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Underway in Ireland
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31 August 2002 |
It's handy to have a way to sniff around your WiFi network and Airtouch Networks War Driving Kit makes it easy to do by using a laptop for security auditing on wireless LANs. All kits currently include sniffing software, 802.11b radio NIC, and antenna. Airtouch sells different versions of the kit with varying antennas types. The Enthusiast Kit comes with a medium power, car-mountable, omni-directional antenna. Other versions include the Beginner Kit ($299), which comes with a lower power omni- directional antenna, and the Pro Kit ($499), that includes a higher power, car- mountable omni-directional antenna.
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KILKENNY, Ireland -- Why would so many people want to offer up their thoughts in a randomly wired Internet Commons? In Sebastian Paquet's ongoing quest to understand why personal knowledge publishing is becoming especially popular with certain professions, it occurred "that people in these professions have another thing in common: they generally have little to hide, and sharing improves the quality of their work output." Stephen Downes thinks "educators play the same sort of role in society as journalists. They are aggregators, assimilators, analysts and advisors." They are middle links in an ecosystem, or as John Hiler puts it, parasites on information produced by others. And they are being impacted by alternative forms of learning in much the same way, for much the same reasons. We're all part of an Information Food Chain.
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30 August 2002 |
Berkshire Hathaway -- "... the marketplace...is competitive and if you don't have an advantage, your returns will eventually be average or worse."
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DIVE INTO MARK -- Proven true. Michael Barrish: Story. "I’ve long believed that we each have a story, often unknown to us, that we try all our lives to prove true. It can usually be summarized in five words or less." [ed: I am who I am when I was 10.]
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29 August 2002 |
Apparatuses, methods, and computer programs for displaying information
on signsLeonid Fridman filed US Patent 20020112026 on 15 August 2002 to claim
rights related to the display of information on signs. The number of
showings desired for different messages within corresponding remaining time
periods is used in selecting which message to show at a given time and/or
location. The showings can be on public displays, including vehicle mounted
displays. The number of desired exposures remaining for a message can be
based on an estimate of the number of people or types of people reached by
its prior showings. Such estimates can be based on information derived from
sensors near the time and place of the prior showings and/or from
less-real-time, previously derived data relating to such times and places.
Which message is selected for a given time and/or place can be based on the
relative degree to which viewership attributes desired for the showing of
different messages match attributes associated with the given time and/or
location.
http://www.iol.ie
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Internet appliance for interactive audio/video display using a remote control unit for user input On 20 June 2002, Imran Sharif filed Patent 20020078445 for a network access device which uses a standard video display to show functional choices and network content received from the Internet to a user. The user directs the functional operation of the network access device with a simple reduced keyset remote control unit having a relatively small number of keys similar to a consumer remote control used for television receivers and video recorders. The control choices are displayed to the user in a unique format with elements associated to characters corresponding to the same characters in the reduced keyset. The display format uses several display areas, some of which can be designated as input focus areas, any one of which can be active at a given time. The device affords low cost ready access to the informational capabilities of the Internet for users at all skill levels by eliminating a full text keyboard and a mouse.
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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association Standards Board has approved IEEE 1484.12.1, Standard for Learning Object Metadata which is the first learning content standard released by an accredited standards organization. The standard makes it easier to find, evaluate and share learning objects (i.e., the content of education and training programs) and ensures that objects in one system are understood readily in other systems.
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 MINOR DAMAGE.com -- The defacement crew used a little humour when replacing the RIAA front page with subtle pieces of commentary.
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AARDVARK.at -- I think the recording industry is full of muppets. Horst Prillinger thinks so too. Prompted by a story in The Register, which attempts to shed a more realistic light on the record companies' complaints that they've done everything right and it's the evil Internet that is causing their shrinking revenues. In actuality, the RIAA has deliquesced artists' revenues by shortsighted confrontational tactics that constrain the listening habits of music advocates. They deserve to experience a downturn in CD sales, since they have lost touch with their buying public.
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WASHINGTON POST.com -- A series of setbacks and difficulties have kept for-profit, online higher education spin-offs from realizing success. Ventures at schools including Columbia University and New York University have been scaled back or dropped. UMUC Online, the online project of the University of Maryland University College, was scrapped last fall. But many involved in such initiatives still believe in the potential for online higher education. Gerald A. Heeger, the president of UMUC and champion of UMUC Online, thinks that online learning can actually be better than traditional, residential education. Matthew Pittinsky, chairman of Blackboard, said that for every failed venture there are five that succeed. Adam Newman of Eduventures said that the industry has seen a "retrenchment" that focuses online initiatives where they can succeed, such as in supplements to traditional classes.
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28 August 2002 |
BLOGSTREET.com -- Based on their (number of) inward links, the world's top blogs include Dave Winer's Scripting News (972), the geek community's Slash Dot (653), and the community blogMetafilter (648).
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27 August 2002 |
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WIRED.com -- Developers at Wake Forest University have written software that turns a Compaq iPaq PDA into a mobile, wireless Web server, allowing teachers and students to communicate in new ways in the classroom. While many schools have experimented with PDAs in the classroom -– using them as a substitute for laptop computers, for instance -– PocketClassroom could increase communication between students and teachers during class.
x:153 >> downloadable app
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| Here's an underinformed reporter, who listened to a single account, and wrote a malformed story. The piece conflates many innocuous trends into rampaging, wardriving, warchalking crackers, roaming the streets. Thankfully, Cory Doctorow sets things straight.
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| After scrambling around copyright and trademark challenges for most of its existence, F***edCompany.com feels the heat from Ford Motor and the Associated Press.
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26 August 2002 |
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24 August 2002 |
I couldn't have a job because that would stop my grant.
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| THURLES, Co Tipperary -- The small town of Thurles is more famous for its hurling team than for its job culture. Yet there are equally famous principles in Thurles that form the basis of 21st century Ireland. Take the concept of residents getting real jobs -- something that local politicians hope would happen to dampen the raging unemployment that typifies this area. After working with dozens of twentysomethings from North Tipperary, I've little success when trying to instill an entrepreurial desire in local people. "Now I couldn't have a job because that would stop my grant," was today's comment. So in one breath, a recent college graduate took up position in the dole queue, right behind another family member who confidently led the way to another generation of State support. This attitude comes on the heels of figures from the World Economic Forum on Competitiveness that shows Ireland has fallen from 11th place in 2001 to 14th in 2002. EU performance figures reveal Ireland is mediocre. You get more for your international investment in China or India. Low-end ICT jobs will be sucked out of Ireland for other places in the global marketplace. The biggest reason this will happen -- rising wage demands in Ireland. And the only way to stave off this inevitability is for real commitments from employees and company directors.
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CHRONICLE.com -- The Alliance for Lifelong Learning, a nonprofit distance education company run by Stanford University, the University of Oxford, and Yale University, has a new name and is open to the public. Now called AllLearn, the company's courses were formerly only open to alumni of the three supporting universities. The venture, similar to Columbia University's Fathom project, will make about 50 distance courses available. Tuition for each course is $250, and each course will last between five and ten weeks. A spokeswoman from AllLearn said the group always intended to make the program available to the public. Others claim the decision evinced the venture was not as successful as its founders had hoped.
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Home Wi-Fi for Entertainment Hub
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Most home Wi-Fi items are audio products. One of the earliest was Audiotron from Turtle Beach. You plug it into your stereo system and it lets you play Internet radio or MP3s from PC hard drives. Audiotron has an Ethernet port so you can access networked PCs and share a broadband Internet connection.
RioCentral, a similar device from SonicBlue, can plug into an Ethernet network via a USB-to- Ethernet adapter -- and possibly via a USB-to-Wi-Fi adapter.
Sharp Electronics has LCD TVs that use a video sender system that employs Wi-Fi for the network transport.
A recent in-depth survey of 10,500 Internet households by Parks Associates found that a surprising number had home LANs -- 3,800. Perhaps even more surprising, 10.7 percent of home LAN users in the study have a television set connected to the network and 11.8 percent have a digital audio receiver. Some of these home entertainment systems plug into Motorola'a Broadband Media Center (BMC) 9000.
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INFOWORLD -- An IBM eServer pSeries UNIX provides wireless emergency access for public safety. This is a secure wireless communications system that will serve more than 40 police, fire and other emergency services in Washington, D.C. and its Virginia and Maryland suburbs. The project, valued at $20 million and funded by the federal government, involves building a network that will handle 10,000 users and, according to IBM, will surpass security standards set by the FBI. The network will connect local agencies' current communication devices, and enable an officer, for example, to inform all necessary agencies from the scene of a hazardous waste spill on the beltway around the city. According to the Washington Post, Motorola is protesting the award of the contract, saying its proposal was not fairly evaluated.
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23 August 2002 |
BLOGSTREET -- Being a voyeur, I enjoy looking at what other people read. The blogstreet reveals the neighbourhood's linked relationships.
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TEMPLE BAR -- Those active in the blogosphere know a klog is a knowledge-management weblog. For Tom Murphy of Spin Solutions, you could use weblogging tools (like Moveable Type, Blogger, Manila, or Radio) or you could use something more potent, like Index. It would be easy to use Index when writing about your work, what happens, and what you know about. Then you could use RSS to aggregate all the content you track to form your conclusions. Soon, you have the core of a knowledge management system.
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John Robb -- Several people have noticed The Creative Commons is empty. Not many want to put anything into it. "Or we want to be selective about it," says Dave Winer. "You can read Scripting News and DaveNet for free. You can even use Radio and Frontier for free, for a short period of time while you evaluate the software. But this world, with doctors, hospitals, grocery stores, cars, gas, insurance, medicine, lawyers, etc, requires money. The trick is to have art in your life and make some of it pay. And that in itself is an art." From my vantage point, both schools of thought rotate around the numinous status afforded to copyright.
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SILICON VALLEY.com -- Former JDS Uniphase chief executive Kevin Kalkhoven says that the overbuilt fiber-optics industry can't rely on long-distance communications to justify its existence but must seek profitability by focusing on the consumer market. "It's the end user, stupid. It's the end user that will determine the growth of industry," he told the attendees at the Opticon 2002 conference. "It's the first mile -- and the first inch -- that will build demand for bandwidth." The new wireless networks for broadband Internet access are brought to homes at lower costs than through traditional cable or DSL lines.
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Mobile Operators Must Get into WLAN Space In-STAT/MDR -- If they don't act quickly, mobile operators may miss their chance to get a critical head start in the burgeoning public Wireless LAN market. The high-tech market research firm reports that offering WLAN services today will enable mobile operators to experiment with broadband services, to combine them with their GPRS and CDMA 1x RTT offerings, and migrate users to WCDMA when it becomes available. If they delay in implementing WLAN technology, competitors will get a sole head start over mobile operators, covering all the hotspots and competing head-on with their future services.
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WASHINGTON POST -- Speaking from a front-line vantage point where I watch the download trends of college students, I would concur with the Washington Post that Washington Post"the most downloaded album in Internet history -- the recently released 'The Eminem Show' -- is also the best-selling album of the year, which suggests that at least some fans were spurred to buy the disc even though they already had it stashed on their hard drives."
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22 August 2002 |
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HELP! -- I need to tweak something to get my Buffalo WLI-PCM-L11G PCMCIA Card talking to my Apple AirPort. The WLI-PCM-L11G connects to my laptop's PC card Type II slot. The WLI-PCM-L11G uses the IEEE802.11b standard to communicate over the 2.4 GHz radio frequency at up to 11Mbps. I need to make the card communicate with the AirPort using P2P or ad-hoc mode. |
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John Robb -- If the RIAA has its way, it will start shutting down selected Internet nodes. That a $20b industry can inflict $100b of damage for less than $1b of damages boggles the imagination.
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NEC.com -- I've presented at several international conferences and when I've offered URLs to my working notes, drafts or presentation materials, my stuff got mentioned more often. That compares to achieving absolutely zip recognition for papers presented in the 70s. Online or Invisible reports that papers published on the web are more often cited than papers not web-ified.
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STAND.org.uk -- "What will copyright look like in the 21st century? Many people have many different ideas - it's all very much still in flux. The European Union, however, decided exactly how it would be on the 22nd of May, 2001. That was the date the European Directive on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the Information Society was passed. It will become law across Europe by Christmas of this year at the very latest: countries failing to follow the order will be in breach of the Treaty of Rome." The British government's consultation period runs until October.
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Doc Searls -- Bored with the "male kinda shit that seems to comprise 5/4 of the blog world," Doc led me to the smartest babeblogs on the Web: Dawn (up yours and more helpful tips) and Moxie (HiQ Attitude).
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WERBACH.com -- Kevin Werbach astutely fingers the conflict between Hollywood and the technology industry. "One sees content as the critical resource, and data networks as simply another mechanism to deliver it. The other sees connectivity as the essential factor, with movies being one of many resources that can travel along those connections. Hollywood sees a moral dimension in protecting its property and the creative works of its artists, as well as a nobility in bringing entertainment to the masses. The tech industry things bits are bits, and the only moral value that really matters is freedom."
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Lawrence Lessig -- He's fun to hear, good to read and true-to-form in his weblog. Welcome Lawrence Lessig to the blogosphere by paying him a visit in cyberspace. Then mull over Dave Winer's rebuttals before you decide to buy any of Lessig's books.
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Personal WiFi Hotspots
Tim Kirby -- From coffee chats with Tim Kirby, I've learned that most American cell phone operators are now integrating 802.11b service with their networks. This means you could use a mobile network with a card phone (like the Nokia D211) to create a personal hotspot within 300 feet of your cardphone. This could make personal WiFi hotspots as pervasive as mobile phones.
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NEWS.com -- John Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general, said Americans should realize that swapping illicit copies of music and movies is a criminal offense that can result in lengthy prison terms.Speaking at the Progress and Freedom Foundations annual technology and politics summit, Malcolm said the Internet has become "the world's largest copy machine" and that criminal prosecutions of copyright offenders are now necessary to preserve the viability of America's content industries.
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PEW INTERNET.org -- A recent report concludes that students are far more adept than their teachers when it comes to finding creative educational uses for the Internet. "Many schools and teachers have not yet recognized — much less responded to — the new ways students communicate and access information over the Internet."
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80211b NEWS -- Starbucks's wireless store locator is merely an extension of their current store locator (select wireless from the popup menu), and it doesn't appear to offer a simple way to, for instance, find all activated stores in a geographic area -- only city by city. T-Mobile's location finder is just a modified MobileStar location finder code, except you can select entire categories.
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21 August 2002 |
BOARDS.ie -- One of the most rabid sources of information about wireless technologies, including:
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Dave Winer -- Winer's Blog and Lessig went back and forth with a frank exchange of views over blogs. They got to an interesting place. At the end of the day, they became joint proponents of blogging in the creative commons. It's important that key people do not delegate their blogging. It's also important to listen to the backbench comments in the blogosphere. Personally, I like Lessig's simple suggestion: identify 2 luddite members of Congress -- one Republican and one Democrat. Organize and defeat them in November. If Congress saw bad ideas cost seats, they'd begin to do something about their bad ideas. This concept works in Ireland too.
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ADOBE.com -- In addition to the superior typographic controls of InDesign 2.0, features like Transparency, Table Creation, support for XML, and a streamlined print interface make InDesign 2.0 the clear choice for professional layout artists who are bound to high design standards and tight editorial deadlines.
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CONTEXT MAG.com -- Today the telegraph is forgotten. What happened to it? And what does its fate say about what lies ahead for the Internet? If you find it hard to believe that the Internet is merely a modern twist on a 19th-century system, consider the many striking parallels.
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BOXES AND ARROWS -- This book is less focused on the practicalities of business than Cluetrain, and is more a treatise on how the Internet and all massively shared internetworked environments (for the book, conflated to the common term "the Web") are changing us as social beings.
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NAVARTS.com -- This whitepaper answers the 10 most critical questions. Here's the blurb from the NavigationArts site
With the overwhelming quantity and demand for information, organizations are starting to think about the nature of their business's institutional knowledge, content and information and its increased burden on today's organization to find an effective means of collection and distribution. To best meet this need, information architecture helps to organize, prioritize and manage the generation, capture and distribution of information. This white paper addresses the ten most critical questions about information architecture in respect to its value in today's evolving business environment.
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Starbucks, HP, and T-Mobile might be announcing strategic links. The additive revenue for Starbucks comes from the "after the morning rush" people who want a WiFi link and a cappuccino.
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ZDNET.com -- We know there are problems with W2K server. Now there is a new flaw in Apache.
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OPEN -- A sweet Flash front-end is bolted onto Kartoo, a very slick search engine. Its great use of metadata provides search options and shows the relationships between search results.
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20 August 2002 |
INFORMATION WORLD.com -- It appears that ISOC will run the .org domain. The Web's governing body has issued a report recommending the Internet Society over 10 other competitors vying to run the .org domain when VeriSign relinquishes it in January.
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INFORMATION WAVE.net -- Information Wave Technologies is blocking the RIAA from its network. Earlier this year, the RIAA announced its new plan to access computers without owner's consent for the sake of protecting its assets. Information Wave believes this policy puts its customers at risk of unintentional damage, corporate espionage, and invasion of privacy.
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NYT -- Industry analysts see evidence that Apple is contemplating what inside the company is being called an "iPhone." Among the evidence, they say, is recent behind-the-scenes wrangling between Palm and Apple over linking Palm's own devices to Apple's new operating system — apparently with little cooperation on Apple's part.
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SLASHDOT.org -- It looks like DVD region encoding is on the verge of collapse. A Slashdot reader writes: "It seems like the infamous Region Encoding system used by DVD manufacturers to prevent us buying disks from overseas is about to collapse - due to widespread flaunting of the system.
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Edward Felten -- Recently lost his Internet account, claiming that his ISP cancelled it because of a single erroneous complaint filed by SpamCop about a mailing list posting that mentioned his new weblog. Workbench says "SpamCop is just a tool that makes it convenient for people to report and complain about spam. It doesn't force ISPs to be stupid."
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Gerry McGovern -- Reflecting on dotcon matters, Gerry McGovern told Newscan "I was part of the whole Dot Com rollercoaster. As I watch the wheels come off the stock market, I can't say I'm surprised. Many of us lived an illusion. Everything was about change, speed and innovation. We got lots of change alright. What we didn't bet on was that the change, instead of ushering in a 21st Century economy, actually created a 19th Century robber baron climate."
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Thomas Jefferson -- "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature,
be a subject of property."
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EIFEL -- I walked under the Eiffel tower this summer, thinking it looked out of place in Paris. I also learned that nothing like the Eiffel Tower had ever been built. It was twice as high as the dome of St. Peter's in Rome or the Great Pyramid of Giza. It's three times as high as the spire of Dublin, In contrast to such older monuments, Eiffel's tower was raised in a matter of months, with a small labor force, at slight cost.the creation and the creator.
After graduation from the College of Art and Manufacturing in 1855, Eiffel began to specialize in metal construction, especially bridges. He directed the erection of an iron bridge at Bordeaux in 1858, followed by several others. In 1867 he designed the lofty, arched Gallery of Machines for that year's Paris Exhibition, and in 1877 he bridged the Douro River at Oporto, Portugal, with a 525-foot steel arch, which he followed with an even greater arch of the same type, the 540-foot span Garabit viaduct over the Truyère River in southern France, for many years the highest bridge in the world, 400 feet over the stream.
In 1884, Eiffel designed the wrought-iron pylon inside Frederic Bartholdi's Statue Of Liberty in New York Harbor and the next year began work on the cupola of the Nice observatory. He later became interested in aerodynamics and wrote "The Resistance of the Air" (1913).
The Eiffel Tower was an immense tower of exposed latticework supports made of iron built to celebrate the science and engineering achievements of its age. The 984-foot structure consists of two visibly distinct parts, a base composed of a platform resting on four separate supports (called pylons or bents) and, above this, a slender tower created as the bents taper upward, rising above a second platform to merge in a unified column.
The curve of the base pylons was precisely calculated so that the bending and shearing forces of the wind were progressively transformed into forces of compression, which the bents could withstand more effectively. The superskyscrapers erected since 1960 are constructed in much the same way.
[NewsScan to Go]
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Van Ossenbruggen -- I read a quick overview of state-of-the-art in Semantic Web technology, the key relationships with traditional hypermedia research, and a comprehensive reference list to
various sets of literature (hypertext, Web and Semantic Web). Jacco Van Ossenbruggen's research agenda describes open issues in the development of the Semantic Web from the perspective of hypermedia research.
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19 August 2002 |
AvantGo.com -- You can get 8MB of channel info by sbscribing to a $19.95 AvantGo plan. The 2MB option remains free.
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ENN.ie -- Vivendi may sell its 50 percent share in Vizzavi to Vodafone for EUR 150m, bringing the future of the Ireland's e-merge wireless portal into question. The sale would form part of Vivendi's drive to offload more than EUR 10b in assets over the next two years, in order to reduce debt. Vodafone and Vivendi have invested more than EUR 1b in the portal, which aimed to bring multimedia content such as music and video to the users to high-end mobile phones.
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CNET -- I count on my notebook to be my desktop and my entertainment co-ordinator. So it's nice to know that others are also demanding innovation from notebook manufactures. For me, it means getting more performance, better battery life, BIOS-level WiFi, and fast power-off. In 2002, I've moved into multiband wireless communications, where my notebooks drifts from GSM to WiFi to dial-up and back, all without restarting.
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Lawrence Lessig -- In his address before a packed house at the Open Source Convention, Lawrence Lessig challenged the open source audience to get more involved in the political process. Lawrence, a tireless advocate for open source, is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. He is also the author of the best-selling book Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. You can get the complete transcript of Lawrence's keynote presentation made on July 24, 2002. You can also download a 20MB MP3 version of the presentation.
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Applied Digital Solutions -- When looking at the innocent faces of the two 10-yr girls who were abducted and killed in England last week, I started to think that I will compromise the privacy of children in exchange for them wearing the new generation of tracking devices. The devices combine two existing technologies. One is a global-positioning-system (GPS) chip, which uses radio signals from a network of satellites to work out where it is on the earth's surface to within a few metres. The other is a mobile-telephone chip, which broadcasts that location to whoever needs to know it. The result is a pocket-sized, or even wrist-sized, personal locator.
Applied Digital Solutions calls its version of the technology a “digital angel”. The angel comes in two versions. People get a pager-like device that clips on to their clothing. Animals get a collar. The angel is intended to look after old people who have become forgetful and young children who have become too adventurous. The wearer's guardians define a perimeter beyond which they feel their charge should not wander, and receive alerts via mobile phone when he has gone beyond these boundaries.
>>This is non-intrusive gerontechnology. The digital angel can also issue an alert when its wearer has fallen down, or when there has been an unexpected change in local temperature of the sort that might be caused, say, by someone falling into a pond. For that to happen, the wearer needs to sport a specially modified wristwatch which has suitable sensors and a wireless link to the pager.
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OZZIE.net -- Ray Ozzie loves his Canon PowerShot S40. "Absolutely a wonderful camera, in so many dimensions, and I've used it quite a bit. Bought one for my son, who took it to college and shared all sorts of great photos over the year via Groove." Now he's looking for a camera that "passes the cell phone threshold for me - meaning, small enough that I would carry it continuously, that I'd never have to think about battery life, and that if even if I didn't take many pictures, I'd have had few regrets in carrying it."
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STEPTWO.com.au -- Why not use klogs to enhance intranets? Klogging could enhance both intranet information and content management.
If you want a logical hierarchical structure, then organic growth is a problem. It's like running water, it flows down along the path of least resistance and doesn't care about the direction. Same with people, they'll squirrel stuff anywhere that makes sense today (have you taken a good look at your my "My Documents" directory lately?) Of course if you're klogging then this organic growth is part of the package.
Klogging helps intranet information exchange. When you have something to publish it's dead easy: click, type, click. You can publish in bite-size chunks. This means that if you have a small but useful piece of information you can just klog it. You don't have to pad it into a long document to make it worthwhile. You also don't have to find "just the right place" for it to go, it just gets klogged. That chunk can exist in it's own right, waiting for the day someone needs it.
As it stands klogging is a decentralizing technology that doesn't encourage a formal hierarchical structure. You klog and, if all goes according to plan, people will subscribe to you and they will link to you.
Some people might argue that a healthy klogging culture coupled with a Google search appliance.
Perhaps you shouldn't scrap the intranet and replace it with klogs, but you should think carefully about what you want your intranet to achieve and whether some of your goals for information publishing and dissemination couldn't be better achieved with a klogging strategy.
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CDFax is a command-line Linux utility for "fax-like transfer of CDs." Two people run the software. The receiver loads a CD blank in his burner, and the sender puts a CD to be sent in her drive. The sender enters a brief command that specifies the receiver's IP address and the disk is imaged, sent, and burned at the remote end. A simple and striking idea. [BoingBoing] [Beltorchicca]
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KILKENNY, Ireland -- We're lucky to have expert usability consultancy on demand from people who need help seeing Web pages. So after a casual afternoon coffee with our Web developers, we're going to scrub all our stylesheets that restrict font sizes. That would please Jakob Neilsen, who argues we should let users control font size. It actually hurts sight-impaired viewers when Web designers specify the exact size of text down to the pixel.
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Perth, Australia -- While airborne, they spotted 90 networks. Jason Jordan noted, "We're the first to brag about going War Storming, . . . a combination of war driving and barn storming.
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18 August 2002 |
ALISTAPART -- Daypop's Dan Chan considers the blogpsphere to be part of The Living Web. It's always changing. Every revision requires new writing. If it uses dull words, nobody will read them, and nobody will come back. If the words are wrong, people will be misled, disappointed, infuriated.
Writing for the Living Web is a tremendous challenge. Here are ten tips that can help.
- Write for a reason.
- Write often.
- Write tight.
- Make good friends.
- Find good enemies.
- Let the story unfold.
- Stand up, speak out.
- Be sexy.
- Use your archives.
- Relax!
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TECHNOLOGY REVIEW.com -- Simson Garfinkel, in Firewall Follies raises a renascent theme: They don't make business systems significantly more secure. And by focusing attention on defending the perimeter, rather than on defending information assets within an organization, firewalls foster lax internal security practices that magnify the damage that insiders can inflict.
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17 August 2002 |
Ormonde Hotel, Kilkenny, Ireland -- I was walking around the foyer of the plush Ormonde Hotel, showing people how this WiFi thing works. Most were nonplussed by the technology but quite curious about the content that flowed wirelessly through it from Dave Winer, Ray Ozzie and The New York Times. They're all commenting about on-going actions by record companies that seeks to compel the companies that control the Internet backbone to intervene in pirate sites located in China. The scary thing is that the technology could be used not only to block content coming out of an internet site, but it could also be used to look inside sites.
Ray Ozzie is worried as the symmetry of the Internet at the IP level takes yet another hit.
As a result of things like this, NATs, firewalls, DNS limitations and politics, the core concepts of the original Internet are progressively being pushed to a higher level, e.g. middleware-level or application-level. IP becomes XML packet routing, TCP becomes transaction state management, DNS becomes namespace management, etc. And it's better than the original: the packet routing is secure, the state management is persistent and durable, the namespace management becomes trustworthy. You can see this happening in most of the interesting Internet applications of the past few years, e.g. IM, Napster, Gnutella, Jabber, and Groove, and I expect that it will soon be happening operating systems and key development frameworks.
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 Kilkenny, Ireland -- It's a beautiful day, sitting in the lobby of The Ormonde Hotel with David Lennon (left) during the Kilkenny Arts Festival. We posted this to the blog with my Acer webcam, then walked downhill along Ormonde Street while connected over a WLAN. Under a clear blue sky, with U2 playing in my Real Player headset, you couldn't ask for a better Internet experience. Within a year, I plan to have four streets in Kilkenny on the WiFi map.
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IBM -- The Everyplace Wireless Gateway promises seamless roaming across disparate wireless networks including cellular, WLANs, private mobile radio, and satellite. The Toronto Police Service plans to put it into action.
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16 August 2002 |
The Intersection of Groove and Office Ray Ozzie -- Where does Office intersect Groove? Ray Ozzie won't say.
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Karlin Lillington -- Technoculture is blogging now, with thoughts complementary to the print pieces. Karlin Lillington writes, "In print, a writer is hedged in by time and space -- deadlines and
column inches. Also, print tends to be a more formal and structured format.
Weblogs are realtime, flexible, unconfined. Here, I can throw out fast bits
of commentary on subjects as they are in the news, rather than several days
after, link to what I find interesting on the web, and generate some reader
discussion.
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Dave Winer -- "The facts are out. You keep all the money for yourselves. The artists get nothing. You care not one whit about the art, on either side of the equation. That's the insult. That has to be dealt with. How dare you threaten to throw users in jail. You should be in jail if there were any justice." This is a consistent theme at Scripting News.Declan McCullagh has a more reasoned approach, as he writes about debunking DCMA myths. McCullagh writes, "The DMCA is both an egregious law and a brazen power grab by Hollywood, the music industry and software companies. It is probably unconstitutional. It creates unnecessary federal crimes, cedes too much authority to copyright holders, and should be unceremoniously tossed out by the courts." But on the issue of going to jail because you wrote a paper, "if published research does not include working code--which is a vital part of research--the odds of a successful lawsuit rapidly approach zero."
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LOCKERGNOME.com -- If you happen to attend GNOMEDEX, you can borrow a free WiFi card for your laptop. Shouldn't we be doing this at Irish technology events too?
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ONLINE LEARNING MAG.com -- There are three major flaws of online video - talking heads, lack of interactivity and lack of control. Then there's Playback Media whose website talks about overcoming those defects and Xi Blue who can teach you how to produce effective educational videos.
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ISOC.org -- "The Internet Society strongly opposes attempts to impose governmental technology mandates that are designed to protect only the economic interests of certain owners of intellectual property over the economic interests of much larger portions of society. The current debate in many countries of the world regarding digital rights management (DRM) has illustrated the inevitable conclusion of technology mandates in law: a world where all digital media technology is either forbidden or compulsory. The effect of these mandates is to grant veto power over new technologies to special interest groups who have continually opposed innovation." The ISOC posturing comes on the heels of Richard Stallman, the controversial President of the Free Software Foundation, who called on the July 2002 OSCON audience to stop conceding that copying or sharing is an infringement of copyright.
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15 August 2002 |
Joel Kotkin -- If the author is correct, then Enterprise Ireland's cluster concept is fatally flawed.
Both Enterprise Ireland and Shannon Development try to build up enterprise centres by attracting a cluster dynamic. That's often useful, but it can also miss the point of how effectively people at the periphery of a company can communicate directly to collaborators without being in the same geographic area.
In The Declustering of America, Kotkin says it's now "increasingly easy for a firm to operate in a dispersed manner". Kotkin limits his scope to geographic issues. It's a good read, because we're well into the phase of "the next company" described by Peter Drucker, who points to the "Internet and e-mail (that) have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications. This has meant that the most productive and most profitable way to organise is to disintegrate."
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WASHINGTON POST -- A study funded by the Pew Internet and American Life Projects has found that students are increasingly comfortable with the World Wide Web, and frustrated that more of their classroom work isn't built around it. The project's director says: "Even though we spend all this money to wire the schools, we're not all that well prepared to use it. The kids really do know how to use the Internet and they want it to be exploited in the ways they know it can be exploited. Outside the classroom and outside of any formal instruction, the Internet is a key part of their educational instruction."
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WSJ.com -- Since mobile users just keep paying up their bills every month, Web site operators have discovered they can turn to wireless to boost their revenues. The three biggest Chinese portals, Sina, Sohu and Netease, reported SMS boosts revenues.
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LAPVANTAGE.com -- These 
