Creative Commons, which produces licenses implemented in 50 different jurisdictions until now, including  Serbian project, coordinated by CC legal lead Nevenka Antic, on December 15th  celebrates its 6th Birthday around the world. Regarding this occasion, Creative Commons Serbia, Wikimedia Serbia,  and Free Software Network Serbia, organises at the Faculty of Mathematics, of the University of Belgrade (room 718, 4th floor) on Monday, December 15th at 6 p.m. - presentation and debate about free software and free scientific, education, artistic and media production to emphasise the importance of free licensing in information society. I’m inviting you tomorrow to join CC birthday world wide celebration, and embrace open source.

I got email this morning from managing editor of Schmap Guides that one of my Flickr photos - Waag Newmarkt [from Amsterdam set] that I was asked to submit few weeks ago, has been selected for inclusion in the newly released fifth edition of  Schmap Amsterdam Guide. w00t! This is the photo of Waag square, that I took from Waag house last autumn, from the top of the apartment that Waag Institute usually hosts their guests.  It doesn’t pay the bill, but is nice to know that if you use an iPhone or iPod touch, then this same link will take you directly to  the iPhone version of the guide, and looks like this.

Share and enjoy!

If you’re not familiar with Twine - it is web 2.5 (towards web 3.0) tool that keeps track of your interests by collecting online content, brings it all together by the topic of your interest, so you can have it all in one place and share it with anyone you want. Even more, beside personalized or collaborative  way of collecting content, sharing interests in communities, learning about new things, getting personalized recommendations.

Before I invite you to join and share with you an interesting Twine I found out recently, I’d like you to know that Twine is powered by semantic Web [one of my fav. anticipated topics since 2002]. This means the system automatically learns about your interests, groups, then makes connections and recommendations tailored to you by using RDF standards (Resource Description Framework language), URI (universal resource identifier) and OWL (Web Ontology Language). For more information how these three main components work in Twine check this page.

You can join Twine anytime and find interesting content - depending from your interests. I use Twine since May 2008, when it was ‘invite-only’ - this is me on Twine , and recently I found out great new resources on Full text. And it is free! Full text is the name of this Twine and it’s enriched with free databases and scholarly search tools, open access journals, which is opposite of locked academic online full text databases, archives or libraries that you have to pay for (or your University/ institution at least). As a preacher of the open access - if you are researcher, student, involved in academia or maybe professional interested in specific area,  this is place with great resources. Please give me a feedback on Twine or meet me there.

Twine Official on Vimeo.

Today is the world’s the first- ever Open Access day, celebrating the growth of international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked archives, libraries, online databases, information flow in general,  that once hid and restricted knowledge.

One of the definitions of ‘open’ denotes ‘a piece of knowledge is open if you re free to use, reuse, and redistribute it.”  The concept of open access has already started to spread rapidly beyond its original roots in academia and software.  Other statements encourage the unstrict sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society.

Open Access is the principle that publicly funded research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers put their weight behind it.
The Open Access philosophy was firmly articulated in 2002, when the Budapest Open Access Initiative was introduced. It quickly took root in the scientific and medical communities because it offered an alternative route to research literature that was frequently closed off behind costly subscription barriers.

Founders and promoters who jointly announced the first international Open Access Day, that is marked with lot of events, locally and internationally, are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science. To see a list of participating countries, universities, campuses,  visit the Open Access Day Web site. Also, you can participate in synchroblogging competiton by posting on some of the questions.

I have been writing, talking, preaching about open access of e-resources, software, movement, issues  (oh, so many times) on conferences and in practice being as one of the editors of E-LIS/E-prints open access archives, and still believe that OA can make a difference in the publishing world, academia and the freedom of information.

How are you contributing to Open Access, today and every other day during the year?  What do you do to support Open Access?

Remember Science blogging conference this January? Well,  next year free three-day event ScienceOnline09, will be held from 16-18 January 2009, at Research Triangle Park, NC. This annual blogging science conference brings together scientists, educators, bloggers, students, journalists to collaborate, discuss, demonstrate online strategies and software for promoting public and better understanding of science.

See the conference wiki for further details, as well as conference program and check out interesting sessions and topics we will talk about.  If you are interested to participate, you can register here. If some of you are planning to go to NC, USA earlier next year, buzz me via contact email.

Two days ago I was giving a talk at the International Scientific Conference, University of Belgrade (25-27th Sept). I have uploaded slides of that talk, for anyone who are interested in OA, e-resources, the usage of social media and software in education. Also, I created temporary wiki page that I need to sort out, until writings section of this blog comes to its place. There is video to be published and some of the photos on Flickr.

In general Serbian scientific community is not ready to embrace social software and Web 2.0 yet, and I was surprised that some of the speakers - e.g., Ron Davies from European Digital Library project was talking about very out-dated issues like semantic web  in ‘new’ EDL projects [seen/heard that back in 2002], but then there are numbers, million of numbers that are promising that project Europeana.net will be finished in 2, 3 years. Locally, there is high level of idleness, inconsistency and net/notworking. No surprises.

Serbia’s Republican Agency for Telecommunications - RATEL, published the Instructions for Technical Requirements for Subsystems, Devices, Hardware and Installation of Internet Networks which have shaken up our local blogosphere and Internet community in Serbia. Reasons are many, one of them is abuse of user’s privacy. I wrote an article for Global Voices today on this topic. In case you’re interested follow the link.

Similar cyber laws and technical instructions already exist in other countries. Formally, at least, it’s good to have such regulation on one side where privacy is protected – formally, but, on the other hand, I am wondering if the Republican Agency for Telecommunications in Serbia, national security and ISP will (or will not) violate and abuse privacy of citizens in the internet community in practice.

Radiohead just released a new video for its song “House of Cards” from the album “In Rainbows”.

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Watch the making-of video to learn about how the video was made and the various technologies that were used to capture and render 3D data.

For more information on data visualization (and how you can download it),  you can click on Google code page. It is interesting that this video is published under the mixture of copyrights/lefts: the code is open source licenced to Aaron Koblin, and the data (not the music)  used to produce the House of Cards music video is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

I hope that this wonderful Radiohead song and the video will inspire and gather other visual artists and IT people to use various technologies in making something innovative in the future.

UNESCO office in New Delhi, as a clearinghouse for dissemination and sharing of information and knowledge in all fields of UNESCO’s competence, published ebook Open Access to Knowledge and Information: Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives – the South Asian Scenario. I wrote earlier that some of the major edu. institutions started to practice free flow of information (some didn’t yet) by giving the open access to their repositories of electronic documents, realizing that locked archives are keeping their users, mostly academics, researchers, away from the source of knowledge and information. For global institution for Educational, Scientific and Cultural affairs - UNESCO, open access is “ an innovative mode of scholarly communication within the digital environment, which is gaining momentum in developed countries that already have necessary information infrastructure.” One of the conditions for information structure is developed information society, and the book presents successful open access initiatives in the South Asia sub-region, available in the forms of “open courseware, open access journals, metadata harvesting services, national-level open access repositories and institutional repositories.” It is good to know about South Asian initiatives and efforts in making the knowledge and information open! You can download this book here.

The Library of Congress began last year first collaboration with Flickr and now has launched its pilot project called The Commons. Yesterday they announced a partnership that will put photos from the LoC’s collection online in a social environment and users to interact with them. LoC started organizing historical photograph collections through Flickr offering 3000 photos (so far): two sets of digitized photos from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information and photos from the George Grantham Bain News Service. “The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.” By tagging or commenting.  From official web site Library of Congress you can find more information about this project, as well as on the blog of LoC.

Also interesting additional information on new tagging initiative - The Commons  says that these photographs from the Library “represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It’s called “no known copyright restrictions.”

Conference time is approaching. Today Bora updated everything you need to know on Science Blogging conference (program,
wiki..). There’s going to be another Science Blogging Anthology and should be published and ready for the event. Nominations for the most interesting and best posts are still open until December 20th, so you have just few days to nominate via submission form one of your own posts or one from your favourite science blogger.

Today is South East Blog festival in Novi Sad, BlogOpen, regional bloggers meeting with interesting guests. For those who cannot come to Novi Sad, here’s the link to live broadcasting via Blog.tv (thanks to Blogowski). At this early afternoon Stephanie Booth talks on blog consulting and marketing. Also, for updates check BlogOpen web site. And you can follow me via Twitter, as I’ve been more micro-blogging due to busy agenda. Soon you’ll read more from me about burning issues happening. Thank you for the patience.

If you didn’t register yet, here’s the chance. Yes, I’m coming to the Conference and will be flying over the pond (second time around, same place, different event)  and East coasters will have a chance to meet me and talk on academic web 2.0 issues, science blogging, and everything else at the Conference. And beyond. Looking forward to see Tar Heelians and other folks.

From Wikimedia Foundation listserv officially comes happy news that Wikimedia Commons now has over two million files. Since March 2007,  Commons routinely have over 100,000 files uploaded every single month. It is becoming more and more common to have over 5,000 files in a single day, since Commons is still a very young project,  say administrators from Commons.

Now comes the exciting part. The 2 millionth file on Commons was an audio file. From the Commons database was extracted that the 2 millionth file on Wikimedia Commons comes from Serbian Wikimedian -Nikola Smolenski who uploaded this file on 03:34, 9 October 2007. Congratulations!

Just came back from Netherlands where I’ve spent great, useful quality of time talking, discussing with colleagues and professionals from different backgrounds, participating, exchanging information, sharing information. They all have in common new concepts and ideas of learning, using new media tools, as well as exploring institutional and cultural issues. Waag Society hosted two day conference on alternatives in education with four major groups of topics that lecturers, presenters, and participants have been discussing during intense programme - download full programme here with abstracts.

Since my 60 min.session was interactive and I asked from my participants to be active, prior to the session I created wiki page (shareslides here :: open knowledge and education at the new level of the web paradigm), as well as ’starting topic questionnaire’ at wiki (guidelines through an hour). Wiki is open, everyone can participate in discussion, post some of the works, slides, or documents, thoughts, examples, unfinished thoughts on and from the session.

[slideshare id=122709&doc=open-knowledge-and-education-danica-radovanovic3029&w=425]

Months, years, whole life is open source principle and since two days ago was Software freedom day.
Since my previous weeks, including this, and following ones, are open source knowledge and education days, weeks - Trebor posted interesting note (via Facebook) with  the link with software packages and teaching resources used in schools and academia. Many of them you already use, and others are very nicely classified. Share and enjoy! 

Some of the interesting readings, in September issue of Edutopia magazine, bring interesting topics on eEducation, innovative ideas to improve education in schools and academia in general. This is top ten topics in teaching and learning, and here you can find edu blogs (ten most interesting) covering different topics in education and pedagogy.