Some great free software and tools for students

There are lots of great free tools for helping student with their studies.  Here are a few I recommend.  These all work on PC and Mac unless explicitly stated

DROPBOX

Dropbox is like having a magic pocket for computer files.  It's like a spare USB stick in the cloud. Never lose a file again. It's great for backing up essays!  Check out the video below:

You get 2GB of free space. Get it here now.

 

EVERNOTE

Like Dropbox, Evernote is a tool that works across multiple devices like laptops, desktops, PDAs and Smartphones.  It helps you grab material (like text, images, webpages, etc) from the web and organise it effectively.  It's an excellent tool for researching.  It even works on popular smart phones (eg iPhone, Android, etc) helping you make audio, photo and text notes.  Here's an example:

Get it here.

 

TWITTER

Twitter is a micro-blogging site which lets uses post and share short messages via its website, third party software, smartphone apps and even SMS text messages. Twitter can be integrated into lots of other sites and tools. Students can use it follow interesting people and network with others.  Depending on how you use it, it can be a terrible distraction or an excellent way of meeting new people and making useful contacts.

Click this link to find a few university feeds that you might find useful:

Create a free account here.

 

DELICIOUS

Delicious is a great tool for keeping track of all those websites and pages you visit and want to bookmark for later. It builds social media features in too (eg sharing and networking with others).  You can tag posts by keywords and bundled them together and assign them a web address.  If you own your own computer, you can install some plug-ins to your browser for fast bookmarking.  Check out the video below for more info:

Get Delicious here.

The cost of free? Not this again.

(image courtesy of Gisela Giardorno, 2006, Flickr, CC)

Over on the Guardian's PDA blog professional songwriter and musician Helienne Lindvall (who previously published for BMG) has written a post in which she seems to find it "ironic" that authors like Cory Doctorow and Chris Anderson charge upwards of $25,000 for professional speaking appearances when they are proponents of "giving away content for free as a business model".  Lindvall points to a number of speakers who seem to be advocates of this approach, such as Seth Godin, Peter Sunde and Gerd Leonhard, who all seem to offer advice on what the music industry needs to do in order to adapt to the digitally distributed economy of bits and bytes.

Somewhat strangely, she bundles the Stanford law professer Lawrence Lessig in with these speakers, despite his interests being more aligned with reforming the punitive restrictions brought about by blanket copyright that prevents material that is no longer commercially viable from entering into the public domain.  After all, he, Hal Alberson and Eric Eldred established the non-profit Creative Commons sets of licences to accommodate this problem.

I've blogged on these topics before (for my MAC309 students) and it's worth watching the short video below if you aren't familiar with the 'free' thesis




I responded to Lindvall's original post highlighting the problem with the "irony" that only she seems to see.  Is it ironic that Doctorow and Anderson charge what Lindvall seems to think are disproportionate fees for live (or video-linked) appearances? No, not really given the arguments put forwards by these writers.

One of the core arguments around the 'free' thesis and its derivatives is that value traditionally associated with content that used to make money in a physical format (ie books, CDs, film, etc) is that content producers have to be more dynamic in how and where they solicit their economic recompense. If that means charging for their expertise and presence then so be it. This also seems to ignore recent data that suggests the creative industries are alive and kicking in Norway and the UK at least.

There seems to be a parallel with the live versus recorded experience with regards to musical performance. It's one of the reasons why the TED conferences are so expensive - if you want to be in the presence of 'celebrity' you pay a premium. Presence is what pays and what people seem to currently value.

Anderson's argument may have its flaws but one thing rings true, the enemy of the creative artist is obscurity. Artists can survive in a digital economy with the right foundations - they need to be able to justify their output is worth paying for and leverage the relationships and opportunities presented by the internet. They need to (re)connect with their fans and give them a reason to buy. This is why you'll find Doctorow making limited edition bespoke editions of his novels that retail at over $300 whilst Amazon bulk sell his hardbacks at a discounted rate (this was one of the themes of his novel, Makers).

Note: I'm not claiming that piracy is a legitimate way for consumers to interact with artists and their content, but I'd be disingenuous to claim that it doesn't take place.   If Doctorow and others can incentivise people to pay for their content in the guise of appearance fees then so be it. They are most likely leveraging the current economic climate and their present celebrity cache to their advantage.

In some respects these speakers are making the new economic conditions work for them.  Several of the commentators on the original blog piece have made the clumsy parallel that these appearance fees are the equivalent to the live music performance.  However, this isn't quite an easy equivalent to make, especially for a band where the fees are spilt.  It might work for solo artists...  It has been suggest that these authors are writing the books with the intention being they will make the real money by touring.

So, is it really that ironic?

[EDIT] It seems like Cory Doctorow has actually responded to the blog post pointing out that he seldom charges for public appearance at all. He does them mostly for, you guessed it, free.

MAC309: The cost of 'free'

This week's MAC309 session looked at the ideas presented by Chris Anderson in his recent book, Free. You can find the slides below. We also looked at the various costs attached to free services like webmail and search, such as our attention and our privacy



You can also hear Chris Anderson talking about his ideas here (and even download the podcast as an mp3) and watch a video here:



You can find a critique of Anderson's argument here by Cory Doctorow

Next week we will look at another kind of free, when we consider the ideas of Matt Mason and The Pirates Dilemma

An open blog post to the Guardian subscriber scheme

When I first noticed the Guardian's most recent subscriber drive offering it's readers a chance to 'save money' I thought to myself, 'great - a nice incentive to actually purchase the paper versions instead of frequently reading the bits I like via my RSS feed for free'. Despite my love of technology I am still a fan of the newspaper format in its paper guise: it is portable, convenient and has established sections and routes for navigation - something which isn't always as workable in digital versions.

I've noticed quite a few Guardian pages are not yet optimised for portable browsing on devices like the iPhone, in particular one of my regular favourites from the Saturday edition of The Guide: What We Learned On The Web This Week (mobile web link here for July 18 2009). This is the message which awaits mobile browsers:

How does it work?

I was curious to see how it was organised given that most people can generally subscribe to their local newsagent to have a newspaper delivered, usually with a small weekly surcharge. There isn't much difference to this tried and tested process. Essentially, the Guardian will issue a book of vouchers which can be handed in to the newsagent where you normally purchase your paper and they will sort out the rest. Subscriptions are available on a monthly, quarterly, six month and annual basis.

There are a number of packages available:

• Seven-day Guardian and Observer package: saves 33% on cover price
• Six-day Guardian package (Monday – Saturday): saves 25% on cover price
• A weekend Guardian Saturday and Sunday Observer package: saves 20% on cover price
  

If you regularly purchase the newspapers that fit into these pricing tiers then there are some genuine savings to be made. However, this is also the root of the problem...

Who still buys newspapers?

The year-on-year trends for national newspapers is a predictable one of slowly falling circulations and has been doing so for some time. The Guardian sales themselves were down over 3.2% when comparing June 2008 with June 2009, although their digital views were the best in the UK for that month, in excess of of 27 million unique readers. As we can see, newspapers are diminishing in reader presence and this subscription deal seems like a good incentive to stimulate the existing readership or to lure back lost readers.

I'm sure there are quite a few people who regularly buy newspapers, including the Guardian, every day every weekend, etc, and this offer is an ideal proposition for them. However, what about those newspaper readers who have long since abandoned their paper buying habits or who purchase specific daily editions? Is this still a good deal for them?

I would love to be a regular annual subscriber of the Guardian but I'd like a little more options in the editions available. I regularly buy the Saturday edition of the paper and frequently purchase the Monday and Thursday editions for their excellent Media and Technology sections (worth the cover price alone in my opinion). This costs somewhere in the region of £10+ per month - not a massive cost for the quality of the end product but probably too small a figure to qualify for subscription discounts - but only if I actually chose to buy the weekday editions. Like I already said, my RSS feeds do a great job of bringing those sections of the paper to me digitally and for free. I run a broswer with adblock plus installed too.

Bottom line

So here lies the rub, would a little more flexibility in the options available be beneficial to the Guardian if it means that I'd become a regularly subscriber? It's already accepted that the cover price of a newspaper accounts for much less than the products true cost. Some estimate that the the cover price brings in about 30% of the revenue with 70% coming from advertising sales. We all know that advertising rates have tanked in the past 12 months.

So what is more beneficial: the material costs of producing a discounted newspaper, delivered to subscribers via a flexible subscription model bringing in a fixed price or the risk of further dwindling sales whilst readers switch to digital editions?