Ben Hammersley, writing from Afghanistan, notes that president Karzai’s bodyguards are provided by DynCorp, which was recently acquired by the innocuous sounding Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). Reading the solutions tab on the Computer Sciences Corporation website you get the same boring options listed on just about every generic enterprise tech company website: CRM, EAI, Hosting, Knowledge Management, Outsourcing. The difference is that they also: “fly the defoliation missions that are the centerpiece of Plan Colombia…constitute the core of the police force in Bosnia…protect Afghan president Hamid Karzai…[manage] the border posts between the US and Mexico, many of the Pentagon’s weapons-testing ranges, and the entire Air Force One fleet of presidential planes and helicopters. DynCorp inventories everything seized by the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Program, runs the Naval Air Warfare Center at Patuxent River, Maryland, and is producing the smallpox and anthrax vaccines the government may use to inoculate everyone in…

If Google, AOL, poss Yahoo and then prob MSN have weblog services, there is a possibility that the weblog space will Balkanize, if the precedent set by the various instant messaging systems is anything to go by. Such an outcome would threaten any standards for weblog API’s and syndication far more than internecine struggles within the existing weblog community ever could. It would also prevent analysis tools or weblog search engines such as Technorati and Feedster from providing comprehensive coverage. Increasingly it is becoming apparent that what makes a publishing system or search/analysis tool a weblog tool is the ability to be part of an open system enabling publishing, syndication and real-time search results. As such, if such Balkanization does occur, then I would suggest that systems that don’t allow this shouldn’t really call themselves weblog services. To enable this means defining publicly what a weblog service is, perhaps now…

Web Advantage: “Rumor has it that Yahoo is about to break into the Blog market and perhaps dominate, taking advantage of Google’s Blogger being overrun with blogs without a sound customer service program or feeling of community.” Hmm, this doesn’t sound like a rumor, but an anonymous snipe from a Google competitor.

Is the lack of variety in computer software not merely a threat to the marketplace, resulting in poor innovation and high prices, but actually dangerous, as more and more of our everyday life depends on healthy functioning systems that are based upon the same underlying code with the same weaknesses? The computer industry is regulated by standard anti-trust measures to prevent monopolies