Google’s “Knol” is now open to everyone, The Official Google Blog announced yesterday.

The idea is to help capture the expertise residing in people’s heads and provide a place for them to author a variety of articles.  For instance, early entries range from “How to Backpack” to information about lung cancer from a thoracic surgeon.  Authorship is known and those who would like to make contributions or edits may make their suggestions to the author, who retains control.  Google is calling this “moderated collaboration.”

Google also has done a deal with the New Yorker which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the magazine’s extensive repository.

Knol says it offers:

• Ease of use — All you need is an account, a name and a desire to write and we’ll take care of the rest.
• Control — You specify the level of collaboration you want with the community. Your knol, your voice.
• Community — You can connect with other experts in your area of interest to share and grow knowledge.
• Visibility — We value and promote authorship. Great content will be visible on any search engine.
• Growth — Sharing your knowledge with the world is rewarding for everyone.

Here are some selected resources related to copyright law and fair use:

• Online Digital Slider for Copyright  From the American Library Association’s Office of Information Technology Policy, the most recent useful tool for determining whether a work is still under copyright.  See image below.
• LLRX resources on copyright  Law and technology resources for legal professionals.
• Checklist for Fair Use (PDF)  From the Copyright Management Center at IUPUI.  IUPUI has other reliable information on copyright.
• Fair Use guidelines  From Dartmouth.
• Fair Use Chart  From Association for Research Libraries.
• Teacher’s Guide to Fair Use and Copyright   “Modeling Honesty and Resourcefulness.”
• Creative Commons (CC)  How creators can share their work but retain some rights.
• How to choose a CC license that works for you.

Here’s another contribution to Wikipedia that may be of interest to both scientists and the general public.  According to the Seattle P-I, authors of the “gene wiki” have created 7,500 Wikipedia entries on different genes and are editing another 650 already existing entries.

The group’s plans appear in the Public Library of Science’s online journal, PLoS Biology, a free access online journal which I have mentioned before on brain research.

The authors of the gene wiki are from the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation in San Diego, San Diego State University and Washington University in St. Louis.

The researchers could have chosen to publish in more authoritative sources, but note that the data model used by gene portals and model organism databases focuses on large contributions from a relatively small number of contributors.  They chose Wikipedia instead, because it uses a different model for collaboratively synthesizing knowledge and is very popular.  The site’s volunteer editors tend to quickly correct inaccuracies.

“We believe that this effort will encourage further contributions from scientists around the world and become a robust, cross-referenced tool for students, educators, and researchers everywhere.  With the entire community’s input, we envision this gene wiki evolving into a collection of collaboratively created, continually updated, community-reviewed review articles for every gene in the human genome,” the authors wrote.

The Center for Social Media at American University’s School of Communication has a report on best practices for making online videos within the boundaries of fair use.  Anyone creating videos that might involve others’ work in some way will find the report informative, guiding them through the copyright law maze, along with the Center’s previous report, Recut, Reframe, Recycle.

Some best practice uses include:

• Commenting on or Critiquing of Copyrighted Material
• Using Copyrighted Material for Illustration or Example
• Capturing Copyrighted Material Incidentally or Accidentally
• Reproducing, Reposting, or Quoting in Order to Memorialize, Preserve, or Rescue and Experience, An Event, or a Cultural Phenomenon
• Copying, Reposting, and Recirculating a Work or Part of a Work for Purposes of Launching a Discussion
• Quoting in Order to Recombine Elements to make a New Work that Depends for its Meaning on (Often Unlikely) Relationships Between the Elements

This guide to best practices does not tell you the limits of fair use rights, they say.  It’s not a guide to using Creative Commons licenses, material that is already free to use without considering copyright, nor to using material that someone wants to license but cannot trace back to an owner — the so-called “orphan works” problem.

The best practices address the most common situations today.  “Inevitably, online video makers will find themselves in situations that are hybrids of those described… or will develop new practices.  Then, they can be guided by the same basic values of fairness, proportionality, and reasonableness that inform this code of practices.  As community practices develop and become more public, the norms that emerge from these practices will themselves provide additional information on what is fair use.”  [via iLibrarian]

A New York Times article reports on a scientific study that identifies “the most complete rough draft to date of the cortex’s electrical architecture, the cluster of interconnected nodes and hubs that help guide thinking and behavior.”  While not conclusive, the findings give scientists a “wiring diagram” that they can test and refine.

The original study was published in the free-access online journal PLoS Biology.

Researchers collaborating at 3 institutions performed a standard functional M.R.I. scan on five healthy male participants, measuring which bundles of their brain cells were most active when the men were at rest.  The technique allows scientists to estimate the density and orientation of the connections running through specific brain locations.  The researchers used a computer analysis that ranked the busiest spots on the cortex in order, by the number of connections they had.  Then they plotted those spots back onto the brain maps of the volunteers.

The same areas overlapped with “network hubs that the group had already identified. In previous studies, activation in these areas has been associated with wandering thought and acute self-awareness.  In the jargon of the field, these areas “run hot” continuously during waking hours and consume far more energy than more peripheral areas.”  The hubs clustered in each brain, in a region about the size of a palm, were centered atop the cortex like a small skullcap.

One of the scientists said that continued research should help produce a complete and detailed neural wiring diagram of the brain. “We hope we can get to a place where we have, in effect, a brain simulator, in the same way we have computer models that can simulate the climate,” he said, “so we can simulate activation patterns we see in clinical cases,” like psychiatric problems and brain injuries.

Essential sites for tips and how-to’s
Mashable lists 10 sites you’ll want to visit for tips and how-tos for just about anything.

Includes instructables  — the world’s biggest show and tell;  About.com  — which covers a wide variety of topics; eHow  “How to do just about everything”; and more.

Best free software programs
Here’s another 10 essentials you’ll want to know about.  The best free software is explored at Tech News World.  [via iLibrarian]
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The list includes:

1. Paint.net 3.08 (graphics editor)
2. EssentialPIM 2.5 (organizer)
3. IrfanView (image viewer)
4. OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 (office program)
5. PDFCreator 8.1
6. CDBurnerXP 4.0
7. 7-Zip 4.57 (compression program)
8. Stickies 6.5 (sticky notes)
9. WordWeb 5.1 (dictionary)
10. ooVoo 1.6.1 (Internet-based telephony)

Web 2.0 features are “put to a socially significant use” at OpenCongress, says Read/WriteWeb.

OpenCongress recently inroduced 13 new features, and is designed to make it easy to track activities in the US congress.  If you are at all interested in politics and what’s happening in government, you will appreciate this project of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.

Use OpenCongress to read news, commentary, and blog buzz, link to bills you are interested in, follow hot topics, share information through Digg, StumbleUpon, etc., and find out what your local members of Congress are doing.  It’s quick and easy to establish an RSS feed.

You can create a personal account with OpenID, and enjoy navigating with “a perfect amount of AJAX.”  Outside news and data is pulled into the site, rated by users and actively discussed.

There are many widgets to choose among, helping you to track trends, bills, and issues in particular areas.  Read/WriteWeb also offers suggestions to OpenCongress on additional useful features they might develop.

Firefox 3.0 to be released June 17
Mozilla developer center says that after more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, the much anticipated next version of Firefox will be ready for download on June 17.  This new version is purported to be faster and include a number of useful new features.

They are hoping for a Guinness world record-breaking download day.

Learn basic web design skills with video tutorials
Is an instructional video worth 10,000 words? 

Mashable highlights some video tutorials that show you right on your computer screen how to do just about anything you want.  Create your first website or your own WordPress theme.

I spotted this post at Library Bytes and was particularly interested in the idea of today’s set of literacies for our information age.  I think a lot of educational institutions recognize these skills as necessary, but the traditional classroom structure fights against an environment that fosters them.

Students today (and other learners), live in a world of connectivity, community, sharing and collaborating -  especially because of technology - but inside the classroom too often find themselves locked out of that world.  The video Learning to Change-Changing to Learn talks about the issues.  Photo by jnxyz.  Creative Commons license.

What learners need to know (4:06 on video):

• how to find information,
• how to validate it,
• how to synthesize it,
• how to leverage it,
• how to communicate it,
• how to collaborate with it,
• how to problem solve with it.

Common Craft’s new video explains social media “in plain English.”  As always, the video is both simple and clever, and completely achieves its goal of explaining the phenomenon of social media.