David Orban | David Orban

Soon a Creative Commons based broadcast content in the Netherlands?

October 23, 2004 / General

Coverage by Alex Steffen at WorldChanging of an article by Figueiredo in DMeurope.com of a conference involving Creative Commons, and future proposals by Dutch parlamentarians for the release under CC licenses of all publicly financed broadcast content in The Netherlands. Public creativity leveraging content produced with publicly financed projects is appropriate, and overdue. Will joint […]

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Italy’s more than half corrupt?

October 21, 2004 / Policymaking

Ok. That sounds pretty provocative. But how should one interpret the results of the latest Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International? Italy, where I live, is at the 42nd place with a score of 4.8 on a scale of 10. It is humbling to see the world’s sixth biggest economy achieve its position with

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Charming side of Italian anarchy as seen from the outside

October 13, 2004 / Policymaking

We were in my car with Joi Ito tonight driving to have a few drinks after his panel at IBTS (yes, that was the name of the conference even if he didn’t seem to know :-), and he remarked how amusing it was to find Italy as he expected: creative, flexible, and pretty anarchic in

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Trust relationships need breathing space

October 9, 2004 / General

Ebay is a great closed garden. So great a lot of people don’t have a feeling of enclosure. However, trust relationships need breathing space (as John Battelle writes on Ebay before drifting to sleep), and other companies, for example Google, good be well positioned achieving this with implementations of the Semantic Web, as analyses by

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Unbounded memetic landscape

September 9, 2004 / Technology

John Battelle is asking for comments on his vision of a world with Perfect Search. Well, the world of the Perfect Search would not be interesting. Asimov was great in exploring in his “I Robot” short stories the shortcomings and unintended consequences of his own laws. I can much more easily imagine someone building a

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Fiction is not science

July 16, 2004 / Technology

I would be surpised if Asimov thought his laws could become the basis of the real science of AI or sentient robots. The fun of his short stories, and probably of writing them as well must have been been also coming from the quirks of the interactions of the laws with the real world, and how their

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Playing with wikis

July 15, 2004 / Technology

I was waiting for an opportunity to start playing with wikis, and Joi Ito’s blog gave me the start with his public Socialtext wiki, where I quickly created a page of my own. So far so good…

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For the record

July 13, 2004 / Technology

I like Archive.org a lot, but their choice of what to save sometimes differs from mine: I’d rather take a snapshot of what the homepage of robocup.org looks like right now… robocup-homepage Originally uploaded by david.orban.

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Playing with Flickr

July 13, 2004 / Technology

“This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.” says the test post generated by Flickr itself. Maybe they are a bit too sticky, requiring registration for the most basic display of photos, too? The flash based photo roll thay I inserted in the right hand column of the blog is really

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Staying power of important images

June 18, 2004 / Technology

I wonder if sometime this could be seen as the zeitgeist of these years: the home page of the RoboCup organization has Cosimo’s penalty kick picture after a year of the event. There is a lot of symbolism it in actually.

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