NewsFeed – Page 57 – <CONTENT /> v.6

November 3, 2005

Plog Is Now Lifetype

pLog, which provides the blogging power for Classcaster, has changed its name to LifeType.

LifeType Development Journal
The formerly known as pLog project has decided to get a facelift including a new name, new image and new logo. This facelift is related to the project’s cooperation with Amazon, current owners of the “plog” trademark in the United States. On behalf of the project, we would like to thank Amazon for their collaboration and help. Other companies would have chosen to sue but instead Amazon decided to cooperate and had a lot of patience with us.

November 3, 2005

Layoffs, Restructuring COme to Novell

Update: Novell details layoffs, restructuring plans – Computerworld
Novell Inc. said today that it plans to lay off 600 employees, or 10% of its global workforce, part of an effort to save more than $110 million annually as the struggling software maker restructures to focus on products such as SUSE Linux.

The announcement came a day after the enterprise software maker promoted Ron Hovsepian to be its president and chief operating officer. Hovsepian had been serving as executive vice president and head of global field operations,

November 1, 2005

By way of correction, we are not using Shockwave to record podcasts. We are embedding a Flash MP3 player object in the post to play the audio, but the recording is done using a telephone connection or by uploading locally recorded MP3s. We are using the open source Musicplayer at the moment, but are developing our own player that is more tuned to playing single MP3s from a blog post.

RSS4Lib:: Shockwave Audio and Weblogs

The Neef Law Library blog at Wayne State University is using Shockwave audio files to record blog content.

Classcaster features an Asterisk PBX on the backend that allows us to record phone calls and then generate a blog post containing the MP3 recording of the call. Blogging services are provided through a modified version of pLog. Taken together these tools allow Classcaster to be a full featured blogging and podcasting platform.

October 31, 2005

House Speaker Blogs!

Denny Hastert, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, has just started his own blog on the official speaker.gov site. I don’t know if he’ll keep up with it, but from reading his initial post, it seems clear that he’s not employing ghostbloggers.

Slashdot | Speaker of the House Starts Blogging

October 31, 2005

Oracle to Release FreeDb

Oracle intends to release a free version of its database, a reaction to the growing competitive pressure from low-end open-source databases.The database heavyweight on Tuesday is expected to announce the beta release of Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE), which will be generally available by the end of the year. It is targeted at students, small organizations and software vendors that could embed the Oracle database with an application.

Oracle to offer free database | CNET News.com

October 27, 2005

Blogging the Day Away…

Trade paper AdAge.com reported this week that US workers would waste the equivalent of 551,000 years during 2005 reading blogs, online web diaries and gossip sheets, which have exploded in numbers in recent years.Around 35 million workers — one in four of the labour force in the United States — spend three-and-a-half hours, or nine percent of their working week on blogs, the survey found.

Blogs on the job: US workers waste millions of hours online – Yahoo! News

October 27, 2005

MSFT Joins Open Content Alliance

Microsoft announced Tuesday that it planned to join the online book-search movement with a new service called MSN Book Search.
And in a nod to the growing influence of a recently formed group called the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft announced its plans to join it. The group is working to digitize the contents of millions of books and put them on the Internet, with full text accessible to anyone, while respecting the rights of copyright holders.

Microsoft to Offer Online Book-Content Searches – New York Times

October 21, 2005

XML Latest Front in Software Patent War

This stuff never seems to stop. I find it hard to beleive that IBM or Microsoft would stand still for something like this. Face it, XML is a straight derivative of SGML and it pre-dates 1997, so how exactly could you get a apply for a patent in 1997 and expect it to hold up?

Small company makes big claims on XML patents | Tech News on ZDNet
Charlotte, N.C.-based Scientigo owns two patents (No. 5,842,213 and No. 6,393,426) covering the transfer of “data in neutral forms.” These patents, one of which was applied for in 1997, are infringed upon by the data-formatting standard XML, Scientigo executives assert.

Scientigo intends to “monetize” this intellectual property, Scientigo CEO Doyal Bryant said this week.

October 20, 2005

Sun Announces Global Education and Learning Community

In a keynote speech on Wednesday at the Educause annual meeting in Orlando, Mr. McNealy announced the creation of a nonprofit organization called the Global Education and Learning Community, which will provide a framework for educators to work together to develop and distribute educational resources online.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Sharing Teaching Tools Online

Sounds cool, kind of like CALI’s CODEC intiative, or for that matter just about anything CALI does. Here’s GLEC’s mission: “The community’s mission is to improve global education by empowering
teachers, students and parents with self-paced, web based, free and
open content (curriculum resources, assessment) combined with best
practices for advancing student achievement world wide“

October 20, 2005

Neef Law Library Classcaster blog gets noticed

The Neef Law Library blog at Wayne State University is using Shockwave audio files to record blog content. A slightly different form of podcasting, but it works very nicely without the ‘pod’ or iTunes. It uses ClassCaster as the underlying technology.