 |  |
Ross Mayfield points out some disturbing facts about the boy scouts movement:
“Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts ban atheists and gays. With the supreme court granting the right to private civil society organizaitons to be exclusive, extreme interests are balkanizing. Again, this is a market with few sellers.”
I guess this is no surprise from the organization that has historically shared some of the styling and aspirations of the Hitler Youth.
How could you have made more than 10 times your money in less than a year, subsequent to the .com crash? - by buying stock in a .com
Last July Ask Jeeves teamed up with Google to have Google supply advertising alongside search. The deal replaced Overture and involves a revenue split between Google and Ask Jeeves, with the majority going to Ask Jeeves.
Since most of Ask Jeeves’ revenue comes from this, and since most of Google’s revenue comes from similar, this is a vicarious way of tracking Google’s performance while they are still a private company.
The results are outstanding, Ask Jeeves is now worth 13 times what it was before the deal with Google.
Contra Costa Times | 07/19/2002 | Ask Jeeves, Google team up for profits
Dave Winer: “Anyway, I don’t see any killer apps in the RDF crowd. I see lots of people with strong opinions and not much software.”
Lets face it, this is true. But the fact that it is true hides something absolutely extraordinary.
From the way all of our brains are configured, to the way every language on earth has subjects, predicates and objects, to the way any box of any form you fill in on the web has a URL a label for the box and a value you type in - all these things are what the model of RDF is about. There is something profound about a non-hierarchical messy network and triples - I suspect it is the way our brain is wired and the way that any language or information based upon this wiring has to be expressed. So why aren’t people using RDF, where are the apps and does it matter?
The ideas of the ’semantic web’, increasingly the ‘pedantic web’ will eventually come to fruition. For it to happen there are two possibilities: either everyone agrees on standards that then get readily adopted and apps. built upon them, or it happens through a trial and error process of selection and adoption of successful elements.
Because the first route is not working, the slower pace of the latter process is making more headway. Some of the key components of the promise of RDF and more generally the semantic web are evolving, quite naturally around publishing tools - and specifically the tools that publish information easily and in an environment where graph-like links between sites are prolific.
There is no killer app for RDF but there is a killer app for what it was trying to do - the weblog publishing tool.
Before 911, the most serious impact on day-to-day life in the West might arguably have been a result of globalization. But globalization and its effects are still an issue: “The recent gyration in the prices of oil and other primary products was related to concerns about the Iraq war and terrorism and masks the trend of falling prices.”
The former vice minister for international affairs in Japan’s Finance Ministry thinks that there is a general trend towards global deflation caused by the information and life sciences revolution and globalization.
Cheap goods from China and India may once again account for nearly half the world’s production after almost 200 years. He argues, however, that if deflation hits the US it will be nothing like as destructive as during the 1930’s.
“The world is shifting from an era of structural inflation to one of deflation, in which prices for most manufactured goods and tradable services fall rather than rise…
…But the new wave of price falls has more in common with the mild deflation of the 1880s - which was associated with big productivity gains - than with the Depression of the 1930s…
…First, a wave of rapid technological innovation centered on information, telecommunication and biotechnology is changing economic and social systems in a fundamental way. This can justifiably be called the Third Industrial Revolution, as it is comparable to the industrial revolution of the late 18th century and to the second surge of technological progress in communication and distribution in the mid-to-late 19th century…
…Second, globalization has been dramatically altering the patterns of production, distribution and transactions. The re-emergence of former economic powers, particularly China and India, is helping to drive this increase in productivity and output…”
Nick Aster points out that the ‘World Council on Tall Buildings’ (straight out of the X-men) decided that the Petronas Towers in KL are the tallest building in the world despite the fact that the Sears tower in Chicago is blatantly taller.
“Measured to the top of the radio masts, Sears’ height is 1,518ft, which easily eclipses Petronas’ 1,483ft. Trouble is, the masts on top of the Sears Tower don’t count, but the mast on top of Petronas’ does. Hmm, confused? The masts on the Sears tower are not considered to be a part of the actual building, so the official measurement stops at 1,450ft. So Petronas gets the crown.”
Jeff Jarvis is sensibly skeptical of conspiracy theories:
“I never buy a conspiracy theory, for I argue that the world — and especially government and especially big business and very especially big media — are simply not well-organized enough to conspire. That’s why synergy doesn’t sell. No, I don’t believe in conspiracies.”
Given that: a. conspiracies, as a subset of mysteries, are seductive and intriguing; b. people who think alike will independently behave alike, without having to go to the significant bother of conspiring. One can assume that the universe of claimed conspiracies is much, much larger than the number which are real.
But I still think that Michael Jackson’s behaviour plausibly points to him having been abducted by aliens.
So Howard Stern reads Gawker every day!
I can’t even get my parents (known respectively as the ‘old man’ and ‘old dear’) to read mine.
Interesting empirical study of rules of meme spreading from looking at weblog postings, from the excellent Microdoc News. via Doc Searls
“Rarely can an individual blogger get a story going.”
“The best blog stories are those that are branded with a word or phrase that is highly identifiable with that story.”
“The stories that get going are not usually subject specific blogs but stories that cut across all interests of the blogging community.”
“When bloggers action is not requested, most often stories get up and running for longer.”
“Perhaps the last conclusion we came to in this study is that blogs cannot be read in isolation from each other. Blog stories are understood and appreciated in aggregate and not in isolation. On the other hand, mainstream media stories tend to be read in isolation rather than read and compared. ”
James Dyson (inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner) has created a waterfall that creates the illusion of water following an endless spiral uphill.
Western economies are largely becoming service based economies, and irreversibly so, the US cannot compete globally in manufacturing and production, as witnessed by the huge subsidies to farming or steel manufacture.
What if many of the services that rely on information technology are not economically viable in the long run? What if never ending cheapness created by the applicability of Moores Law and lack of scarcity in digital media conspire to create hyper-deflation?
Kevin Werbach recently delivered “the notion that many media organizations currently depend on their revenues through the assumption of
You are currently browsing the David Galbraith’s Blog blog archives for May, 2003.
rss