Information Wants to Be Free

Since I’ve started looking at blogs, I’ve kept my eye on BoingBoing, in part because of my fondness for the techgeek magazine of the same name from about a decade ago, which was sort of the halfway node between Wired and Mondo 2000. Today Cory Doctorow, the primary author of the site, mentioned that one of his short stories had been picked up for two science-fiction anthologies, and in digging down for detail, I discovered that he’s made his work available online for free through a Creative Commons license. That includes the short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More and the novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

The more I poke around the CC website, the more the concept makes sense to me, and Doctorow’s license seems to be a really great success story for it.

5 January 2004 | read this |

Niall Ferguson & Colossus

Have spent much of Sunday working on a book review due later this week of Colossus, the new book from Niall Ferguson. Can’t say too much about it until after the review’s turned in and published, but I was interested enough to look up this interview, which although about a previous book hints at some of Ferguson’s current themes, and am now eagerly awaiting the full posting of this interview. Oh, and here’s another sneak peek at the themes of Colossus, in a recent book review Ferguson wrote for Foreign Affairs.

4 January 2004 | read this |