"...Here’s a list of 5 things you can do to get ahead of the game and make sure you don’t get trampled by the herd while looking at your watch. Although these ideas are written from a visual arts perspective, I’m sure that readers from other creative backgrounds can also apply them to their field. And please be warned, this is not an article about free-culture. It is about adapting to some of the changes that free-culture ideas are creating. If you want to learn more about this phenomenon, there are links after the article..."

"...The Renaissance ideal can be expressed as a creative synthesis between cultural disciplines, standing in stark contrast to our traditional focus on scientific specialization. This panel presents a number of experts who approach the synthesis of art and science as the modus operandi for their work, using it as a tool for creativity, research, and practice. Understanding these approaches allows us to identify the roles of synthesis in successful innovation and improve the implementation of interdisciplinary synthesis in research and practice..."

These are strange times indeed. While they continue to command so much attention in the mainstream media, the 'battles' between old and new modes of distribution, between the pirate and the institution of copyright, seem to many of us already lost and won. We know who the victors are. Why then say any more?

Because waves of repression continue to come: lawsuits are still levied against innocent people; arrests are still made on flimsy pretexts, in order to terrify and confuse; harsh laws are still enacted against filesharing, taking their place in the gradual erosion of our privacy and the bolstering of the surveillance state. All of this is intended to destroy or delay inexorable changes in what it means to create and exchange our creations.

There’s a great deal of interest in open source software development these days.

"NEW DELHI: Imagine a world free of patents and passwords, of copyrights and copycats, of freedom to create. Imagine a world full of free software. That’s the world of Richard Stallman , tech guru, hacker, political activist, pioneer of concepts like Copyleft, digital colonisation and maker of GNU compiler and debugger of GNU/Linux operating system.

As founder president of Free Software Foundation, Dr Stallman, 55, has managed to convince governments like Kerala and companies like ATI (now AMD) to switch to the idea of free software. ET caught up with the legendary Richard Matthew Stallman (called RMS by hackers) on his visit to India to understand his idea of a free world of technology. Excerpts..."

"MIT's Sandy Pentland finds surprising implications in patterns of cell-phone use. [...] «But we definitely need to talk about it and figure out a new deal for privacy--to use this data and not be abused» ..." -- Unfortunately, Freedom seems no longer to be part of MIT vocabulary -- http://reality.media.mit.edu/

I was eating breakfast in my favorite restaurant today and I noticed a sign up on the wall that said: "Free Range Eggs, $4.00 per dozen"

"The World Social Forum has played an integral part in the adoption of the free software through the Americas as well as in developing countries around the world. For this reason, the WSF is topical for this blog. Roberto Savio is probably among the best informed insiders at the World Social Forum (WSF)..."