Here's a sweet pointer from Tomalak's Realm: it's news that the PTO has ordered an examination of the patent in the Eolas/Microsoft case:

In what could be good news for the Web, the Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office has ordered a re-examination of the '906 patent, which was the subject of a patent infringement lawsuit this summer brought by Eolas against Microsoft.

Issued in 1998 to Michael Doyle of Eolas Technologies, the patent (#5,838,906) covers the ability to embed and control applications (or objects) in a web browser. Doyle succeeded in obtaining a $500M judgement against Microsoft. In the aftermath, Microsoft said that changes to the browser were necessary to work around paying royalties on the patent, and that these changes would impact developers who create and maintain web pages. Many believe that the patent would also affect other technologies such as Flash and Java as well, which are launched from a browser.

On October 23, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) filed a request for re-examination, citing prior art that defined the early HTML standard, written by Tim Berners-Lee and Dave Raggett.

Here's more on this from the W3C itself. What a shame they don't have individual memberships!

6:29 PM | | linkme | home

Speaking of a great resource, the BBC has announced it will make the BBC Creative Archive available to the public for non-commercial use. This archive will include Internet access to all of the BBC's radio and television programs.

On this side of the pond, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace author Lawrence Lessig has just a few things to say about the lessons for the US:

On the other side of the Atlantic there is little evidence of similarly creative thought. Instead, the US government remains captured by the extremists. The very same week that the Creative Archive was born in Britain, it was exercising its power to kill a planned meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (Wipo), the United Nations' intellectual property agency, to consider "open and collaborative projects to create public goods."

Check out the latter if you're into the various arguments about copyright, open source, and intellectual property.

4:16 PM | | linkme | home

The had an email today re-acquainting list members with an (apparently old) essay about a potential digital dimension by Kari-Hans Kommone. He writes:

Eventually we may end up with a situation like the one in fig. 4 (at right). The digital hardware and the network behind it will form a platform for a seamless digital dimension. The various devices form the interface to the objects of our interest, the digital environment formed by software and information content, which can appear to us through any of our devices. This development will be driven by the simple fact that the software and the digital information are so much more important to us than the hardware. We change mobile telephones and computers, but we want to move the old information to the new machine.

He loses me a bit with the "features" at the same level as the "gadgets" but it's an interesting read (no matter what your perspective of the c-word) and the illustrations are nicely done.

8:04 PM | | linkme | home

From VC Returns -- Do They Exist in Wi-Fi?

Here's the irony in Wi-Fi public access pricing: retailers can be profitable by offering free Wi-Fi as a customer acquisition tool. But when they charge for Wi-Fi access, these retailers, and the WISPs serving them, almost certainly lose money. ... The fully loaded cost of offering free Wi-Fi access is less than $6/day. Operating a billable hotspot costs over $30/day.

Hat tip: Fred Sampson and boing boing.

10:04 PM | | linkme | home

Here's something fun that appeared on the DC WebWomen list today: it's the Milko Muscle Machine, where you can create your own workout video starring a fairly likable animated cow. This is brought to you (in Shockwave) by the same folks who previously did the Milko Music Machine, where you can make your own music video starring the same cow.

Having recently worked with Apple's iMovie (which I really liked), I was quite impressed with all the controls for the Milko products. Alas, since I am unlikely to buy Swedish milk (not stocked by most US supermarkets), I'm not sure that my being impressed does too much for Milko. But I managed to kill a bit of time with it! And I think it shouldn't be hard to imagine how this kind of interaction could be extended in a, shall we say, more productive way.

If you play, be sure to mouseover all the moves...in particular, I most enjoyed seeing the "Travolta" (circa Saturday Night Fever) followed by the "Pulp Fiction" (above right) in the Music Machine. And if you really like your composition, you can email it to someone who might also be inspired!

7:08 PM | | linkme | home

Adrian Miles has commented about my recent vog blog post and says I "misread [it] as how to put video onto a blog."

It's hard to say (communication is such a fun thing), but I don't know that I was necessarily thinking he meant putting video on a traditional blog, though given my mention of Mike's photo-enhanced moblog, I can see why he might think that.

I originally said I wasn't sure what to think about video blogging (the term Adrian uses to describe what "vogging" is). I do think there's a fab application for multimedia as a tool to help folks with their information needs, and clearly video (presumably with an audio component) has an awful lot of advantages compared to static text and images.

I can say for sure that I did not think that Adrian's tutorial was about putting video on a traditional blog! I really thought it was more about making a video blog, and I stand by my comments that the directions were more than I wanted to go thru to see an example of video blogging. And that was probably my mistake...thinking that the tutorial was a way to actually see an example of a video blog!

All that said, I agree with Adrian that things would be very different with a video-capable Movable Type tool. So...in case you assumed that Adrian is working on putting video into traditional weblogs, he isn't! Instead, he's hoping to make sure that we know what to do with video weblogs when the tools make it something for Joe Average Weblogger. Cool!

6:38 PM | | linkme | home