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When IBM approached little Microsoft to supply them with an OS to service a market for computers that individuals owned, they did not see the lock in that would mean that Microsoft would soon be telling IBM what to do. The combined hubris and stupidity of the record labels is repeating this game of switch with Apple. The music guys thought that they could test the waters with electronic delivery with an also ran like Apple and use tight DRM to make sure that they weren’t fueling the file sharing networks. As this excellent piece in brainwash points out, AFF’s Brainwash :: The recording industry’s new clothes, they have created the Microsoft of music. Apple now owns the customer, even if you have most of your music as MP3s on an iPod but a few songs you have bought from the iTunes music store, you have a real dollar value…
The company that Nick Denton, Angus Bankes and I started on my kitchen table in Shoreditch, in 1998, sells to Verisign – I can’t comment, but Tom Foremski has the scoop and Rafat Ali more details, including a link to a good piece on Moreover by Jason Kottke, who use to work in my team: Moreover was early on some things, news search before Google news and RSS and weblog search. The thing that we did with Evan and Meg, from Blogger, Newsblogger, was kinda cool – and we almost bought Blogger, but who knows. I have been banging on about the importance of ping servers for a while, perhaps Versign with Moreover and Weblogs.com can do something or perhaps another startup will. Whatever happens, the architecture of online publishing is changing and with it, the entire architecture of search – pinged instead of crawled. That is a very big…
Of all the gadgets which must be coming soon, this is what I want: A super high res, digital paper, ebook which boots instantly and allows web browsing with lower resolution bitmap images and print quality vector text. This news.com article shows why it hasn’t happened yet. Forget blogs–print needs its own iPod | CNET News.com
Welcome to the Infrablog: Weblogs 2.0
1. Most Romans were on welfare. 2. Many Roman citizens living in Rome were not ‘Italian’, but anything from German to Indian. 3. Rome had an African Emperor, Severus. 4. The last Roman Emperor had the same name as the first – Romulus. 5. Rome was only ever defeated by the French and the Romanians. 6. Rome had a population of a million. 7. Julius Caesar wiped out a million French in genocide. 8. Romans thought that pants were girly. 9. Pagan Rome could absorb other cultures by absorbing their gods. Monotheism made this impossible, and martyrdom made it impossible to attack. Christianity was one of the major reasons that Rome ultimately fell and Europe slipped into the dark ages. It only really emerged when secular culture and scientific reason developed in Italy after the middle ages with people like Galileo. Frontpage — The Ammianus Marcellinus Online Project
Whatever Web 2.0 really is, and in some ways its an empty ‘container meme’ for a meme that will morph into whatever is most convenient and successful, Yahoo are looking pretty well equiped to give Google a run for their money in the more media centric worlds of social applications and publishing. When did you last use Orkut? When did you last use Flickr? With a media savvy exec. team and some small but smart acquisitions: Oddpost; Flickr and now Upcoming, Yahoo have the people, the components and the technical approach to create a synergy of social applications with next generation UI. It used to be that using online apps. was a trade-off of functionality and performance vs not having to worry about maintenance, upgrades or backups or ability to move from one machine to another. With Gmail or Oddpost, there is no trade-off, my desktop email client crashed when…
Google is to build a gigantic campus in The Silicone Valley ‘Silicone’ Valley – that would be the San Fernando Valley where all the porn stars hang out, I guess.
I normally agree with what Seth Godin has to say, but his rules of viral spread (which have spread virally, interestingly enough) seem provably wrong: Seth says (and note that he does not say anything about virality in his set of criteria for message sending): “No one ‘sends’ an idea unless:” “a. they understand it” Not true. People send things when they think they understand it but don’t and when they don’t understand it but think they should. An example of the former is the Sokal Hoax. In fact the Nietzsche example given is perfect proof to the contrary – Nietzsche does propagate but without understanding. This is important as it explains the mechanism of mutation of an idea into a better propagating one. If people had to understand an idea as the sender intended, the mechanisms of natural selection on ideas would be vastly different. “b. they want it…
The myth: “religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.” The reality:
Full article is subcription only. FT.com / Home UK – Track clickerati’s new buzz
“It is a powerful, highly addictive drug openly peddled on street corners and in purpose-made buildings across the country. Suicide bombers get high on it and governments encourage its use. It can be hallucinogenic, destroys lives and, in its strongest doses, start wars.”