The Machine is Us/ing Us

Do you have a spare 4 minutes and 33 seconds? One of our readers sent us a link to a video, The Machine is Us/ing Us (subtitled ' "Web 2.0" in just under 5 minutes') made by Professor Michael Wesch at Kansas State University as part of his Digital Ethnography project. It's apparently been hot around the web for the past couple of months.

Another reader pointed out an article about the quirkily personal Prelinger Library in San Francisco, from the May, 2007 Harper's Magazine. Curiously apposite to Professor Wesch's Digital Ethnography, Gideon Lewis-Kraus's article, A world in three aisles: Browsing the post-digital library, is available in full on the Harper's website, and also from the magazine database; and we have the paper issue if you'd rather.

And if you have a spare half hour or so, there was a discussion of digitization on NPR's Talk of the Town Science Friday earlier this month. It's available for listening. The interviewees were Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg; Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive; and Michael Keller from Stanford University. The really really scary part was when they agreed that the US Congress will continue to move copyright law in the direction of perpetual copyright, and there will be very little left in the public domain in the United States...