Something I've enjoyed a fair bit over the last couple of years is the idea of a blog carnival. You can learn what they are mostly by looking at them, but essentially the idea is that about every month a blog is chosen to host a given carnival, in which they link to a number of thematically related posts with short summaries or reactions. The one I've most often dropped in on is The Carnival of Feminists (Down Under Feminists Carnival has also just started up), The Festival of Frugality I've also seen once or twice (budgeting and frugality blogs are mostly run by people who both live in the US and have extracted themselves out from under tens of thousands of dollars of consumer debt though, so a lot of it is 'spend less than you earn!' advice that I've never had much need for).

There's also Club Troppo's Missing Link Daily which does actually pass through my feed reader, and from which I occasionally launch a spate of new tabs (the secret to carnivals in general is not being completionist about them, for goodness sake, people are already getting down when their reader says they aren't up to date).

It's not something I've come across in the Free Software blogs though, or at least not enough to have ever made it to a Planet. The blogcarnival site shows a couple of software development related carnivals, mostly defunct. As far as Free Software goes, the Planets are probably part of the reason, they already bring together a bunch of thematically related posts, or rather, people likely to make thematically related posts some of the time, but I still think there'd be room for a carnival of some type, for a couple of reasons: one is getting some cross-community linking, and the other is selecting individual posts of high quality.

If you'd be interesting in doing one round of hosting for such a thing, get in touch, if I get enough interest (and if I get a few non-Australians), the experiment would be worth a go.

Via Unlocking IP comes a suggestion that the iTunes U feature (videos of university lectures, essentially) is going to be a lock-in deal where if you put your academic content on iTunes U you forgo the right to charge anything yourself for it, and thus probably forgo the right to do truly free licencing of it. (Releasing something under a licence that restricts use to non-commercial only — common in academia and on Flickr — is not really free in the sense I'm using the word.)

This sounds like another round of a very annoying saga in academia, it has its equivalent in publishing, which goes something like this. Academic articles are:

• written by academics on their salary, stipend, wage or whatever;
• reviewed and judged by reviewers and editors almost always donating their time (or rather, working on paid time but foregoing some of their paid research hours to judge other people's research);
• published (typeset, copyedited and printed) by, increasingly, for profit specialist academic publishers; and
• bought by universities for large subscription fees back from those publishers.

This is generally considered quite a tidy little deal for the publishers, who are getting the universities to buy back their own product in a somewhat value-added form at a rate often thought to well exceed the additional value. (Incidentally, I personally am part of the additional value in a sense. I work one day a week for Macquarie University paid by money from the Association for Computational Linguistics in order to do most of the grunt work of coordinating the review process for Computational Linguistics. My job title is editorial assistant. In this case the reviewing work isn't all donated: although the editor himself is a volunteer, I am not.)

Some movement in academia is trying to claw this back, particularly the advent of Open Access, whereby a journal is published (usually in electronic form only) and does not require a paid subscription to read it. Computer scientists are ahead of the curve, if informally: throwing PDFs up on their webpages, having OA conference proceedings. I was shocked when I went to a 'graduate experience' feedback meeting and someone in an experimental science was held up in their work due to not having a journal subscription, in CS we'd head over to the author's website and download their preprint and work from that.

But just as we start to get it back apparently video lectures are becoming the new model where universities produce content for someone else to sell. I'm fairly firmly of the school where the value of universities is in producing public knowledge (this is quite controversial now: many universities and governments see universities as a sort of a behemoth commercial intellectual property production shop), and this is not the right way to go about doing that. Dear universities: don't sell exclusive licences.

Yesterday I posted that, per Unlocking IP, that iTunes U was only accepting content on the understanding that the university itself didn't have the right to re-licence. Nicholas did what I didn't though, and went to the source to find that the iTunes U licensing overview is quite a gentle friendly document instructing universities to check that their copyright is in order before distributing it and suggesting Creative Commons and GFDL as potentially appropriate licences for academic work. Nicholas also observes that universities are retaining their copyright, eg SMU.

So unless iTunes U USA and iTunes U AU are signicantly different beasts, it looks like all this is an object lesson (for me) in not citing without sighting (not trusting to a summary of anything without seeing the original documents). But good news overall, and my apologies for stupidly perpetrating confusion.

My laptop is only moderately recovered from a recent 'spillage incident', in that the arrow keys do not work very well and I need to replace the keyboard. But this cloud does have a silver lining. While the down key was completely broken, I was unable to adjust the brightness of my screen downwards (Fn+Down). During that time, my terrible (or terribly annoying) X slow crashes in which I progressively lose the mouse, the keyboard and sanity in various orders (because the main effect is the Ctrl key behaving as if it's being held down, this last time I managed to scatter the same document all over my Desktop, since Ctrl and drag is copy in Nautilus).

And now the Down key is mostly working, I can adjust my screen brightness downwards... at the cost of needing to restart X every couple of hours. So, there you go. I might even be able to file a bug, depending on what ended up in the logs.

As the very model of a modern moderate drinker, you can think of me as your reasonably safe bet to back for Dry July, the Prince of Wales Hospital fundraiser in which participants gather sponsorship and do not consume alcohol for a month! (If people want wild and daring, you're out of luck with me until Movember, sorry.)

As it happens, one of my sisters and I have both been patients of Prince of Wales Hospital during our lives (in my case, my recent compression chamber therapy for suspected decompression sickness was done there) and so this should be a matter dear to your heart as a way of ensuring the continuation of the Gardiner lines in the eons to come. And the Gardiner livers, under-abused things that they might be.

Sponsor me through my Dry July page.

Dear Google,

I am not sure how to quantify the exact amount of evil involved in unsolicited bulk email (I guess I could argue that it's even commercial email, because you are a company promoting a product, even if it is a coding competition), but let me assure you, the amount of evil is exactly the same in 2008 as it was either time in 2005, and for that matter, in 2003.

So, knock it off already.