October 7, 2006
Business Week's Kate Norton interviewed Microsoft Vice President Robert McDowell and me about the role of information technology in business following a debate we had in London earlier this week.
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October 2, 2006
Richard MacManus notes the emergence of a marketplace for buying and selling Digg votes.
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October 1, 2006
Noting the continuing decay in the quality of algorithm-generated search results - the current top Google result for a search on "Martin Luther King," for example, is a page created by white supremacists - CNET's Elinor Mills suggests that parents should encourage their kids to consult librarians instead of search engines when doing research. Bizarrely, a Google spokesperson defends the King result as an example of the "integrity" of the company's algorithm: "In this particular example, the page is relevant to the query and many people have linked to it, giving it more PageRank than some of the other pages."
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September 30, 2006
Writes Jason Epstein in an otherwise surprisingly uncritical review of recent books on Google: "The confrontation of founders who wish to do only good with the complex reality of their astonishing commercial achievement is an issue of biblical scope which calls to mind the expulsion, naked and trembling, of our ancestral parents from prelapsarian Eden into a world where choice is obligatory and error inevitable, a blessing and a burden upon themselves and what Milton called, with mixed feelings, their hapless seed."
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September 26, 2006
Facebook this morning abondoned its exclusivity hallmark and opened its doors to all comers. Facebook's most attentive watcher, Fred Stutzman, believes the move marks the end of the social network's relevance: "It depresses me to think that Facebook is simply building Classmates.com 2.0. However, I just don't see how else I can look at this ... Sure, a couple million people might sign on to check the service out, but are these people actually going to become first-class users? Of course not. Is Facebook simply looking for a bump in their userbase to sweeten the deal for Yahoo?"
With computers sucking up an ever larger portion of the world's energy output, two Google engineers will today push the computer industry to reengineer power supplies to improve their efficiency, reports John Markoff. The electric power industry has a similar initiative ongoing.
Mohit Chhabra finds the link between information technology, the Winchester Mystery House, and Indian businesses.
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September 24, 2006
In Monday's Financial Times, John Gapper looks at the tension between egalitarianism and elitism in the world of Web 2.0.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project today released a report called "The Future of the Internet," a speculative look ahead to what will be happening in 2020 based on a survey of experts and pundits.
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September 23. 2006
Losing track of your online selves? A Dutch company offers a solution to avatar fragmentation, writes Pete Cashmore. It's also good, he notes, for "cross-network stalking."
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September 22, 2006
Confirming a Business Week report from last week, Microsoft has acknowledged that it is considering releasing a free online version of its Works suite, incorporating advertising. Richard MacManus says it would be "a wise move by Microsoft to pre-empt Google's upcoming Web Office suite."
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September 21, 2006
Business Week reports on the escalating war of words between software superpowers Oracle and SAP: "Lurking behind all the talk ... are two fundamentally different approaches to software going forward. Oracle has cast its lot with the movement toward open standards and programming languages, such as Sun Microsystems' Java. SAP also knows how to talk the open-standards talk, but realistically, the company depends much more heavily on proprietary products."
A lawyer provides a quick rundown of some of the key legal implications of business blogging.
Kent Newsome looks at a response to the Dead 2.0 semi-outing and sees red.
Journalism professor Jay Rosen announces that Reuters is providing some money to launch NewAssignment.net, his experiment in "open source journalism, where people collaborate peer-to-peer in the production of editorial goods." "In some respects," comments Ian Delaney, "NewAssignment sounds like a Citizendium for news."
Bruce Schneier writes that the recent "Facebook riots" show that "privacy is more about control than about secrecy." But even though web companies need to respect that fact and "give users as much control over their personal information as they can," in the end users "are just fooling themselves if they think they can control information they give to third parties." He concludes: "we all need to remember that much of that control is illusory."
Larry Sanger responds to Clay Shirky's critique of the Citizendium concept: "I think Clay lacks any good reason to think the Citizendium will fail; but clearly he badly wants it to fail, and his comments are animated by wishful thinking."
Gizmodo reports that Microsoft has already slashed the price of its forthcoming 30 GB Zune music player, from $289 to $229, in response to Apple's cutting of the price of the 30 GB iPod from $299 to $249. Talk about a consumer's dream: a price war that breaks out before a product is even released.
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September 20, 2006
New Scientist magazine interviews MIT professor Sherry Turkle on social networking and the end of aloneness: "When technology brings us to the point where we're used to sharing our thoughts and feelings instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence, sometimes to the extent that we need others in order to feel our feelings in the first place ... Self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one's time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it ... We insist that our world is increasingly complex, yet we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think, uninterrupted." The interview is part of a special section, which also includes a short story by Bruce Sterling titled "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google."
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September 19, 2006
In a preemptive strike, Clay Shirky trashes Larry Sanger's proposed Citizendium project: "Sanger wants to believe that expertise can survive just fine outside institutional frameworks, and that Wikipedia is the anomaly. It can’t, and it isn’t."
Oh unreal world! Boing Boing finds that Hewlett-Packard has added a "slimming filter" to its digital cameras. HP's pitch: "They say cameras add ten pounds, but HP digital cameras can help reverse that effect. The slimming feature, available on select HP digital camera models, is a subtle effect that can instantly trim off pounds from the subjects in your photos!"
The boom in the solar-panel business has led to an "acute shortage" of silicon, driving up prices. The shortage should continue for at least two years as silicon makers build new factories, reports the Financial Times.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt tells Forbes that mashups will "transform the business world."
Phil Edwards writes: "The artificial elitism of the Wikipedia community doesn't only marginalise the 'masses' who contribute most of the original content; it also sidelines the subject-area experts who, within certain limited domains, have a genuine claim to be regarded as an elite."
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September 18, 2006
"Wiki," writes Andrew Orlowski, "is a pun on the Hawaiian word for 'labyrinth.'"
Seth Finkelstein says the blogosphere is more about demagoguery than democracy, as it provides greater incentives for argumentativeness than for reporting.
John Markoff reports on a technological breakthrough that promises to allow data to be sent between a computer's microchips with laser beams rather than through wires: "Commercializing the new technology may not happen before the end of the decade, but the prospect of being able to place hundreds or thousands of data-carrying light beams on standard industry chips is certain to shake up both the communications and computer industries."
Dan Farber and Mark Anderson discuss the "super data centers" that will form the heart of utility computing.
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September 17, 2006
In a curious twist, Google appears to be testing a program that provides an incentive to NOT click on their advertisements: If you avoid clicking on ads, fewer of them will show up at the top of your search results pages. Writes one webmaster, "I spoke to my [Google] account rep. They are testing a new feature whereby when a user performs multiple searches and does not click an ad, the ads are all moved to the right side of the page. The rationale is that the user does not want to see the ads anyway and it lessens the chance of a poor prospect clicking on an ad." I'm down with that.
Blogs make a perfect attack weapon for politicians, finds the Washington Post.
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September 15, 2006
The recording industry fires a warning shot across the bows of YouTube and MySpace. "We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars," says Universal Music Group chief executive Doug Morris. "How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly." Reports the Associated Press: "Universal's talks with YouTube Inc. have deteriorated and the recording giant is set to file a copyright infringement lawsuit against the video-sharing company if no agreement is reached by the end of the month." A Los Angeles Times reporter notes the difficulty of removing copyrighted content from sites like YouTube: "On Wednesday, a search for 'Black Eyed Peas Video' on YouTube returned 553 results. Many were copyrighted materials."
Martin Banks believes that parallel processing's time may have finally arrived: "the move towards service-based architectures and even dedicated, applications-specific virtual servers, means that there is now an architectural approach available that will allow the few who do understand the intricacies of parallel processing to service the needs of the many who don’t but are very likely to need it."
In yet another sign that computing's PC era is ending, Esther Dyson has iced the venerable PC Forum. The conference had its origins, back in the mid-70s, in the rise of the personal computer.
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September 14, 2006
Microsoft is preparing a free web version of Works, its entry-level Office suite, in hopes of killing off small online competitors, according to Business Week.
Looking at the explosion in the popularity of social networks like MySpace, Tony Hung foresees a balkanization of the web into separate enclaves with corporate overseers: "At the end of the day, you’ll be locked into where your friends are. The cost would be too high to migrate from system to system. You’ll spend your time within the system checking messages, blogging, communicating in real time, playing games, reading the news, and so on." So it's back to the age of Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy?
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September 13, 2006
Bernard Golden argues that most companies will prefer to use pools of virtualized servers, rather than computing grids, to handle spikes in application demand. Rewriting applications to run on grids, he says, is too onerous: "Generally speaking, imposing new conditions on users in order to move to a new architecture is a non-starter."
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has released a report on the "Cyber Storm" exercise it held last February, which involved the simulation of a large-scale computer attack by terrorists on crucial national infrastructure.
Joshua Porter digs into how Digg's design promotes gaming.
The Wall Street Journal's interview with me on innovation, from the Monday issue, has come out from behind the pay wall, at least temporarily, and can be read here.
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September 12, 2006
In a First Monday article, Tom Cross suggests color-coding Wikipedia entries to highlight different levels of textual reliability. He recommends using four colors: red (very unreliable), yellow (pretty unreliable), green (pretty reliable), and black (very reliable).
Encyclopedia Britannica editor Dale Hoiberg mops the floor with Chief Wikipedian Jimmy Wales in a lively and revealing Wall Street Journal email debate. At one point, Wales criticizes Britannica because it "doesn't display its rough drafts, or the articles before being checked by a copy editor." Counters Hoiberg: "No, we don't publish rough drafts. We want our articles to be correct before they are published." Hoiberg's final comment, in which he draws on the work of the great technology critic Lewis Mumford, is worth pausing on:
Long before the Web, Lewis Mumford predicted that the explosion of information could "bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance." Not only would lots of information fail to make us smarter; it would actually make us dumber by overwhelming us. The solution, he thought, was not to be found in technology alone but in "a reassertion of human selectivity and moral-self discipline, leading to continent productivity." In these days of information incontinence, in order to be part of the solution rather than the problem, I think it is important to remember this.
A group of more than 100 leading U.K. teachers, psychologists, and writers, including popular author Philip Pullman, published an open letter in today's Daily Telegraph warning that our technology-saturated culture is poisoning childhood: "Since children’s brains are still developing, they cannot adjust – as full-grown adults can – to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change. They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed 'junk'), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives." In an accompanying article, Britain's former "children's laureate" Michael Morpurgo "condemned the 'virtual play' represented by electronic games and internet surfing."
Ubiquitous MySpace "friend" Tom Anderson admits to being "as anti-social as they come," reports ValleyWag. That's a bummer, because Tom happens to be the only person who's friended me at MySpace. Do you realize how depressing it is to be greeted with "You have 1 friends." (That plural really twists the knife.) And now it turns out even he's a sham.
Michelle Kessler covers the Web 2.0 miniboom for USA Today.
The web site Dropping Knowledge hosts a "table of free voices" in Berlin. It's "a peculiar combination of political theater, performance art, a focus group and a corporate gala," according to Deutsche Welle, in which "112 participants launched a new Internet platform for promoting social issues through dialogue by answering simultaneously [the] 100 most pressing questions facing the world of today and tomorrow." "We are in the process of liberating knowledge," said one participant.
The latest Web 2.0 social network, GroupHoop, is "dedicated to enablevating an ideaspace for memes to prosper ... By interfacing directly with other web 2.0 content canvases we unlock the potential of diversity aggregation."
Having endured one user revolt, Facebook nervously discloses plans to open the online community, once reserved for college students, to all comers. The company seems intent on alienating the faithful and muddying its distinctiveness. “The point of Facebook is the exclusivity,” notes one observer. “If they don’t have that, what do they have that MySpace doesn’t have?"
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September 11, 2006
Avatars are human, too, a Stanford study of Second Life finds: "Male avatars (whether created by a man or a woman) stood further apart than female avatars, for instance, and were more likely to avert their gaze. And when an avatar gets within a few metres of another, the user reduces eye contact by moving their character to face slightly to the right or the left of the other 'person' ... Social interactions in the online virtual environments such as Second Life are governed by the same social norms as social interactions in the physical world."
Optimize magazine provides a practical guide to buying software as a service.
Tom Zeller Jr. writes on the ethics of sock-puppetry, pointing out that even Walt Whitman made use of an anonymous avatar to promote his own work.
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September 9, 2006
AOL has launched StudyBuddy as an alternative to Wikipedia, reports Frank Ahrens. The "homework-approved" site, aimed at K-12 students, says of itself: "You can rest assured that the info you are seeing is trustworthy. No more navigating to random Web sites that make you wonder if the info there is true."
A 23-year-old geek from Birmingham, England, takes on the BitTorrent pirates.
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September 8, 2006
Ebrahim Ezzy argues that "the future of computing isn't entirely web-based. It's necessary to have the desktop as the pivotal point, because the power of the desktop is important for a rich user experience - and will be, for a very long time to come." I think he's essentially correct - for productivity applications, anyway. We're entering a transitional period - the hybrid phase - in which desktop apps gain increasing web functionality while remaining desktop apps. This transitional phase will likely last ten years. The pure web-based productivity apps popping up all over the place right now are interesting, as forerunners, but doomed.
As HP's skullduggery scandal expands, Michael Schrage provides some useful context.
Facebook wisely retreats.
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September 7, 2006
Fred Stutzman explains "how Facebook broke its culture" by introducing automated feeds: "Facebook feeds are the ultimate chilling effect. If you knew everything you did was going to be broadcast to everyone you know, wouldn't you second-guess yourself more?" I've said it before, and I'll say it again: avatar anxiety is our new neurosis.
A company named Munchkin has introduced the iCrib Sound System. Because babies need iPods, too.
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September 6, 2006
A Digg fan takes a close look at the popular news site and finds that "a small 'aristocracy' controls the vast majority of the content that gets on Digg, and it means that every day it gets harder and harder for new users to have any kind of an impact." Even the cult of the amateur has its upper crust.
"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine," writes Wired's Lore Sjöberg, "and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it."
The backlash against Facebook's new feed service builds, as some students see it as a violation of their trust and their privacy: "When we join facebook, we automatically give up a little bit of our privacy. To use Facebook has always been 'socially-acceptable stalking.' Now, though, they've just gone too damned far. No one wants their girlfriend or boyfriend knowing when they've commented on a photo, written on a wall, or anything else. No one wants people to see that they've left a group; it could offend someone. No one really wants to see the change in status of someone's love life."
Paul Hartzog sees a rosy future for writers in a world of "social publishing," where "authors create and distribute their work, and readers, individually and collectively, including fans as well as editors and peers, review, comment, rank, and tag, everything." Phil Edwards sees the darker side: "My problem is that I'm not sure about the economics of it. It's not so much that writers won't write if they don't get paid - writers will write, full stop - as that writers won't eat if they don't get paid: some money has to change hands some time. If the kind of development Paul is talking about takes hold, I can imagine a range of more-or-less unintended consequences, all with different overtones but few of them, to this jaundiced eye, particularly desirable."
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September 5, 2006
Information Age reports that information technology now accounts for "a third to a half of all corporate energy consumption in the UK ... And dealing with that energy – powering, cooling and paying for it – has precipitated a crisis in many data centers."
Wikipedia reports that Microsoft has purchased Underoos, the cartoon underwear line. An Underoos-Zune mashup may be in the offing.
What happens when your avatar's personality changes are suddenly placed in a public archive? Fred Stutzman examines Facebook's controversial decision to add an "identity feed" to its service.
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September 4, 2006
At eWeek, Steven Vaughan-Nichols pooh-poohs Google Apps for Your Domain: "Beneath all the hype, beneath an incredibly awkward name, there's just a set of long-existing, perpetually beta, Internet programs ... This is not, in any way, sense or form, a Microsoft Office competitor."
Three business school professors publish the results of a survey of corporate wiki users. Most wikis, they found, are quite small, with an average of just 12 contributors. Users report that contributing to a wiki makes their work easier but has little effect on their professional status or reputation.
A New Republic senior editor finds himself in hot water after being accused of anonymously posting comments on his blog at the magazine's site.
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September 3, 2006
A new study indicates that people's interest in using their cell phones as music players is already dwindling.
In light of the release of Google Image Labeler, Tim O'Reilly gets excited about "the idea of harnessing humans to work as program components via games."
The Economist describes how the pioneers of synthetic biology are trying to take the kludginess out of life.
Writing on a Salesforce.com developer blog, Purpleprose argues that Web 2.0 represents an anarchic postmodernist rebellion against the formal modernism of Web 1.0. As with the postmodernist movement in art, the Web 2.0 movement is doomed, he says. The new will be coopted by the old, with "the rebellious quality of Web 2.0 [becoming] merely a useful marketing gimmick." At the same time, "there will be a backlash against the more anarchic, freewheeling, serendipitous aspects of Web 2.0, typified by the attitude you seen thrown around about the 'permanent beta.' Instead, users will seek a return to a more 'grounded' and 'determined' experience of the Web." He draws a practical lesson for tech firms: "Web 2.0 represents a great set of ideas and ideals, but it should never allow vendors to take their eye off the ball when it comes to quality." In a gloss on Purpleprose's post, Paddy Byers points out that Web 2.0's postmodernist ethic is in conflict with its collectivist leanings: "Much of the discussion of Web 2.0 confuses these two philosophies, swept up in the excitement of the power of collectivism and failing to spot that the postmodernist idea has been changing the landscape for a lot longer."
Designing user interfaces has long been the Achilles heel of open source software. Gervase Markham believes that may be changing.
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September 2, 2006
"Taking aim at parts of the iTunes-plus-iPod system, now that it has become a de facto standard, is unlikely to work," Richard Waters writes today, in a column on challenges to Apple's dominance in digital music. "History shows that technology leaders, once established, are seldom dethroned by direct competition. It usually takes a shift in business model, or in a technology paradigm, before that happens."
Another day, another "direct challenge." Drawing on a story broken by Reuters, Pete Cashmore writes that "in a direct challenge to Apple’s iTunes, MySpace has announced its intention to sell songs from the 3 million unsigned bands on MySpace.com." That's great news for the unsigned bands, but it's premature to call it a big threat to iTunes. In a comment on Cashmore's post, Ivan Pope puts the MySpace move in context: "I don’t see in any way that selling music from ‘3 million unsigned bands’ challenges Apple and the iPod. I mean, no DRM is great, but Apple is not about selling unsigned bands. And most of us aren’t about buying unsigned bands."
On Slashdot, chief wikipedian Jimmy Wales takes pains to argue that a new Wikipedia plan to have administrators vet page edits before posting them on the public site will make the online encyclopedia "more wiki than ever." Another Slashdot writer takes a different view: "This is a major shift, from a 'publish and fix' policy to one of prior restraint, where a cadre of privileged users will supervise what appears."
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September 1, 2006
Want to confuse a search engine? Info World reports that two NYU researchers have released TrackMeNot, a Firefox extension that, in the background while you're browsing, sends random strings of search terms to Google, Yahoo and MSN. The junk searches, according to the researchers, "hide users' actual search trails in a cloud of 'ghost' queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles."
Information Week's Thomas Claburn takes an in-depth look at how Google manages its information technology assets and staff. An interesting tidbit on the company's use of open source: "One of the things Google likes about open source software is that it facilitates secrecy. 'If we had to go and buy software licenses, or code licenses, based on seats, people would absolutely know what the Google infrastructure looks like,' DiBona says. 'The use of open source software, that's one more way we can control our destiny.'"
A manic Dana Gardner ups the 2.0 stakes: "What really deserves the numeral 2 associated with it at this time in history is not advertising, nor marketing, nor SOA, nor even the Web. It's quite a bit larger than that. What we are up to here is actually Knowledge 2.0, and it is at least a millennial trend, and it shows every indication of having anthropologic impact. That is, Knowledge 2.0 is changing the definition of what it is to be a modern human, individually and collectively." Personally, I don't think Knowledge 2.0 goes far enough. I would call it "Humanity 2.0." I would have suggested "Civilization 2.0," but I think that one's already taken by a computer game.
Andrew Orlowski interviews AQA founder Colly Myers, spurring some interesting thoughts about the flaws and the future of web search.
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August 30, 2006
"The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003," reports the New York Times. "As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s."
Google adds instant messaging, calendars, and web publishing to its existing "private label" (ie, domain-specific) email service in a bid to entice small businesses and nonprofits away from Microsoft. Here are the terms of service.
A YouTube video of a Korean guitar virtuoso moves Virginia Heffernan to "find beauty in the speed and accuracy that the new internet world demands."
The Washington Post covers the entry of news fraggers (formerly known as social bookmarkers) into the price system. Says one of the salaried elite: "I do not think this is about paying users. I consider this paying people to contribute quality content, which is not a new concept on the internet by any means."
The New Statesman finds that "suddenly corporations are all over the blogosphere."
Google's Marissa Mayer says the internet "should cause users to consume more." Finally, the truth slips out.
Writes Christopher Caldwell: "Although YouTube users describe their self-filmed offerings as creative and individualistic, viewer-generated video is unlikely to be more appealing, on average, than 'diner-generated food' would be in a restaurant. So a lot of the offerings have a corporate, even consumerist orientation. Some of YouTube’s most visited web pages are advertisements. The site is a meeting place for what Harold Rosenberg, the American art critic, called 'the herd of independent minds,' where everyone is unique in the same way."
Bill Thompson, of the BBC, looks warily at Wikipedia's emerging "architecture of control": "What makes Wikipedia special and encourages those of us who are registered with it to participate in the community is the sense that we can all make a contribution. Putting more and more steps between editing and publishing risks damaging that sense of engagement and, as a result, could rapidly diminish Wikipedia's usefulness."
Fred Stutzman looks at the natural emergence of an A List at Digg: "The assumption that Digg is purely egalitarian falls apart just as any assumption that the blogosphere is egalitarian." The rich are different from you and me; they have more links.
Unbubbly: The US IPO market remains in a deep funk, according to the latest data from Thomson Financial.
Amazon.com expands its utility computing service to encompass processing as well as storage.
An experiment in the German edition of Wikipedia points to much tighter controls over the editing of the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit."
Steve Rubel notes the rickety Ponzi scheme emerging as one of the economic drivers of Web 2.0 media: "The Web sites and blogs that cover Web 2.0 ... are largely supported by ads from startups that also are hoping to capitalize in the rising interest in online advertising." Take a look at the TechCrunch home page for a good example.
Calling digitally recorded music "atrocious," Bob Dylan says, "I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, 'Everybody's gettin' music for free.' I was like, 'Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway.'" Relax, Bob, it's good enough.
"Why is banking IT so boring now?" asks Computerworld's Mitch Betts. The "culprit," he says, is commoditization. "It's as though the industry is trying to prove Nicholas Carr right." I don't think banks are trying to prove anyone right. They're just acting in their best business interests.
An AMD executive suggests that Big Software's resistance to simplified pricing may push more companies toward open-source alternatives.
Writes Dan Farber: "... we now have evidence of an appropriately simpler, virtualized, utility computing-based future (em)powering the entire planet, reducing the insoluble complexity quotient, but exactly what constitutes this transformation and how it transpires remains to be seen." I would have said "(em)powering and/or controlling," but otherwise it's on the money.
Professional blog wrestling: Our Resident Billionaire versus Our Resident Philistine.
Steve Gillmor stops gesturing long enough to actually make some sense.
Forrester Research boss George Colony believes that replacing the term "information technology" with "business technology" would have a magic-wand effect: "If you are the head of IT, you are no better than a glorified librarian, dispensing information. In contrast, if you are the head of BT, you are shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow executives who are running the operation." It's a nice, tinkerbellish notion, but it doesn't wash. It's who you are and what you do that matter.
Salesforce.com will on Tuesday announce a new service incorporating Google's AdWords into its software for managing customer relationships, Steve Hamm reports.
Mitch Kapor describes the "spiritual experience" he had while watching a YouTube video of Suzanne Vega's avatar giving a performance in Second Life: "And all of a sudden my sense of what was real expanded a million-fold. A fundamental shift of my awareness happened." I can only imagine what's going to happen when he watches the Duran Duran gig.
John Battelle worries about the supply-side boom.
Is illiteracy the new literacy? Berkeley's Dan Perkel writes, in a paper, Cut and Paste Literacy, on MySpace profiles: "A social perspective of literacy helps show that a part of [the] problem in this framing of copying and pasting as a literacy practice is that it does not neatly fit within common educational practices. From the perspective of the social niche of traditional schooling, to copy and paste is to plagiarize, unless there is careful attribution of sources ... An 'ideological' perspective points out that even the word 'literacy' is loaded with meaning and has ideological implications." It doesn't seem quite so complicated to me.
If you stare too long at a long tail, will you go blind? asks Douglas Galbi, in so many words.
"almost every discussion in cyberspace, about cyberspace, boils down to some sort of debate about Truth-In-Packaging." I was rereading the infamous humdog rant from way back in 1994 when that line jumped out at me.
Writes Daniel Akst in the New York Times: "The digital revolution may be empowering amateurs even as it undermines the ability of blockbuster-free professionals - who often do the best work in writing, music and other fields - to make a living, since the long-tail effect is redistributing downward the scant share of rewards that the pros now enjoy." Also in the Times, Kurt Eichenwald continues his important series on the internet's dark markets.
What happens to those cute baby wikis when they grow up? They turn into bureaucracies, as Andrew McAfee discovers. (I'm with the wikipedian on this one. Enterprise 114.12.2.0, maybe. Enterprise 2.0? C'mon.)
Alex Bunardzic makes the case for throwaway software.
Kent Newsome gently dismantles a house of cards.
Stowe Boyd critiques my Great Unread post and some of the reactions to it. I'm going to withhold the "amen," though, however charmingly innocent the fraud of his penultimate paragraph.
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