technology

Wired discovers that an exposed log file for a ‘penis enlargement pill vendor’ showed that they made $600,000 in one month. Email is a perfect example of the nothing is for free principle. If email cost 1c to send as Evan Williams suggested then spam would be less of a problem. Perhaps in any free network where there is implicit economic value then cost emerges. In the case of Email, the cost of marketing is so low that an undirected shotgun approach is viable. On the receiving end, the effort, and therefore cost, associated with spam filtering make Email like watching a TV channel where the viewer instead of the advertiser has to pay for the commercials.

What I like most about this is that the latest version of Lindows runs off a CD so there is no need to install the OS and you can run it on a machine with another OS installed without having to mess around with dual boot settings. Techweb > News > Lindows Powers $169 Web-centric PC > Lindows Powers $169 Web-Centric PC

Weblogs are different from threaded discussion groups or mailing lists. They allow you to carry out a distributed discussion where the thread can be assembled remotely using an analysis tool such as Technorati. The advantage is that weblogs are personal, down to the look and feel of an individual blog, with all the functionality of a threaded discussion implicitly available. To add comments within someone else’s weblog is surely a retrograde step? In true trackback style the comments box should pull up a list of references to the post from Technorati – with a box that posts to your own blog or signs you up to start one.

I liked Marc Canter’s observation that anything beyond 1 degree if separation is just that – separated. However, I finally gave in and signed up to Friendster a while back, my tactic being to assume that by choosing one person who is a consumate networker, I would now have a PDNA a Personal Digital Networking Assistant and wouldn’t have to do anything (except be like those selfish peer-to-peer software users who never share anything). My Friendster account now says “You are connected to 12729 people in your Personal Network, through 1 friend.” – Hilarious. Can anyone guess the identity of my PDNA? Friendster – Home

Dave Winer: “Anyway, I don’t see any killer apps in the RDF crowd. I see lots of people with strong opinions and not much software.” Lets face it, this is true. But the fact that it is true hides something absolutely extraordinary. From the way all of our brains are configured, to the way every language on earth has subjects, predicates and objects, to the way any box of any form you fill in on the web has a URL a label for the box and a value you type in – all these things are what the model of RDF is about. There is something profound about a non-hierarchical messy network and triples – I suspect it is the way our brain is wired and the way that any language or information based upon this wiring has to be expressed. So why aren’t people using RDF, where are the…

Western economies are largely becoming service based economies, and irreversibly so, the US cannot compete globally in manufacturing and production, as witnessed by the huge subsidies to farming or steel manufacture. What if many of the services that rely on information technology are not economically viable in the long run? What if never ending cheapness created by the applicability of Moores Law and lack of scarcity in digital media conspire to create hyper-deflation? Kevin Werbach recently delivered “the notion that many media organizations currently depend on their revenues through the assumption of

Europemedia on a virtuoso Kevin Werbach performance: “The notion that many media organisations currently depend on their revenues through the assumption of ‘scarcity’ is as radical as it is true. As weblogs provide a rival to newspaper columnists, P2Ps topple record companies, open spectrum enables everyone to become a broadcaster and TiVo makes advertisers shudder.” Europemedia.net: News – TVMW Seminar: The Kevin Werbach experience

A web browser is at its core a simple thing, a few lines of PERL and you can write a very basic one. What is important about a browser is its elegance and simplicity and its reliance on simple standards like HTML or server logs etc. Weblog tools can be simple and elegant and they too rely on simple standards however they are not formalized and this is getting scary. At first glance I can think of four key pseudo-standards for the writeable web. Getting these right will surely have huge implications if weblogging is anything like as important as web browsing: 1. The Meta Weblog API – needs to be modular. 2. Pings from posts (make weblogs.com the principal server and post the whole message) 3. RSS – freeze on 2.0 with slightly tweaked core and generic XSLT to create RDF if needed. 4. Permalinks (oh yes) – standardize…

Craig Silverstein from Google is talking at ETech, he asks ‘how many of you would normally be asleep at this time (note this is 10:30 not 7:30). About one third of the people in the room put up their hands. Craig admitted that he normally got to work around noon. Imagine if this had been a sales convention, if the talk had been at 5:30 in the morning and the same question were asked, there probably wouldn’t have been a single hand shown. So on the one hand the number of hands shown is a good measure of the geek factor of the crowd, but even more so, I suspect it is a measure of the ‘hacker factor’ i.e. the percentage of creative engineers. It seems that there is a direct correlation between extraversion and morning people and introversion and night owls. There is also a connection between introversion and…

Vivendi is in deep doo-doo and so it is perhaps prepared to sell Universal, the worlds biggest music company, for the same price as its annual earnings, five times less than what it originally paid for it. But if Vivendi is in immediate trouble, this is nothing compared to the bottomless manure pit that the music companies find themselves in longer term – they market and distribute music, and digital music can leverage cheap viral marketing and zero distribution cost. The opportunities for music companies of the future are great, they could leverage the opportunities of digital media to create lean operations with high profit margins, but these companies will be smaller and the existing record companies would rather fight than go with the flow. When you are in a quicksand-like substance you shouldn’t fight against it – so deeper into the shitpile they go. With digital media there are…

Kevin Werbach writes: “The best known open-source projects take advantage of established standards — Linux and Unix; Sendmail and SMTP; MySQL and SQL; Apache and HTTP; Mozilla and HTML. But then again, so do most of the proprietary applications these days. “ The odd one out here is Linux/Unix, Linux is a flavor of Unix, which is an archetype rather than a standard. Hair splitting aside, Kevin makes a profound point about the involvement of standards in a ‘networked’ computer environment: “Networked computing necessarily requires standards, because no one entity controls the whole environment.” In other words, the real threat to people like Microsoft may not be Open Source – but Open Standards. Microsoft had to compete with free browsers and web servers, by offering IE free and an OS bundled web server, but Linux and to a much lesser extent MySQL are a much bigger threat to Sun and…

Dawkins applies Moore’s law to gene sequencing: “In 1965, it cost