February 2003

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February 28, 2003

Knowledge isn't power

Knowledge isn't power, says Xerox... Unless it's shared: "The idea that knowledge is power has been knocked on the head by researchers who claim that high-performing employees are more likely to be ones who proactively share information with their colleagues." Rachel Fielding at vnunet.com.

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50 Cent, In Da Club

fiftycent.jpg

In my crowd, pop music was always a guilty pleasure, but groove elitism is impractical. Yeah, you can love Ornette Coleman but sometimes you have to jump up and down, sometimes you get stinko and make out in the cloak room. Sometimes you want the beats. And these days are good days for beats. Who wouldn't want to escape? So I hunkered down today and listened to XM Radio's Top 20 on 20, an around the clock top 20 countdown driven by user requests and online voting. This week's most popular song, according to Billboard, was rapper 50 Cent's song "In Da Club":

You can find me in the club, bottle full of bub
Look mami I got the X if you into taking drugs
I'm into having sex, I ain't into making love
So come give me a hug if you into to getting rubbed

Lyrics do matter I suppose, but rarely have I heard something in which the voice was such a rhythm instrument. Sharing the upper part of 20 on 20 are Russian teen pseudo-lesbians t.A.T.u., some Belgian eurodance from Lasgo, and DJ Telepopmisik. Beats beat war any day.

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February 27, 2003

Content Management Tools Fail

Content Management Tools Fail: "Today, more than 60 percent of companies that have deployed Web content management solutions still find themselves manually updating their sites," writes Jupiter Research analyst Matthew Berk. Writes Erin Joyce: "The report found the bulk of companies surveyed felt they overspent on content management platforms, and the tools in those platforms are under-deployed."

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February 26, 2003

Tomoye One of the Fast 50

I'm happy to announce that my old friends at Tomoye Corporation have been named to Fast Company's Fast 50, "individuals and teams whose achievements helped change their companies or society."

Tomoye's flagship product, Simplify (which I'm proud to say I contributed to) is the world's leading platform for communities of practice, used to share ideas within the World Bank.

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February 25, 2003

Total War

A fascinating column by Brian Whitaker of the Guardian. One concept that is floating around these days among neo-conservative pundits is total war. Quoting Michael Ledeen in the National Review Online: "Limited war pits combatants against combatants, while total war pits nation against nation, and even culture against culture." Writes Whitaker, "the real point is not whether such ideas are mad, it is the amount of influence that they have on policy." He goes on to write about the media relations agency that helps get these ideas out to the public and decision makers.

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Are you happy with what the World Wide Web has turned out so far?

From the Tim Berners-Lee FAQ: Are you happy with what the World Wide Web has turned out so far?

That is a big question. I am very happy at the incredible richness of material on the Web, and in the diversity of ways in which it is being used. There are many parts of the original dream which are not yet implemented. For example, very few people have an easy, intuitive tool for putting their thoughts into hypertext. And many of the reasons for, and meaning of, links on the web is lost. But these can and I think will change.

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February 22, 2003

Evan Williams could not be reached for comment

Evan Williams could not be reached for comment. "Evan Williams, Pyra's co-founder, blogged his day-to-day life for the last three years right up until it got interesting. Williams pulled his blog offline earlier this week." Leander Kahney at Wired asks Why Did Google Want Blogger? and thinks it has something to do with that slippery idea of a semantic Web.

Posted by John at 4:54 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 20, 2003

From U.S., the ABC's of Jihad

From U.S., the ABC's of Jihad: "In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation... The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books..."

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If It Happened Here

If It Happened Here - A bioterrorism attack on Los Angeles might look a lot like this: "On Wednesday, March 5, 2003, around 5:30 P.M., a single-engine Cessna 172 passes over the Santa Monica Mountains, just west of the 405 freeway, heading southeast at 3,500 feet. Over the next 10 minutes it will fly over Brentwood, LAX, Hawthorne, Torrance and Long Beach. Because it will stay carefully in the prescribed north-south transit corridor through the Los Angeles Special Flight Rules Area and squawk code 1201 on the transponder; air traffic control will pay no attention to the plane, and the pilot won't be required to file a flight plan or identify himself in any way."

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moblogging

Mobile weblogging, or moblogging: "New tools like Manywhere Moblogger, Wapblog and FoneBlog allow bloggers to post information about the minutiae of their lives from anywhere, not just from a PC... What distinguishes Kablog from other moblogging software is that it does not use e-mail or text messaging for updating weblogs. Other programs such as FoneBlog enable users to e-mail posts from a cell phone or PDA to a server, which uploads the entry onto a site. Kablog lets those who use Movable Type as their weblogging software log directly onto their sites for updating." From Peter Rojas at Wired News.

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February 19, 2003

Quicksilver

Neal Stephenson's new novel, Quicksilver, is due out March 7: "I've written every word of it so far with fountain pen on paper. Part of the theory was that it would make me less long-winded, but it hasn't actually worked. I think it has improved the quality of the actual work somewhat, simply because it is actually easier to edit something on paper than on screen."

Posted by John at 9:23 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Welcome to Earth: meet the leaders

"Welcome to Earth: meet the leaders" - There is an interesting post on Metafilter linking to an email proportedly written by New York Newsday journalist (and sort-of blogger) Laurie Garrett, candidly describing her experience attending the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. The email was personal and not meant for publication but ended up being forwarded around and posted on discussion lists. Was the email real? Mefites tore it apart, finding inaccuracies here and there, but I thought the missive rang true given what I know about How Things Work. And there was some good discussion. Things became interesting when Garrett wrote Mefite Beagle indicating that the email was from her, but was not meant for public discussion. She also chastised the Metafilter community: "Do you actually believe, as you type your random thoughts in such Internet settings, that you are participating in Civilization? In Democracy? In changing your world?" While I cannot disagree with any admonition to participate more fully in the world around us, it's pretty clear we're hearing the sound a priviliaged journalist's ego makes when it crashes to the ground.

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February 18, 2003

John's loose nuke problem

John Robb on his Radio Weblog writes: "There is a strategy problem that defines this potential war that is worth exploring. It is what I call John's "loose nuke problem." .... In this new strategy problem we are faced with a model scenario where through military or political inaction (or misapplied action), NYC is destroyed by a terrorist nuke. The question becomes: should we change the regime in Iraq to reduce the chance of a nuke claiming 3 m NYC victims? What if the risk was reduced by 20%? How big of a risk is it? This is a complex calculus. The calculations stretch beyond Iraq. What if fighting a war with N. Korea will cost 1 m lives. Would it be worth it to fight the war to save 3m lives in NYC? As you can see, this gets very complex and very dangerous very quickly."

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NewsIsFree supports publish-subscribe

NewsIsFree supports publish-subscribe: "Now the excellent NewsIsFree network, spearheaded by Mike Krus, a gutsy Frenchman who's always up for something new, includes a element in their RSS feeds and if you subscribe to those feeds, and if you're not behind a firewall or NAT, you can get instant news from those sources, not just at the top of the hour."

Posted by John at 4:15 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Reed's Law

That Sneaky Exponential - Beyond Metcalfe's Law to the Power of Community Building: "Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet, is known for pointing out that the total value of a communications network grows with the square of the number of devices or people it connects. This scaling law, along with Moore's Law, is widely credited as the stimulus that has driven the stunning growth of Internet connectivity. Because Metcalfe's law implies value grows faster than does the (linear) number of a network's access points, merely interconnecting two independent networks creates value that substantially exceeds the original value of the unconnected networks... But many kinds of value are created within networks. While many kinds of value grow proportionally to network size and some grow proportionally to the square of network size, I've discovered that some network structures create total value that can scale even faster than that. Networks that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size, i.e. much more rapidly than Metcalfe's square law. I will call such networks Group-Forming Networks, or GFNs."

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February 17, 2003

Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content

Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content by long-time weblogger, Biz Stone, is a well-reviewed (average, five stars) handbook for getting the most out of your blog.

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February 16, 2003

Google Buys Blogger

Google has just purchased Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger. Google bought the online Usenet archive Deja.com a few years ago. If it had been Yahoo! instead, Deja might simply have been re-branded and the service left pretty much as it was. But Google used Deja only as the foundation for the service they eventually wanted to create. Google never used the Deja search software, and the six years of Usenet posts was beefed up to twenty, creating a much more useful and comprehensive archive. I would expect something similar from Google. Right now the search engine provides a number of specialized searches along with their general Web service, and a think a blog search to be the most likely new feature. It may well be that Google is as interested in the Blogger API as anything else. What I imagine as the end result of this is a cross between Weblogs.com, Daypop, and the current Google News... but we'll see soon enough.

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February 14, 2003

"That's just not a serious poll"

"That's just not a serious poll." How strange and bad have things become? Last night on CNN's Crossfire there was some discussion concerning the recent Channel 4 News poll in which the British public identified the United States as a bigger threat to world peace than Iraq or North Korea. The quote is from Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and represents the new breed of delusional ignorance, too often masked by a xenophobic, righteous rage. Yes, Senator, that is really what a lot of citizens of your staunchest ally think. You will find similar numbers all over Europe and, yes, in Canada. What will it take for someone to ask, Why?

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Do aid agencies and their counterparts learn from their experiences?

Do aid agencies and their counterparts learn from their experiences? "16 articles... in which professionals with long experience of working with development assistance, inside and outside donor and recipient agencies, present their personal reflections and ideas about learning, with examples from rural China to the World Bank headquarter in Washington. Five factors are singled out as particularly prominent constraints on organisational learning in the field of development co-operation..." Learning to Make Policy - Working Papers from Kenneth King and Simon McGrath, including "Towards knowledge-based aid" and "Knowledge-based aid - a 4 agency comparative study." Both from Joke van Veen.

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AOL to support blogging?

Blogging for dollars: "If recent rumours are to be believed, AOL is getting ready in the next month or so to add blogging to the home-page services it offers users." From Jim McClellan at theage.com.au.

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Afghanistan omitted from US aid budget

So much for rebuilding Afghanistan: "The United States Congress has stepped in to find nearly $300m in humanitarian and reconstruction funds for Afghanistan after the Bush administration failed to request any money in this latest budget." From the BBC.

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February 12, 2003

Intolerance on the Left?

Intolerance on the left: "Even as other members of the democratic left have denounced the hardcore Maoists and Stalinists behind much recent antiwar organizing, Michael Lerner, the dovish San Francisco rabbi and editor of the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun, has defended the role of sectarians in the movement. When members of his congregation complained about the stridently anti-Israel rhetoric at demonstrations sponsored by ANSWER, a front group for the Workers World party, he urged them to turn out anyway, and Tikkun sent busloads of people to both Washington and San Francisco... So Lerner was understandably outraged to learn that he'd been banned from speaking at the San Francisco rally ANSWER is co-sponsoring on Sunday. The reason for his banishment remains murky."

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February 9, 2003

The Myth of the New Economy

"'New Economy' is just a buzzword," Mukul Krishna, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan, told the E-Commerce Times. "When you try to make decisions based on buzzwords, it's not [saying] much about your future prospects."

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Camille Paglia on why Bush think twice about rushing to war with Iraq

Camille Paglia on why Bush think twice about rushing to war with Iraq: "I tried to be open-minded about Bush's case for war. I waited for him to present the evidence for an imminent threat to the U.S. But months passed, and they hemmed and hawed. It was words, words, words. Do they think the American people are fools? That we can't be trusted to understand a casus belli? There was a shiftiness, a sleight of hand, a kind of blustery bravado and smugness: "Well, we know, but we just can't tell you, because it would compromise national security." Give me a break -- we're about to go to war and kill or maim thousands of innocent people. Americans will die too. And they couldn't lay all their cards on the table?"

Posted by John at 8:35 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

February 8, 2003

Phantom Cosmonauts

'SOS to the whole world': On 28 November 1960 Italy's Judica-Cordiglia brothers received what they claimed was this cryptic Morse code message from space. The source? A cosmonaut who had inadvertently rocketed into a translunar trajectory, weeks before the supposed first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. This "phantom cosmonaut" is only one among many created by disinformation and hoax during the secretive Space Race.

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Lysistrata Project

The Lysistrata Project - A Theatrical Act of Dissent: "On Monday, March 3rd, 2003, the first-ever world-wide theatrical event for peace will happen in a city near you... Attend or help plan a reading of Lysistrata, Aristophanes' anti-war comedy, to protest the rush to war on Iraq. Many of the readings will benefit non-profit organizations working for peace and humanitarian aid in Iraq."

Posted by John at 10:39 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

identity and the internet

The Metafilter discussion of the veracity! of What a Cute! got me thinking about the topic of "fake" weblogs. I notice no one is keeping a list anywhere. How many identities online are overtly constructed, I wonder?

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