iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

On Monday I found out that BlackBoard (Bb) had been issued a patent on eLearning. Bb recently bought WebCt inc. which makes the learning management system that consumes most of my days at work. I was dismissive of it until I learnt about the subsequent lawsuits against Desire2Learn (D2L) the day afterwards.

As far as I’m concerned it’s a problem with the US software patent system more than anything else. The reason I initially dismissed it was I assumed it was akin to Amazon’s “single click purchase” patent and the collection Microsoft and Apple hold against each other in a kind of cold war — then Bb sued D2L (see Slashdot).

Now I’m a little more concerned and hope that the patent gets invalidated, take a look at these gems (from US Patent office):

9. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise an asynchronous communication file.

10. The system of claim 2 wherein the course files comprise a synchronous communication file.

19. The system of claim 18 wherein the grade is made available to the student user.

I’m pretty sure that there’s a lot of prior art on these points, some might even pre-date Matthew Pittinsky’s (Bb chairman of the board and co-founder) birth! I’m not sure if Bb can win on a few points of a patent that is otherwise invalid.

I left the international WebCT Conference in Chicago with a relativly good feeling about Bb and what their future plans were, even if I’ve never been a big fan of CEO Michael Chasen — that feeling is rapidly going away and according to the academic technology related list serves, I’m not the only one who feels this way.

To use a Chasen-ism, BlackBoard is becoming a thought leader in business bullying.

If you don’t know now you know – Net Neutrality is important and we don’t want big US telcos to be able to double charge and create an internet class system.

The cool cats at www.wearetheweb.org are doing their part. Watch the video.

I found this video in Google Video today – It’s CBC radio’s the current with video added from an old episode of The Transformers. I can only assume it was created by Cambrian House, the topic of the original CBC video based on the attibution Google video has.

In this episode of The Current Maureen Taylor discusses “Crowdsourcing” with guests, including Jeff Howe, Contributing Editor for Wired Magazine, Cambrianhouse CEO Michael Sikorsky, and Russell Kord, a professional stock photographer.Cambrianhouse was also in the news recently when they dropped off 5000 pizzas for Google staff.

Apparently people are interested in this thing.

Digg.com has been mentioned numerous times at every conference I’ve been to this summer: Random people talked about it in presentations, Keynotes including Tim Bray of Sun, BlackBoard’a CEO Michael Chasen and David Weinberger (of the Cluetrain Manifesto) all mentioned it. At WebCT’s Chicago conference this year someone asked me about Digg while I was reading stories on my laptop and asked if I was reading it in responce David Weinberger’s keynote. I totally shot him down and said “um, I’ve had an account for one, no, I guess, two years now — since December 2003” .. back peddling I added .. “but it’s great and I’m glad David Weinberger mentioned it.” not realizing that he clearly had only learnt about digg a day ago.

I read digg almost every day with the username mattclare – I keep the main RSS feed in my Firefox toolbar. In fact, I’m trying to track down more interesting people who read digg because with the recent growth of articles I find it easier to view the “What your friends are digging” page than the main page.
Digg is bigg and it deserves to be, it has become a great technology news site and with its latest revision it has become an OK general news site (though I still prefer news.google.ca).

If imitation is the highest form of flattery than digg’s been collecting a lot of votes in that category too. Netscape just cloned it and Netscape’s boss Jason Calacanis offered to pay $1000/month to Digg’s top posters (and those on Newsvine, Flickr, Reddit, and del.icio.us) to post on netscape.com‘s ripoff Digg page instead – apparently the people who aren’t smart enough to change their default home page also aren’t smart enough find and submit articles.

Jason Calacanis is actually a pretty cool dude, and I really liked his “I didn’t tow your car” analogy he used when he went around to meet with all the AOL executives to bring them on board with the changes he wanted to make to the company. He introduced himself by comparing this situation to a NYC car impound lot which has a sign that says “the people working here did not tow your car. They are trying their best to help you retrieve your car.  Anger will not help.” Good line, good introduction.

But now Calacanis is becoming a real pigg. Kevin Rose, creator of digg.com and former TechTV personality, called the proposal crap on his rowdy podcast “Diggnation” and suggested that a better strategy would be coming up with an original idea for a website. Calacanis complained that Kevin didn’t address the issue and implied he is exploiting digg’s users. Kevin shot back basically saying that Jason following a bad idea with bad behaviour.

The point is the ten top submitters to digg don’t make digg, the framework and community make digg. The loss of the ten top submitters make as much of a difference as the loss of the top ten readers of this million plus hits per day website. At the moment everyone has equal access to digg, equal incentive and competes in the same competition (dare I saw market) of submissions. The owners of the site make money of the site, but they also give away everything it produces for free.

If Calacanis thinks that paying a grand to posters is the way to jump start the new netscape.com I think he’ll quickly learn that it’ll be an addiction that’s hard to kick and will only end in netscape dying in a gutter somewhere.

Netscape.com needs to reinvent itself, but the only thing less sincere than a community of equals with a few paid a little more equally is this phony rivalry/publicity stunt. At least one can take solace in the fact that netscape.com has already been hacked and that most of the stories promoted to the home page are about how much the site sucks.

If you bought a copy of iPhoto ’06 or bought a new mac in ’06 here’s how you can subscribe to someone’s flickr photos:

• First head over to the flickr home page of the person or group you would like to subscribe to and find the feed at the bottom of the page.
  
• Follow that link or right (ctrl) click it and copy the URL.
• Next open iPhoto and find “Subscribe to Photocast” in the File menu.
  
• Past the URL (Command+V) into the space provided and press subscribe.
  
• You should now be subscribed and able to view and work with these photos.  iPhoto should check for new photos when you launch it or when you press the little refresh circle.