The ability to quickly compare prices online is leading to price convergence, right? Wrong. To explain why, Andrew Odlyzko has written a very interesting report (also covered in The Economist) about online privacy and price discrimination. His main conclusions:
Along the way, there are lots of interesting snippets, from descriptions of the inhuman way in which third-class rail passengers used to be treated to examples of legal forms of disrimination (including, apparently, against lawyers — yeah!). There's also an interesting observation on the fact that price discrimination is where communism and capitalism converge. Plenty of food for thought. Read it.
Bob Cringely is looking for...
...a registry of friends... I am Bob, and these are my 10 friends. They don't even have to be friends -- just people who know you. You don't have to tell them they are on your list and you can change your list as often as you like... But it really needs a clever name. Too bad Friendster is already taken.
It already has a name. It's called FOAF. (Which has reminded me to put up a FOAF file of my own — I've been promising Leigh for ages that I'd do this.)
A lot of people (example) seem to be talking about 3d17 by Ian Clarke (creator of Freenet).
It's an intriguing experiment in online collaboration, but I'm not optimistic about the likely quality of the output. There seems to be an inverse correlation between the number of people involved in the creation of a document and its ultimate quality. Consider, for example, the draft European Constitution and compare it with the Declaration of Independence or Shakespeare's words for Henry V.
In any case, if we're going to pursue this route, I still find Darwinian poetry more interesting.
MSN closes down it's chat rooms because "free, unmoderated chat isn't safe".
Also coming soon:
Yeah right, this has everything to do with the safety of our kids (who will presumably move on to even less trustworthy discussion forums) and nothing at all to do with the safety of Microsoft's bottom line (free chat just happens not to make any money).
It's OK to close down a service that doesn't make business sense, but why lie about your reasons for doing so? Can you gain the respect of your customers by treating them with contempt?
Since the days when my love affair with the web was at the embarrassed fumbling stage, Jon Udell has always been an inspiring read and, if the truth be told, something of a hero to me. So it's great to see him writing about a subject that's been close to my heart lately: RSS and RDF.
The exciting thing about Jon's latest posting is that he seems to get it:
What I hadn't fully appreciated, until just now, is the deep connection between RDF and namespace-mixing.
Yes, being able to mix different XML namespaces easily requires a higher-level data model, and RDF is it (or at least the best candidate we have today). Hallelujah!
I'm currently involved in a project that involves aggregating and querying a lot of RSS data. The only extension modules we can deal with in a fully generic way are the RDF-types ones designed to work with RSS 1.0. To deal with RSS 2.0 modules (which don't use an RDF structure, at least currently) we either have to manually add routines for each one to our code (a maintainability nightmare) or skip them all together (which means we lose data).
I seem to remember that the idea if making RSS 2.0 and its immediate predecessors non-RDF-like was to make programmers' lives simpler. Well it hasn't for us, not by a long shot. That's why we still use RSS 1.0 and all it's RDF goodness whenever we have a choice.
Why do we need weblog ethics? I'm not questioning the need for ethics per se, but why do we need to separate out the rules that govern blogging from those that guide us during the rest of our lives?
This highly cited piece on the subject — which is well-written and thoughtful — lists rules such as the following (to which I have appended the same rules more generally stated):
Lighten up! Medicine needs ethics because it determines whether people live or die. By comparison, blogging is insignificant[inconsequential, so it's OK to take a more laissez faire approach]. [Otherwise] what next, a moral philosophy [for making phone calls? A code of conduct ]for brushing our teeth? Your blog is your own so write it as you would lead the rest of your life. And if people don't like your approach then they won't read you.
BTW, while we're on the subject, I found it hilariously ironic that this even-tempered and thoughtful post on blogging ethics should elicit as its very first comment a thoroughly different response from a leading light of the blogosphere. Don't you sometimes get the feeling that a few people live in a parallel universe to the rest of us? I guess that some people's personal rules don't include "Thou shalt not take offence where none is intended, and neither shall thou needlessly flame". But that's cool: we can always exercise our fundamental human right to ignore.
After reading this, I was wondering whether or not I'm a MOUSE. More like a MUSE, I thought at first. But now I've settled on being an OS; that describes me best.
Following on from his flawed but intriguing Snapster idea, Bob Cringely has posted version 2.0, which involves members contributing their own CDs to a truly global jukebox. I like this one a lot. It'll be interesting to see if the lawyers can pick holes in it. As before, I wonder whether this idea (and probably all others like it) isn't vulnerable to the record companies issuing CD user licences (like software licences) that simply forbid this type of use. I hope not, but fear so.
This advice just in: don't post your password on your website. Other handy tips: look both ways before crossing the road, don't try to disembark until the plane has fully touched down, and don't go jogging with a lemming.
This from the BBC:
Official music download websites could replace record shops as the public's preferred places to buy singles within five years, one of the UK's leading music industry figures has said.
Well, no shit. But the really interesting thing about the web is not that it's an alternative channel for 'mainstream' music, but that it allows a much greater variety of music to be bought and sold.
NHK (Japan's public TV network) has screened a video of a traffic pile-up taken by a trucker wth a mobile phone. Now everyone's a (potential) TV reporter.
I've been using Shrook for about half an hour but I already prefer it to NetNewsWire. This is no mean feat: NNW was previously my favourite RSS reader on any platform. On Windows, only the up-and-coming FeedDemon even comes close (and it's not quite there yet, though it's still in beta).
Why is Shrook so good? Forget the highly innovative "distributed checking" for a moment (this sounds useful but I haven't had time yet to judge how useful). Here are my favourite bits so far:
I don't have a good idea about performance and reliability yet — let's see.
(Thanks to BoingBoing for telling me about Shrook.)
Of the two manifestations of the machine-readable web, Web Services took off quickest and has already become a fact of life. That's not surprising: Web Services are defined and promoted by a bunch of companies. Companies are good at getting things made quickly and encouraging people to use them.
The Semantic Web, on the other hand, has been academia's contribution to this endeavour. As befits these roots, it's visionary — arguably to the point of delusion — and its moving forward v... e... r... y... ... s... l... o... w... l... y.
But companies never act except in their own interests and this can sometimes lead them into feuds that are counter-productive for their customers. There are signs that this sort of bickering might now hold up Web Services.
The Semantic Web, by contrast, long criticised for its lack of useful applications, continues to grow bit by bit.
Web Services is clearly centre stage today while the Semantic Web lingers in the wings. But would you bet on that staying true for 5 or 10 years? I wouldn't. The Semantic Web's time in the limelight will come, and probably sooner than you think.
Arrgh, we're stuck in an IE-centric world!
I'm with Tim on this one and, as an aside, this is a clear example of a blog being clearly better informed and more interesting that a professional publication.
I've really been enjoying the Samuel Pepys blog. It's a welcome respite from the here-and-now, in-yer-face resolutely 21st-century web and reminds us that there's nothing new under the sun. Pepys was a blogger too, he just used a quill instead of a keyboard.
And so to bed.
So politicians are coming to the blog and bloggers are going to see the politicians. There's sure to be a lot more hype about this before the dust settles and we can see what the long-term changes will be (both for politics and for blogging). But for now, here's a snippet from the second piece that I think we can all agree on:
"A blogging generation will be interested in an MP who blogs, because they themselves run blogs," said [Voxpolitics director James] Crabtree.But he admits that not all blogs will be popular, admitting that some politicians will run awful ones.
Who could he have in mind?
Is videoblogging a wave of the future? Probably, eventually, when someone comes up with something good to do with it. But not for this site while I'm paying $10 per gig. And for me it conjures up visions of public-access TV. So I'll stick with the mainly text variety for the time being.
Knowledge@Wharton reports on an online music service idea that's getting too little attention:
In a celestial jukebox, instead of downloading songs to a computer hard drive or burning them onto a CD, listeners log onto a site that streams the music directly to their computers for immediate listening.
They acknowledge some resistence from consumers, who have been used to 'owning' the music they buy. But this seems a trivial obstacle to me compared to the one that's really holding everything up:
The music industry continues to fixate on CD sales as the chief vehicle for delivering its product.
Of course they do. It's so damn profitable that they can't really do anything else even though this way of doing business is already outdated and ultimately doomed. It's a classic Christensenesque dilemma.
Joi(chi) Ito has posted a long-but-interesting piece on emergent democracy. There's a lot to disagree with here (sorry, blogging isn't going to reshape the political structures of western democracies) but the whole piece is thought-provoking. The possibility that the internet might encourage countries to move towards a participative democracy along the lines of the Swiss model is something that I've been interested in since I found the web faith in the mid-90s.
Samuel Pepys is reincarnated in blogland, courtesy of Phil Gyford. (Thanks to Clay Shirky for teaching me about this.)
RSS as a technology is fantastically simple and powerful, and is just now beginning to hit the big time. But RSS development as a social phenomenon is the biggest stinking failure I've come across in a long time.
See the discussion following this post to get an idea why. It's absolutely hilarious. Unless you're a developer who needs a clear definition of RSS. Or a consumer of RSS feeds. Or someone who cares about the future of the web. In those cases it would be more appropriate to weep.
The creators and promoters of RSS should take a huge amount of credit for producing something so valuable and an equally huge amount of stick for doing it in such a disorganised, bad-tempered and purile fashion. I'm not saying I could do any better — I'm also a borderline-autistic geek who's better at writing code than communicating and cooperating. But is it a shame (not to say hugely ironic) that an interoperability format that is so simple and powerful has to be created by an acrimonious process that's so convoluted and ineffectual.
I am suddenly even more in awe of what Linus Torvalds has achieved. Imagine the Linux kernel development being directed by the RSS crowd. :-{
Record companies continue in their quest to keep pleasure and convenience out of the hands of music-lovers. <sigh>
I'm still trying to work out whether or not I like Echo. The aim is to rationalise and consolidate the various blogging APIs and versions of RSS.
Some people clearly like the idea. And other people clearly don't.
It apparently won't use the RDF data model but will retain some compatibility with RDF (whatever that means in practice).
It's still very early days but at the moment I find myself tending to favour the opposition. RSS (in all its variety of forms) is out there in a lot of places and works pretty well as it is. While the aims are laudable, I think the most likely outcomes from Echo are (i) a serious amount of concern and confusion over what it will produce and (ii) yet another bloody version of RSS. ;-)
Cringely is right that, if anything, the bandwidth situation is getting worse, not better. Despite predictions to the contrary, bandwidth doesn't look like becoming free anytime soon. Our capacity to soak it up is much greater than our ability to make use of ever-faster processors or even those gargantuan hard disks. And yet the telcos don't seem to have a serious long-term solution. Cringely promises to reveal one next week...
I've got this theory that there's an inverse relationship between the frequency with which a blogger blogs and the interest (to me, at least) of what they write. Examples offered in evidence:
OK, I started to exaggerate a bit towards the end there, but hopefully you get my point.
One key reason, I think is that there are too many people (on my blogroll, at least) for whom blogging itself is just about all there is to talk about. So they sit there blogging and reading blogs and writing blog-related software without giving the impression that they have any interest in other things that are going on in the world.
Blogging has reached its inflection point and its rise has suddenly become news, but that won't last long. And when it fades from the popular headlines, I fear those people with not much to post except for self-referential blogs about blogs won't be left with much of interest to say. On which point, I'd better stop indulging in the very practice I'm complaining about – bye!
A Japanese friend of mine has been indulging in what seems to be the latest online lifestyle craze, lifeslicing. You hang a digital camera around your neck, then set it take photos automatically every few minutes and post the results online. Here is the journey he made recently with his wife from Tokyo to Hawaii. It's as fascinating as watching paint dry. This makes it considerably more interesting than several famous blogs, which presumably means it'll catch on. ;-)
In report presumably based on this or similar blogs, Wired reports that Orrin Hatch is commiting copyright offences on his website. In case you missed it, this is the irony.
Senator Orrin Hatch thinks we should be remotely destroying the computers of copyright infringers. Also coming soon: ejector seats for speeding motorists, roads that eat jaywalkers and exploding dollar bills for politicians who can be bought.
Not content with adopting its browser, AOL is also following Microsoft's approach to R&D: copy Apple.
Yeah! Thanks to myRSS for making this feed of one of my regular haunts.
Amazon.com might be launching a rival to the Apple Music Store. Which begs the question, why the hell didn't they do so years ago?
No sooner could lucky iTunes users share their music with the world than Apple took that particular freedom away again. And I never even got a chance to try it. :-(
No, you don't need to be a spammer to do it. So with thanks to Professor Lessig:
Dear Spammers,If you would like to send me unsolicited commercial emails, then I agree to read them on the condition that you promise to pay me £500, and subject to the additional conditions mentioned below. You can accept this offer by sending unsolicited commercial email to me at spam@hannay.net.
In accepting this offer, you also agree (1) to be subject to the laws of England for the purpose of enforcing our contract, (2) to pay any costs, including legal fees, incurred in enforcing our contract, (3) to pay your obligation under this agreement within 10 days of sending the email, by mailing a cheque to me at 31 Adamson Road, London NW3 3HT, UK, and (4) to accept service and costs associated with any bill collector that I hire to help collect obligations owed me under this contract.
Timo Hannay
I hope I have as much success as Larry.
Following on from this story, someone at Kuro5hin reports a PHP-based snare for RIAA spiders. Nice one!
Hilary Rosen, head of the RIAA, has written a piece for Business 2.0 in which she tries to come over all technology- and innovation-friendly:
As I prepare to leave my post this year, I'm proud that part of my legacy will be the role I played in championing new technologies.
Hahahahahahaha!!! Good one, Hilary! Then why did it take Apple to show you the way? From where I'm sitting, the record industry still doesn't appear to have an ounce of imagination or courage. Though it might be a bad idea, something inside me would love it if Apple ate Universal Music.
"Hitting 1m songs in less than a week was totally unexpected," said Warner Music chairman Roger Ames recently. "Apple has shown music fans, artists and the music industry as a whole that there really is a successful and easy way of legally distributing music over the internet," he said.
The only amazing thing is that it took Steve Jobs to make anyone in the record industry relaise this. Don't they have a brain between them?
This is just too delicious not to post. The RIAA have sent a cease-and-desist letter to Penn State University because they host a site with the words "Usher" and "MP3" in it. Except that it's Professor Usher and he's posted an MP3 of an a capella song performed by his fellow stronomers about the Swift gamma-ray satellite.
So, RIAA, come and get me too:
Shio_of_Fools_Erasure.mp3, Big_Mistake_Natalie_Imbruglia.wma, Dont_Stop_the_Music_Lionel_Richie.ogg, Burn_For_You_INXS.wav
According to William Gibson, blogging went mainstream during the first week of the Iraq war:
On a Monday, I'd mentioned to a friend in Vancouver that there was a guy in Baghdad who was blogging and my friend asked me "what the fuck is blogging?" By the Friday, blogging was being discussed on the evening news.
I liked this piece from Business Week. My favourite bits:
...[T]he piracy problem is behavioral, not technological... Since Napster's rise, [Steve Jobs] has missed few opportunities to declare that he thinks the music industry stumbled big-time when it came time to figuring out an online music strategy. All along, Jobs has espoused an approach the makes buying music online easier rather than one that tries to make pirating it harder... The iTunes Music Store is a perfect example of this approach, with minimal antipiracy controls but a low-enough price that lots of people will feel they're getting a good deal when they click the "buy" button.
...Of course, the labels could try to keep the music within their own retail operations. But Jobs saw he could do it better and more easily than the labels. His big edge: The labels have been so busy promoting individual artists over the years that they never built a real brand name for themselves.
Joe Sixpack looking for tunes online gives a rip whether they're coming from Arista or Columbia. Chances are he doesn't even know who owns those labels. But he does know that he can download his Eminem fix at Apple.com.
Apple is heralding a new era of online retailing, where the retailers will have the same kind of brand recognition as Apple -- perhaps Amazon, eBay, or Yahoo!. The labels will from now on play this game at a distinct disadvantage not only because they lack a true brand name but also because they have forever lost control of distribution.
Yeah! :-)
Spam has spread from people's inboxes into the news. The Economist has an article on the subject this week, and though their coverage of anti-spam measures is poor, they include an interesting graph that shows spam rapidly approaching 50% of all email.
I'd say 50% is about right for my work email, where I get 100-200 messages a day, about half of which are spam. But my personal email box sees a lot less legitimate traffic, so spam ends up accounting for perhaps 95% of mail arriving there.
At home I use Mail for Mac OS X (10.2), which has a built-in spam filter that takes out 90% of my spam and diverts only about 1% of messages that I actually want to see. For my mum, I have Razor set up on the server side (courtesy of our wonderful new hosts, DreamHost) and she reports similar levels of success. Here's an article about other software that's out there. And for those with an artistic bent, it's also possible to stop spam with poetry.
But spam also has to be choked off at source, which is why it's good to hear that some powerful people are going after the offenders.
And if you just want to laugh about it instead of cry, check out these two pieces.
It seems that the smallest blogs can strike a blow against the mightiest corporations. I must make time soon to get those $*!&@s at BT Internet for stealing over £150 from me.
According to Business Week, online music services are getting better at last. I haven't tried any of them yet but since I use OS X, that might not be an option. I still live in hope of Apple's Music Store being worth the money but it's interesting to see that Business Week (among many others) don't think that Apple should buy Universal. They make a few good points and I suspect that Steve Jobs will try hard to take a minority stake in the music company rather than forking out for the whole thing.
Microsoft is up to it's usual tricks and I'd be the last person to claim that they are a force for good (let alone good software). But as Tim O'Reilly has pointed out, Microsoft (like every commercial company) not only has a right to do everything it legally can to make money — it has a moral obligation to it's shareholders to do so. It's venal politicians who are to blame for failing to reign in the monopolist.
Cringely's piece this week is a melancholy number about SIDS and why open source software will not last.
After endless speculation, I can't wait to find out exactly what Apple has in mind for their Music Store. This could be our best chance to escape from the brain-dead approach that the major record labels have taken so far, and might even get me buying music again.
This is my first blog entry. I'm using Moveable Type and so far it seem very, very good.