Today Luke and I gave a CS lunch talk about Free Culture, and rose_garden took excellent notes on our talk, which resulted in me posting way too much on her livejournal entry about it. Why don’t you join in the discussion and post your thoughts?
I also came across some other cool things, such as Nutch, a project to build an open-source search engine. I think this is VITAL, and I’m shocked that nobody has done it before. The Open Directory Project is wonderful, but we really need an open source search engine to go with it, otherwise we are at the mercy of Google, or even worse maybe Microsoft someday (shudder). I found this while reading up on search engines on technologyreview.com, which has a fantastic article called Search Beyond Google. This also mentioned Mooter, which tries to break down search results into categories that it refines for you as you continue searching.
Finally, I discovered the Roadmap to Online Music Fun, which is kind of cute, but unfortunately leaves out some efforts like Magnatune, which is the awesomest online music label in existence. I really intend to write up something comparing all of the online music services, but I need to do homework first…
When you do your write up, you might want to mention that the founder of Magnatune, John Buckman, has started a new blog at http://blogs.magnatune.com/buckman/