of our own. Here it is — now, abide by it!

Boing Boing doesn’t believe in linking policies. They’re dangerous, have no basis in law, and they break the norms that make the Web possible. They’re a wicked, stupid idea.

That said, if you believe in linking policies –
that is, if you believe that people who make websites should be able
to control who links to those sites and how — then have we got a policy for
you:

No site with a linking policy (other than a policy such as
this one, created to deride and undermine the idea of linking
policies) may link to Boing Boing. Ever.

“

(Via Boing Boing.)