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If you want to be a great public speaker, your preparation has to be more than just blasting gangsta rap and shadow boxing in front of the mirror. Whether you have to videotape yourself speaking, join a presentation club, or rewrite your PowerPoint deck 40 times, it's important to be able to tell your own story. Few of us are born with the gift of public speaking but with a little preparation we can learn to persuade, sell and inspire.

In order to usher the patent system "into the 21st Century", Deputy General Counsel for Microsoft Horacio Gutierrez believes that "global patent harmonization" must happen. In a recent CNET article Andrew Donoghue lists a number of opponents to Microsoft's ever-growing patent power. The Redmond giant has been widely criticized for anti-competitive tactics and has been investigated in a number of antitrust cases. Unsurprisingly, Gutierrez's statements for standardized patent applications and processing have struck a chord with free culture supporters.

According to a study published in The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, patents may be harming our ability to innovate. Patents and the Regress of Useful Arts, written by Bill Tomlinson of UC Irvine and Andrew Torrance of University of Kansas School of Law, tested the hypothesis with a game called PatentSim. The game is an online simulation of a pure patent system, a patent-free commons system, and a mixed system. Within each environment, first year university students were asked to license, assign, infringe, and enforce patents. The study found that while a mixed patent environment and pure patent environment did not offer substantially different results, students in a commons system generated significantly higher rates of innovation, productivity and social utility. Essentially, the study supports what Lawrence Lessig and free culture advocates have been saying for years: a society free from intellectual property monopolies is a society that is better off.

Few websites have made a bigger impact on the world than Wikipedia has and today the organization is celebrating its 8th birthday. Not content to rest on its laurels, Wikipedia is gearing up for the future with new a new structured data search integration with Yahoo!, 24 times as much media storage space as it had this time last year and goals to integrate with media sites like Flickr.

This year Wikipedia survived the launch of Google's Knol, a product many feared Google would give favorable treatment, served up its pages to nearly 700 million unique viewers and launched its first official mobile version of the site. What's next? Big, tech-centered plans.