Cooper to talk. My guess is that Miller Gossiped, i.e. the leak went Judith Miller (NYT) -> Administration -> Cooper (Time) and Novak (WaPo). Whether there is any evidence that Plame’s name went twice around the merry-go-round (Administration -> Miller) is another matter. Whatever the scenario, what amazes me is that few people seem to question that this was a vindictive act rather than a cockup.
The Internet Stock Blogoutlines the case that Yahoo is most likely to buy six apart, because “Yahoo! has no blogging platform”. Dave Pell pointed out an interesting idea, that when a large company makes an acquisition in a particular area, then it is difficult for them to acquire a competitor to it, since there would be internal resistance or operational complications from the existing team within the company. Consolidation tends to happen on the outside. On that basis, Google has Blogger and Microsoft has Spaces. So maybe Yahoo would buy Sixapart? Perhaps, since Google have Picasa, Yahoo could also buy Flickr. With Sixapart and Flickr, Yahoo would have added two formidable services to their arsenal.
People say that Hungarian is the language of the future, and it always will be. Similarly, you get the feeling that speech recognition is the technology of the future and always will be. Until recently the same was true of Internet telephony. There are many technologies that fail because they don’t pass the ‘good enough’ test. Having noticed that more and more friends are using Skype these days, it seems that VOIP passes the good enough test, for once the marketing blurb is right – it just works. In fact, beyond that, two recent examples illustrate that it is now better than other means of telephony. Example one: a friend’s cellphone ran out of juice, he resorted to war driving to find an open wifi network to contact me, his web based email didn’t work, couldn’t get a good enough connection to Instant Message me, but VOIP worked just fine….
Predictions for 2005: 1. Wikiyahoo – Tagging/Folksonomies become the tech talk of the town. Flickr gets acquired 2. Googlets – People cash out and leave Google, creating a startup frenzy in SF 3. An Englishman
Microsoft is caught in a potential pincer movement where it will have to: 1. compete in a consumer market where MP3 players, media PC’s and laptops will be sold as luxury goods with value-added hardware and software design, something that is not Microsoft’s strong point. 2. compete in a business market, where the vulnerabilities of buying into a monoculture cost time and money. As Firefox continues to grow its market share, the difference between now and the Netscape days is that Internet Explorer is often a disease ridden product. The advantage of having it preinstalled on most machines is outweighed by genuine benefits of switching, and large corporations have IT staff that will do that for people, to save time and money. It is not hard to imagine a headline – ‘Merrill Lynch to switch to Firefox’. A friend was recently dissing a competitors use of Apple Mac’s for their…
Alexa today shows a traffic rank of 1,255 and a 1.5% reach for Burger King’s subservient chicken. Related Info for: subservientchicken.com/ Trying to create an Internet meme like this is hard, but Burger King have pulled it off. What is likely in the future is that savvy advertisers will track sites like Technorati and endorse new memes as they take off.
GSReport:Megatrends Looking back at someone looking back at someone looking forward. “The 1957 launch of Sputnik and the first space shuttle launch in 1981 were ‘far more important to the information society than to any future age of space exploration.’”
1. Enterprise software backlash. After being a temporarily fashionable haven from the dotcom collapse, enterprise software takes a beating 2. Hybrid social networking and blogging services emerge 3. VOIP makes the music industry
“In principle blogging promises us something close to Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of a writeable web because anyone can create their own constantly-updated site.” BBC: Gagging the bloggers It seems that even the mainstream press are now saying that weblogging constitutes something more important than personal online diaries. Weblog tools are how you publish online and are as important for publishing on the Internet as the browser was for, well, browsing. Perhaps just like the word browsing effectively means reading things on the Internet (or we’d be gophering), blogging will mean publishing on the web, publishing anything, not just a diary.
Apple Music Store is out. Three years after Napster there is finally a pay-per-song, jukebox-style application and, like everything Apple do, it looks beautifully executed. But is this a good deal? Each song costs 99c. An average CD has 10 tracks. CD list price: $19 CD wholesale price: c $12 Ave. cost of pressing and shipping: $2 Looking at these numbers, the music industry has only been prepared to discount the music by the actual cost of manufacturing and shipping the CD. In other words the arrogance and stupidity of the music labels is unabated, they still refuse to admit that online music changes the economics and mechanics of the marketing and distribution of music beyond removing the costs of a physical storage medium. Perhaps this isn’t so much the death of the CD, but another step towards their own suicide. Follow the money: who’s really making the dough.
Steve Hall points out that because links to individual postings often produce the traffic to weblogs, there needs to be an advertising system for weblogs adaptable to variable traffic to individual permalinked items. The notion of advertising at the ‘page’ level is meaningless for weblogs. I believe the permalink model will inevitably extend to all web publishing – a web page is a virtual rendering of one or more items, individual postings have self contained meaning and therefore value. To put it another way, the web is a web because of links. Links point to information elsewhere, and information exists within content, not pages. If there are no permalinks to individual pieces of content, then the advertising model of the web will never be able to fully take advantage of linking. Eventually everthing on the web will have a permalink. “Slate wrote an article about a post on Gawker that…