To Real Steve Jobs - Tear Down This Wall

wow … for those of us lifelong learners in the post-academic world, iTunesU is utterly amazing.

i am presently watching/listening to some vintage HCI Seminars (Terry Winograd, Stanford) from 06 and 07 in the background while doing my daily grunt work; and discovering the genius of Joe McKay and Greg Niemeyer.  awesome … EXCEPT … iCan’t post a link to share the content with you, dear reader, because it’s tightly locked away behind Apple’s proprietary iTunes WALLED GARDEN interface!

even iTunes.Stanford.Edu is wholly complicit in reconstructing the walled garden … directing and compelling the explorer to download iTunes or No Deal. in stark irony, Niemeyer provides all the code to the amazing collaborative project.

darth … i mean, steve … c’mon … we know there is still some humanity left in you. deep down, you are still one of the collective fathers of the Light Side for computing … for Yoda’s sake, man, YOU created the legendary 1984 commercial … so we say to you now, “Mr. Jobs: Tear Down This Wall.”

i thought we had finally (collectively, as a market of consumers) killed off the evil of AOL’s walled garden assault on Open Information Networks once and for all, but apparently the closer that Apple gets to Google, the more “don’t be evil” is tempted by “just one bite from the apple” and “think different” enjoins “as long as you think exactly like us as we control (er, i mean “index”) all the world’s information.”