Internet chat is compelling enough to overcome the fact that there are "four solitudes" of proprietary standards: AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and ICQ. Unlike the Web or email, there are no open Internet standards for chat, resulting in a situation that is something akin to having four separate telephone systems that don't connect to one another.

Oddly enough, this hasn't limited the popularity of chat applications, with America Online's Instant Messenger being the big consumer choice, ICQ the selection of those who might think of themselves as more tech savy, and Yahoo's chat with a significant following as well.

The problem, of course, is that anyone who really wants to be connected and available in all four services has to have four different clients open. All those open apps do use up resources; on top of a confusing interface, ICQ in particular seems to seems to leak memory all over the place. Technically, connecting to AOL's network should be simple enough, and building an application to access more than one chat network is possible. Attempts in 1999 by Microsoft to have their Messanger connect to AOL IM network resulted in a cat and mouse game of blocked access until Microsoft finally gave up. One has been forced to choose a favorite system, and this is exactly what leading IM network AOL wants.

The result for me was using all the chat clients a lot less, since it was something I should be able to have running in the background all the time. I might prefer ICQ, but my staff uses Yahoo! and our consultants use AOL.

Enter Trillian, a chat client that connects to the "big four," along with Internet Relay Chat (IRC). I've been using for about a month, and in that time I have chatted more often and with more people than probably in all of the past six months combined. The interface is clean and easy to use, and Trillian's feature set and added functionalities are great, like the URL Grabber that keeps Web addresses people have IMed you.

So it should come as no shock that AOL has tried to block Trillian from accessing its network. The makers of Trillian, Cerulean Studios, has released two upgrades in as many days to regain access to AOL; as of this writing, I can still connect to AOL IM through the software.

The problem, of course, is that chat was allowed to become a proprietary protocol. There should be an open standard for chat, just like there is for Web and email, allowing the various clients to fight it out based on feature set and reliability. When AOL merged with Time-Warner, there should have been a requirement that they open up their network, but the US Federal Trade Commission did nothing.

Posted by John at 7:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

14249 » January 28 2:37 PM. News actuality from September 11th, 2001, from the Television Archive. Live coverage includes programming from ABC, BBC, CBC Newsworld, NBC, NTV Moscow, and China Central Television. [MetaFilter]

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CamWorld writes: "The Case Against Knowledge Management. Hmmmm. I think that gathering knowledge is the first step. Then you need to filter it. And only then do you distribute it. Maybe the whole Knowledge Management field needs to coin some more specific phrases: knowledge filtering, knowledge aggregation, knowledge syndication, knowledge sharing, etc."

Posted by John at 6:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tim Berners-Lee on Microsoft's Latest Browser Tricks: "When I see any Web site claim to be only readable using particular hardware or software, I cringe - they are pining for the bad old days when each piece of information need a different program to access it."

Posted by John at 12:48 PM | Permalink

Some interesting search tools at Tools.Komlenic.com: search Yahoo! Briefcases, Apache directories, and the FreeDB CD info database. He should write more.

Posted by John at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chris Casciano, Your CSS Bores Me: "Is it just me or are you starting to equate CSS with simple 2 or 3 layout content sites, too? After searching the web long and hard I found very few uses of CSS above and beyond formatting body copy. Why haven't designers begun exploiting the benefits of style sheets yet?"

Posted by John at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Psychology of Weblogs: "Most weblogs are drivel, banal shit written by angst-ridden teenagers and adults sharing feelings, thoughts, and mind-numbing details about their daily lives that provide little insight into anything or anyone. But the gems can be found amongst the long-since abandoned or forgotten sites. These gems are personality- driven. That is, the person or persons writing for them are genuinely interesting. They are storytellers."

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It's the Ben Brown Show. Check out the sponsor.

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James K. Galbraith on Enron: "The scandal is essentially simple. A handful of rich people, closely tied to the Texas Republican Party led by Gov. George W. Bush and Sen. Phil Gramm, decided to become richer still."

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I was cleaning out an old links folder today getting a lot of 404s from the 1990s, and came across myweb.wco.com; it is something like a big abandoned building, but this story about someone's truck.

Posted by John at 6:11 PM | Permalink

Online Journalism Review on the Rise and Fall of Plastic.com: "Today, there's just Carl. Carl, who was never really a part of Automatic Media, has become Plastic's sole proprietor. ... Gone are the affiliates. Gone are Feed and Suck. Gone are Steven Johnson and John Aboud and Joey Anuff. Gone are the 'Web's smartest editors.' Gone are the latter trappings of Plastic -- a wounded and limping thing that loaded with all the speed of a cheddar log making its way through Strom Thurmond-the paypal beg boxes and the Karma contests. Gone, is Automatic Media's old office in New York. Once the uber-hub of uber-cool uberuberistic media hyperbole, it's now a Pilates studio."

Posted by John at 12:54 PM | Permalink

I could do without another night of bad dreams about a certain ex.

Posted by John at 7:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Shouts to Donna of existential dishwasher, currently fighting the good fight at CKDU-FM, my vox matris in Halifax, still using the logo I designed in 1988. Funding Drive is starting today, and I remember the first one: some spinners sitting around thinking that no one was going to call in, and how wrong that turned out to be.

Posted by John at 7:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Peter Gzowski died today. It is a name that every Canadian knows, yet few outside the country have ever heard of. He hosted the three-hour CBC Radio morning programme Morningside for fifteen years, starting in 1982, and it might as well have been my whole life. The show was, for all intents and purposes, something like a common space for English Canada, a place on the air to listen and be heard. And saying that doesn't do it justice.

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I forgot to shave again today. I must look scraggly.

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David Winer on the AOL-Microsoft lawsuit: "Skimming yesterday's Scripting News I see a comment from a law professor saying that AOL must have been quite unhappy with the Microsoft settlement. I wanted to say this. I was quite unhappy with it too. It leaves Web developers at the mercy of Microsoft. Not a great place to be. This medium is the new broadcast system. Imagine if there were one radio receiver manufacturer, not the company that invented radios, not one with any passion or philosophy about what radio is, or what it can be. Assume it's even worse -- radio was a diversion for them. They resent it. "Back to our regularly scheduled program" -- which isn't radio at all. If you were a radio lover would you be happy with a settlement that allowed them to continue to dismantle it?"

Posted by John at 1:15 PM | Permalink

Spyware, In a Galaxy Near You. Anyone who has downloaded file-sharing software from Audio Galaxy recently may also have downloaded an insidious program that tracks your surfing, delivers pop-up ads and maybe even gathered credit card information. By Jeffrey Benner. [Wired News]

Posted by John at 1:02 PM | Permalink

Edward Cone in Wired on The Naked Truth of the online porn business is 2002: "[Cybererotica principal Ron] Levi pities anyone dreaming about breaking into porn these days. 'When we started in late '95, our conversions were about 1 of 20. Now our average is 1 of 200," he says. "If you started now in this business with $5 million and didn't make a single mistake, I still don't know if you'd make it."

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Jason Scott of textfiles.com is doing a documentary about computer bulletin boards. There is a story about it at Salon.com.

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the most visible effort so far by the music biz to get into the digital music space, Pressplay launched yesterday, and it may end up being the textbook case for how not to do digital music distribution.

Remember that two years ago, Napster was proof of concept for peer-to-peer media distribution. While no royalties were paid to artists and a business model was never really tested, from the consumer acceptance side Napster was a huge success. What Napster did that was so important was shift the infrastructure burden for media distribution from the industry to the consumer.

How did the wise men of the music industry respond? They killed Napster dead, and now the kids are flocking to the harder-to-control Morpheus, and royalties are still not being paid.

Pressplay is quite a bit different than Napster. First of all, there significant limits on what can be downloaded. Music files live only as long as one remains subscribed to the service. One can burn tracks to a CD, but we're limited to at most 20 tracks a month, and no more than two of those tracks can be from the same CD. Downloads are also limited, depending on the plan, and cannot be transferred to a portable MP3 player.

Pressplay may, in fact, be designed to fail. CD sales are declining, perhaps because of the popularity of the MP3 format the music CD may be at the end of its product cycle. Perhaps the industry wants to recast digital music as more expensive and harder to use than the traditional CD.

Posted by John at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blogger Pro will be released in some form this week, and was demoed last night at the Weblogger Interest Group meeting in Mountain View.

Posted by John at 11:07 AM | Permalink

I think Blogger has surprised everyone. The personal publishing tool doesn't really do very much: just store a chronilogical list of postings and FTP them to the Web host of the user's choice. But in an era of complex Web creation tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver, Blogger is finding a very broad audience by shifting the task of creating a Web site from coding and HTML authoring to simply creating content. Weblogs and blogging software existed before Blogger, but it and similar personal content management systems have brought Web publishing to a much wider audience.

The challenge for Blogger now is sustainability. Pyra has to keep their servers running, update the software, pay for bandwidth, and worry about security, but have no business model that I can see. It will be interesting to see if the future belongs to hosted services like Blogger, or commercial client software like Radio Userland.

Posted by John at 5:24 PM | Permalink

Amazon.com has posted its first ever quarterly profit. As Cameron has pointed out a few times, Amazon's accounting has been a little shady over the years, and there was some concern that the retailer's expected fourth quarter profit might be created by smoke and mirrors. I also remember in the mid-1990s that there were similar concerns about America Online and the way it calculated the costs of sales, among other things, and look how that turned out.

Posted by John at 12:54 PM | Permalink

Crisis of the (Virtual) Commons: News websites -- where discussion boards and chat allow readers (at least in theory) to question the official record, bicker with columnists, or offer dissenting political views -- should be where democratic discourse is at its most vibrant.

Posted by John at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NY Times: "Now, Amazon.com, once the champion the strategy of 'get big fast,' has learned how to become small."

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Given the current circumstances, it seemed natural for me to revisit the world of massively multi-player online role-playing games, or MMORPG. In the early 1990s I spent some time on MUDs, text-based environments where one built simple machines, changed the environment, and socialized. In 1997 Greg and I played 3DO's Meridian 59 (which still seems to be around), the first graphical MMORPG and a rather brutal affair.

I am again exploring our most popular MMRPG, Everquest, after a gap of more than two years. When EQ was released in 1999, it was a ground-breaking game that could be great deal of fun. But the culture of EQ has become dominated by a hardcore gaming attitude to which I'm not attracted. There is really only one way to play EQ: engage in a repetitive cycle of hunting, looting, and selling. Level advancement, the heart of the game, is slow going, requiring hours of usually tedious play time for each level. One has kill what seems like a horde of exactly the same monster in exactly the same way. And as interesting as some of Everquest's environments can be, they still have an empty, stage-like quality to them, in which stand mute, robotic non-player characters.

I expect the next breakthrough in MMORPG will be to create a game that is as flexible as a MUD using current 3D graphics. The real challenge will be to create something that behaves more like a platform than a game. Shadowbane, a new MMORPG now in beta testing that will allow players to establish cities, form alliances with other cities, and create buildings, might be the next step in this direction.

Posted by John at 8:47 AM | Permalink

Web services raise security, privacy concerns, Dan Gillmor, SJ Mercury: "We'll have a programmable Web that lives up to its early promise as a multi-directional, writable medium, not the generally read-only collection of pages we have today. But the attraction dims in the light of some fundamental questions, the answers to which remain far too unclear."

Posted by John at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is no secret to getting traffic for a personal Web site. The cliche is that content is king, but certain kinds of content rule others like miserable dictators. In order, I would suggest sex, nudity, pirated music, pirated software, and information about hacking, followed by an ever-changing mix of pop culture subjects of interest to teenagers and children, currently seeming to include the World Wrestling Federation, Dragon Ball Z, Britney Spears, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter.

My most recent affirmation of these facts came about when I reformatted and reposted some fascinating articles written by Luke Ford about the history of pornography. Ford maintained a site at lukeford.com which provided the closest thing to stream of consciousness coverage of happenings in the porn business one could imagine. This work was, I suppose, the substance of notes he made for his book A History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film. These "notes," which are more akin to free-flowing essays than anything, are probably the best stuff online dealing with the history of the adult industry; they are accessible and meaty both, and probably better for lacking in the trappings of current contemporary criticism. Ford seemed both obsessed with porn and disgusted with his obsession; he had no qualms about relaying nasty gossip about this or that starlet, and at the same time covered his pages with numerous banner ads for adult sites.

Last year under pressure from his religious community Ford decided to give up his research and his site and move to Israel. Initially his new Web at lukeford.net seemed to focus on Israeli politics and religious issues, but checking it today I see that Ford straying back to California and writing again about the succulent nastiness of the entertainment business. Ford sold lukeford.com to someone or other in the adult industry who kept the meaty content but replaced the gossip with schilling; traffic is traffic after all, and in online porn traffic is the foundation of profit. Ford's essays and notes are still there but aren't getting updated, and always seem out of place among the banners for "raunchy sluts." So I rescued them, did some reformatting, and mirrored them to my site.

Imagine my shock then to find that when one searches at Google for "history of porn" or "history of pornography" my site is at the top of the list. The revenue potential is, of course, obvious, but I'll let the opportunity slip by, this time.

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What is the worst sex scene of all time in Canadian literature? Sandra Martin of the Globe and Mail writes it is Leonard Cohen in Beautiful Losers: "Oh what a greasy tower he there massaged!. . .His right hand beneath the steering wheel, urging, urging, he seemed to be pulling himself into the far black harbour like a reflexive stevedore. . .F's eyes closed suddenly as if they had been squirted with lemon. . ."

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There was and is a band named A Flock of Seagulls. In the early-1980s they had about as much New Wave cache as the Thompson Twins: something like the right haircuts, but too poppy, sneaking in there with the post-Marsh and Ware Human League. In Pulp Fiction, Samuel L. Jackson blows away a dealer he calls "Flock of Seagulls," at least subtextually because he hates his Flock of Seagulls-style floppy pompadour.

This year, 2002, and a television spot for Diet Pepsi: a middle-aged man business-looking man with thinning hair says he wants the same hair he had in high school, so we hear A Flock of Seagulls ("I Ran" I think) and he now has the waterfall style of lead singer Mike Score, playing tennis, in a meeting, and at the end concluding he'll stick with what he has. All quite silly, but scary for me is that "I Ran" was a hit in 1982, the year I graduated high school, and I look nothing like the guy in the ad, though I imagine I am supposed to.

This is for me: not Britney, but A Flock of Seagulls and someone's thinning hair.

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American-born sumo wrestler Yokozuna Akebono retired from the sport Sepetember 29th 2001 in Kokogikan, Japan. An excellent photo essay talks about a few of the more than 300 people who were scheduled to help cut off Akebono's topknot, a bit about the history of Sumo, and why he needs eight men to help him with the belt tying ceremony. Also a few good photographs of another American-born Yokozuna, Musashimaru, and one Japanese one, Takanohana.

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Plot to undermine global pollution controls revealed: "A secret group of developed nations conspired to limit the effectiveness of the UN's first conference on the environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. The existence of this cabal, known as the Brussels group, is revealed in 30-year-old British government records that were kept secret until this week."

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An AOL Guide for Webmasters: "AOL has developed this site for webmasters. If you are seeking basic web information, please use the links on the left to learn more about the World Wide Web... If you are a webmaster for an AOL Web Partner or want to enhance your site for AOL members, the links on the left will assist you. AOL members account for a large portion of Internet traffic. Working with us to develop a great web site that works with our browser and caching system is to your advantage as well as ours. Our goal is to ensure that our members experience your site just as you envision."

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"Digital Web Magazine is an online magazine intended for professional web designers. The magazine consists primarily of work contributed by web artists and authors, as well as by others who occasionally delve into the realm of web design. We put emphasis on and provide recognition for contributed work. The Magazine is recognized by nearly all of the major web design agencies in the industry."

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Curt Cloninger, lab404, Understanding the Web as Media: "why the dot com bomb? Lots of reasons. One reason is: We were trying so furiously to make the medium do what we wanted it to do, few of us stopped to ask, 'What is the web good for? What can the web do that other media can't do? What can the web NOT do that other media CAN do?' In other words, what are the unique media characteristics of the web? What are its inherent strengths and weaknesses? How does the web 'fit in' with existing media? Let's answer some of these questions... "

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"Agitprop is an experimental space featuring items of interest to Web developers, particularly with regard to typographical design support. Writes Owen Briggs: agitprop ... todd fahrner's seminal writings on css and text styling on the web. anyone who even pretends to design websites should read this stuff several times over."

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Owen Briggs presents "a Problem & Workaround Set for a series of CSS Boxes going from a simple single box, through 3 columns with a full width top box, all with variations... There are also some relevant content placement issues that affect box positioning, a little gem of a bg image problem or two, and my own explanation of what it's all about."

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Ancient World Web and Weblog: "This site can not and does not index all resources relating to things ancient on the web. That would be impossible, as sites appear and disappear with astonishing rapidity. There is an astounding amount of information about some topics out there (not all of it accurate or useful), and next to nothing about others. Please bear that in mind as you use the sources you find on-line. Just because one person says something doesn't make it true (or accepted as true)."

Posted by John at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rogers @ Home (or whatever they are calling it now) has failed me again. Tuesday morning I turned on the computer and the lights blink on the cable modem but the connection never materialized. Over the past few months the connection has generally been good; when the service does drop off, it is usually back up within a few minutes. This time, it didn't happen, and I waited until 4 pm to call Rogers. The first support fellow told me to fiddle with the Windows IP configuration utility, which I did with no positive result. I called again, and the next guy suggested that perhaps my network card wasn't working, or that the Ethernet cable was bad. I tried a new cable, then the other PC in my office, but the symptoms were the same.

'Why did it take you so long to check the cable?' asked tech support. I paused. 'Well, I was upstairs,' I said, thinking, Why do I have to explain this to this fellow? Is he getting paid by the call? But I know they have a terribly tough job: poor pay and not enough training.

In the end, I suggested that given the symptoms there might be something wrong with the cable modem, and a technician will, I am told, be coming by Thursday evening. I am considering switching to Magma's DSL, however; there have been too many problems with Rogers, not the least of which was the recent email transition, and Magma seems cool with running a Linux server, something I have wanted to do for awhile.

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