Musings on law, tech, chess & other topics by a geek

The first of two blogs I am overseeing this winter has just started to pick up with some great posts. This blog is for LIS550, Information in a Social Context and is written by second year  MILS students (mostly librarians).  Topics include trademark, Burning Man, copyright, net neutrality, spam, privacy, Free Press, patents, hacking xbox and many more topics.  I am impressed by the topics and the quality of resources referenced, these posts have lead to some strong in class discussions.

Here is the first round of public posts:

LitigationVille: Can FarmVille prevent other social media games from using the “-Ville” suffix?

A Second Helping: the Return of Rustock and all the Spam you didn’t get over the Holidays.

Trademarking Tradition: Getting the tm on Baltimore’s Hon

The Implications of Geolocation and Digital Images

Video Game Consoles: Information Appliances or Generative Platforms?

Copyright Reform in Canada, Bill C-32 – Point of Comparison for the U.S.

PatentlyO & Microsoft i4i

Scam baiters: better than the spammers they’re scamming?

Net Neutrality – The FCC Ruling and Its Impact on Developers and Libraries

These are mostly short form post about recent events.  Longer form opinion pieces will be incoming later on in the quarter. Follow the blog at brianrowe.org/LIS550/ or read more on the syllabus at brianrowe.org/LIS550/about/.

Boing Boing has a great post on board game:

If you asked people in the street to name three new books, films, TV shows or music they’ve enjoyed in the past 20 years, you’ll soon have hundreds of different answers. Ask them to name three boardgames, and you will likely only hear “Monopoly, Scrabble & Cluedo” (aka Clue)*. Not an exaggeration, most people have no idea how far boardgame design has progressed recently. Modern boardgames compare to Monopoly like a BMW compares to a Model T Ford. It’s that different.   I was shown Settlers Of Catan in 1996, just after it was first published and it changed my life**. The epitome of modern German game design, Settlers is totally engaging. You have to think, make decisions, barter, trade and influence the other players. You don’t attack people, but you can block them. You don’t get eliminated and the game takes about two hours tops. Settlers does use dice, but you win by being smart, not lucky. The ‘board’ is modular, large hex tiles, so every game is different and fresh.

Read the rest at BoingBoing

I completely agree, Settlers Rocks. It is collaborative, social, strategic and ever a little competitive while still having an amazing replay value. Our 9 year old loves it and just won her first game of knights and cities this past weekend.  This was a big accomplishment for her, she learned a lot about planning and implementing a strategy to get there. Board games were a staple for my family growing up but they were nothing like this.  Board games have gotten so much better in the last 15 years.

Board games really took off when I was managing a WOTC store.  We had a game night where employees would get together and play new games.  We also had a policy where employees could check out any game in the store to take home for a week and learn.  I miss working somewhere that people get together to play games .

Image CC BY SA Marcaunon wikipedia