Quædam cuiusdam

I’m noticing more and more things I can’t do on the web because of where I am. First it was Google’s hypercautious imposition of snippet view for items that are clearly in the public domain both in the US and in Canada, and Major League Baseball’s refusal to sell me access to online video of Toronto Blue Jays games because I’m in their blackout zone (which covers all of Canada). Then, during the presidential election, I found that that any link to a Daily Show sketch on an American blog was broken, because the Comedy Network has the rights in Canada: so I have to click over there and try and find the right bit (when will OpenURLs cover political satire?). Then I started to hear about Hulu - which you can’t get in Canada. Now Last.fm is going to start charging for access if you live outside the US, UK and Germany.

It appears that DRM isn’t just an individual problem; it also depends on the size of the market and the characteristics of the jurisdiction within which you live. The web does a lot to bring us together on an equal footing, but the purveyors of commercial content have figured out how to break up the market again.

Medieval News: ‘Vampire’ Skeleton found in Venice

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Matteo Borrini of Florence University said he and his team discovered the skeleton of a woman dating to the Middle Ages whose skull had been impaled through the mouth with a brick - a traditional method of ensuring undead bloodsuckers could no longer feed.

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The woman’s skeleton was found in mass grave of victims of the Venetian plague of 1576 - in which the artist Titian also died - on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo.

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So let’s get one thing straight: if she was a medieval vampire, then Titian was a medieval painter. Harrumph.

So I tried Cuil again the other day, after not paying any attention to it since the flurry of publicity around its launch last summer. Remember, one of its selling points was that it indexes more stuff than Google. The results are weird: I tried a search for my grandfather, Robert C. Binkley, who published a few books in the ’30s and has some moderate web presence these days. I got … OPAC records. Pages and pages of them. And nothing else. Google comes up with a range of materials and sites, and you have click through a couple of layers before you get to any library sites. Admittedly Cuil does better with a better-known author, but still — what’s with this? Is Cuil specifically targeting libraries?