PaulBHartzog's blog

Hartzog at "Internet as Playground and Factory" Digital Labor Conference

Posted Fri, 10/16/2009 - 11:56 by PaulBHartzog

I will be on a panel at this event with my colleague Howard Rheingold, surrounded by an incredible plethora of amazing participants.

http://digitallabor.org/speakers1/paul_hartzog

This conference confronts the urgent need to interrogate what constitutes labor and value in the digital economy and it seeks to inspire proposals for action. Currently, there are few adequate definitions of labor that fit the complex, hybrid realities of the digital economy. The Internet as Playground and Factory poses a series of questions about the conundrums surrounding labor (and often the labor of love) in relation to our digital present:

- Trebor Scholz

Organized by Trebor Scholz, and takes place at The New School in NYC.

Website: http://digitallabor.org/

Hartzog at Media Ecologies & Post-Industrial Production Conference

Posted Tue, 10/06/2009 - 16:01 by PaulBHartzog

My colleague Sam Rose and I will be speaking at this event:

Media Ecologies & Post-Industrial Production Conference
& launch of the P2P Research Group (an independent collective allied with the P2P Foundation)

University of Salford, Greater Manchester, UK
Tuesday, November 3rd 2009

At this event, we will discuss the emergence and proliferation of a new form of production and value creation: peer production, where communities of producers work to create (free) software/hardware and/or (open) content accessible to everyone. Within peer production, producers create products within a ‘commons’ or shared space, which can be used and modified by others who then return the product, thus improved, to the common pool. Producers often operate as a cooperative ecology between communities as well as the companies that create market-based spin-offs from that same commons.

Website: http://www.espach.salford.ac.uk/sssi/p2p/

Hartzog at SLA 2009 Future of the Book Symposium: "Digital Book Debates"

Posted Tue, 10/06/2009 - 12:41 by PaulBHartzog

My "Social Publishing" colleague Richard Adler and I will be speaking at this event, October 10th 2009.

SLA 2009 Future of the Book Symposium: "Digital Book Debates"

The University of Michigan Library is being scanned as part of the Google Books project and the Amazon Kindle and the iPhone allow for digital book access on the go. Journal publishers like the University of Michigan press are abandoning physical publication, print newspapers are going out of business, and bookstores are closing down. Publishing is changing dramatically, which in turn is changing the collections that house, preserve, and make those texts available. How are publishers and collections such as libraries and archives adapting to the new digital landscape? What are the current challenges? How is that changing what qualities are needed from Information professionals?

Website: http://www.searchonly.org/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=38824963061

We believe in the freedom to read

Posted Wed, 08/05/2009 - 10:29 by PaulBHartzog

We believe in a way of life based on the free exchange of ideas, in which books have and will continue to play a central role. Devices like Amazon's are trying to determine how people will interact with books, but Amazon's use of DRM to control and monitor users and their books constitutes a clear threat to the free exchange of ideas.

That is why we readers, authors, publishers, and librarians demand that Amazon remove all DRM, including any ability to control or access the user's library, from the Kindle.

Amazon's assurances that it will refrain from the worst abuses of this power do not address the problem. Amazon should not have this power in the first place. Until they give it up they will be tempted to use it, or they could be forced to by governments or narrow private interests. Whatever Amazon's reasons for imposing this control may be, they are not as important as the public's freedom to use books without interference or supervision.

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/amazon1984

Flows - Generating Documentation with Doxygen

Posted Fri, 06/26/2009 - 00:19 by PaulBHartzog

Today I successfully generated some documentation directly from commented Flows code in both php and python, and I also found that Doxygen ought to work with Ruby (we'll see). In a Flows-like way, Doxygen generates the documentation in XML, HTML, RTF, etc.

I learned enough about the process though to realize that it might be smarter to write a Flows component that generates the documentation you need when you are looking at it in the browser, instead of pre-generating static files of documentation.

Will have to contemplate....

Flows Development HowTo

Posted Fri, 06/19/2009 - 09:34 by PaulBHartzog

http://flows.panarchy.com/index.php?title=Development_HowTo

Basically:

1. Pick a programming language: python, php, etc.
2. Download the template for components in that language, or in another language if your choice is not available.

http://flows.panarchy.com/sandbox/templates/

Mercurial Repository:
http://code.google.com/p/flows-dev/

3. Add in the desired functionality
4. Make your component accessible via HTTP

that's it. srsly.

Q: But why is it so simple?