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Underway in Ireland
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19 October 2002 |
Kevin Werbach -- Yale Law School is holding "Revenge of the Blogs," a conference on Weblogs November 22, featuring
This follows a recent blogging panel and course at Berkeley.
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Book: Women Who Kept the Lights NEWS SCAN -- Honorary Subscriber:
Abbie
Burgess Grant.
The remarkable American woman, Abbie
Burgess Grant (1839-1892), spent 38 of the 53 years of her life as a
lighthouse keeper, a highly atypical occupation for a
woman. Burgess's career tending lighthouse lamps began in 1853 one
week after her father, Sam Burgess, was appointed Lighthouse Keeper at the
Matinicus Rock Light Station, a windswept 32-acre granite island 18 miles
off the Maine shoreline and 25 miles from Rockland, the nearest
port. Although her father held the title of Lighthouse Keeper, she
was the one
actually doing the work. Her father was often off lobstering to augment his
income, and she became responsible for lighting the whale oil lamps and
performing other duties around the island. As one of ten children living in
an isolated environment, her invalid mother mostly home schooled her, but
the limited education she received did enable her to read and
write. When Captain John Grant, a friend of the family, succeeded Sam
Burgess as the Matinicus lighthouse keeper, Abbie stayed on to help train
Grant. The new keeper's son, Isaac, was the assistant keeper. A romance
quickly developed between Abbie Burgess and Isaac Grant and they were
married within a year. Abbie was officially appointed assistant keeper at
$440 per year. The couple had four children at the Rock before Isaac Grant
was appointed keeper of the White Head Light Station in 1875. Abbie
was a heroine upon several occasions, risking her safety and
well-being for the sake of her family and "those that go down to the sea
ships." In January 1856 her father left in his sailboat to pick up supplies
in Rockland, leaving Abbie alone with her mother and younger sisters. By
the afternoon a storm began with large waves and gale winds and increasing
over the next three days, leaving Matinicus Rock practically underwater.
Abbie moved her mother and sisters to the island's north lighthouse
tower
only a short time before a gigantic wave swept the island and destroyed the
original keeper's house. The island remained inaccessible for the next four
weeks, during which time Abbie kept the lights burning and cared for her
mother and sisters. Again in 1857 her father was away for three weeks
during a stormy period. That time the family's food supply was reduced to
one egg and a cup of corn meal mush a day before supplies
arrived. She died in 1892 in a house on Maple Street, Portland,
Maine. In 1960 historian Edward Rowe Snow organized a gathering at her
grave. A little metal lighthouse was unveiled at the foot of her grave, and
Poet Wilbert Snow read a poem that called her "the friend and guide of
sailors through dark nights."
["Women
Who Kept the Lights: An Illustrated History of Female Lighthouse
Keepers" by Mary Louise Clifford and J. Candace.]
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On the Train -- I just overheard a teenager sitting down the aisle ask a friend, "Do you have Google?" as she went about describing how to find her class log online. On News.com, Wharton radio ads suggest listeners Google for "Wharton West" rather than remember the longer domain name. After all, if you paid for top billing, why even worry about a domain name? Meanwhile, Plasticbag reports Google got a mention in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Willow: Have you tried Googling her?
Xander (shocked): "Willow, she's only seventeen!"
[Google Weblog]
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Richard Wiggins -- Perhaps the best way to handle search engine visibility is to author pages in accordance with known searches. For any given Web presence, whether intranet or global, the top 500 unique search phrases entered by users represent at least 40 percent of the total searches performed. Good metadata architecture should do this already, but it's difficult to enforce metadata standards across a large enterprise.
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HANDY ru -- Palm Info Center spotted pictures of the next-generation Palm. The pictures show the screen of the Tungsten T at various angles and a side by side comparison with a HP HJournada 568.
[lockergnome]
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LOCKERGNOME -- Some spammers are slipping ads through a hole in Windows. They use the messenger service, which is the channel normally reserved for sysadmins to send warnings to users when a server is scheduled to go down for maintenance. Now some advertisers are using it to send bulk messages to anyone connected to the Internet with an accessible address.
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18 October 2002 |
Let's Uninvent It | BALLYBLOG -- Ever have something you wish could be uninvented? Coming from Lancaster Dutch Country, I've seen the Amish shaking their heads and wondering aloud at "what in the world are those English doing?" Right now, stuck on a train overflowing with boisterous students, I wish I could uninvent automatic doors. They're a nuisance as they open and close. I'd rather have them close off the rowdy bunch between carriages and let the cold draft suck their loud mouth energy away. | | | [x: 17] |
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TV over IP | >> I think the Premier County should have a TV over IP. It shouldn't hog a lot of bandwidth. Streaming services with two minute shorts sounds just about right. | | | [x: 350] |
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Ireland's Fortitude in The Information Age | BALLYBLOG -- Perhaps the biggest investment Ireland has made in the Information Age is the human resources and IT infrastructure behind local government initiatives. The hiring practises alone reveal courageous management. Many of the IT specialists come from outside the civil service. These newly-hired professionals aren't mired in a government career path. Rather, they are linked to well-defined skill sets as programmers or Web designers. And they're good. | | | [x: 26121] |
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| JD on MX -- The Washington Post is talking to the experts and the punters are blogging about the cameras. Everywhere the cameras. "The average American is caught on camera eight to 10 times a day, law enforcement officials say." |
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[x: 261] |
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Matt Mower -- How about using blogs to improve language skills? One of Matt's friends commented on his imperfect English and suggested her help for improving it. She is going to start Radio blog, so he thinks:
- She makes a special category, which is not visible in her blog, but has an RSS feed.
- Then she uses this category to comment on my posts pointing to errors and suggesting improvements.
- I subscribe to this RSS, get my personal feedback and correct posts.
For multinational companies this could be a solution to help their employees developing language skills and overcoming fears of writing in foreign language. |
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| [x: 109] |
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Arid Desert of Venture Capital Funding | BOSTON -- Bleak news on the VC front. In 2001, for the first time ever, America’s venture capital industry generated a negative return. This dismal performance will repeat in 2002. Most of the money invested by east coast VC companies in 2000 is likely to be lost. Most of the start-ups are failing because they were ideas, not businesses. While poking around different offices, it's easy to see that the American VC industry faces a huge liquidity crunch because the lack of exits for venture capitalists to generate a return on their investments. In the late 1990s, many new companies could plan for an IPO and benefit from a huge windfall. That’s not happening now.
Some considered IPOs as the bellwether of the Irish Celtic Tiger boom.Now that IPOs are difficult, VCs focus on the potential for trade sales. This puts a premium on forging strategic partnerships. VCs will not put money into a company without an exit mechanism being considered. This has created a high hurdle for new companies searching for VC funding. It's not much better for later-stage companies. Several start-ups discovered their companies were valued less during second and third rounds of funding than their initial valuations. That’s depressing for founders.
But I've seen fund mangers who are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into mature businesses that show growth potential linked to the new business brought by an innovative acquisition. | | | [x: 109] [r: 3733] |
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FORTUNE -- The print edition of Fortune magazine often arrives to my Irish mailbox two weeks late. Even so, there's illuminating reading. David Kirkpatrick has written two articles that spotlight the declining fortune of big media in the eyes of the consumer. In Turning Out the Consumer, he explains how media companies are defeating their long-term interests. In Listen to People Who Listen to Music, he heard media executives telling a discussion panel that they wanted to enter the digital future.
They then proceeded to lay out the criteria for how they'd like to do it--by encrypting all movies so they could only be viewed on approved devices that electronically monitored your rights to see a movie, and by inaugurating a complex system of payments that would vary based on how long you intended to use a movie. If you wanted to keep it and indefinitely play it on all the devices you own, you'd pay a much higher price than if you just watched it once or kept it for two days. But such unlimited usage would cost considerably more than we pay today for a movie on DVD. The word the executives used most often was "protection" -- they aim to protect their products from the depredations of their untrustworthy customers. Is there any doubt why highly talented programmers want to defeat this obnoxious perspective? | | | [x: 26121] |
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| Kevin Werbach -- A thoughtful 148k white paper discussing Open Spectrum, alongside ideas for cognitive radio, ultrawideband, and software-defined radio. Werbach envisages a world of non-scarce spectrum where high-speed wireless data networks drive community activism, economic recovery and unparalleled innovation. Plus commentary from the Slashdot Rabble. |
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17 October 2002 |
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Sneak Peek -- I just got a look behind the curtains of the South Tipperary County Council Web site. Two newly-hired IT specialists crafted an original information site, taking some very courageous steps forward in making public information more accessible to the taxpayers. This is definitely 21st century Web work and a fine example of sending tax money effectively. |
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[x: 26121]
emailed to blog from Nokia 9210i over Vodafone HSD. |
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Event: e-Forum Breakfast EVENT -- e-Forum Breakfast, Guinness Storehouse, Dublin, 0800 5 Nov 02. Mary Hanafin and Chris Horn take your €35 and talk about the state of the Nation's Information Society.
[x: e1]
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Event: Sedona Conference 24 Oct EVENT -- Sedona Conference, Clontarf Castle, Dublin, Ireland, 24-26 Oct 02. The role of digital media in the educational sector will be the central theme. Over 100 delegates from around the world are expected to attend. The opening speaker is Edward de Bono, management theorist. Other speakers include Jerome Morrissey, director of Ireland's National Centre for Technology in Education, Chris Horn from Iona, and Stephen Heppel, Apple Master.
[x: e1]
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RESEARCH BUZZ -- A quick look at the changes in Yahoo and a handy directory too.
[x: 109]
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RADIO -- After I updated my Radio Root, I started getting a "comments" hyperlink in some of my News Aggregator stories. It's part of a Radio Update.
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DIVE INTO MARK -- As Mark Pilgrim writes in Dive Into Accessibility, "virtually all accessibility guidelines are about adding, not subtracting. Have an image? Add alternate text. Have navigation? Add a skip link. Have those wacky dynamic Javascript menus? Add regular text links. Whatever kind of exciting stuff you have now, keep it, but add this too."
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Ruth Maher -- Wants to be a female bear in her next life. "If you're a bear, you get to hibernate. You do nothing but sleep for six months.
Before you hibernate, you're supposed to eat yourself stupid.
If you're a bear, you birth your children (who are the size of walnuts) while you are sleeping and wake to partially grown, cute, cuddly cubs.
If you're a mama bear, everyone knows you mean business. You swat anyone who bothers your cubs. If your cubs get out of line, you swat them, too.
If you're a bear, your mate expects you to wake up growling. He expects that you will have hairy legs and excess body fat.
Yup, I wanna be a bear!
emailed to blog from Nokia 9210i over Vodafone HSD.
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MACLACHLAN ie -- An Irish patent application is effective only in the Republic of Ireland, but if applications in other countries are filed within a period of one year from the date of filing of the Irish application, then the original Irish application date can be claimed as a "priority" date under an International Convention to which most developed countries adhere. You can file a patent directly with the Irish Patent Office in Kilkenny. If the filing has a technical description of the invention, accompanied by drawings, you will establish a priority date. This kind of application is insufficient to achieve the grant of a patent, as it lacks so- called patent "claims". The claims are the legal language which define the scope of the monopoly being sought for the invention. At any time within the twelve month period, the applicant has the option of completing the basic priority application by filing claims, or of filing a new application claiming the priority date of the initial application. So this means one could modify filings in a minor way and still ensure patent protection.
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Jonathon Delacour -- "Given the paltry stipend one receives as a tenured faculty member of the University of Blogaria, the professoriate's ongoing fascination with the Blogging for Dollars controversy should hardly come as a surprise. AKMA, The Happy Tutor, Steve Himmer, Tom Matrullo, Mark Pilgrim, Shelley Powers, Dorothea Salo, Jeneane Sessum, Halley Suitt, and David Weinberger have all weighed in to the debate."
[x: 109] [r: dive into mark/further reading]
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Karlin Lillington -- While walking along the Grand Canal with herd of geeks, Karlin distinguished between an introverted mathematician and an extroverted mathematician. "An introverted mathematician looks at his shoes while he's talking to you, while an extroverted mathematician looks at your shoes while he's talking to you."
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KIRBYCOM -- Tim Kirby picks up the theme of "knowledge sharing" by pointing to a "personal knowledge sharing and its use in research," an essay by Sebastien Paquet.
[x: 109]
e-mailed to blog from Nokia 9210i over Vodafone HSD.
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PHP BB OPEN -- Ken Gunderson from Team Cool swears by the PHP BB, since "PHP pretty much spanks Perl these days." So we're going to use it as the back end of a training site.
[x: 109]
e-mail to blog from Nokia 9210i over Vodafone HSD.
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Spam Certified as Virus-Free
OPEN -- Ross Cooney had a bad SPAM day yesterday. One of his clients got hijacked when using their dial-up Internet connectiion. They got hit when their cmail open relay took delivery of about 5,000 emails advertising a great way to save money on mortgages. They then used SMTP auth to relay the emails through Cyber Sentry and guess what happend? The spam was certified as virus-free as it was dispatched from the Dublin screening servers.
[x: 109]
e-mailed to blog from Nokia 9210i over Vodafone HSD.
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John VanDyk -- "I'd be interested in talking privately with anyone who is using RSS for knowledge management. I'm putting together a session for a national symposium in April on RSS."
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Dave Winer -- ESPN uses RSS enclosures. I don't know how they work, so I'll read Don Park's note about big binary objects as RSS items. Radio has this feature. Radio Enclosures now use a new distribution model, one that gets rid of the click-wait for large media objects. Winer terms it "virtual bandwidth."
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ROAMAD -- Here's technology that allows cellular WiFi. You can build a WAN using 802.11b. I wonder if any Irish operators are considering this kind of platform? "RoamAD has already deployed the first stage of a metropolitan-wide (100 km2) Cellular Wi-Fi network that provides end-users with secure non line-of-sight mobile broadband connectivity to the Internet, office networks and the PSTN. Within the RoamAD network, end-users already enjoy ubiquitous coverage and the ability to roam with 100% committed bit rates of anything up to 330Kbps."
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16 October 2002 |
VISUAL THESAURUS -- Visual Thesaurus takes a submitted search term and returns similar or associated words. According to OLDaily, Visual Thesaurus was created from ThinkMap, a general purpose visualization engine.
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MISCHIEF MAKER -- Lousianna asks, "Where are we going and why am I in a hand basket?" And affirms the delight possible by randoming clicking around our Blog World. She reminds me I have to create my own list of 100 things about me.
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NEWZOID -- Get your fill of wacky headlines from Newzoid's headline generator. Daniel Young has been generating false come-ons with this technology since 2001. You can even roll your own. Newzoid polls online news headlines and does a simple amalgamation, so you get things like "Finnish Police Took Dresses During Night Visit," "Iraqis Fighting Back In Playground," "VH1 Vogue Is Dense, Demanding," and "Ex-Taliban Official Questioning Safety Of Slower Loan Growth"
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NEWZOID -- Get your fill of wacky headlines from Newzoid's headline generator. It's been generating false come-ons since 2001. Newzoid polls online news headlines and does a simple amalgation, so you get things like "Finnish Police Took Dresses During Night Visit," "Iraqis Fighting Back In Playground," "VH1 Vogue Is Dense, Demanding," and "Ex-Taliban Official Questioning Safety Of Slower Loan Growth"
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AD Marwick -- It's worthwhile to read Matt Mower's musings as he digests knowledge management technology by AD Marwick. The book argues that knowledge includes both the experience and understanding of the people in the organisation and the information artifacts, such as documents and reports available within the organisation and in the world outside. But there's much more. Marwick is especially sensitive to tacit knowledge, saying "The key to knowledge creation lies in the mobilization and conversion of tacit knowledge."
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Adam Curry -- It looks like Adam and other blogoholics will be able to convert their brain droppings to blog posts very soon with Dave Winer's outline2blog tool.
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REUTERS -- As Intel's CFO Andy Bryant tells it, the Tech Economy is not recovering. This fact has caused an nagging sore spot in the whole of the Irish economy.
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NEW YORK TIMES -- Mixed results in revenue and profit at Motorola. The company is still reeling by the bad Turkish debt, as that little drama continues unfolding in US District Court. Turkey -- the country where German firms routinely carry bribery fees as legitimate (and grant-adided) costs of doing business.
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Jack Kapica -- Kapica lists 10 rules of e-business failure, inspired by the recording industry's imaginative approach. "It's easy to fail in e-business; what's hard is failing magnificently. The Big Five music-recording companies have been transcendent in this respect. Their combined efforts have gone beyond killing their e-businesses and are close to destroying an entire industry."
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15 October 2002 |
Slow Economy with Closed Doors Business Week -- With Europe's economy growing at less than 1 per cent annually, does it make sense for Ireland to rebuff practising IT professionals at her gateways? Speaking from personal experience, that kind of two-fingered attitude does not make Ireland a progressive place worthy of foreign investment.
[x: 261 r: 3537] Aboard Virgin Rail with an IBM TransNote using Nokia D211 card.
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They Make Jeeps into Everything Karl Ludvigsen -- The Corvette celebrates its golden anniversary this year, one year before my parents mark their 50th wedding anniversary. Both events have one thing in common -- the Jeep. My dad drove a Jeep as a US Army medical corpsman before coasting into my mom's life at Fitzsimons Army Burn Unit. Major Kenneth Brooks presented his wife with a Jeep too, in 1950, and her rejection led to him creating a sports car design that later became the Corvette.
[x: 350 r: 3535] Aboard Virgin Rail from IBM Transnote using Nokia D211 card.
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Jared Spool -- Interesting metaphor in Jared Spool's Acrobat presentation about "Scent of a Web Page." He includes useful tips concerning layout and page objects, to "ensure a good scent."
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Jerry Weinberg -- Tom Bowden talks about "Weinberg's Zeroth Law of Unreliability." If a system doesn't have to be reliable, it can meet any other objective. I have to get Jerry Weinberg's Quality Software Management Vol 2 on my book shelf, so I can read Chapter 19 at a leisurely pace.
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MACROMEDIA -- The Dreamweaver MX Certification exam is almost ready. It is tough. It will be released for DevCon, but you will be able to take it locally after October 27th at a VUE testing center. There's a good article on DesDev (photogenic image too) with additional details.
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Phil Wolff -- Next week, UCD host a Knowledge Management Seminar, but exceptional info exists right now in Phil Wolff's excellent resource, a dijest (sic) of commendable stature.
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MIT -- There's an Interdisciplinary Symposium on Reputation Mechanisms in Online Communities planned for Saturday and Sunday, April 26-27, 2003 at MIT. Funding for this symposium is provided through grants from the National Science Foundation (award number 0209136, CISE/Digital Society & Technologies) and the MIT Center for eBusiness. Some of the invited presenters could be soporific at best, but the event promises to illustrate ways of improving trust on the Internet. The 19 Sep 02 print edition of The Economist carries an article about a study comparing web use in a region to the degree that people think others are trustworthy and good. So mainstream publishers are interested in the veracity of electronic content.
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ONLINE ie -- If you let your aggregators do your browsing, you'll definitely discover affiliated interests. This morning, I discovered Online.ie has a feed for my Palm. I didn't know that! But the feed appeared inside one of my FeedReader and now I want to grab its RSS file. The story that got me started is about how The Register does more than report. "There are lots of tech outlets that re-write press releases and take tech company statements at face value. I expect more of the Register. Look into some of the complaints about what is broken in Google's page ranking that were in Wired's article." Nice commentary.
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Karlin Lillington -- Herself a nomadic hack, Karlin found this Salon story about Kevin Barbieux, a homeless blogger in Lousiana. Barbbieux sleeps in abandoned buildings or shelters -- and writes a daily journal that has made him an Internet celebrity. It's a mark of a digitally homogenous society when Dublin's homeless enter the blogosphere.
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DIVE INTO MARK -- Shortly after reading how Mark's dog ran away, my stray Pomeranian just about became homeless again. I legged it after him, into a blacked-out housing estate that had just lost power to its street lamps, and found him cornered by a sheep dog. The sheep dog had a mouthful of the Pom's hair and both dogs were snarling at each other. So I guess my lost dog story, one I blame on Mark starting the thread, is more exciting than the original. I missed my night deadline as well.
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MOBILE COMMERCE WORLD -- Deutsche Telekom-owned T-Mobile USA announced a deal with Borders through which it will install 802.11b networks in over 400 of the book and music chain's US locations. T-Mobile is the company whose "HotSpot" service pumps wireless bandwidth into over 1,200 Starbucks locations (projected to increase to 2,000 stores by 2003).
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Dave Winer -- One distinction about outliner users and everyone else is outliners think about thinking. Outliners are aware of their own process. Only people who think about thinking get to a place where they can invest in being more efficient in their thinking. Some people say they don't think in outlines. Winer says, "Hanging information on a hierarchy makes it easy to forget it and focus on new ideas and relationships. It's a good way to relax intellectually." I use Mind Maps and distill my monthly topics into one cross-referenced document, showing me interesting places where things fit together.
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14 October 2002 |
IA SLASH.org -- Victor and Joshua are both talking about story telling as a method for communicating possible actions or paths when interacting with web sites. Victor mentioned an IBM seminar about story telling. There is probably a good deal of learning material here.
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13 October 2002 |
Jenny Levine -- For months I've been trying to get to the back end of several sites I read through hypertext, but now I discover The Shifted Librarian has most of the RSS feeds of sites I like to read in my aggregator.
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Good Languages for Mathematical Computations OPEN -- Dave Wilson has "been piggy backing on Excel via COM in order to do some calculations as ColdFusion isn't the best of tools for performing
mathematical routines. Now, this is not ideal either as it requires Excel to
be installed on the server and takes up valuable processing time." He's looking for languages better suited for mathematical processing, preferably with the ability to connect or extract results easily. He wants to avoid COM because CFMX doesnt work too well with COM now and COM is becoming an obsolete technology with MS pushing .Net and web services instead.
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WIRED.com -- Wired's staff explains the philosophy behind the Wired News Design. After the switch to XHTML and complete adoption of CSS, Wired News pages now load faster, and are at once more accessible to all Web browsers and specialised browsing environments used by the visually or physically impaired. By stripping out font, color, and margin rules from the markup, and aggregating all those style rules into just a couple of CSS files, design changes can be propagated to thousands of pages instantly. That's progress.
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Sam Ruby -- Noah Mendelsohn's DevCon slides are online. The opinions and analysis are his alone, and not necessarily IBM's, but the contents ©2002 IBM. More details at Schema Secrets.
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LM ORCHARD et al -- If you mix the Blogwalking idea with Adam Curry's Audioblogs, you could arrive in a shopping queue where you buy a Nokia Communicator 9210i. I blogwalk with my 9210i, using it to send blog items over email. I blogwalked this upload that way. Then I cleaned it up with Radio a few hours later. In my case, my Radio is off most of the time my 9210i is publishing. This idea deserves a lot more reading.
>>Blogwalking as an "Essential Web Writing" topic anyone?
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DECAFBAD.com -- Leslie Michael Orchard argues it's all about the conversation, not the referrer logs.. Yet Mark Pilgrim's Further Reading RSS starts with the referrer. When I first started browsing, I wanted to know bookmarks of others. When I started reading news reports of the tech world, I wanted URLs. When I refined a way of searching the Web, I needed to figure out ways to drill down to first-hand info. Mark Pilgrim's further reading RSS takes this search for reflective knowledge into the blogosphere, and that should create a "nice game of follow-the-leader for referrer log watchers," in L.M. Orchard's words.
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