Christopher's page

Just stumbled across this rare lecture from the 1970s given at John Hopkins by Marshall McLuhan, picked up by David Weinberger's Joho from Star Larvae where it was blogged over a year ago.

I set up this network on Ning just over a year ago with a view to promoting the topics that were to be discussed at the Unlocking Audio 2 conference in London last March. The network grew quite swiftly ahead of the conference and has continued to flourish. As 'manager' of the site I have access to some basic facts and figures about RSSR so you may be surprised to learn that around 27 people join every month, or just under one every day, which has brought the membership total to 334. 4 specialist… Continue

Following the fate of records and tapes, could MP3 also be on the way out? This is the first of five predictions by Carl Franzen writing in the AtlanticWire based on the latest views of different commentators about new directions underway for listening to recordings of music:

* Eliot van Buskirk (Wired) on Lala
* Ian Paul (PC World) and John Healey (LA Times) on Goo… Continue

Nate Anderson (Ars Technica) surveys the objections to innovative technologies across a century or more.

Reference is made to William Patry's new book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, in which he wrote, "I cannot think of a single significant inno… Continue

Professional archivists and librarians are accustomed to talking about three kinds of metadata: descriptive, administrative (including technical) and structural. The compilation of these different sets of data into a container file such as METS is becoming routine but it's evidently a time-consuming business as its success continues to rely on manual creation and editing by trained staff. This is not an efficient way to manage abundance.

Fortunately the Web environment provides other sources of… Continue