April 02, 2008
Royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable licenses
With disappointing repetitiveness, I stumble across some bozo up in arms over some company that's attempting to "steal your copyright." These are usually in a lather because they've actually read the Terms of Service for [insert web-based application here] and noticed language that looks something like this:
"the submitting user grants [company] the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license."
A good example is this comment on the Slashdot story last week about Adobe launching an online version of Photoshop Express. I've had to deal with these kind of complaints for the web properties I'm responsible for, but my annoyance is nothing new. The first time I remember coming across complaints about these kind of terms is almost a decade ago when Yahoo! took over Geocities. It annoyed me even back then when I was just a humble ed tech trainer, not a product manager responsible for honest-to-goodness web applications.
Although I am not a lawyer and you definitely shouldn't take legal advice from me, let me explain to you what the heck is going on here: it's called the Internet.
When you upload your content from your computer to [insert web-based application here] you are transferring that content from your computer to the centrally-hosted web application that, presumably, will reproduce that content when it serves it up for display to you or someone else on the web page. This is is commonly known as publishing in web parlance, a way to distribute content over the World Wide Web. Etc. etc. Terms starting to sound familiar?
The Web works by making copies of content and transmitting/distributing those copies all over hell and back anytime someone views a web page, not to mention all the caching of copies. Any company that's going to get into the business of helping you put content of any sort on the web needs to get your permission to do fling that content all over the globe.
If the vendor didn't explicitly make the license to do that part of the terms, then some other bozo is going to come along and say "I uploaded a photo to your photo sharing site, and you had the unmitigated gall to -- horror or horrors -- transmit my content to the web browser of someone, and in the process of doing so allowed them to cache a copy of that photo on their own computer! How dare you! I'm suing you for copyright infringement, Mr. Vendor!" The type of terms like those quoted above are about how the web works and making sure that some litigious jackass doesn't sue the vendor over doing what's necessary for a web app to exist. It's not about "stealing copyright."
So, you "stealing copyright" bozos, please stop getting your knickers in a twist. Put your tinfoil hat back on and wait by the front door for the black helicopters.
Oh, by the way, the quoted terms above? They're quoted from the Slashdot Terms of Service. ;-)
Posted April 2, 2008 07:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
March 31, 2008
Seriously, RIM, have you no shame?
Does the shape, coloring, and body design of RIM's new Blackberry 9000 look vaguely similar to any other product to you guys, too?
Posted March 31, 2008 05:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 02, 2007
Are you a hotshot UI designer?
I don't write about work on this blog, but my team at Blackboard is hiring a UI hotshot to work on Web 2.0-ish education applications. Having a full-time UI designer on my team will make my life a lot less stressful (borrowed resources & contractors make my head hurt), so I figured it can't hurt to reach out wherever I can.
Check out the full job description for the Senior User Interface Designer position. This isn't an entry-level position. We're looking for someone with some serious UI design & AJAX chops to really make user interface and user interaction a focus on a team that's focused on new product development. The team, the Blackboard Beyond Initiative, is a new division within the company that's focused on building centrally hosted web applications, a different approach than Blackboard's traditional enterprise, server-based product line.
Consequently, the team is sort of a start-up within the company, with both the benefits (more freedom to innovate, not hindered by legacy code or interfaces, etc.) and the challenges (yeah, we could use more headcount). One start-up challenge we don't have, though, is the worry about where the next paycheck comes from, since Blackboard a stable public company with a market cap over a billion dollars.
Blackboard's a great place to work -- casual environment with lots of fun, really smart people. I've stayed at Blackboard for over 8 years now, longer than I've stayed at any other job, so they must be doing something right. Of course, I'm the product director for the Beyond team, so a potential downside is that you'd have to put up with me on a daily basis. ;-)
If you or someone you know sounds like a good fit, submit your resume through the regular channels, but drop me an email as well at my work address, greg.ritter@blackboard.com.
Posted August 2, 2007 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 07, 2007
Accessing Your Computer's Files Remotely Via iPhone
So I'm out and about earlier today and realize that some information I need is in a file on my MacBook Pro . . . which of course is sitting at home on my desk. Sigh.
Waitaminute. I've got a brand new portable Internet device in my pocket. Wouldn't it be simple if I could just access the files on my home computer from the iPhone?
Waitanotherminute. I use FolderShare, a free service from Microsoft, to keep key files on my multiple computers in sync across the various machines. One of FolderShare's other features is that you can use the FolderShare web interface to access files on any of the machines that you've configured with FolderShare. Maybe I could access those files via FolderShare's web interface and Safari on the iPhone?
Holdonthereaminute! Are you sure this is secure? Well, FolderShare is a secure P2P infrastructure. All the traffic is authenticated via RSA, encrypted via AES, and delivered over SSL. Good enough for me. Let's give it a shot.
Starting up Safari on the iPhone . . . thumbing http://www.foldershare.com into the iPhone keyboard . . . yep, there's the site . . . logging into FolderShare . . . navigating to the FolderShare Remote Access interface . . . yep, the FolderShare client on my home computer is running . . . click on that icon for my home computer . . . zowee! there's the Home directory . . . navigating to the Documents folder . . . scrolling down the list of files . . . bingo! there's the file . . . opening . . .
Ta-dah! There I am sitting in the bookstore viewing a PDF pulled off my computer at home over the Internet on my iPhone.
Sometimes technology makes me really happy.
Posted July 7, 2007 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 30, 2007
Total Time to get an iPhone: <15 minutes!
On a whim I drove by the Apple Store in the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington, VA, after grabbing an omelet at Pete's Diner this morning. The Clarendon Apple Store is in a little shopping center called Market Commons that has a U-shaped road looped through it. There's almost never parking in the loop, but I told myself if there was no line at the Apple Store and if there was parking in the loop, I'd buy myself an iPhone.
I figured I was saving myself some money by making that deal.
Oops.
The loop's one way, so you have to drive all the way around it to get to the Apple Store on the east side. I could see there was no line outside the store. As I rounded the corner of the loop, I saw an SUV pulling out of a parking space right in front of the Apple Store. Yes, I got a space less than 10 feet from the door of the Apple Store. I got out walked in and walked straight to the demo table where the floor samples of the iPhone were set up. As I walked up, another guy walked away and with a grand total of zero seconds waiting time, I was playing with an iPhone.
It really took only a few minutes to confirm that I wanted one. I checked a few websites, played a song, flicked the contact list up and down, badda bing, badda boom, turned around and walked the eight feet to the front counter where there was no one in line and bought an iPhone (8GB model).
I would have been out of the store in under 6 minutes, except as soon as the cashier handed me the box, I realized the iPhone doesn't come with a belt clip of any kind, so it took another four minutes or so to grab a simple, inexpensive belt clip and get back to the cashier -- still no line -- and buy the clip.
Total time elapsed from getting out of the car to getting back into the car with an iPhone -- less than 15 minutes.
I had to text (from the old Sony Ericsson) my friend, Bug (a nickname, but he answers to it) and gloat a bit. He's an Apple diehard -- the man has three 30" Apple Cinema Displays on his desk, and I lost count of the number of Apple computers he owns. He did some intermediate (read: hours, but not double digit hours) line waiting yesterday evening.
Gloating was unnecessary. He was at the Bethesda, MD, Apple Store getting his second (or third maybe) iPhone, and having the same speedy experience.
Should anyone really have expected any different? I'm sure it might be different in some of the densely populated areas like NYC or geek-heavy regions like San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but Apple is not like Sony delivering a new playstation. Apple doesn't have to under-manufacture the hardware to manufacture demand through scarcity, because they are expert at creating demand before the release.
So the iPhone is activated now and going through the first sync with iTunes which is nearly done, so I'll finish up this post and write a full review later.
Posted June 30, 2007 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 28, 2007
When 20/20 Hindsight Makes You Want To Blind Yourself
It's hard to feel sorry for James Hong. As one of the two co-founders of HOTorNOT, the oft-copied photo rating site, he's raked in the dough. For years, HOTorNOT was run leanly, with little investment in development and lots of advertising revenue. Hong himself describes it as a cash cow.
Recently Hong has been re-inventing the aging HOTorNOT, and he has written about it on his blog.
It's a good read in general, but this is the part that made me groan out load. He describes their initial strategy to re-invent the business:
[O]ur original vision was to become an incubator and to enable our employees to work on new ideas, and let them spin those off as separate companies.. basically let our employees graduate into becoming funded entrepreneurs at a time when funding was hard to get. Our first and only attempt at this was back in 2003 when we hoped to work with Steve Chen and Mike Solomon to start Yafro.com, which was going to be a social networking site with media sharing applications built on top. [Emphasis mine. -greg]Sounds reasonable until a couple of years later when you realize you punted on funding a social media-sharing service being pushed by Steve Chen. Yes, that Steve Chen.In the end things did not work out because some members of our board were uncomfortable with the idea of giving the employees of a spinout majority share and control… so Jim and I agreed with Steve and Mike that it was a no go.
I'm sure the tens of millions Hong has raked in from HOTorNOT allays the pain a little, but still . . . damn, that's gotta burn!
Posted June 28, 2007 06:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 13, 2006
Switch Part 1: The Demise of the Dell
The old Dell Inspiron 8200 notebook did right by me, and, in general, it's been the best computer I've ever owned. My basic computing activity has changed a lot in the last four years -- I'm arguably online more hours per week than I've ever been before, thanks primarily to getting off the road and broadband in the home. For the most part, the Dell kept up with my needs. Unfortunately, it was getting a bit gray around the temples. Time to switch.
The Dell has been getting cantankerous for almost a year now. The original 40GB hard drive on the Inspiron gave up the ghost last fall. (Thankfully less than a week after I'd bought an external hard drive for back-up purposes -- how's that for serendipity?) Simple enough to replace it with a new 80GB hard drive. Well, simple except that the old HD must have been pneumatically screwed into the HD tray frame. I had to buy a new tray off eBay to put the new drive in, since I mangled the old frame trying to get the old drive out.
That delayed my HD upgrade by about a week while I waited for the new HD to arrive, so during that week I booted the Inspiron off a bootable Ubuntu Linux CD and saved any work to a USB key or the external HD. Craziness, but it worked just fine. Apparently, you don't need an internal HD with an OS on it to run your computer. Its more just a convenience than anything else. :-)
Then, in the winter, one of the two fans built into the Inspiron started to fail with ear-endangering grinding noises. I considered replacing the fans, but apparently the way the Inspiron is laid out, you have to remove the entire motherboard to replace the fans. Ugh. Too much geekery even for me. Instead, in an attempt to keep the CPU cool I found a little free app for manual control of the Inspiron's fan. That let me disable the grinding fan, and control when the remaining good one kicked in and at what speed – enough control to keep the CPU adequately cooled. I also invested about $35 in a cooling pad (which also conveniently doubled as a USB hub) to assist in the anti-heat campaign, but which unfortunately added about three-quarters of an inch to the height of the already-thick Inspiron. But I'm frugal (comes from being a teacher for years before I got into the software biz), so I made do.
This cobbled together solution kept me going for another six months, but last week the second, remaining fan started making the same grinding noises. I'd already been toying with getting a new computer, even as far as proclaiming to a co-worker a week earlier that I was going to buy one of the new Intel-based MacBook Pros over the weekend. I even went to the Apple Store that weekend, but couldn't really justify purchasing a new computer because "the Dell was still holding its own." (That frugality again.)
But, man, when that second fan started moaning like a horror movie monster, my ass was in the car on the way to the Apple Store in minutes. Oh, I could probably have figured out some way to keep the Dell going for another couple of months, but frankly there comes a point when enough's enough. I'm not broke, I make a decent living -- I can afford a new computer. So rather than deal with the headache of keeping the Dell on life support, I am now the owner of a brand spanking new MacBook Pro (the 15" 2.166 Ghz model).
Up next: Why Mac?
Posted August 13, 2006 08:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 26, 2006
Going Mobile
Recently, I got a Tablet PC courtesy of my boss. (Thanks, Dan!) This is my first ever blog post written by hand. Literally -- by hand, with a stylus, in digital ink, on the tablet. So far I have only corrected the handwriting recognition twice in this paragraph. I'm finding that it actually does better if I don't try to compensate for bad handwriting. Damn. Okay three times. :)
There's really no comparison between the handwriting recognition entry and typing. Typing is FAR easier. Lower case L's are a bitch, too. But I am impressed with the quality of the recognition. The tablet PC is definitely is useful for taking notes in a meeting, though. Clacking away on a keyboard during a meeting is annoying, but note-taking on a tablet PC makes no more noise than on paper. And I have the advantage of (1) the notes not disappearing into the impending avalanche of paper stacked on the corner of my desk as do all my paper notes and (2) the eminently useful searchability of the notes. Still, typing wins in 90% of the use cases, but it's nice to have the digital ink option for those last 10%.[*]
What I really like is the light weight of the tablet PC. This tablet, a two-year old hand-me-down Acer Travelmate C110, is geared towards mobility, so it's tiny. Sure you can recline on the couch with a laptop, but it's usually a precarious balancing act and you can only deal so long before the battery heat starts burning a hole in some body part. With the tablet, it's not much heavier than a thick hardcover book, and I have to say -- web browsing with your feet up is a really different experience. At two years old, this model is getting a little outmoded even; I can imagine that the new "Origami" ultra-mobile PC's announced by Microsoft last month are going to generate a new form factor.
In the past, I've had discussions with friends and colleagues about the impending doom the publishing industry faces as books become digitized in the way music and video have. Their response has always been, "But the experience of reading a paper book is what will save it." Balderdash, I say! It's just a matter of the device's form factor. Once a device capable of displaying text at a high enough resolution can be reduced to something approaching the size/weight of a trade paperback, people will just as quickly abandon the printed book as they have abandoned the cassettes, VHS, CDs, and DVDs. . . . especially if they can get fast and easy wireless access to downloadable books via the Internet. Long tail anyone?
My recent tablet PC experience convinces me that we're getting much closer to that ideal form factor that's going to shake up the publishing industry for good.
[*] Full disclosure: the latter half of this post -- basically everything after the asterisk -- was not written by hand on the tablet PC, but really for no other reason than I had saved it before I finished, forgot about it, and finished it a couple days later when I was already working on a laptop. :-)
Posted April 26, 2006 06:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 16, 2004
Microsoft buys Lookout
Lookout, the search plug-in which I wrote about announced today that they have been this week was acquired by Microsoft.
I'm hoping that this turns out to be a good thing but the fact that it appears to have been rolled into the MSN Search team instead of into the Office team is somewhat worrisome.
Posted July 16, 2004 09:19 AM | Permalink
July 14, 2004
The Personal Web
Or, "Why Furl, Lookout, and Google put the smackdown on Backflip, Outlook, and Yahoo"
In a comment to my recent post on Furl, Scott Leslie of Ed Tech Post responded:
"FURL is cool enough, I guess, but I've been a bit surprised by the hype surrounding it, given that web-based bookmark managers have been around for a while now"Scott's right of course, and I've used a gazillion bookmark managers in my day. They all had the same problem: they're bookmark managers. Managing bookmarks sucks. I don't want to manage bookmarks; I want to manage information that interests me.
Bookmark managers almost all suffer from the same conceptual flaw . . . which also happens to be the same conceptual flaw that has plagued organization of other information as well, such as emails.
Take for example, my Outlook/Exchange set up. My job requires I correspond with a couple hundred vendors and academic institutions a year, so, in the past, I've spent a lot of time creating mail folders to keep mail from different sources organized. Forget Outlook's search feature -- with several gigs between my mailbox and archives, Outlook's search performance is near useless.
Enter Lookout, a plug-in for Outlook that indexes your mailbox (and archives and attachments and, if you like, My Documents) in the background. It provides a fairly flexible search interface that responds with googlespeed. Since installing Lookout, I've discovered my Outlook folder heirachy blows chunks. I don't need it anymore. A good search query and I can find most any email I've sent or received via Outlook in the last five years in seconds. Which suddenly means that the four gigs of mail folders and archives ceases to be an almost-static hunk of data and becomes knowledge that I can use.
The lesson (and the point of this post)? A good search obliviates the need for a hierarchy. The conceptual flaw inherent ot most email clients and bookmark managers is the assumption the best way for to make the information useful is to organize it (usually manually) into categories or hierarchies. To be fair, this is probably less a conceptual flaw, than a historical technical limitation -- you need a certain level of processing power and storage space.
Solving for this allowed Google to take a commanding lead in the "finding information" field. At one point in the history of the Web, human-managed hierarchical directories like Yahoo were still a valuable method to get to information kind of like what you wanted. Enter Google. By applying brute force processing power, suddenly a search turns up relevant results, so I don't need the legion of Yahoo indexers as much anymore. (Librarians shudder at this line of thought.)
Furl is more valuable than other bookmark managers, because it indexes the full text of every page I "furl." Not just the page title, not just the metadata I add, but the full text of the page. I quickly did away with categorizing "furled" pages once I realized I can use Furl's fairly decent, Google-like query syntax. That's great because heirarchies are bitch to maintain and keep relevant (just ask Yahoo). Furl is like Lookout for bookmarks. Or, more to the point, it's like Google for bookmarks.
The least important thing Furl does is help you manage bookmarks. More interesting and useful are the social aspects (and, in general, I'm a great fan of recommendation engines of any sort). Clay Shirky hit on these social aspects yesterday as well, posting about social link management on , as did Peter Capula in a post on social bookmarking and other stuff on the Social Software Weblog.
However, the most important thing Furl does is allow you to carve out a sub-section of the web that you're interested in and deal with that sub-section in a Google-like manner, meaning being able to search the full text of the web pages. John Battelle hit the line drive on this back in April, calling it the Personal Web. Bookmarks are a list of page titles. A Personal Web -- like a Furl collection -- is a repository of content. It's the difference between being the card catalog and being the library.
Posted July 14, 2004 05:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
June 24, 2004
Furl: Bookmarks Done Right
So for many years (as my old buds on the FutureCulture mailing list will attest) I've moaned about the problems I have with bookmarks (aka "favorites" if you prefer Microsoft branding). Most importantly, I hated the fact that my bookmarks on my work machine were separate from my bookmarks on my home machine. Why isn't this information hosted online so I can access it from anyplace.
I've tried various solutions over the years. Recently, a glimmer of hope came from a Mozilla Firefox extension, Bookmark Synchronizer which let me keep the bookmarks in sync between multiple machines.
But now I'm hooked on Furl, a free service. You stick a "Furl It!" bookmark in your browser toolbar, and click that when you want to archive a page. It pops up a window that lets you add the link, an excerpt you've highlighted, comments, and keywords to your Furl account. Links can be categorized (in multiple categories). Plus, Furl caches a copy of the page and indexes it, so the page and metadata are searchable. You can import/export your links in various browser bookmark formats or raw XML.
If that's not enough, you can rate the pages you save & they've just built in a recommendation engine to suggest new pages, based on your ratings -- found a gazillion neat pages and tools through that today. Also, Furl links are share-able. See mine. And you can subscribe via RSS to someone's public Furl bookmarks.
Whew. That's a lot of features.
The Furl It! bookmarklet has been giving Mozilla Firefox 0.8 some trouble, though. So far that's been the only hiccup. Long term? We'll see. Furl has no revenue model right now (though I expect Google Ads could generate them some money). In any event, if we're lucky we'll see a spate of Furl-like services arise.
Now pardon me while I go kick myself in the ass for not finding a way to implement this idea when I had it six or seven years ago.
Posted June 24, 2004 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
June 17, 2004
300 images, 1800 sites
300 Images From 1800 Sites: a beautiful little compendium of common website interface elements (e.g. arrows, mail icons, bullets, etc.). Link via boing boing.
Posted June 17, 2004 07:34 AM | Permalink
June 14, 2004
Social Networking Sites Meta-List
Social Networking Services Meta List. It's like portals or online stores in 1999. Looks like it's time for a shakeout.
Posted June 14, 2004 11:31 AM | Permalink
May 13, 2004
Google Moving Closer To Yahoo
First, good old search, then a heirarchical directory, then shopping via Froogle, then email, and now Google is allowing the creation of groups/mailing lists: Google Groups 2 Beta.
The old Google Groups was just an interface to Usenet. This extends it by allowing people to create their own, non-Usenet online discussion groups that can also double as an email listserve.
Posted May 13, 2004 12:02 PM | Permalink
May 11, 2004
Skype Plans For-Fee Service
Reports are beginning to leak in that Skype, the free peer-to-peer voice-over-IP (VoIP) slash instant-messaging service, will launch a pay service connecting Skype VoIP to the plain old telephone system.
Didn't someone write about this back in the fall? Oh wait -- that was me! To wit:
At some point, to gain market, Skype needs to open a gateway between the IP network and the telephone network (which is apparently in the plans). At that point, I would lay bets that Skype ceases to be free and falls into pretty much the same realm as Net2Phone and DialPad.
That's from the Skype Hype is Tripe entry, that, incidentally, is consistently one of the top ten entry points for this site. I think a lot of people find their way here via searches that land them on that link. It's on page 5 of Google search for "skype," but the third for "skype hype."
Posted May 11, 2004 02:21 PM | Permalink
April 15, 2004
AOL goes HTML
AOL is moving away from their proprietary markup language.
AOL's online service has always been a walled garden. At one point even, AOL users could only send email to other AOL users and were unable to view any content on the Interent -- just content that lived inside AOL's proprietary network. Since the late 90's there's been a hole in the wall that lets AOL users get out to the Web (and lets email come in), but all the content in the AOL garden was still authored in their own proprietary markup language.
That's changing. AOL has started buiding their content in and migrating their services to HTML (though it will be interesting to see how standards-compliant they are).
Why now? Here's the real kicker from the Post article:
"subscribers will soon be able to sign onto AOL.com from any computer without installing AOL's special software and get most of the company's content."That's a big deal (and not only because it means no more CDs in the mail), but because it means their business model is shifting to be more directly competitive with Yahoo and MSN (advertising-funded services with premium content subscriptions). I'm sure there'll still be a client-side app, if for no other reason than it's a great ease-of-use benefit to newbies. But there are fewer and fewer online newbies in America these days, so that market advantage is shrinking.
A walled garden works great as a business model as long as what's inside the garden is more attractive than what's outside. For years, though, pretty much anything you could get inside AOL was available for free or cheaper on the Internet. When the flowers in the walled garden cease to be unique, it's time for the walls to come down.
Posted April 15, 2004 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
April 06, 2004
The Google Operating System
Jason Kottke posts an interesting entry called GooOS, the Google Operating System which extends on these three paragraphs from the Topix.net weblog:Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.
While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.
This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?Kottke's right -- that's a brilliant summary of Google's business model.
Posted April 6, 2004 06:15 AM | Permalink
February 20, 2004
The Celestial Recommendation Engine
Stephen Downes has posted an interesting essay, The Semantic Social Network, which I haven't read as thoroughly as I should have, but it looks pretty well thought out.
Stephen says, "It is perhaps a bit of an oversimplification to say this, but the problem could be summarized with the following observation: the blogging network and RSS link content, but not identities, while the social software network links identities, but not content."
I think his proposal is getting close to my dream social network, which is really an unbounded recommendation network.
A recommendation network is basically the "People who liked/rented/bought this also liked/rented/bought _______" functionality you are seeing more and more in e-commerce sites. In essence, every social software network is a recommendation network. With social network sites like Friendster, Orkut (which I haven't been invited into! Wah!), Ryze, etc., there's typically an implicit recommendation in the establishment of "friendship" with another user.
Recommendation systems seem to fit a semantic web model quite well. The basic structure is
user ---> hates/dislikes/likes/loves ---> objectWith social software networks it just so happens that the object is another user ("Joe likes Mary" or "Joe befriends Mary"). Other recommendation systems typically have users rating books, music, films, etc.
I like the recommendations I get from Netflix; they're nearly always spot on with my tastes. Amazon's recommendations are not as good and probably gamed by Amazon to drive purchases. E.g., if you say you've really liked a book by a particular author, immediately all of that author's other books float to the top of your recommendations. I suppose that's generally true, but it's seems like a cheap correlation, probably because Amazon recommendations are driven by purchasing as well as by ratings.
However, the great thing about Amazon's recommendations is that they are cross-product: it recommends the Lost in Translation DVD partially because I liked the short story collection, Cathedral, by Raymond Carver. Now Cathedral and Lost in Translation aren't even works in the same media, but there is definitely something Carveresque about Copolla's film -- that's a good correlation.
What I want is a social/recommendation network that has no boundaries. I want to know that people who liked Cathedral and Lost in Translation also dine at Ten Penh and buy groceries at the Whole Foods on P Street and are going to The Shins show at the Black Cat and wear Kevin Cole shoes and finds the girl named Jane who lives around the corner from me attractive. Sort of a crazy combination of uber-recommendations and social networking.
Stephen's proposed approach -- a marriage of blogging, FOAF, and some kind of metadata (e.g. dislike, like, love) -- comes closer to what I'm looking for. The challenge, I believe, is how to represent the object being rated, reviewed, recommended, or commented upon. I think his system's effectiveness may fall apart there because there's no common frame of reference, which is what non-distributed social network software provides.
By limiting the semantic frame of reference narrowly ("User A recommends User B" where all Users are uniquely identifiable or "User A recommends Book X" where all Users and Books are uniquely identifiable) you avoid fuzziness. In today's social networks, John can recommend Mary or John can recommend Cathedral, but John (for the most part) can't recommend a particular diner in Manhattan because it is neither a User or a Book -- it's outside the bounded frame of reference.
With Stephen's model I believe John could recommend another user, a book, or anything under the sun, but I suspect that if John has blogged that he likes Lost in Translation and pointed to a link to the DVD on Netflix and Mary has blogged that she likes the same film but linked to the database entry for it in IMDB, then Stephen's hypothetical semantic social network application may not be able to distinguish that John and Mary are in fact talking about the very same recommended object.
I suppose combing a Google-ish level of indexing and searching might get around that to some extent. Stephen suggest this: "It will be a search / aggregation tool that uses FOAF and RSS aggregators to satisfy queries based not only on the content of an article but on information about the authors of those articles." E.g. I think this means if John and Mary both use the text "Lost in Translation" in their semantically, socially networked blog entry, then maybe a search query can be used to semantically identify that they are both recommending (at least) the chunk of text, "Lost in Translation." However, there still needs to be a way to relate the text "Lost in Translation" with the film Lost in Translation (not to mention the "information about the authors"). For socially networked blog entries, this might work, but I don't think it makes the next step to the sort of "celestial recommendation network" (a la the idea of a celestial jukebox) that I'm dreaming about.
The challenge to a "celestial recommendation network" is one of (as seemingly always) metadata. Everything recommended needs to be identified. In Amazon they can do cross-vertical recommendations because Amazon has unique metadata (the ASIN number) for everything in all its web-based stores. However, outside a bounded, centralized system like Amazon, though, you lose the ability to uniquely refer to the object being recommended unless everybody previously agrees on a schema by which you will bind references to that object. And I think it's some approach to that kind of schema that is required to make a celestial recommendation network a reality.
Posted February 20, 2004 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Google v Yahoo
Yahoo has launched a new Yahoo Search to compete with Google. As Brian points out it also finds the RSS feed of a site, if one exists. Fits in well with My Yahoo's recently launched beta RSS aggregator. The nicest thing about the Yahoo search I've found so far? A search for Ten Reasons Why puts me ahead of "10 Reasons to Believe in the Christian Faith." Never managed to edge those dang Christians out on Google.
Posted February 20, 2004 01:12 PM | Permalink
December 15, 2003
Biculturalism
Joel on Software writes about biculturalism. In this case, the two cultures under discussion are Windows programmers and UNIX programmers:
Suppose you take a Unix programmer and a Windows programmer and give them each the task of creating the same end-user application. The Unix programmer will create a command-line or text-driven core and occasionally, as an afterthought, build a GUI which drives that core. This way the main operations of the application will be available to other programmers who can invoke the program on the command line and read the results as text. The Windows programmer will tend to start with a GUI, and occasionally, as an afterthought, add a scripting language which can automate the operation of the GUI interface. This is appropriate for a culture in which 99.999% of the users are not programmers in any way, shape, or form, and have no interest in being one.
Posted December 15, 2003 05:49 PM | Permalink
December 14, 2003
Free Online CSS Course
Via Mezzoblue comes this self-paced course on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that is free for a limited time.
Posted December 14, 2003 05:14 PM | Permalink
December 10, 2003
Wireless Saves The Day
And the award for Quickest Thinking In Use of Technology 2003 goes to....
When officer Jason Zier pulled over a 1992 Mazda 626 on Thursday afternoon, the vehicle's registration had expired. By the time he'd finished writing up Sean Leach for the infraction, the car was legal again. That's because the 36-year-old Jersey City man had a cell phone, a friend with a computer who he could reach and the foresight to use the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission's online registration service.
Via Gizmodo
Posted December 10, 2003 01:03 AM | Permalink
Just Say No to Microsoft
Just Say No to Microsoft is a site that lists alternatives to major Microsoft software packages.
I'm a big fan of the Mozilla Firebird browser, Mozilla Thunderbird mail client, and OpenOffice office suite as replacements for Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and Microsoft Office.
Now I'm eager to check out Ability as an alternative to Microsoft Access (since OpenOffice doesn't come with a database manager) .
Posted December 10, 2003 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
November 22, 2003
I Already Knew That About Myself
...but affirmation is good.
174.
Posted November 22, 2003 01:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Wal-Mart v. Microsoft (and Dell and HP and...)
Wal-mart is apparently planning to launch its own line of Wal-Mart notebook computers. The article from CNet says:
The retail giant plans to begin offering notebooks under its own brand name during the first quarter of 2004, according to industry sources quoted in a report the Taiwan Economic News published this week. . . . If Wal-Mart, which sells PCs from companies such as Hewlett-Packard and eMachines, moves into the notebook market successfully, it could send ripples across the PC industry. The retailer's typically aggressive pricing could compel manufacturers such as Dell, HP and Toshiba to reduce their notebook prices in response, analysts said.
Thinking about this in the light of the recent Fast Company article on Wal-Mart, this could feasibly be a move that significantly affects notebook pricing, particularly for manufacturers that sell via retail stores (e.g. Hewlett-Packard).
It would also be interesting to see if if Wal-mart would forsake Windows and sell Wal-mart-branded laptops with Lindows or Lycoris (two consumer-oriented desktop versions of a Linux OS) installed. They already sell Lindows workstations from Microtel. Given that the Linux-based Microtel desktops haven't exactly revolutionized the OS industry, I doubt that a Linux-based Wal-mart notebook would.
But it would be fun to see Wal-mart and Microsoft get into competition. :)
Posted November 22, 2003 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Some Ideas Die
Kudos to Clay Shirky for Otlet: Some ideas die because they are wrong.
[Yahoo] was, in other words, "an intellectual cosmos illuminated both by objective classification and by the direct influence of readers and writers." And it sucked. Sucked sucked sucked. We didn’t even know how bad it sucked until Google came along and (its hard to remember this even five years later) saved the Web from drowning in its own waste.
I won't dive into the Otlet debate 1, 2 (not that it's that heated).
However, as someone who in the past longed for a way to heirarchically categorize all of my information, I have gradually moved away from that mode of thinking toward the value of search.
In fact, my current strategy for personal knowledge management, both at home and work, revolves around recording the non-heirarchical flow of ideas into a wiki. My wiki-of-choice is the Python-based MoinMoin, because it's quick to set up, easy to customize, and has good management tools. While I maintain some notion of heirachy when recording ideas into my personal wiki, I find that the best way to access them is through the search.
The problem with ontologies or taxonomies is that they are damn hard for the average person to build and maintain effectively, especially if you want it to be used by someone else, and even more so when it has to interface or mesh with other taxonomies created by other people. Which is why I think Dave Winer's attempt at organizing weblog entries by heirarchical categories, and the eventual goal of meshing multiple people's category directories together, pales in comparison to the usefulness of a tool like searching a Wiki or searching a weblog for your own information or searching Google or Feedster for multiple information sources.
Posted November 22, 2003 10:24 AM | Permalink
September 25, 2003
Skype Hype Is Tripe
Last week, the blogosphere was all atwitter over Skype, a P2P VoIP ("peer-to-peer voice over IP" for the acronym-challenged) application.
This week, several weblogs pointed to the New York Times today about Dartmouth transitioning to Internet telephony:
This week, as classes begin, the 1,000 students entering the class of 2007 will be given the option of downloading software, generically known as softphones, onto Windows-based computers.Using the software together with a headset, which can be plugged into a computer's U.S.B. port, the students can make local or long-distance telephone calls free. Each student is assigned a traditional seven-digit phone number.
Of this Dartmouth development, Stephen Downes wrote about an article that
says students will be able to make long distance calls for free - but neither indicates what software is used and whether the institution is paying additional (and post-Skype, unnecessary) charges.
Nope, nope, and nope. Skype doesn't make the telcos unnecessary at all. I think Stephen and the bazillion other people writing about Skype and Dartmouth are conflating computer-to-computer VoIP with real internet telephony.
Skype has made this conflation easier by appropriating telephone terminology (clever business move), but Skype's VoIP is not Internet telephony. What the Dartmouth system has, that Skype does not, is an interface between the IP network and the dedicated circuit telephone network. This means at Dartmouth, in addition to computer-to-computer calls, you can place computer-to-telephone calls or telephone-to-computer calls. Mom can use her land-line to call you on your laptop (and vice versa). With Skype, both sides are tied to the computer (and a Windows computer at that) and limited to computer-to-computer calls. Because most people on the planet don't have the luxury of making calls only to people sitting at a computer running Skype, Skype won't make any significant dent in telephone usage.
At some point, to gain market, Skype needs to open a gateway between the IP network and the telephone network (which is apparently in the plans). At that point, I would lay bets that Skype ceases to be free and falls into pretty much the same realm as Net2Phone and DialPad. It's only differentiators will be (a) it has a slightly higher geek quotient than equally free solutions like Microsoft NetMeeting through of the inclusion of P2P in the marketing hoopla and (b) the instant messaging-like interface piggybacks on a popular interface that millions of computer users are familiar with.
In the long run, I think it is the latter -- the instant messaging-style interface for voice communication -- that may prove to be Skype's real innovation. Presence detection could be a significant improvement over the traditional telephone network.
Skype is far away from being a replacement for telephones -- try using Skype to get kung pao chicken delivered from the local Chinese eatery if you don't believe me. It's not even a replacement for a system like the one Dartmouth is implementing.
Don't throw away your telephones anytime soon.
Posted September 25, 2003 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)
September 10, 2003
There's an Alanis Morrisette Lyric In Here Somewhere
I wonder if the marketing wonks responsible for Windows 2003's Rights Management Services understood the other common usage of the "RMS" acronym.
Of course, being a big geek, phrases like "RMS will require Windows Server 2003" now make me chuckle to myself.
Isn't it ironic . . . don't you think?
P.S. Yes, I recognize that the use above and Alanis' use of "ironic" runs counter to the opinion of 78% of the Usage Panel, but everyone loves a nice pop culture reference in the headline, right?
P.P.S. By god, don't you just want to be a member of the Usage Panel?!? What a crew to have heady grammar discussions with . . .
Update 09/11/03: Of course it would have made my ebullience seem more honest if I'd spelled the word "grammar" correctly when I posted this. D'oh!
Update 09/12/03: And if I had actually remembered to put the URL in the second link. D'oh, d'oh!
Posted September 10, 2003 05:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
August 26, 2003
Making the Switch
Inspired by the thunderstorm that drowned my afternoon outdoors plans, I geeked out indoors and switched over to Mozilla Thunderbird, the open source, stand-alone email client from the Mozilla Foundation. Though it's only a 0.1 release, it's a fully featured mail client as it is based on the core technology of the mail component of the Mozilla 1.x Browser Suite.
I jettisoned Internet Explorer last fall and switched over to Mozilla 1.2.1 for web browsing and email (at home -- Outlook is required at work). Mozilla was designed as the replacement for the Netscape 4.x generation, and, as such, it had some requirements to match features in that clunky old browser. Mozilla 1.x was overkill, as Netscape products are.
Earlier this year, though, the Mozilla Foundation released Mozilla Firebird, the first post-Netscape browser from Mozilla. It is sweet! Amazingly better than IE.
I've been using Firebird exclusively, at work and home, for about six to eight weeks now, and haven't had a single problem with it. The availability of extensions means that there's no end to the customizability of this browser.
Today, I finally got around to it's sister application, the Thunderbird mail client. I hung onto the Mozilla suite's mail client at home because when I had previously tried to migrate my mail profiles (by hand -- it's a 0.1 release, so there's no automated migration), I couldn't get it to work. Today I came across some more recent directions for migrating mail folders apart from the profile that worked smashingly. I'll have to re-train its Bayesian junk mail folders, but since I switched ISPs a few months back, my new address isn't on as many spam target lists so that's not a big problem.
By the way, I also highly recommend Sebastian Delahaye's Firebird and Thunderbird installers. Since these aren't 1.x releases, the downloads from Mozilla.org are notfull installation packages. Makes upgrading hard. [Update 10:09pm -- forgot the "not" italicized a sentence or two back. That statement was inaccurate without the negator. In the words of the prophet: D'oh!. Though the installers take care of install and upgrade issues, I should probably also mention they are 'unofficial,' FWIW.]
So now, at home, I'm using an open source browser (Mozilla Firebird), an open source email client (Mozilla Thunderbird), an open source office suite (OpenOffice), and an open source graphics program (Gimp) . . . which accounts for the majority of the time I spend on my computer at home.
The only thing keeping me from totalling geeking out and switching to GNU/Linux as my operating system is Madden NFL 2003!
[By the way, I'm on vacation until after Labor Day, so postings will be slim to non-existent.]
Posted August 26, 2003 05:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
August 14, 2003
The Northeast Has Gone 404
I've been getting errors trying to get to websites all afternoon. I was just about to call our IT team and yell at them about the Internet connection, but I'm guessing now that it might be because there's a major power outage in parts of US and Canada.
Posted August 14, 2003 05:40 PM | Permalink
August 13, 2003
Cable v. Commons
From Keeping the Net Neutral from Salon:
Imagine if you called 1-800-L.L.-Bean and your phone company said, 'Sorry, we're not going to connect your call because we have a deal with Land's End.'" For telephone service, that would be preposterous; the phone company is prevented both by laws and by customer outrage from limiting your calls to specific phone numbers.Worth thinking about.But Waldron says that on the broadband Internet, customers enjoy no such protections. If your cable company decides it wants to sign a deal with Land's End and stop you from visiting L.L. Bean's Web site, it's free to do so -- what are you going to do, find a new cable company?
For more reading on this issue, check out the Larry Lessig interview in Scientific American, or Lessig's book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.
Posted August 13, 2003 01:22 PM | Permalink
July 22, 2003
Synchronized Bookmarks
I want this for Mozilla on Windows. And for RSS subscriptions.
It's not rocket science, is it? I can't be the only person who wants to access their information from multiple workstations, can I? Grrr. It's these kind of situations that make me irked at myself for dropping out of Computer Science and switching my major to English.
Posted July 22, 2003 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
July 16, 2003
Like Weblogs But On DVD
From the Washington Post: Low-Budget Reality, On Sale Everywhere
On the streets of DC, there's apparently an emerging business around low-budget "reality" DVDs. Enterpreneurs with digital video cameras, a computer, and a DVD burner are making a business out of video recordings of everything from go-go shows to street fights to video collections of women's posterior parts captured at outdoor festivals.
Move over, Mark Burnett.
Posted July 16, 2003 10:46 AM | Permalink
July 08, 2003
Dissertation Could Be A Security Threat
The only thing my own graduate work was a threat to was my own sanity, but here's a story, Dissertation Could Be Security Threat, from today's Washington Post of a different kind of dissertation danger:
Sean Gorman's professor called his dissertation "tedious and unimportant." Gorman didn't talk about it when he went on dates because "it was so boring they'd start staring up at the ceiling." But since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gorman's work has become so compelling that companies want to seize it, government officials want to suppress it, and al Qaeda operatives -- if they could get their hands on it -- would find a terrorist treasure map.Gorman's work takes publicly available information about the nation's infrastructure -- power grids, fiber optic networks, etc. -- maps it all, and uses algorithms to find the weak points.
Interesting story about how using technology to crunch together a bunch of unclassified information results in aggregated knowledge that the government has an interest in classifying. The reporter does a good job of presenting both sides of the issue, though.
Posted July 8, 2003 12:59 PM | Permalink
June 24, 2003
The "Mom" Test
Long ago (like 1996ish) I had a series of arguments on the Future Culture mailing list about why Linux was unusable to the masses. My litmus test: could you put someone's grandmother in front of a Linux box and have her write and print a letter to her grandchild without help or nervous breakdown.
While apparently an actual grandmother wasn't used, current Linux usability testing seems to be
moving in the right direction. [link via Slashdot]
Posted June 24, 2003 05:21 PM | Permalink
EFF Report on Internet Blocking in Schools
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a report on Internet Blocking in Public Schools. [link via Boing Boing]
I haven't read the whole report, but the abstract tells me enough:
- The use of Internet blocking software in schools cannot help schools comply with the law because schools do not and cannot set the software to block only the categories required by the law, and because the software is incapable of blocking only the visual depictions required by CIPA. Blocking software overblocks and underblocks, that is, the software blocks access to many web pages protected by the First Amendment and does not block many of the web pages that CIPA would likely prohibit.
- Blocking software does not protect children from exposure to a large volume of material that is harmful to minors within the legal definitions. Blocking software cannot adapt adequately to local community standards. Most schools already have in place alternatives to Internet blocking software, such as adoption and enforcement of Internet use policies, media literacy education, directed use, and supervised use.
- Blocking software in schools damages educational opportunities for students, both by blocking access to web pages that are directly related to state-mandated curriculums and by restricting broader inquiries of both students and teachers. Teachers and students 17 years or older (most high school juniors and seniors) should be exempt, yet suffer the consequences of CIPA implementation.
Posted June 24, 2003 05:03 PM | Permalink
May 20, 2003
Supernova
I was excited to notice that the Supernova 2003 conference that Joi Ito referenced today (or...er...tomorrow...so international dateline action happening there, I guess) will be around the corner from me in July.
Then I noticed registration is $1795. Yikes! It ain't coming out of my pocket and since it's not directly related to my job, there's no way I'm gonna get my employer to front for it (especially since we don't have a conference budget).
Bummer. Maybe someone will organiza an extra-curricular activity around the conference?
Posted May 20, 2003 02:59 PM | Permalink
May 19, 2003
The Originator of All Thought
Stephen Downes in Online Learning Daily:
Google doesn't rank 'first' it ranks 'most' (the one interesting exception to this being Google news, where 'first' counts but 'accuracy' doesn't). And though many articles break first in the mainstream, they are discussed most in the Blogsphere. . . . The Google algorithm should attempt to trace - and credit - the origin of a meme. Otherwise we will be in a situation where, according to Google, Dave Winer is the originator of all thought.
And probably according to Dave Winer, too. ;-)
Posted May 19, 2003 06:09 PM | Permalink
The SCO Strategy
Dana Blankenhorn of Moore's Lore on why IBM Should Pay The Blackmailer:
If SCO's claims are upheld, Linux simply ceases to be open source until the open source community can rewrite something compatible that uses none of SCO's source code, and even then the new code must be tested in court (as well as in computers and the market).The wise thing for IBM to do, it seems to me, at this point is to accede to SCO's blackmail, buy the company, and then put the entire code into the public domain. This isn't just right for egalitarian reasons. It's also right in terms of IBM's strategy, which is based on millions and billions of programmers banging on Linux and stamping out bugs.
Oooh, SCO is sneaky.
Posted May 19, 2003 06:07 PM | Permalink
Microsoft Now Controls Unix
Cue the Darth Vader heavy breathing sounds:
Microsoft to Buy Unix Technology From SCO GroupMicrosoft Corp. has agreed to buy rights to Unix technology from SCO Group Inc. , a boost to SCO's controversial campaign to exact royalties for a predecessor to the Linux operating system, Monday's Wall Street Journal reported.
In case you've had your head under a rock, SCO owns proprietary Unix code that it claims is being used in the open source Linux kernel. They're suing IBM and going after other Linux vendors.
Unix was developed by AT&T. Much of it was licensed out (the BSD, or Berkely Systems Distribution), but some of it remained proprietary and was eventually acquired by SCO. SCO itself was acquired by Caldera, a Linux distribution provider, but Caldera jettisoned their brand and kept the SCO name. If there's merit to the claim that these proprietary parts are being used in the Linux kernel, that could bring Linux distribution to a halt.
With this acquisition, Microsoft would own the proprietary parts of Unix. The implication of the acquisition is, of course, that Microsoft will continue SCO's attempt to stomp out Linux by waging an intellectual property rights war against it. And, of course, Microsoft has the resources that SCO did not to go after IBM & other big Linux providers.
I can't imagine that the Department of Justice would let this go through untouched.
This could get ugly.
ADDENDUM (4:10pm): I just realized I should have titled this "Microsoft MAY Now Control Unix" because it's far from a done deal.
ADDENDUM (5:20pm): As Anthony Hersey points out in a comment to this post, even my toned down headline is probably hyperbolic. Microsoft has licensed the rights to the SCO UnixWare code because the "license ensures that Microsoft's software complies with SCO's intellectual-property rights and that the software giant can ensure compatibility with Unix software." [NY Times (free registration required) ]. Microsoft doesn't "own" Unix exclusively -- they just have the right to use the proprietary Unix code to their hearts' content.
Why would Microsoft want to do this? Probably not because, as they claim, they want to respect intellectual property and comply with SCO's patents in any Microsoft-Unix interoperability. More likely, they believe -- probalby correctly -- that this will add credence to SCO's lawsuit against IBM and SCO's warning letter to 1,500 other enterprises that use Linux. If SCO can make every Linux distibutor -- or, worse, every Linux-using business cough up patent license fees to them for using Linux, that puts a hurt on Linux total costs. Putting a hurt on Linux helps Microsoft.
Posted May 19, 2003 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
May 18, 2003
How I Seek Validation
Can anybody tell me why <BLOCKQUOTE> causes my page not to validate as XHTML 1.1 Transitional?
UPDATE: Ryan Eby's comment to this post were dead-on. I am now valid. Whew. :-)
Posted May 18, 2003 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
May 07, 2003
Smarter, Simpler, Social
From Smarter, Simpler, Social:
"Whilst the first wave of online applications was characterised by large, centralised top-down implementations driven by a command-and-control mentality, the outlines of an alternative approach that is informed by new thinking about social networks and online behaviour is coming into focus. This approach is driven not by major IT vendors, but by rapid innovation occurring “in the wild”, where free or almost free online social applications are achieving usage levels and a depth of user engagement that enterprise software purchasers can only dream about. It is smarter, simpler and social." [link via elearningpost]Given all the buzz surrounding "social software," I found this to be an actually useful summary regarding some of the key issues. And it has a lot of juicy links in it!
Posted May 7, 2003 09:38 AM | Permalink
May 06, 2003
Spam Redux
eSchool News Online writes about recent spam legislation, mentioned earlier on this weblog. Good summary.
Posted May 6, 2003 06:09 AM | Permalink
April 30, 2003
Virginia Puts the Smackdown on Spammers
Washington Post: Virginia Blocks Bulk E-Mailers
Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) traveled to the Dulles headquarters of America Online, the world's largest Internet service provider, to ceremonially sign recently enacted legislation that establishes five-year prison terms and other criminal penalties against chronic, large-scale senders.Yay! Having grown up in Virginia this makes me proud. This is significant for a few reasons:
1) Don't confuse this measure with many of the existing anti-spam laws, which only provide recourse to recoup expenses spam caused in civil court. This new bill makes spam a crime, punishable by a state-funded vacation in the lovely Virginia Penitentiary.
2) It's significant that it's Virginia making this law. Both AOL and MCI are based in northern Virginia, outside of Washington, DC. You know AOL, of course, and the number of sunscribers they have. MCI (previously MCI, then Worldcom, now MCI again) is also a large ISP, but more importantly owns UUNet, a major backbone provider. A lot of Internet traffic flows through those two providers, who both may be subject to the new law and in a good position to enforce it.
3) It's significant that it's Gov. Mark Warner putting this into action. Warner is a high-tech governor; he was co-founder of Columbia Capital, a northern Virginia VC outfit. He "gets it."
Posted April 30, 2003 06:20 AM | Permalink
April 24, 2003
Amazon v. eBay
Matt Haughey writes of revelations about Amazon at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:
"Amazon looks poised to take on eBay/paypal as they build a public merchant platform that can be used by all."It's like Godzilla v. King Kong in the e-commerce world.
Posted April 24, 2003 09:04 AM | Permalink
April 23, 2003
Intelligence for the Celestial Jukebox
Note to self: This Slashdot article, Machine Learning and MP3s, reminds me of an idea that I wanted to expound upon here regarding recommendation technologies.
Note to readers: Don't let me forget!
[See above post for note re: drafting and post timing. Same applies for this one. Sheesh.]
Posted April 23, 2003 12:30 PM | Permalink
April 11, 2003
Trust & Recommendation Systems
Howard Rheingold talks about a study that shows how recommendation systems -- like Amazon's "Customers who bought this book also bought..." or NetFlix's "People who liked this movie also liked..." -- can be shilled:
"Taken together, the experiments provide several tips for the designers of interfaces to recommender systems. Interfaces should allow users to concentrate on rating while ignoring predictions. Finer-grained rating scales are preferred over simple "thumbs up, thumbs down" scales, but are not essential to good predictions. Finally, because users are sensitive to manipulation and inaccurate predictions, to keep customers happy, no recommender system at all is better than a bad recommender system."Note to self: you've got some thoughts on recommendation systems. Don't forget to post them soon...
Posted April 11, 2003 06:52 AM | Permalink
April 08, 2003
Integrate OpenOffice
ZDNet is reporting that OpenOffice.org has released a software development kit to allow developers to more easily extend this open source office suite. [Addendum: link via Ed Tech Dev]
At work, I use Microsoft Office because that's the company standard. At home, I still use Microsoft Word for writing because (a) I'm used to it and (b) it came on my Windows XP laptop (as part of the otherwise-useless Microsoft Works Suite).
However, I have installed OpenOffice 1.0 on that laptop and see no good reason to ever pay for Microsoft Office again. OpenOffice provides about 86.75% (I'm guestimating) of the features that are available in Microsoft Office, writes RTF, and reads most Office files fairly well. The other 13.25% of the featuers are only used by eight people worldwide anyway, so who cares?
The on glaring ommission in OpenOffice is the lack of a relational database with a simple GUI front-end (a la Microsoft Access). OpenOffice should build a comparable GUI for MySQL and optionally ship that with OpenOffice 1.0.
Posted April 8, 2003 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)