Entries Tagged 'History' ↓

the idea of “social software” became the hottest thing. Jack Schofield in the Guardian takes a look in an article called Social climbers. The best quote to my eye is the quote Schofield includes from Tom Coates of plasticbag.org:

But Tom Coates, from UpMyStreet. com, has reservations about the “current hysteria”. Three months before the conference, he posted a short essay on his blog, Plasticbag.org, saying: “There’s something about the abandonment of concepts of ‘online community’ and the complete rejection of familiar terms and paradigms like the message board that worries me. There seems to be a bizarre lack of history to the whole enterprise - a desire to claim a territory as unexplored when it’s patently not.”

about it for years, but I never imagined that it could still be seen: Doug Engelbart’s 1968 Demo is available on the net. “On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962.” This presentation was the first public demonstration of the mouse, and featured tons of other historical goodies as well. [via Boing Boing]

wrote today, “I gotta dig how fast and far the People Vs. Hollywood political conversation is spreading.” For the record, I’d like to throw one small point out, maybe to fill in the historical side of this a little. People are fixated upon the DMCA and its role in overturning old US copyright law traditions. It is right to be fixated on that insidious law - but it didn’t begin there.

In its own way, the Telecom Reform Act of 1996 was as important as the DCMA. Everyone focused on the Communications Decency Act back then, but that was clearly just a smoke screen from the beginning. The types of business combination that were finally allowed under the Telecom Reform Act are what has given rise to the large, monopolistic firms who are driving things currently in Hollywood.

Of course those combinations started to occur well before 1996 - but the “reforms” in 96 stripped away the barriers to companies who could own the whole pipeline and control it from head office. Before 1996 there were enough different kinds of player in the food chain that it was harder to get traction, either operationally or as a lobbying force.