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Tuesday, 20 November 2007

Do not fold, bend, mutilate or Kindle

I had some hopes for Amazon's e-book device - after all I buy paper books from Bezos via Amazon Prime weekly, I buy Subterranean Press's splendid editions, and I even end up susbcribing to the Folio Society's offers each year. I spend 8-12 hours a day reading screens and 1-4 reading paper books; I should be right in their target market. So I'm really sorry that KIndle is doomed.

I'll keep this short. Kindle requires DRM. DRM destroys value - it makes things do less and cost more, and means they will break suddenly without warning when the service inevitably goes bust.

If you have $400 to spend on a small gadget to read outdoors on, buy yourself an OLPC and give one away to a child elsewhere too. If you are still tempted by the Kindle swindle, read Mark Pilgrim's literary dismissal of it.

Posted by Kevin Marks at 01:04 2 comments:
Labels: amazon, books, DRM, DRM destroys value, Kindle, OLPC

Monday, 19 November 2007

Open Rights Group - Happy ORG day

I'm proud to have been involved with the Open Rights Group since it was an idea at a conference, and to be on the Advisory Board.

Support the Open Rights Group
Today, the two year report was published.

By using web tech to gather reasoned responses to digital rights issues, ORG has got a lot done in the UK, from helping persuade the Gowers review of intellectual property that copyright should not be extended, to sensibly evaluating and opposing the blind use of e-voting and e-counting equipment in May 2007's ballots, to clearly explaining to the All-Party Parliamentary Internet Group that Digital Rights Management is a huge mistake.

You should sign up to support more good work from ORG.

Posted by Kevin Marks at 12:24 No comments:
Labels: digital rights, DRM, Open Rights Group, ORG

Friday, 2 November 2007

OpenSocial and Social Software history

In the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison have written a very thorough history of Social Network Sites.

Over at the OpenSocial API site we've written what we hope could be their future. Let me know what you think.

Posted by Kevin Marks at 01:25 No comments:
Labels: danah, OpenSocial, social networks
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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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