Fred Wilson: “I think the telecomm market isn’t falling apart, it is just rebuilding itself in horizontal layers ala the technology industry.” Surely something big is up in telecom, the distinction between voice and data is disappearing but their business models are entirely different. By-and-large, data is flat fee and voice is duration and distance, all you can eat vs. a la carte. Will the telco’s throw an RIAA fit if, for example, too many people subscribe to a VOIP service in the US and use it from another country – its got to hurt them at some point.

Could trackbacks be enabled by simply adding an argument t=y (trackback equals yes) to any permalink? If this were the case and you wanted to use trackback to post a remote comment about something, you could select the trackback link and then use a bookmarklet to blog the post and trackback at the same time. In order to stop browser referals from showing weblog referer urls would have to have a similar parameter, say ?dt=y (display trackback equals yes) as part of the permalink. A script would check for qualified referrals. (A trackback to a permalink that also could track to another site would be called as ‘permalink?dt=y&t=y’) e.g. https://www.davidgalbraith.org/archives/000486.html#000486?t=y

Joi Ito wonders what Amazon’s A9 search engine will look like. My guess is that it may build upon some of the price aggregation technology that they bought with their 1998 acquisition of Junglee. Junglee was pretty good then, and the basic technology requirement for this type of aggregation hasn’t changed much.

Doc points out that there are five bloggers born every minute. I guess if bloggers outnumber suckers five to one, they can’t all be bad. Keeping up with tracking blogs growing at this rate sounds like a daunting task, however, I suspect it is easier than it at first seems. The popularity as measured by the number of inbound links tends to follow a power law distribution. Perhaps the measure of how prolific a weblog is also follows a power law. Our analysis at Moreover tended to show that the majority of weblogs are not updated even once a week. The two standard metrics for information retrieval are relevance and retrieval, i.e. what percentage of all the good stuff you get back. In tracking weblogs popularity and prolificacy are the equivalent of relevance and retrieval. I’d love to see Dave Sifry’s indispensable Technorati include a blog popularity and freshness rank….

The BBC: gamesblog. This is the second time today that I have accidentally come accross a weblog on a media site.

Moby: “i’m almost tempted to go onto kazaa and download some of my own music, just to see if the riaa would sue me for having mp3’s of my own songs on my hard-drive.”

The folks at Intelliseek have a site that looks at trends within weblogs, top links and word bursts etc. The nice thing about this is not the idea, but the execution – the results are meaningful, easy to read, and low on cruft.

Nick Denton looks at the possible pitfalls of Calacanis’ weblog ‘trade-publishing’. Many of the successful things on the web are to do with brand and having control over look and feel. The web itself scored over Gopher and WAIS in that it allowed pages to look unique. Weblogs could be seen as a decentralized Usenet with individual branding. If, as Nick argues, a decentralized About.com model is to learn from this then perhaps simple things like having unique domain names and control over look and feel are very important.

The distinction between voice and data is non-existent in many cases, but it seems that new laws don’t reflect this, and are therefore inconsistent and obsolete as soon they are passed. A federal judge throws out the national ‘do not call list’. Meanwhile, at the state level, California bans spam, and in the UK spam is made illegal altogether. What if anti-spam laws could be formulated to prevent unwanted telemarketing calls? “The [Californian] law also prohibits collecting e-mail addresses or registering multiple e-mail addresses for the purpose of initiating or advertising in an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement from California or to a California e-mail address.” Aside from the fact that this begs the question, what is a California email address? What if there were a law that covered not just email but any unsolicited electronic communication? Surely this would be more logical since ’email’ is merely a particular technical implementation…

A team of crack geeks come round and set your VCR. “give three geeks US$15,000 and three days to bring a family of four up to date with technology. The average family doesn’t know which DVD player to buy or how to setup a wireless network. What happens when even the geeks can’t get it work?” Slashdot | Geek Eye for the Average Guy