Diablog October2003

iCan

BBC has put up a beta version of iCan. The website incorporates social networking, content publishing and campaign-organization tools to foment civic involvement. Something like Tribe.net meets MoveOn.org meets MeetUp.com.
According to Wired ”The BBC says it has chosen to focus on local issues – such as parking, freeway building or street cleaning – because research shows that’s where most citizen concerns lie. And observers who have played with the iCan beta or were involved in its development say they look forward to local issues getting more air time. This site may provide the mechanism to go over the heads of media executives who choose which issues to cover.”

Possible takeover

New York Times tells that ”According to company executives and others briefed on the discussions, Microsoft - desperate to capture a slice of the popular and ad-generating search business - approached Google within the last two months to discuss options, including the possibility of a takeover”.
Of course neither Google or Microsoft executives are willing to comment on this, which - if it’s true - might be considered the most important takeover in the information-industry ever. I must admit I find the thought a litte scary. Not necessarily because Microsoft always seems to be “the bad guy", but because of the extreme concentration of power.
On the other hand this shouldn’t be a surprise, given Microsoft an Googles posissions in different markets. In terms of making money it makes perfect sense that the two wants to talk with eachother.

Some more reasons why DRM sucks

This iTunes user writes a strong statement: ”You see this music has a wonderful feature called Digital Rights Management (DRM) which as far as I’m concerned exists for the sole purpose of screwing the people who actually pay for music. /../ The record companies can be proud that they’ve so thoroughly screwed things up now that there really isn’t even any point in paying for music now.”
Dan Bricklin has written a thought provoking piece about why the future may not be bright for preserving many of the works we create today: ”I believe that copy protection will break the chain necessary to preserve creative works. It will make them readable for a limited period of time and not be able to be moved ahead as media deteriorates or technologies change. Only those works that are thought to be profitable at any given time will be preserved by their “owners” (if they are still in business). We know from history that what’s popular at any given time is no certain indication of what will be valuable in the future.”

Evidence Invalidating Eolas Patent

Tim Berners-Lee has sent a letter to Under Secretary Rogan requesting that his office reinvestigate the
Eolas Patent. Berners-Lee wrote that ”W3C urges the USPTO to initiate a reexamination of the ‘906 patent in order to prevent substantial economic and technical damage to the operation of World Wide Web” and ”The impact of this patent will be felt not only by those who are alleged to directly infringe, but all whose web pages and application rely on the stable, standards-based operation of browsers threatened by this patent. In many cases, those who will be forced to incur the cost of modifying Web pages or software applications do not even themselves infringe the patent assuming it is even valid.”

Maybe something good comes out of this kind of cases after all, the Federal Trade Commission said Patent protection for new inventions should be harder to get and easier to challenge. “There is widespread concern about patent quality, and that means there is widespread concern that there are patents out there that shouldn’t (be) issued,” Federal Trade Commission chairman Timothy Muris told reporters.

XML User-interface Language

Simon Willison writes about the rumours that Microsoft is going to implement XUL (XML User-interface Language) in Longhorn, and that this is the reason why there hasn’t been development of IE.
One of the comments states that it is ”somewhat depressing that Mozilla have such a great technology (XUL) but seem unable or uninterested in getting people to use it”.
Longhorn might not be released bedfore 2007. Which might give the open-source community almomst 4 years in order to “recapture” the GUI and make it truly cross platform.

Coding for easier redesigns

Zeldman has written an article, �Coding for Easier Redesigns�, in the 17 October issue of Macromedia�s The Edge Newsletter. The article explains how designers can make the transition to structural thinking and thereby saving themselves much labor in the future.

Apple’s Knowledge Navigator

Jon Udell writes about Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept video. I must admit I’ve never seen this video before. Udell tells he saw it for the first tilme in 1988. That was some years before I was even close of being in this business.
Some of the features presented in the video are existing today, others are still far out of reach. Quite interesting considering that this is 15 years ago. Since then a lot have happened to the way we use computers, but the video reminds us that there is more to come.

Germany embraces the worldwide web

According to Financial Times Germany has more websites per inhabitant than any other country. According to the 30-nation Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Germany had 84.7 websites per 1,000 people, last year followed by Denmark and Norway with 71.7 and 66.4 respectively.
I’m not sure whether this is a good sign or not. A few years ago I was programming a game about litterature, called LONT. For a two year you could play the game at lont.nu, but look what happened after a german firm bought that domain.

New Feature form Amazon

Amazon.com has introduced a feature that lets users search for specific words or phrases in the texts of 120,000 books. In a letter on its Web site, Amazon’s founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, says the feature is added to benefit customers, but the american Autors Guild is sceptical.
The new feature ”Search Inside the Book” lets registered users see up to 20 pages of each book where the phrase appears.

Bandwith, not the biggest problem

Dan Gillmor is reporting on BBC’s plan to open up their archives. The original promise has been chopped down considerably due to copyright questions and other matters. On the other hand it’s interesting that the adressed bandwidth question probably can be solved by taking advantage of peer-to-peer technology. One of the comments suggest BitTorrent and Onion Networks’s Tornado. This paper explains some of the technology behind Tornado.
The quiestion of diskspace is probably not going to be an important issue, in the near future.

Proposed ‘Broadcast Flag’ in USA

Washington Post is writing about how the american  federal government is preparing to require that personal computers and other consumer electronics devices contain technology to help block Internet piracy of digital entertainment.
The rule being considered by the Federal Communications Commission is one of a series of proposals pushed by the entertainment industry to help thwart copying and online trading of movies and television shows that increasingly are being broadcast in digital form with high-quality picture and sound.
Given the american entertainment industrys economic and cultural power there is reason to believe that such a rule will have serious consequences all over the world. Perhaps we will have to rely on China who will have its own audio-video compression standard in order to shift reliance away from Western formats. At least the chinese will be able to make the equipment. And I do actually believe I could manage without american movies.

Helpful tools for webdesigners

Listamatic is mentioned earlier, in my norwegian blog. Now the process of making some fancy lists is automated by List-o-Matic. Add Layout-o-matic and you’re close to a complete design. They have also got a service for ”Amazing Rollovers”. Now I’m waiting for something like Post-o-matic in order to make fancy styles for my blogposts.

The Importance of �Self-Service Content Management�

Jakob Nielsen has annonced what he thinks are the Ten Best Intranets of 2003. One interesting part is the observation thst most of the intranets on his list �have recognized the importance of providing employees with simple tools for adding and maintaining content. Intranets live by content currency and contain large amounts of specialized information that originates in widely diverse departments and teams. The more people can take care of their own content creation, the more the content will be up-to-date.

Possible futures of blogs

David Weinberger writes about what might happen when blogs become a mainstream phenomenon the way email is :

1. The word “blog” will expand. If something is more permanent than IM, it’ll be a blog.
2. Group blogs will be at least as common as individual blogs.
3. The lines between blogs and discussions will blur, as in the comment boards of the Howard Dean blog.
4. The lines between email and blogs will blur.
5. Closed circulation blogs will become as important as open blogs.
6. Many blogs will be event-based and time-limited.
7. Blogrolls and buddy lists will thoroughly merge somehow.
8. The distinction between the big, high-traffic blogs and the rest of the world of blogging will be increasingly sharply etched.
9. Blogs will be of increasing value to democracy.

Academic blogging?

This years AoIR conference - Broadening the Band - is going on in Toronto. The Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) is an association dedicated to the cross-disciplinary field of academic Internet studies. Thomas Burg ”missed the spirit of BlogTalk“, but he came up with a post about Research ethics and the blogosphere. He argues that the researcher must be familiar with the medium he is researching, in other words; blog-researchers must blog.
Burg’s post were pointing to a good summary by Elizabeth Lawley. She writes about an interesting paper from AoIR, ”Beyond the Unusual: Weblogs as Genre” (ppt-slides from the presentation). The research were beginning with these general hypotheses:

1. Blog content tends to be external to the author (news, links)
2. Authors are typically well-educated adult males
3. Blogs are interactive, actively soliciting comments
4. Blogs are heavily interlinked.

Their conclusion on he other hand is that blog content is mostly personal, often intimate, and authors are almost equally split between male and female, adult and teen. There are important differences though: Adult males tend to create more filters and knowledge-managment-blogs, females and teens do more often create personal blogs. ”The “typical weblog” is more personal, democratic; less interactive and less intellectual”.
One of the findings which seems rather strange to me is that most blog entries contain no links. I guess thats because I’m mostly into the knowledge management part og blogging. Adding that most entries have no comments it might seem as an srument against blogs as “social software”.

Future blogging

Adrian Miles points to an article which discusses moblogging, photoblogging, audioblogging. The article suggests that video blogging might have a future, something which seems quite obvious to me, given the popularity of photoblogging. Adrian considers the business model for Audblog to be interesting for those planning to get a videoblog application up and running.

Sharing Information by Computers

Today I’ve been working on a lecture about technology and society and its relevance to modern libraries. During my search I came across The Distributed Library Project, which is ”an experiment in sharing information and building community in the San Francisco Bay Area.” After creating an account where you list the books and videos that you own, you ill have access to other people’s collections. In order to manage trust they have incorporated an ebay-style feedback system. The software can be downloaded by anyone who feels like doing the same thing in their community.
There seems to be some interesting similarities with file-sharing, but of course, one quite substantial differnce is the fact that the information is stored in physical copies.

Mouse with Bluetooth

Having bought a new Powerbook I was wondering where to get a wireless pointing-device for Bluetooth. Now it seem like Logitech makes my wishes come through with their MX™900.
They even tell me more about things to do with Bluetooth.
I guess I’ll need a new cellphone too.

First posting

Wordpress 0.72 came with an exellent installation procedure and the interface looks really good. Seems like a big improvement from version 0.71 (sic!) which actually was pretty nice too :-)

I’ll need to make som substatial changes to the templates though, but there is no need to be in a hurry.

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