technology

Peopleaggregator is up, contrats to Marc and Eric and all involved. Lots more to come.

The Guardian analyses the impact of its anti-protectionist blog KickAAS in a rather po-faced way. “One of the reasons for the attention that it got could have been the novelty of a “serious” blog with a dedicated political purpose. This was at a time when Blogdom was wondering whether blogs could be use for serious, non navel-gazing purposes. KickAAS was, of course, a predictable failure, and it had no effect at all on the Cancun talks. However, it brought people of all political persuasions from around the world together to discuss policy and tactics. In this way, it may have raised awareness about the potential of blogs to further a cause, but there clearly needs to be a long term-strategy, as well as a tactical website, in place.” KickAAS is certainly not the first ‘serious’ blog, and the fact that it may not have had the impact desired may be…

Ian Davis has been working on URIs that represent places and times. There are 3 types, a single point in time, a span in time and a place. Interestingly this could be used as a standard format for permalinks. In fact if a weblog entry used an event/author standard for its permalink then it could in theory become truly permanent in that it would be portable. More interestingly this could extend the use of a permalink for any object within space or time. PlaceTime.com – URIs for Places and Times

Is there no electronic ‘Friend or Foe’ PIN enabled transmitter device that could help prevent friendly fire accidents?

“Analysts have predicted that there will be almost 1 billion camera phones in use within five years, which has led companies such as Samsung and LG Electronics to bar employees from using camera phones in research and manufacturing facilities because of fears over the security of sensitive data.” For the last twenty years, there has been a huge increase in video surveillance, as the required hardware became cheap. Surveillance that has been heavily resisted in the US is commonplace in Europe. The ubiquity of camera phones changes the surveillance equation around. So now everyone gets paranoid – but they shouldn’t. If everyone carries camera phones, then perhap you decentralize and democratize ‘surveillance’. The risk is that you replace a fear of big brother with vigilante paranoia that police neighborhood watch schemes can produce. This all may sound far fetched, but clearly 1 billion people carrying around a camera and the…

Is a SWAT team going to burst through the windows of your house one night and drag you off into the moonlight because they can’t find the CD original of some tracks on your iPod since you threw out the disk when it got scratched? Unlikely. Here’s why I believe that CD’s could pose a bigger threat to the music industry than web-based file sharing. The music industry has three tactics to put people off trading online: polluting networks with false tracks; telling parents that file trading exposes children to porn; suing individuals. This will put people off. Authorized online distribution of digital music files, Apple music store style, will enable copy protection within the files. Hardware devices such as iPods will continue to use protection measures at the hardware level. CDs and CD players don’t have this kind of protection, because CD standards were defined before ubiquitous file trading,…

“I can imagine the day when RSS-powered email clients are included in the software image on your machine. In fact, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the likes of Microsoft and IBM Lotus are not far away from including RSS newsreaders in their email clients. It’s a must-have feature.” InfoWorld TechWatch: Inside baseball: the RSS backlash

Good new business blog on CMS: cms~wire: Content Management Industry News

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