Bookmarks for April 20th through May 17th

These are my Jumptags for April 20th through May 17th:

• The Wall Street Journal Coupon Codes – We have free coupons and deals for The Wall Street Journal online shop that can instantly save you.
• Airplane with 43 on board crashes in Afghanistan – Yahoo! News – A local Pamir Airways plane with 38 passengers and five crew on board, including six foreigners, crashed in Afghanistan on Monday in the inaccessible mountainous Hindu Kush region near Kabul, officials said.
• Food Insurance Coupon Codes and Discounts – Food Insurance Coupon Codes, great deals and promotional discounts on your online purchases at foodinsurance.com online store. We have free coupons and deals for Food Insurance online shop that can instantly save you.
• Teaching with the iPad | This Lamp – I suppose I should mark April 19, 2010 on a calendar somewhere. Last night was the first time I've taught a college class exclusively from my iPad. I'll write
• How to Calibrate Color for the Web | Webdesigner Depot – When is orange more like red? Web designers, even picky ones, sometimes ignore color shift across monitors. How is a web designer to manage color when the
• PLoS ONE: Do Pressures to Publish Increase Scientists’ Bias? An Empirical Support from US States Data – PLoS ONE: an inclusive, peer-reviewed, open-access resource from the PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE. Reports of well-performed scientific studies from all disciplines freely available to the whole world.
• Portfolio of grahic design student Julian Hansen – So you need a typeface is an alternative way on how to choose fonts (or just be inspired) for a specific project, not just by browsing through the pages of FontBook. The list is (very loosely) based on the top 50 of the Top100 Best Schrieften by Font…

Publishing has changed … or not so much?

Last week, I spoke with students at Clemson University in their graphic communications program about HTML and CSS, content management systems, and how to combine mediums for publishing.  Yesterday, in one of my feeds this video was brought to my attention.  It’s incredibly clever. Apparently, the video was created by Penguin Group for a sales conference and it sort of exploded from there, as mentioned in at paidcontent.org.  At Penguin Group’s blog, though, they explain the inspiration, idea, treatment, and development process, following “The Lost Generation” video.

Disclaimer:  This video was produced by publishers PenguinGroup USA and DK in the UK.

I encourage you to watch the whole thing.  Don’t stop half-way through.  If you do you’ll be disappointed. This video is very thought-provoking and it’s in the vein of Michael Wesch’s viral The Machine is Us/Using Us.  I can see this video as a sort of mantra or battle cry for publishing as printers and publishers consider digital technologies and the individuals that rely on them.

So, take this video with awe and a grain of wisdom for recognizing it as a small piece of propaganda, too. Enjoy!  Hey, but let me know what you think about the video.  Leave your comments below.  I’d love to heard from you guys!

Bookmarks for November 19th through November 20th

These are my Jumptags for November 19th through November 20th:

• The Wired Campus – ‘The Last.fm for Research Papers’ Tops 100,000 Users – The Chronicle of Higher Education – Mendeley, a Web service that lets users organize and share research papers, recently announced that it has surpassed 100,000 users, and that its database now includes some 8 million works.
• Principles Of Good Design: Balance – In a typical web layout, a designer needs to place a logo, text, photographs or illustration. By making a conscious effort to work on the relationship between these elements to produce an eye catching design.
• 16 Intelligent Sites For Application Review | Showcases | instantShift – Web based applications have many advantages over software that you have to download and install it on your computer. First, You don't need to install or update , Daily Resource for Web Designers and Developers.
• Designing CSS Buttons: Techniques and Resources – Smashing Magazine – Buttons, whatever their purpose, are important design elements. They could be the end point of a Web form or a call to action. Designers have many reasons to style…
• GoAnimate – Create your own cartoons and animations easily. Our tools are free and you don’t need to learn Flash. – GoAnimate is a way to easily create animations and share with friends.

Ownership of knowledge: To whom or for whom do you attribute ?

Something’s been bugging me a lot lately:  I’ve been thinking about “indirect objects,” retweets, and reposts.  Huh? Indirect objects?  You know, indirect objects from 10th grade English grammar class.  They are the “to whom or for who the action is being done.”  They usually come at the end of a sentence.  It’s usually how you can tell whether you’re supposed to use the word who or whom.  And what do they have to do with retweets and reposts?  Here it is:  When someone retweets or reposts a whole post, a massive chunk of a post, or even writes two lines to preface a video, is that ethical?  To whom or for whom will others attribute the ideas?  Are they in some way attempting to leverage someone else’s knowledge and works for their own acclaim or profit or notoriety?  Let me give you a few examples of things that have begun to bother me.

Probably eight to ten months ago, I received an email for an RSS feed from a Diigo group that I subscribe to.  In the email digest, someone had bookmarked and annotated a blog post of which a portion of the blog post was some text I had written.  (Admittedly, this sort of thing where someone actually reads and bookmarks something of mine  everyday, so I happen to notice that the text sounded rather familiar.)  In the annotation, the individual attributed the ideas and point of view to the blog owner instead of to me.  Yes, I had given the blog owner permission to use the text, and he had used my name in the attribution to the post. But the individual who bookmarked it, did not really see the idea as mine.

Also, I read RSS feeds from a lot of places.  In a couple of feeds, I’ve read notes from a presentation.  Someone sitting in the audience is taking notes and then publishes the notes on his or her blog…usually along with the link to the presentation.  If it were my presentation, I’m sure I’d be flattered that someone wanted to publish my ideas.  But here’s where I start to question it.  If they are more well known than I am, have a larger Twitter following, or more subscribers to their blog, then they will receive the hits and acclaim for my ideas through their publishing outlet.  Did I as the presenter just lose some control of my ideas?  By allowing someone else to publish (or even republish) my ideas, did I just give away a portion of my ownership — or even copyrights?

So, my question is, at what point do you lose control of your ideas when they are so easily published and republishable by others? Coming from publishing background, I certainly understand that ideas can be usurped by anyone.  For an intense example, consider the swastika.   I also certainly understand that those individuals with an audience are the ones able to promote ideas.  This have been going on forever with magazines and TV.  But in this “age” or citizen journalism, where anyone should be able to promote their ideas, and “the flat world,” where playing fields have supposedly been leveled, are ideas and knowledge just easier to be misrepresented?

I’m not even talking about embed codes here.  I understand that social media have changed the way we view marketing and celebrity.  Retweets, Delicious, Digg, authority on Technorati—sure these represent new methods to determine authority, value, and credibility.  But what I’m wondering is much more basic and personal.  What are the ethics or netiqette to re-publishing or mashing up others’ ideas?  This is more than just attribution.  Copyright and fair use really doesn’t seem to cover this.  What do you think?

[In an effort of full disclosure, image courtesy of Pasquale D’Silva and Function Web Design & Development .]