Underway in Ireland

12 October 2002

"I am better than your kids" Maddox Rules -- While searching Google for the best page in the universe, I stumbled upon reasons why "I am better than your kids."

Transclusion in Action Marc Barrot -- Check this out, especially the Endless Web Page demo. Clicking on an icon causes the linked outline to be inserted directly in the current page, as a child of the node that carried the link. While the linked outline renders, a small globe replace the icon. Once the linked content is inserted, the iconn reverts to a normal twisty outline wedge. This is the in-browser version of what Dave Winer and UserLand created for Radio's outliner. This is instant rendering, happening on the fly as you browse through the current page.

In Praise of Evolvable Formats Mark Pilgrim -- My Radio says I've written something like this already, but I'm doing it again because of feedback I've received following my piece published in The Irish Examiner. And because James Robertson makes a better point: "Mark Pilgrim calls into question how XML standards are developed and used. See Mark's comments on RDF, for example."

Dealing with the RIAA SLASHDOT.org -- Cliff explains in Slashdot why this hasn't been a good year for music lovers since the RIAA has removed the kid gloves. In the past 3 months they have declared war on their own customers, silenced Internet Radio, and are targeting 3 other P2P networks for shutdown. At about this time last year, they wanted unprecedented access to your personal property. [...] The RIAA has waged war on the Internet rather than try and use the technology for the benefit of their artists. Now there are people willing to play by the rules, but the RIAA is unresponsive, and their web site seems to provide more questions than clear answers. Who do you need to contact? What forms need to be filled? What agreements need to be signed? By whom? What do you have to pay? How is this value determined? If you are planning on offering the RIAA's music, what do you really have to do to play their music legally?

Mr. Swartz Visits the Internet Bookmobile Aaron Swartz -- Have you ever seen Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive Bookmobile? Aaron Swartz stepped aboard and wrote about it in "Mr Swartz Goes to Washington." Unlike most Bookmobiles, this one didn't contain any physical books. Instead, it connects to the Internet Archive's servers in the Presidio to download them. Then the high-speed printer prints out the pages. The chopper cuts them in half so you can fold them together to make a normal-sized book, and the binding machine heats up the glue-smeared cover to hold it all together. The whole process takes about fifteen minutes. [...] People have a hard time understanding the public domain," Brewster says. "It's an abstract concept; it's hard to grasp. The bookmobile changes that." He picks up one of the books he's made. "This is the public domain! The public domain means giving books to children. You want to extend copyright? You want to steal books from children? No one wants to steal books from children."

Can Public Web Services Work? NEW ARCHITECT MAG.com -- In small Irish communities, you have to have a business model to sustain public information providers. The most generous of government handouts push you towards a money-making business model. If you can identify, then scrape, government information, you might be sustainable. That means setting up an aggregator, like we're using in the blogosphere. When implementing the public information model, you have to consider the protocol in use. There's no way any kind of walled garden approach is tenable.

Further Reading Upgrades Mark Pilgrim -- How cool is this? I'm on Virgin Rail in England posting to my Weblog in London using no wires to my IBM TransNote. (Mobile data services over Vodafone at 43k wirelessly are good to me but damaging to my wallet.) And because of Mark Pilgrim's innovative RSS 2.0 feed, my laptop comments will appear on Mark's blog. (On the second day, it said that 28 people have followed this link and arrived on top of Mark's post. But the Swedish post that points to diveintomark.org lost a bunch of character enhancements, so the behind-the-scenes parsing is probably limited to an English language character set.) Imagine wrapping Mark Pilgrim's code onto separate laptops -- let's say Tim Kirby's and Bernie Goldbach's -- as they both work in separate countries on the same project. If Mark's "further reading RSS feed" works as I think, the further readings on my blog will keep me updated on Tim's project work. That's v.cool laptop web services. I think it would be easy to spam this kind of referrer log system, so to keep its integrity intact, some form of look-back would have to be figured into the script.

11 October 2002

Blogging on the Way to Work THE OBVIOUS BLOG.net -- It's fun to read that Euan Semple also works, blogs, and chats wirelessly while on the train, coming and going to work.

Free MIT Courses MIT -- Since late September, those with an online browswer can access 32 MIT courses free, including syllabi, lecture notes, exams and answers, and in some cases, even the videotaped lectures.

Creating an XFML Facetmap IA SLASH.org -- An xfml feed creates a facetmap, which is quite nice. Would be interesting to see if any clustering information visualization emerges out of these types of metadata experiments. Some nice services could come out of this. At the forefront, the application will help individuals map topics on disparate systems. It's puts a major emphasis on correctly classifying posts. Also, check out Drupal's externalpage module, which parses each blog entry for URLs and adds them to the site's search index. That should be helpful for finding duplicate entries.

Itanium Infringes on Patents INFOWORLD.com -- If Intel's Itanium infringes on patents, it does not bode well for Intel restarting its Fab plant construction in Leixlip, Ireland. The chip giant was ordered to pay out $150m in damages.

Danny Goodman on Dynamic HTML Joel on Software -- Check out Danny Goodman's latest version of Dynamic HTML. Joel on Software says it best: "It's the best reference on HTML. The new edition is 1400 packed pages that actually tells you what web browsers that are actually in use actually do, which makes it invaluable. It has been brought up to date with all the latest browsers and the newest HTML specs. If you're working with HTML in any way, shape, or form, this book is an absolute requirement."

Cows with Guns TEMPLE BAR -- Dana Lyons turned heads in Temple Bar, wearing his trademark black cowboy hat as he discussed Cows with Guns over dinner with the directors of the Irish Animation Festival. What? An animated Cows with Guns?!? Well, if that happens, maybe the cows will get ray guns. Maybe a time machine episode, where the cows go back into the 30s, 40s and 50s, packing heat for the times and holstering guns from Europe and Japan. We could have cows with stamped metal squirt guns, cardboard ray guns, pyrotomic disintegrator rifles and space navigator guns. And cows with ray gun holsters, space costumes, rings, and necklaces. See the man in JJ's on Dublin's Capel Street, Friday evening, October 11th.

Cheap Bikes in Dublin, Ireland A public auction of bicycles will be held at Kevin Street Garda Station, Dublin, on Thursday 17th October 2002 at 1100. You can view the cycles the day before from 1000 to 1500.

10 October 2002

Why Fathers of PC Revolution Are Wary of Digital Rights THE AGE.com.au -- Nathan Cochrane, Deputy IT Editor of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, told Declan McCullagh things he observed about Digital Rights Management when tracking down comments made by David Reed, Dan Bricklin and Ray Ozzie -- who can legitimately claim to have collectively done more than most to kick-start the PC revolution. David Reed was chief scientist and VP R&D at Lotus. "This is what is wrong with Berman-Coble, with DRM, with TCPA, and with Gator. It's my computer, dammit. If I don't give informed consent, you can't use it." Dan Bricklin, co-inventor of Visicalc, the first killer app for the PC "If you are an artist or author who cares more than about the near-term value of your work, you should be worried and be careful about releasing your work only in copy protected form. Like the days when "art" was only accessible to the rich, two classes will probably develop: Copy protected and not copy protected, the "high art" and "folk art" of tomorrow." Ray Ozzie, inventor of what became Lotus Notes, the world's first groupware collaborative software for PCs, a killer app. "With rich and open access, will contractual controls on use of Web Services data be sufficient, or will we need technical means of use enforcement? How far will Digital Restrictions Management creep its way into the system-to-system realm?"

Sonny Versus Share Kwindla Hultman Kramer -- An excellent but depressing summary of Larry Lessig's day in front of the Supreme Court. As Declan McCullagh would tell you, blogging made a powerful statement the day the case was heard. Ernest Miller and Raul Ruiz of the Yale Law School’s LawMeme covered the Eldred v. Ashcroft oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court nearly live. Lessig gives his own post-mortem of the case, delivered from the front line. Everyone interested in copyright should read Lessig's blog from the front line.

Seven Illegal Search Engine Optimisation Techniques STICKY SAUCE.com -- We have a Search Engine Strategies course that will soon include discussion of seven illegal search engine optimisation techniques. Although none of these are surprising, they are great discussion points when handling client requests for bent pages.

Matt's Commons Metafilter's Matt writes about what the concept of public domain really means, aside from really old books and movies. Over the past 7 or 8 months that I've been working on the Creative Commons, I've come to recognize and respect what a true commons for our culture would mean. Of course, it's mostly imaginary, as copyright has encompassed almost everything from the better part of last century and limited the use of works. There's the old saying that good artists copy and great artists steal, and that's not based on outright theft, but the acknowledgement that we are all influenced by others' work, and things like hip hop music and photoshop collages point out how great new art can be created when combining other works into new works. The Supreme Court heard arguments about the Creative Commons in presentations made by Lawrence Lessig yesterday.

09 October 2002

P2P Organisations Paolo Valdemarin -- Like Paolo, I have bumped into some very smart people electronically. They hail from all parts of the world. They work with technologies and are involved in projects that interest me. So, how can we operationalise a method that would increase the opportunities for these kinds of contacts? How about encouraging the development of omnipresent expertise through collaborative technology?

Community Wireless Network in London LONDON -- Ben Hammersley just installed a community wireless network that covers all of South Molton Street in London. Help yourself to his generous bandwidth.

The Illusion of First Mover Advantage BOSTON -- We're talking in the MIT Enterprise Forum about first mover advantage and I cannot help but think it's a myth. "I would argue the first mover advantage is largely illusory," says Steve Jurvetson, of Draper, Fisher Jurvetson. "A company may say they are the only one doing something, but we usually assume there are at least twenty others doing a similar thing." So it puts added importance on establishinng the patent rights and protecting unique intellectual property. Being first in Ireland Valley or even the U.S. is no small feat, but can you be sure you beat the rest of the world?

Sighting: Logitech io Digital Pen LOGITECH -- The io Digital Pen is a lot like the digital pen I use with the TransNote. With the io pen, you must download its contents into a USB device. With the ThinkScribe, it transfers into the TransNote automatically. The software for the Logitech io pen was deloped by Anoto, a company whose pen-and-paper technology is emerging as a new standard for digital writing. The pen itself is the key component of an ecosystem that includes paper manufacturers Mead Cambridge Notebooks from MeadWestvaco, Post-it® Notes from 3M and productivity tools from FranklinCovey® in the US. The suggested U.S. retail price for the complete system starter kit is $199.

Eden Faster with WiFi GUARDIAN.co.uk -- Ben Hammersley wrote this story in The Guardian last week, but my local news agents didn't get the copy. Thanks to my news aggregator, I caught the story on the rebound. It's about bringing the net to Eden. In the village of Kirkby Stephen, in the Eden Valley, on the border between Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales, getting on to the internet is a major effort. With phone lines shared between remote farmhouses, and mobile phones a cruel fantasy, an internet connection here can drop as low as 12Kbps. [...] But all of this is about to change. EdenFaster, a local community organisation, is about to supply broadband internet connections to the entire valley, bringing 10,000 people, 500 businesses and 50 schools online with an internet connection 20 times faster than ADSL for half the price. They're doing it on their own because of a perceived lack of demand by telecoms companies. They're doing it wirelessly, and they're one of the leaders in the new revolution in ways to deliver the internet in the UK.

Everything Can Be a Link EVHEAD.com -- Last year, Ev Williams wrote about browsers linking to specific chunks of text instead of linking to pages or pointing to adventitious content in entire websites. Brian Donovan has taken the idea further, developing JavaScript to hyperlink specific areas on pages. This is worth considering, but the companion JavaScript must be on the pages containing link text.

Movement and Action Ernest Hemingway -- "Never confuse movement with action."

You Might Be a Longhorn TAMPATANTRUM.com -- You might be a Longhorn, if: The Halloween pumpkin on your porch has more teeth than your spouse. You let your twelve-year-old daughter smoke at the dinner table in front of her kids. You've been married three times and still have the same in- laws. You think a woman who is "out of your league" bowls on a different night. Jack Daniels makes your list of "most admired people". You wonder how petrol stations keep their restrooms so clean. Anyone in your family ever died right after saying, "Hey watch this." You think Dom Pérignon is a Mafia leader. Your wife's hairdo was once ruined by a ceiling fan. You think the last words of the Star Spangled Banner are, "Gentlemen start your engines." You lit a match in the bathroom and your house exploded right off its wheels. The bluebook value of your truck goes up and down, depending on how much gas is in it. You have to go outside to get something from the fridge. One of your kids was born on a pool table. You need one more hole punched in your card to get a freebie at the House of Tattoos. You can't get married to your sweetheart because there's a law against it. You think loading a dishwasher means getting your wife drunk. Your toilet paper has page numbers on it. Your front porch collapses and kills more than five dogs.

Googling Your Email Jon Udell -- Interesting thoughts on implementing local host web services.

Three Good Reasons to Stop Using PowerPoint PRESENTATIONS.com -- How about teaching three good reasons to stop using PowerPoint? Make it a short course in Flash MX and give people a powerful option to the PowerPoint mafia. Harry Waldman makes his case in an October 2002 Presentations.Com article.

Water, Slush, Ice and a Slice Andy Chen -- Innovations funnel from ideas to implemented projects. Here's a diagram that illustrates this process: If your Weblog is part of a knowledge network, you're also encouraging innovation. I think the "water to ice" metaphor describes the aggregation process that fills a meaningful portion of my day.

How Open Should Company Mail Be? Ray Ozzie -- What if all e-mail done on company time was open to all in the company? Ray Ozzie thinks "people would be shocked at not having private email, and private hotmail addresses and Groove Spaces would appear when people wanted to do something privately." But people are creatures of convenience and habit, and more and more work would be done in the open. And what would be the benefit to the collective productivity if we could all watch and listen to the thought processes of the stars on our teams? What kind of interesting bots would emerge that started to watch and subscribe to relevant queries? Customer support interactions with customers should be watched by engineers every bit as closely as the public forums.

Alexa Ranks Topgold at 280,438 ALEXA -- Topgold slips out of the first quarter million. Alexa ranks Topgold at 280,438. I've watched the site slip from 116,018 years ago to its current position. It's more to do with established users of the Alexa client not visiting the personal site.

Gartner's IT Predictions COMPUTERWORLD -- Thomas Hoffman explores Gartner's IT predictions and summarises them. Adding bandwidth will become more cost-effective than buying new computers. Most major new systems will be interenterprise or cross-enterprise systems. Despite the complexities, interenterprise systems will provide a macroeconomic boost to companies. Companies will lay off millions of employees. The consolidation of vendors will continue in many segments of the IT market. Moore's Law will hold true through this decade. Banks will become the primary providers of "presence services" by 2007. Business activity monitoring will hit the mainstream within five years. Business units, not IT, will make most application decisions. The pendulum swings back to decentralized IT operations by 2004

Essential Blogging O'REILLY -- My aggregator scrapes content from three of the authors of "Essential Blogging," a no-nonsense guide to the technology of blogging. The book gives detailed installation, configuration, and operation instructions for the leading blogging software: Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom. Without reading the book, Tim Kirby has chopped and changed a Radio local host. It also includes practical advice and insider tips on the features, requirements, and limitations of these applications. Chapter 6, "Advanced Blogger," is available free online.

In Praise of Evolvable Formats Mark Pilgrim -- Dave Winer calls this "a beautiful essay" as Mark writes, "If it were April Fool's Day, the Net's only official holiday, and you wanted to design a 'novelty format' to slip by the W3C as a joke, it might look something like RSS 0.9x/2.0." In Winer's words, "If you aspire to design real-world formats and protocols, or if you just want to understand how they evolve, this is a must-read."

War in Any Language The U.S. military is being equipped with PDAs and other mobile devices loaded with translation software. Lt. Col Kathy DeBolt, a senior officer at an intelligence technology lab, says: "Should we, God forbid, go into Iraq, we'll have to ask 'Are there any chemicals here? Are there any facilities used to develop chemical or biological weapons?'" Translation software has been developed to assist conversations between speakers of English, Arabic, Kurdish and Farsi. The military's laptop war kit includes 1,500 briefcase-sized document scanner-translators, which could be used to make on-the-spot rough translations into English of documents written in Dari, Pashto and Arabic.

08 October 2002

Canadian Government Teaching Metadata Coding Doug Salzwedel -- The Information Management Division of the Canadian Government's Treasury Board Secretariat is currently planning a metadata training course for use by government departments. The content and organization of the course will be based in part upon input received from a variety of sources. The objectives of the training course will be to assist metadata trainers in explaining: What metadata is; how and why metadata is used for departments; Canadian government requirements for metadata; how metadata elements are applied to Web resources; The role and use of controlled vocabularies in metadata (including specific examples) Evolving trends and best practices for metadata; How to identify and use various resources (Web sites, metadata experts, etc.) for guidance on metadata implementation. The Canadian government is seeking examples of metadata training plans, courses and other associated metadata training documentation in either English or French.

Paolo's Theme Tool Paulo -- Check out Paulo's Theme Tool and turn out complex templates in Dreamweaver that work in Radio.

Wireless Classroom and Online Learning Lou Hirsch -- Now beginning to break into the mainstream, wireless classroom links will lead to new opportunities for online learning. As I've personally obsered, new learners seek learning in short bursts. But the jury is out on whether the wireless classroom will usher e-books back into the forefront. It's important to note that wireless e-learning suits people who dwell in very dense metropolitan areas, but are unable or reluctant to congregate at a particular place and time just to make courses cost-effective. Combining mobile wireless with Internet capabilities allows efficient delivery of the same course offering to individuals spread all over the globe. There is a viable business model in this form of course architecture.

A Compelling Essay On Why 3G Will Fail Steven Den Beste -- A compelling essay on why 3G will fail. This time, information laced with technical details.

Real-Time Connectivity Is More than Pictures Jeremy Allaire -- Business and the military are trying to get desktops to be real-time in the decision process. Major software vendors need to bring real-time communications capabilities to the enterprise. Macromedia has focused on real-time connectivity too. Jeremy Allaire thinks the world of real-time communications is very immature right now. He knows most part people have natural associations between IM tools, or even web conferencing systems, and real-time. But he believes real-time communicatons involves more. We need to move beyond thinking and talking about how we communicate to talking about how and what we do, what activities we perform in real-time. Communications augments social activities, and those social activities should become the real-focus for real-time application advocates. Talking to a sales person is one thing -- configuring a product with them is another. Getting a question answered about an insurance application is one thing -- jointly populating the form is another. Having a voice conversation with a room designer versus actually designing a room, visually.

Itanium 2 Underperforming on the Market NEW YORK TIMES -- Intel may have overextended its market when producing the Itanium 2, according to Technology Circuits in THe New York Times. Itanium 2 may not be as sure a bet as it looked even a few months ago. The 64-bit Itanium 2 boasts more than 200 million transistors and is designed to deliver top performance.

The Coming Copyright Storm FARCES.com -- The entertainment industry is paying BayTSP, run by former black-hat cracker, Mark Ishikawa, up to US$50,000 per month to determine who is illegally copying protected works on the net. There is a copyright storm brewing.

07 October 2002

How Do You Sue a Company You Cannot Find? NEW YORK TIMES -- Amy Harmon reports the Internet music-swapping firm KaZaA, which has assumed the successor role to now-defunct Napster, is being sued in a federal court in Los Angeles by the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright violations, but the RIAA has several problems to overcome. First, there is a question of geography, since KaZaA is everywhere and nowhere: its distributor, Sharman Networks, is incorporated in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, it is managed from Australia, its computer servers are in Denmark, and its developers can't be found. Second, there is an issue of jurisdiction: Sharman's lawyer says, "What they're asking is for a court to export the strictures of U.S. copyright law worldwide. That's not permitted. These are questions of sovereignty that legislatures and diplomats need to decide." And third, there is the question of whether giving people the tools (KaZaA's service) to break the copyright law is itself a copyright violation, even if KaZaA itself did not misappropriate copyrighted music.

The Shape of the Net ECONOMIST.com -- Scientists at the University of Notre Dame have created a new model of the Internet that differs significantly from previous attempts that used graphs depicting routers as points and the links between them as lines. These older representations are misleading, says Albert-Laslo Barabasi, because they miss two important features: Links in the Internet are "preferentially attached" -- a router that already has many links is likely to attract many more; one that doesn't, won't. In addition, the Internet has more clusters of connected points than random graphs do. These two properties give the Internet a topology that is scale-free, i.e., a small part of the Internet will, when suitably magnified, resemble the whole. The scale-free aspect means that the Internet is resistant to random failures -- one reason it's proven so resilient over the years -- but it also puts it at risk for deliberate attacks on the most popular hubs -- the sort of thing cyberterrorists might attempt. Barabasi's research offers new insight on how best to stop the spread of a computer virus. Rather than attempting to block the infection by "inoculating" as many machines as possible, a scale-free model suggests that treating a relatively small number of the most popular hubs would be the most effective way to stamp out the virus entirely.

Know Your Flight Seat Dimensions SEAT GURU -- You need a seat-by-seat guide to the airlines so you can break down every plane in the fleets of American, United, Continental, Delta and US Airways, to see which seats have the best width and the most legroom. Did you know that seats towards the back have smaller distances between arm rests due to the curvature of the fuselage in the rear? Now you do.

Sony Clie Has Sweet Flash Player SONYSTYLE-- Sure, this is only the Flash 5 Player on the Clie. When the Flash 6 player hits the Sony Clie, we're going to see world-class connectivity and communications features carried around in your pocket.

Google May Charge for Searches TELEGRAPH.co.uk -- According to Simon Goodley, Google may charge for some targeted searches or for its newsfeed.

Who Is Going to .NET? LANCASTER, Pennsylvania -- If no one is investing in IT gear and everyone wants to squeeze more years out of what they have, wouldn't that mean Microsoft's .NET is trying to fill a hole that doesn't exist? I got that thought after reading the Washington Post Tech section today.

Hiding from CCTV NEW YORK TIMES -- Michael Naimark thinks he can hide from CCTV cameras with the the aid of a $1 laser pointer.

06 October 2002

Grub is Crawling Me GRUB.org -- Grub provides a free for download, free to run, distributed crawling client, which is used to create an infrastructure (database + volunteers) that will eventually provide URL update status information for nearly every web page on the Internet. Grub's distributed crawler network will enable websites, content providers, and individuals to notify others that changes have occurred in their content, all in real time. Grub will provide update feeds of the content that it gathers via the clients. These feeds will be free for public consumption, with additional high speed, high reliability feeds available for a fee. It's just about ready for Windows.

The Real T312461 IRISH ANIMALS.com -- I meet denise cox more often virtually than in person. Like this week, I met her in my web site logs, browsing with her Internet Explorer 5.5 client named T312461. Everyone has a browsing identity and with denise, if you don't spot her T321461, you'll probably see her humanelectric.com moniker just as quickly.

Resource: ryze.org RYZE.org -- A well-connected business community with excellent networking opportunities.

Cutting Hidden Costs of Directory Assistance LONDON -- Using directory assistance to place a phone call normally costs around 12 cents per call and nearly triple when using the service to connect to oanother number. I've known staff members who call for a number they already know, then using directory assistance to connect them. That way, the number they dialed does not show up on the monthly phone register. They can be calling around for another job on company time, and the company pays for it.

XML Will Save You Money LONDON -- Save money by replacing your EDI system with XML. That's the gist of the coffee conversation at Starbucks. EDI is so 90s. XML is a lot cheaper and a better long-term investment.

Knowledge Management on a Shoestring Budget David Weinberger -- How about Knowledge Mangement on a budget? Brother Dave would tell me that his paper napkin conversations constitutes elements of corporate knowledge because his HP teams often have Eureka moments in the canteen coffee breaks. And investigative reporters would tell you that nondescript Post-It notes provide important shreds of continuity on such things as planning permission approvals or the granting of telecommunications licenses. During my Pentagon days, verbal ephemera such as telephone conversations gave contingency planners essential elements of information that they used to move forward on timelines. Unless you put all these snippets into a central collection, you don't capture all this transferable knowledge for easy sharing. What about the 99 cent KM solution? David Weinberger's short essay proposes that low-budget tools such as email list applications and weblogs will get you far. In many ways, I'm trying to accomplish what he articulates in his article.

Thomas Jefferson on Truth in Media Thomas Jefferson -- "The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper."

Buffalo Lights John Farr -- I like the bits of Buffalo Lights that I've read and have to admit that I'm just as entertained by many of the reader comments.

How Black Holes Form COSMIVERSE.com -- Sure, I am interested in how black holes form. And I also love Google's Science News Aggregator. But to satisfy my interests, I have to upgrade my connection speed at home. More than anything else, getting this story illuminates my quasi-chthonic existence -- far away from the centre of the Internet universe. I need speed to get closer to where it's happening.

Rich Media Communications Marc's Voice -- Marc Canter has started some great cross-talk about activity-based computing and its apparent manifestation in this cool tool for capturing, managing and distributing photos online. Why do we have to depend on complex tasks, involving digital imaging, scanning, resizing, uploading and checking photo content, when it's easier to get a computer to act like a rich media communications tool. Several online photo tools, like Ofoto and Shutterfly, make things simpler for the average consumer. We've still got a long way to go. >>Rich Media Communications Course.