Information and the Future

This is the blog of the Information and the Future task force of the Rolfing Library at Trinity International University. The IF task force exists to explore the role of libraries in the future of Christian higher education.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Information R/evolution

Here is another video from Mike Wesch of "The machine is us/ing us" You Tube fame. This video presents some of the ideas in David Weinberger's book Everything is Miscellaneous (a book I'm slowly reading) and is especially applicable to libraries.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Flickr - A Cautionary Tale

I just found out today about the lawsuit being brought against Virgin Atlantic after they ran ads using Flickr photographs.

The photographs were posted to the yahoo's popular photo sharing site by a youth pastor under a creative commons license. What I didn't realize is that Flickr offers six different types of creative commons licenses and some of them do allow commercial use. The idea behind Creative Commons is to allow people to share intellectual property, so for example, I can post a photograph you took on my blog without violating copyright laws. However this story is a reminder that we do not live in an innocent world and although "radical trust" is great piece of web2.0 rhetoric we need to be careful with what we share and how we share it, especially when we are sharing content about other people.