TechWeb Napster An Indicator Of Online Culture Change
""A culture change is coming," said Esther Dyson, chairman, EDventure Holdings, author, and board chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers the international organization charged with technical administration of the Internet."

"The rise of peer-to-peer technology is going to change how companies do business and how consumers are perceived, she said. "It's a whole new attitude," Dyson said. It will also be a challenge to harmonize it with existing copyright law and business models, she said."

"The vision behind peer-to-peer technology, content, and applications is more idealistic than commercial models. "People become the producers rather than just consumers. It's run by the people and for the people. It gives users world economies of scale. It used to be you'd have to be part of an institution to have that," Dyson said."

redux [05.22.00]
Washington Post e-power to the people
"Both the beauty and danger of Gnutella are that it is a more sophisticated version of Napster, the infamous and popular program that college students have been using to swap music files over the Web. Napster's developers have recently been hit with a flurry of copyright-infringement lawsuits. But unlike users of Napster, Gnutella aficionados can trade files without going through a storage center, making it impossible to shut down the system without unplugging every computer on the network and difficult to control by laws because there's no central authority."

"Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape Communications and a former chief technology officer for AOL, compares Gnutella to a benevolent virus, a "revolutionary" program that spreads the power of publishing from an elite set of corporations to anyone who has a computer."

ZDNet Linux leaders: Beware of Napster
"Leaders of the "open source" software movement have a message that some of their followers may not want to hear: Beware of Napster."

""Piracy is bad," says Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, when asked about the matter. "Of course you should be able to sue over copyrights. The one good lawsuit in the whole Napster case is the one by Metallica: a suit by the actual authors. While it's probably motivated mostly by money, I can still at least hope that there is a strong feeling of morals there, too."

Larry Wall, developer of the Perl language, has a similar perspective. "Open source should be about giving away things voluntarily," he says. "When you force someone to give you something, it's no longer giving, it's stealing. Persons of leisurely moral growth often confuse giving with taking."

Wired Get Your Music Mojo Working
"A new file-sharing system could best rivals like Napster and Gnutella through more anonymous and efficient transfers.

The service has an innovative feature that rewards users for uploading and distributing files: payment in a form of digital currency called "Mojo." "

""It's a cross between Napster and eBay," says Jim McCoy, the 30-year-old CEO of Autonomous Zone Industries, which created the open-source MojoNation software.

McCoy's goal is nothing if not ambitious: to create the first file-sharing economy of agents, servers, and search engines in which senders and receivers can agree on prices for each transaction and use micropayments to get paid."

redux [05.13.00]
WebReview The Value of Gnutella and Freenet
"Notice how much bad press has fallen recently on the networking technologies Gnutella, Freenet, and Napster? I think some of the public alarm over genetic crop modification has cross-pollenated over to software. Suffering from legitimate fears over far-reaching technologies like genetic modification, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and nuclear waste disposal, the press and the public are ready to listen to anything bad said about anything new—even a clean, open, noninvasive technology like distributed computing.

If you check my biography, you will see that I make my living selling content. I do not extend knee-jerk sympathy to systems publicized as ways to circumvent copyright enforcement. But investigating Gnutella, Freenet, and Napster, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that they're intriguing innovations in the best tradition of the Internet pioneers. While it's important to talk about their potential for the distribution of illegal content, we have to look at their larger goals and the promise they offer."

Freshmeat Client As Server: The New Model
"The RIAA mentality is one and the same as that of the Russians of yesteryear: a desire to stop the flow of information through the network. The answer to the Russians is one and the same as the answer to the RIAA: a completely distributed system. If every client on the network was connected to a handful of other clients, each of which in turn connected to others like some apocalyptically enormous online incarnation of Amway, then every person could have some connection to every other person through a chain of mutual acquaintances. It's Six Degrees of Freedom."

"This is a "virtual Internet" of sorts in which links are not physical (a wire from you to me) but logical (I know you). Data flows through this "web of friendship" in such a way that it looks like you are only talking with your friends, when really you are talking to your friends' friends, and so forth."

The Standard The Secret History
"After all, privacy is inherently vague. Neither decades of legal cases nor these two books have come up with a definition on which most would agree. And we are hypocrites about it – we have an endless curiosity for personal details about others even as we zealously protect our own."

"Those already in a frenzy over technology and privacy, though, should get out the smelling salts: Privacy-disrupting technologies are only going to get better (or worse). Wealthy, concerned parents will doubtless soon be able to equip their kids with global positioning system implants and send remote controlled video cameras scurrying after them. Soon after that, not-so-wealthy parents will be able to track their children, as well as anyone who wants to keep tabs on someone. We will all be swirling haplessly in a giant fishbowl."

NPR: All Things Considered Voyeurism
"Tonight, CBS debuts a new reality television show called Big Brother. Twenty-eight cameras and sixty microphone will record the every move of ten people living in a house. This show is in the same vein as Survivor, The Real World, and The 1900 House -- all of which are examples of how technology has brought about a much more public voyeur. Millions of people are gathering around their televisions sets to peer into the lives of others. Bob Mondello has an overview of how the term voyeurism came about through motion pictures. And Noah talks with Robin Rimbaud , aka "Scanner," about the new techno voyeur, scanning people's cell phone conversations."

The New York Times Magazine Voyeurism for the Entire Family
[requires 'free' n.y.t. registration]
"George Orwell was a loser.

As a friend observes, if Orwell could really see into the future, he would have registered Big Brother as a brand. He would have known that the ominous specter he raised in "1984" would, by 2000, become a crowd-pleasing entertainment franchise."

"The truth is that the phenomenal appeal of "Survivor" and "Big Brother" is the news right now -- perhaps not coincidentally at a time when the shows' promos bleed into amateur videos of real-life wilding in Central Park and Americans are said to be alarmed about Internet invasions of their privacy. We may learn more about the country from these TV series than we will from the political parties' version of "reality" television (the infomercial conventions, which will get far less network air time)."

"This would all be harmless were we certain that the line between "reality television" and actual reality is universally clear. But TV's exploitation of the Central Park videos of packs of men mauling dozens of women after the National Puerto Rican Day Parade makes one wonder. Though the videos were broadcast over and over for gratuitous titillation long after they ceased to qualify as fresh news, the voyeuristic overkill aroused no more public protest than the prospect of "Big Brother."

Feed Daily
"PRIVACY'S a funny thing. The word itself never appears in the Constitution, or in the Bill of Rights, or in the Declaration of Independence, and still most Americans believe that, like their other freedoms, the right to privacy is inalienable. And there's something to that belief. Judge Brandeis made the first attempt to codify personal privacy rights in 1890, when he famously wrote that people have "the right to enjoy life – the right to be let alone," and juries, journalists, private citizens, and public figures have been wrangling over that notion of privacy the right to be let alone ever since. With Wednesday's release of a videotape documenting the horrors at Columbine High School, the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department has, probably unwittingly, reinvigorated this long-running debate."

redux [04.30.00]
The New York Times Magazine The Eroded Self
[requires 'free' registration]
"A liberal state should respect the distinction between public and private speech because it recognizes that the ability to expose in some contexts aspects of our identity that we conceal in other contexts is indispensable to freedom, friendship, even love. Friendship and romantic love can't be achieved without intimacy, and intimacy, in turn, depends upon the selective and voluntary disclosure of personal information that we don't share with everyone else. Moreover...privacy is also necessary for the development of human individuality. Any writer will understand the importance of reflective solitude in refining arguments and making unexpected connections: in an odd but widely shared experience, many of us seem to have our best ideas when we are in the shower. Indeed, studies of creativity show that it's during periods of daydreaming and seclusion that the most creative thought takes place, as individuals allow ideas and impressions to run freely through their minds without fear that their untested thoughts will be exposed and taken out of context. "

"We are trained in this country to think of all concealment as a form of hypocrisy. But perhaps we are about to learn how much may be lost in a culture of transparency -- the capacity for creativity and eccentricity, for the development of self and soul, for understanding, friendship and even love. There is nothing inevitable about the erosion of privacy in cyberspace, just as there is nothing inevitable about its reconstruction. We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. What we need now is the will."

"While issues of privacy have been far more debated in this day and age then environmental concerns were in Carson's era (for instance, polls consistently show that the public does care very much about privacy, both online and off), Garfinkel's work is the first time a writer has decisively and persuasively marshaled all the information together to show how our right to privacy is under constant attack, often by people who claim to have our best interests at heart. "

The Christian Science Monitor The war over patents on the Web: Who owns an idea?
"You won't find them in sleek trench coats, toting sensitive government files in chrome briefcases. Nor do they troll the Beltway in white SUVs with tinted windows. But the traditionally low-profile examiners at the US Patent & Trademark Office are suddenly playing a highly visible role as agents of the information superhighway.

Yet the limelight has not been kind to this under-funded, short-staffed group in Arlington, Va. Director Q. Todd Dickinson and his team of examiners have been accused of handing out patents on software technology like they were housewarming gifts: "Welcome to the Internet - here's your patent.""

redux [02.28.00]
The Industry Standard Amazon.com Patents Enemy-Making Process
"Question: When did the media stop seeing Amazon.com (AMZN) as an e-commerce hero and start seeing it as a corporate bully for which, in the words of San Jose Mercury columnist Dan Gillmor, "arrogance and greed seem limitless"?

Answer: When it started collecting patents on business and Web practices that people had thought were fair game."

redux [03.11.00]
The New York Times Magazine Patently Absurd
[requires 'free' n.y.t. registration]
"When 21st-century historians look back at the breakdown of the United States patent system, they will see a turning point in the case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com and their special invention: "The patented One Click® feature," Bezos calls it."

"In ways that could not have been predicted even a few years ago, the patent system is in crisis. A series of unplanned mutations have transformed patents into a positive threat to the digital economy. The patent office has grown entangled in philosophical confusion of its own making; it has become a ferocious generator of litigation; and many technologists believe that it has begun to choke the very innovation it nourish."

The New York Times Amazon.com Falls After Downgrades
[requires 'free' registration]
"Disenchanted with Amazon.com's sales growth in the latest quarter, six more analysts lowered their ratings on the Internet retailer's stock on Thursday, driving its shares down 15 percent in afternoon trading."

"Just about the only thing keeping our bullish hope afloat over the last few quarters as the stock has been beaten down by the bears and a more exacting stock market has been the very real likelihood that revenue could always outperform and make profitability even closer to reality," Reamer wrote in a research report. "Today that feels like less of a probability.""

Free Software Advocacy Against intellectual property
"The original rationale for copyrights and patents was to foster artistic and practical creative work by giving a short-term monopoly over certain uses of the work. This monopoly was granted to an individual or corporation by government. The government's power to grant a monopoly is corrupting. The biggest owners of intellectual property have sought to expand it well beyond any sensible rationale."

"This chapter outlines the case against intellectual property. I begin by mentioning some of the problems arising from ownership of information. Then I turn to weaknesses in its standard justifications. Next is an overview of problems with the so-called "marketplace of ideas," which has important links with intellectual property. Finally, I outline some alternatives to intellectual property and some possible strategies for moving towards them. "

"Intellectual property is supported by many powerful groups: the most powerful governments and the largest corporations. The mass media seem fully behind intellectual property, partly because media monopolies would be undercut if information were more freely copied and partly because the most influential journalists depend on syndication rights for their stories."

"Another problem in developing strategies is that it makes little sense to challenge intellectual property in isolation. If we simply imagine intellectual property being abolished but the rest of the economic system unchanged, then many objections can be made. Challenging intellectual property must involve the development of methods to support creative individuals."

Slashdot Napster Shut Down Until Trial
"Everybody goes on about the poor music listeners, but what about me? Let me go over this so we're all on the same page, OK? Let's look at what's _really_ happening.

-I am a musician (see URL link above- please visit it if you haven't already?). A NON-RIAA musician. The RIAA labels are my competition, and crushing, stifling competition they are too, and I have to work really hard to get production values comparable to the majors (or better).
- I had songs on Napster BY REQUEST. I publically asked people to put my songs off mp3.com in their Napster directories, if they could, if they didn't mind taking the trouble to do so. I own my songs AND the mechanical recordings of 'em and I have an absolute right to permit such distribution. It's _my_ say-so, not the RIAAs, not mp3.com's.
- Napster is being shut down anyhow- the RIAA lawyers successfully convinced the judge that _I_ don't exist, just like the RIAA continually tries to convince the listening public that I don't exist, that nobody like me exists.
- So- the judge is taking away a _major_ distribution channel from me, at the request of... my competition.

Who thought _this_ one up? Wait, don't tell me, it might just possibly be the the same trade organisation that taxes the blank tapes I record MY MUSIC on, said taxes again going to my competition. Yes, the same people who arranged that I have to pay money to help the Backstreet Boys out-PR me have now arranged to sabotage a _key_ internet distribution mechanism that could work in my favor- and of course are also suing the 'label' (mp3.com) that I signed with (ever hear Roger McGuinn's take on the mp3.com contract? This is the leader of The Byrds. He loves the mp3.com contract- it's actually _fair_. Quick, kill it before more people realise how brutal standard major label contracts are! Competition must die!)

I don't remember agreeing to steadily pay off my biggest, most implacable competition to bury me. Please, Judge Ma'am, stop the music industry, I'd like to get off? Seems that owning my own music, owning my own equipment, recording only my own songs, attempting no samples and expecting no industry PR is not enough for me to be allowed things like non-RIAA distribution channels and the ability to buy tapes at the store to put MY MUSIC on and not pay taxes to my biggest competitors. So please, Judge Ma'am, if you hear of a free market out there somewhere won't you let me know? Apparently me buying all my own gear and recording all my own stuff and trying to put it out there through services like Napster is not permissible. Tell me, is this for my own good? Should I learn to behave?"

The New York Times Saving The Nation's Digital Legacy
[requires 'free' registration]
"The Library of Congress is charged with collecting the creative work of the American people. This has come to include such varied output as the papers of Thomas Jefferson and the Wright brothers, the original compositions of Leonard Bernstein and the video archives of the Martha Graham Dance Company.

But now the nation's creativity extends to Web sites, electronic journals and magazines, and CD-ROM's of every sort. And the library is lagging in collecting and archiving that digital material, according to a report released yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences. Unless its administrators act swiftly, the report says, the library risks diminishing in relevance."

redux [07.08.00]
CNN.Com Company aims to preserve Web history
"The Internet provides a unique glimpse into the lives of ordinary people, much like newspapers of old, but little is being done to preserve Web pages for future historians. One non-profit company is trying to change that.

"We have a shadow of the world that we're able to capture and make available to the future," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.

"Why save the entire Internet, when some would argue that most of it is junk?

Referring to newspapers of the past, Kahle said, "If we had been selective, we probably would have kept all the articles and thrown away those ads, but it's the ads that the historians really like. That's what of what life was like."

The Internet Archive Why the Archive Is Building an ‘Internet Library’
"Libraries exist to preserve society’s cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it’s essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world."

"The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet — a new medium with major historical significance — from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to permanently preserve a record of public material.

Open and free access to literature and other writings has long been considered essential to education and to the maintenance of an open society. Public and philanthropic enterprises have supported it through the ages.

The Internet Archive is opening its collections to researchers, historians, and scholars to ensure that they have free and permanent access to public materials. The Archive has no vested interest in the discoveries of the users of its collections, nor is it a grant-making organization."

Mappa Mundi Conceptual Map of Net Spaces - Circa'94
"It is important to realise that the Internet is not just the Web. Many people are unaware that the Internet in fact provides a rich array of services beyond those beginning with WWW. I'm a geographer so I like to think of these as different information spaces, with differing virtual 'geographies'. A good way to get a information spaces of the Internet, their shape, size, landmarks and interconnections, is to map them. One of my favourite conceptual maps of net spaces was drawn back in 1994 by John December."

"The map was drawn at the end of 1994 and the nature of the Internet has changed markedly since then, with certain information spaces dying off as they fall out of favour with users, particularly WAIS and Gopher. Undoubtedly, the biggest change has been the inexorable and exponential growth of Web space which would now be a huge blue blob on the map, squeezing and submerging many other information spaces. For many end-users the Web, seen through the browser interface, is the only information space, although e-mail is still the most widely used. But even here, the Web is coming to dominate with the growing popularity of Web-based e-mail services like Hotmail.

Other important information spaces within the global Internet have evolved and grown to prominence since December drew his map. Notable examples include, instant messaging (e.g. ICQ), chat environments (e.g. IRC), multi-user game spaces (e.g. Quake) and streaming media (e.g. RealNetworks, MP3s). Also, large intranets have proliferated, creating important private information spaces, which are largely unseen from the outside and are therefore difficult to quantify and map. While at the scale of the networks of the Matrix, John December commented to me, via e-mail, that since 1994 there has been "the swallowing up of all alternate networks into the Internet…everyone thinks of only the Internet as the online world.""

Council on Library and Information Sources Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation
"There is as yet no viable long-term strategy to ensure that digital information will be readable in the future. Digital documents are vulnerable to loss via the decay and obsolescence of the media on which they are stored, and they become inaccessible and unreadable when the software needed to interpret them, or the hardware on which that software runs, becomes obsolete and is lost. Preserving digital documents may require substantial new investments, since the scope of this problem extends beyond the traditional library domain, affecting such things as government records, environmental and scientific baseline data, documentation of toxic waste disposal, medical records, corporate data, and electronic-commerce transactions."

BBC Tiny disk to record posterity
"New ways of storing information in a way that can be understood thousands of years from now have been discussed at a conference in the United States.

Scientists, librarians, technologists, anthropologists and others, with the backing of the Long Now Foundation, are considering the best way to ensure that the culture and heritage of the 21st Century are not forgotten.

The foundation has developed a small metal disk which can store hundreds of thousands of words.

Called the Rosetta disk, experts hope it will provide our descendants with details of how we live today."

Council on Library and Information Resources Risk Management of Digital Information: A File Format Investigation
"This report is based on an investigation conducted by Cornell University Library to assess the risks to digital file formats during migration. The study was carried out with support from CLIR.

The report includes a workbook that will help library staff identify potential risks associated with migrating digital information. Each section of the workbook opens with a brief issue summary; this is followed by questions that will guide users in completing a risk assessment. The appendixes also include two case studies for migration: one for image files and the other for numeric files."

The Register Internet could be 500 times bigger than we think
"The true extent of the Internet is not widely known, and according to a study published this week, it could be more than 500 times larger than we think. The authors claim that as much as 7500TB of data exist in places on the Web that no search engine has mapped, as compared to the 19TB on the familiar 'surface' web."

"The material BrightPlanet has uncovered consists mostly of public information - 95 per cent of this is freely accessible, with more than half residing in topic specific databases. Of these, the 60 largest contain 750TB of information. This exceeds the capacity of the normal web by 40 times. All this hidden material is causing a great deal of frustration, the company says, since people can't find it using normal search engines. Even NorthernLight.com, widely reported to have the largest percentage of the web mapped at 16 per cent, covers only 0.03 per cent of the total content including the 'deep' web."

MSNBC Experts probe Net’s natural defenses
"The Internet’s organic structure explains why it’s so resistant to random failures, but researchers now say those same features make it vulnerable to cyberattacks. The findings could help security experts strengthen weak links in the Net’s chain.

"They found that samples of the World Wide Web didn’t have a random structure: Instead, the connections exhibited a hierarchy similar to that found in naturally occurring networks such as trees and living cells, with a small proportion of highly connected nodes branching off to a large number of less connected nodes. The structure was the same at different scales, meaning that the results could be extended to the Web as a whole, they said."

"Although the structure is particularly well-suited to tolerate random errors, it’s also particularly vulnerable to deliberate attack, they said. If just 1 percent of the most highly connected Internet routers or Web sites are incapacitated, the network’s average performance would be cut in half, said Yuhai Tu of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center.

“With only 4 percent of its most important nodes destroyed, the Internet loses its integrity, becoming fragmented into small disconnected domains,” he wrote in a commentary published in Nature."

Nature : Science Update The missing links
"In an exponential network, there is a well defined ‘average connectivity’ for the nodes: most are connected by a certain number of links, and only a very few differ substantially from this average.

Barabási’s team says that there is another common kind of network that has hitherto been neglected: the ‘scale-free’ network, in which there is no meaningful average number of links - no ‘scale’ to it, in other words. In a scale-free network the number of nodes with a given number of connections simply declines as that number of nodes increases. Many nodes are linked to the network via just one connection; fewer have two, even fewer have three, and so forth. Unlike an exponential network, there remain small but significant numbers of nodes with many connections."

"...a cyber-terrorist armed with a map of a scale-free network could deliberately focus their attack on the few most highly connected nodes. Knocking just a few of these out would disable just about all flow of or access to information for other users, breaking up the webs rapidly into isolated fragments. This is the Achilles’ heel of the net, say the researchers, and defences against e-terrorism need to concentrate on making key nodes invulnerable."

redux [03.22.00]
The Christian Science Monitor Wars of the future... today
“Take the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade several weeks ago. Rage spread across China and hackers from the mainland attacked the Web sites of the US Departments of Energy and the Interior, and the National Park Service. A subsequent attack brought down the White House Web site for three days. The attacks generated headlines across the country.

What the news media didn't report was that the US government had known for a long time that someone had been in its computer systems - they just didn't know who. Then, in a fit of anger, the Chinese hackers caused some real damage - and gave away the hidden "location" of several "backdoors" they had built in US government networks."

"The US Government Accounting Office estimates 120 groups or countries have or are developing information-warfare systems. According to a report issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 23 nations have cyber-targeted the US."

redux [03.22.00]
News.Com Researchers find Web divided into 4 regions
"A study by researchers from Compaq Computer, Web portal AltaVista and IBM concluded that the Web has distinct regions, including some that are inaccessible to one another. The layout, researchers said, resembles a bow tie with four sections: a "strongly connected core," "origination" pages, "termination" pages and "disconnected" pages.

Within the core, the knot of the bow tie, Web surfers can travel smoothly between sites through hyperlinks. One side of the bow contains origination pages that allow surfers to reach the central knot. The other side of consists of termination pages that can be accessed from the core but are not linked back to it.

The final region consists of disconnected pages, which are cut off from the core but are connected to other areas peripherally.

"Webmasters and people doing e-commerce need to understand how to position their sites," said Andrei Broder, vice president of research for AltaVista. "If you want to have more international traffic, you need to be in a better connectivity position. It's always better to be in the center of the town than far out.""

IBM Almaden Research Center Graph structure in the web
"The study of the web as a graph is not only fascinating in its own right, but also yields valuable insight into web algorithms for crawling, searching and community discovery, and the sociological phenomena which characterize its evolution. We report on experiments on local and global properties of the web graph using two Altavista crawls each with over 200M pages and 1.5 billion links. Our study indicates that the macroscopic structure of the web is considerably more intricate than suggested by earlier experiments on a smaller scale. "

"In a sense the web is much like a complicated organism, in which the local structure in a microscopic scale looks very regular like a biological cell, but the global structure exhibits interesting morphological structure (body and limbs) that are not obviously evident in the local structure. Therefore, while it might be tempting to draw conclusions about the structure of the web graph from a local picture of it, such conclusions may be misleading."

Mappa.Mundi A Shared Reality
" In the beginning, maps were fiction. We perceived our world as myths defined by belief not geography. Maps of these imagined worlds came in many shapes and sizes, but they all mixed the unreal with snippets of the real world. The process of mapping the real world was one of going from geographies of ideas to maps of real geography. On the Internet, we will pursue a reverse path: maps of the Internet will progress from our current maps of network topologies to maps of virtual worlds that we build, maps of ideas and thoughts."

"Maps help us navigate. On the Internet, finding things has become the big challenge. Death by a thousand clicks is the bane of any net user. The reason? We are attempting to shoe-horn the metaphor of maps–tools for navigating complex spaces–into existing metaphors, such as the infinite book that is the World Wide Web.

The Internet is a network of many metaphors. The core infrastructure supports many protocols, and each protocol adopts a metaphor. Electronic mail uses analogies taken from a postal service. Streaming media started with a radio metaphor before evolving into a unique medium. The World Wide Web is also a metaphor–pages in an infinite book.

What is missing today is a metaphor that helps us tackle the problem of meta-information: information about information. As we look at a page on the Web, the logical next step is to find other pages that are conceptually near. Near, of course, varies on your point of view. Meta-information is what helps the Internet become smarter about organizing itself. As we develop the tools to describe Internet resources, to manage meta-information, maps will happen. Until then, we are stuck in a world of many facts: all content, no context.

Wired Web Killing Newspapers? Ha!
"Wall Street is getting the news. Six months into the 21st century that was meant to toll the death knell for newspapers, the word is: Don't shoot the messengers, yet.

All major U.S. newspaper publishers, except one, have reported stronger earnings for the second quarter, confounding financial experts who predicted "daily rags" wouldn't even survive the challenge of radio and television, let alone the ubiquitous Internet."

"John Sturm, president and chief executive officer of the Newspaper Association of America, which represents some 2,000 newspapers in North America, said: "The overall message is that business is really good ... and the attitude out there is that this will be another good year.

"The Internet has not been much of an issue to date," he said, adding that most top U.S. dailies now have their own news sites, which attract a loyal readership because of the newspaper's standing in their local community."

redux [06.13.00]
Freedom Forum Web news scores above print, broadcast on credibility
"The most-credible Internet news sources are Web sites run by network or cable TV outlets or national newspapers, according to a new survey. Such well-known Internet names as America Online, Netscape and Yahoo! ranked higher on credibility than lesser-known sites."

"Among news media, continuing a trend, the Pew poll found key segments of the nation's news audience, particularly younger and better-educated Americans and those seeking financial information, are turning increasingly to the Internet."

""Increasingly, news organizations that are going to be successful have to offer news on a 24-hour basis..."

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press Investors Now Go Online for Quotes, Advice
"Traditional news outlets are feeling the impact of two distinct and powerful trends. Internet news has not only arrived, it is attracting key segments of the national audience. At the same time, growing numbers of Americans are losing the news habit. Fewer people say they enjoy following the news, and fully half pay attention to national news only when something important is happening. And more Americans than ever say they watch the news with a remote control in hand, ready to dispatch uninteresting stories. To some extent, these trends are affecting all traditional media, but broadcast news outlets -- both national and local -- have been the most adversely affected. "

redux [04.20.00]
Editor and Publisher Online Newspaper Sites Must Adjust To Life Without 'Editions'
"An online news site is more akin to a wire service than a printed publication, because it can (and should) publish news on around-the-clock basis. While the notion of "editions" still prevails at many news sites, the trend is more toward a constant publishing cycle, where news is published whenever it breaks.

Newspaper Web sites are in a period of transition, as more and more of them move into publishing news throughout the day instead of posting stories at specified times. While the idea of publishing Web "editions" is a comfortable one for a newspaper company, editions are really counter to the nature of the Internet publishing medium. Ideally, a news Web site will publish news without a set schedule."

The Washinton Post On Web, Newspapers Never Sleep
"As the journalistic precincts of cyberspace turn increasingly competitive, newspapers are transforming themselves into 24-hour news machines, in part by asking their print reporters to do double duty. The result has altered a tradition-encrusted newsroom environment that has never had to deal with round-the-clock deadlines."

""You're building a relationship with a new generation of young people for whom newsprint holds no magical qualities," said Ken Paulson, executive director of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University."

The Round Table Group Young Adults Most Often Get Info From Net - Study
"Young adults say the Internet, not newspapers or television, is their number one source of information, a Round Table Group survey has found.

Fifty-nine percent of Internet users in the 18- to 24-year-old age group say that their household gets more "useful information" from the Net than from newspapers; 53 percent say they receive more information from the Internet than from TV.

Fully 84 percent say that their household is more likely to use the Internet to find useful information than to go to the public library. For specific questions, 68 percent are more inclined to consult the Internet than turn to a newspaper and 67 percent are more likely to go to the Net than rely on television. "

Online Journalism Review What the Pulitzers Missed: What makes a Newspaper a Newspaper? Welcome to the 21st Century, Joseph Pulitzer, where ya been?
"In the wake of this year's Pulitzer awards and the various complaints and gripes about who should have been recognized, we would like to suggest a dig deeper into the psyche of the Pulitzer policy: the question of why online news publications were not allowed to submit applications. The answer, according to the rules of the Pulitzer committee, is that only "newspapers" may apply."

"...what makes a newspaper? It's daily, it's printable, it's news, commentary and reporting and is, ostensibly, read by someone. Merriam Webster defines a newspaper as "paper that is printed and distributed usually daily or weekly and that contains news, articles of opinion, features, and advertising.""

redux [02.02.00]
First Monday Interactive Features of Online Papers
"According to McAdams, who helped create the Washington Post's online service, "A journalist with little online experience tends to think in terms of stories, news value, public service and things that are good to read, but a person with a lot of online experience thinks more about connection, organization, movement within and among sets of information and communication among different people". Journalists today must choose. As gatekeepers they can transfer lots of information, or they can make users a smarter, more active and questioning audience for news events and issues. Making users smarter means involving them in a collaborative experience; i.e. interaction ”

The New York Times Stephen King Sows Dread in Publishers With His Latest E-Tale
[requires 'free' registration]
"Is the horror writer Stephen King leading a revolution in the way books are published, or just exploring the power of celebrity in the digital age?

His latest thriller, entitled "The Plant," describes a vicious vine that terrorizes a small publishing house, extorting human sacrifices. To some in the book business, the image is apt, because with the "The Plant" Mr. King plans to become today the first major author to self-publish on the Internet. He will offer the new book to fans in electronic installments available for downloading from his site, www.stephenking.com.

The launch has touched off a debate over whether the Web can liberate authors from their dependence on publishers, or just make it easier for truly famous people to rally their fans."

LA Times E-Book Publishing: Much Ado About Nothing Much?
"King is asking readers to send $1 each time they download, an experiment to see whether the honor system can trump the Internet urge to pirate. The effort is another sign of the building enthusiasm for electronic publishing. Unlike the recording industry, which has fought rear-guard legal battles against Napster, MP3.com and other online technologies that spread pirated music, the big New York publishing houses have been investing rapidly in new e-book companies and joint ventures.

Yet for all the ink getting spilled about e-books, almost no one is making money.

And King's latest move shows how precarious the old industry's plans are. As he wrote recently on his http://www.stephenking.com site: "My friends, we have a chance to become Big Publishing's worst nightmare.""

redux [03.28.00]
Salon The revolution that wasn't
"The news that Stephen King would release a story exclusively in digital form and exclusively via the Web rode the media mountain like an intermediate skier on a black-diamond trail -- tentatively at first, then with a little more confidence and, finally, hurtling out of control, crashing into unexpected territory. The trade press gave its imprimatur, and within a few days the story spread like a virus over Web and wire. Television and radio chugged behind.

For those who've watched digital content come into its own, the frenzy was nothing short of remarkable."

"...[Publisher Simon & Schuster] seems to be proclaiming something more insidious with the publication of "Riding the Bullet": that not only can it drag us kicking and screaming into the next era of digital entertainment but that, as a traditional content provider, it can control how and when that will happen. For the consumer, it seemed to say, cyberspace offers much that is new -- speed, efficiency, lower costs. But it also reminded us that, for the moment, Old Media and traditional entertainment still rule."

redux [04.07.00]
O'Reilly Network Jon Katz: Book Publishers Still Don't Get It
"I think interactivity involves many, many things. It involves the way the company is structured. It involves whether people are listening to their customers or paying attention or interacting with them. Publishing is one of those institutions that's almost medieval. You have a handful of people cloistered in New York, and nobody knows how they make decisions. The process is completely closed to the public.

And the reason that they dislike it [interactivity] so much is that if you're a newspaper editor or publisher or book publisher, you have to give up some power. You have to be less powerful. You have to listen more. You have to share a bit. You're still more powerful than your customers, but you're not as powerful as you used to be. And what we see about -- you know, corporations dread this because they're afraid it's going to cost money, they're going to lose control. I think the structure of the modern corporation is not inherently creative. These companies basically were designed for selling cereal, not for creating books.

You really need to let the public in. Let people into the process. Open it up. That's what interactivity is, and this thing with Stephen King is a classic stunt. It reminds me so much of newspapers saying, "Okay, we're going to join the 21st century. Let's throw up a Web site." Now they're giving away their products free, and they're saying to people in the bargain, "You don't even need to subscribe to us anymore." And then they wonder why this isn't good business."

redux [03.09.00]
Alertbox Electronic Books - A Bad Idea
"Even when electronic books gain the same reading speed as print, they will still be a bad idea. Electronic text should not mimic the old medium and its linear ways. Page turning remains a bad interface, even when it can be done more conveniently than by clicking the mouse on a "next page" button. It is an insufficient goal to make computerized text as fast as print: we need to improve on the past, not simply match it.

The basic problem is that the book is too strong a metaphor: it tends to lead designers and writers astray. Electronic text should be based on interaction, hypertext linking, navigation, search, and connections to online services and continuous updates. These new-media capabilities allow for much more powerful user experiences than a linear flow of text. Linear text may have ruled the world since the Egyptians learned to produce arbitrarily long scrolls of papyrus, but it's time to end this tradition. Nobody has time to read long reports any more: information must be dynamic and under direct control of the reader, not the author."

Xerox Research and Technology A Comparison of Reading Paper and On-Line Documents
"We report on a laboratory study that compares reading from paper to reading on-line. Critical differences have to do with the major advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout. These, in turn, allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing. We discuss the design implications of these findings for the development of better reading technologies."

The Standard When Data Checks In
"When it opened in 1928, the former R.R. Donnelley & Sons' Lakeside Press plant on the near South Side of Chicago embodied the splendor and sweat of the old economy."

"Now, the building is on the verge of becoming a bellwether for the new economy."

"Across the country, real estate investors are turning obsolete manufacturing plants and warehouses – as well as derelict office buildings and failed retail centers – into so-called telecom or carrier hotels. Instead of packing the buildings with crates, lathes or die casters, companies this time around jam them with racks of switches, routers and generators. Once brick-and-mortar icons of heavy industry, the structures are being rehabbed to house the backbone of the Internet Economy."

"These structures were built to house heavy machinery, so they usually feature floors that can support more than 125 pounds per square foot; high ceilings that provide clearance and ventilation for telecom-equipment racks; and space for generators to take over in case of power outages. The Lakeside Technology Center, for instance, has more than 80 generators and stores 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel to run them."

"Generally, upgrades require bringing in huge power supplies – the Lakeside Center could use up to 96 million megawatts – as well as state-of-the-art heating and air conditioning systems."

redux [07.05.00]
The New York Times Digital Economy's Demand for Steady Power Strains Utilities
[requires 'free' registration]
"Read-Rite's milling machine is indicative of a long-running, but accelerating problem: the nation's electrical power supply system is not up to the task of meeting the digital economy's needs. While the utility industry has historically prided itself on delivering fairly stable power 99.9 percent of the time, today's computerized economy is demanding even fewer interruptions and a much steadier current.

That is because electricity is more than just energy for computers -- it is the medium they use to do their job. Rapid, minute changes in voltage represent the ones and zeros that make up digital information.

Those patterns are ultimately translated into a human voice during a phone call, a calculation during a banking transaction, a dose of radiation during cancer therapy or a photo of a new baby e-mailed to scattered relatives. Any disruption in the power supply that compromises the processor's ability to manage those voltages can lead to lost data or system crashes."

USA Today Internet saps California's power grid
"As California's tech-savvy businesses and households plug into an increasingly wired economy, the state's power system is sputtering like a frayed electrical cord."

"Computers consume about 13% of the nation's power, according to EPRI Corp., a Palo Alto research and development group that studies the utility industry.

The Internet's borderless community also is taxing U.S. power suppliers because about 80% of online traffic comes through this country.

To handle all the Internet action, businesses are turning entire offices into warehouses for the powerful computer servers and peripheral equipment needed to navigate networks. These so-called ''server farms'' consume 10 to 12 times more power than the traditional office building filled with human workers. "

SiliconValley.Com Rich nations tap 'Dot Force' to tackle IT divide
"Leaders of the Group of Eight nations decided on Saturday to establish a task force, dubbed "Dot Force,'' to search for ways to fuse the gaping information technology (IT) split between industrial and developing countries.

The G8 gave the aptly named group the task of supporting the development of communications infrastructure in poor countries and drawing them into the Internet-led economic revolution."

""Because Napster users are music enthusiasts, it's logical to believe that they are more likely to purchase now and increase their music spending in the future," Jupiter analyst Aram Sinnreich said in a statement."

""`Everyone, everywhere, should be enabled to participate in and no one should be excluded from the benefits of the global information society,'' the G8 said in an IT charter."

redux [04.23.00]
The New York Times When Villages Go Global: How a Byte of Knowledge Can Be Dangerous, Too
[requires 'free' registration]
"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.

Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites. "

"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.

"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."

redux [07.09.00]
Washinton Post Poor in Latin America Embrace Net's Promise
"Until a brilliantly sunny day when the Internet reached this Ashaninka Indian village in central Peru, tribal leader Oswaldo Rosas could think of few benefits modern life had brought his people.

Poverty and disease had debased and decimated them since British missionaries brought the first link to the outside world 81 years ago. As recently as the early 1990s, communist guerrillas had forced some Ashaninka into slavery. Even after the Peruvian army defeated the insurgents, life in this thatched hut settlement with no electricity or running water remained a grueling struggle.

It still is, but as the incongruent buzz of a computer fired up in Rosas's hut--now doubling as a tribal cybercafe--the somber 30-year-old leader could not repress a smile. "This," he said, pointing to the machine, "is the first real chance they have ever given my people.""

""Calep, 15, who hovered by the humming unit covered with a brightly hued Indian blanket here in Marankiari Bajo, would agree. His village computer, he said, has brought "the hope that I won't be poor for the rest of my life."

Calep wants to be a computer programmer. He is not naive enough to think one computer will be his ticket out of poverty. But he is not cynical enough to rule it out.

"I've never gone very far from my village, but I've [chatted] with kids [on the Internet] in places like Canada," he said. "Now I think anything is possible.""

redux [05.14.00]
Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

The Freedom Forum Katz: geek and proud
""It's appealing to me," Katz added, "that people who have always been perceived as outcasts, marginalized, different, have all of a sudden become the only people who understand how the world works. And you can see it's freaking out the rest of the world."

"These kids have done something unprecedented in the world, which is they have created this rich, diverse and critically important universe almost by themselves — without help or support from any of these other institutions. What they've done is now becoming one of the most significant social institutions in the world, and everyone else is trying to figure out what's happened."

"This is the first time I can think of that a culture of kids understands so much more than any adults about something so important. Sometimes I think if you're not 15 or 16, you're already beginning to fall behind in this culture.""

News.Com Study: Napster users buy more music
"People who use Napster and other file-swapping networks to trade MP3 files are more likely to boost their music spending than those who don't use such services, according to a new study from Internet research firm Jupiter Communications.

The study is the latest attempt to gauge the economic impact of file-swapping services such as Napster and Scour.net, both of which stand accused of encouraging brazen Internet piracy and untold damages in lost CD and video sales."

""Because Napster users are music enthusiasts, it's logical to believe that they are more likely to purchase now and increase their music spending in the future," Jupiter analyst Aram Sinnreich said in a statement."

Dan Gillmor Napster and the Internet Fringe
"...Napster, the idea, is unstoppable. And if the company goes away, the problem for the industry will not have changed, and in fact will only get worse (from the industry's perspective).

No one should have been surprised that Napster moved so quickly from the fringe to the middle, not in retrospect. Yet most of us didn't see it coming until it was already over, at least those of us over 25."

NME Napster users exceed the 20 million mark
"The ongoing problems experienced by MP3 file-swapping application NAPSTER seem to have done little to dent the Internet company's popularity. It was announced on Wednesday (July 19) that users of the application now exceed 20 million - and that figure alone is double what it was only three months ago."

redux [05.02.00]
Infoworld Napster sends a message to music industry: 'Your customers aren't happy'
"The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway. There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers. And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt."

MSNBC Hackers stumble toward legitimacy
"IT IS EVERY social activist’s fantasy and every CEO’s nightmare: a powerful, motivated grassroots movement gains legs, legitimacy and sympathetic media attention. Access to the national stage follows thanks to an articulate mouthpiece for the message. And for corporate America what used to be merely a nagging irritation—a kind of free market jock itch—now becomes a cause celeb, with teeth.

And that’s what one sensed happening at H2K."

The New York Times Magazine The Smart Set
[requires 'free' registration]
"A generation ago the kind of students who entered science fairs were considered nerds -- preternaturally bright kids whose ardent intellects, moire-patterned wardrobes and clueless social instincts put them outside the adolescent mainstream. Geeks still roam the halls of American high schools -- and of Midwood, for that matter -- but many of Midwood's Intel kids move comfortably in the newly respectable mainstream, where being scientifically astute has a certain cachet. They inhabit an area of cultural endeavor that -- coming a quarter-century after the birth of biotechnology and personal computers and, yes, the rise of Nasdaq -- is now seen not only as intellectually precocious but also, suddenly, improbably, as positioned in a fast lane pointed toward wealth, creature comforts and the freedom to choose what to make of one's life. "

redux [05.14.00]
Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

The Freedom Forum Katz: geek and proud
""It's appealing to me," Katz added, "that people who have always been perceived as outcasts, marginalized, different, have all of a sudden become the only people who understand how the world works. And you can see it's freaking out the rest of the world."

"These kids have done something unprecedented in the world, which is they have created this rich, diverse and critically important universe almost by themselves — without help or support from any of these other institutions. What they've done is now becoming one of the most significant social institutions in the world, and everyone else is trying to figure out what's happened."

"This is the first time I can think of that a culture of kids understands so much more than any adults about something so important. Sometimes I think if you're not 15 or 16, you're already beginning to fall behind in this culture.""

Salon Learning to Love Your Geek
"The key to interacting with your geek is to learn to speak his or her language, she explains -- defining personal improvements as "upgrades" and bad habits as "nonproductive feedback loops." It's simply a matter of using the right encouragement. Don't tell him he needs to get some exercise and lose some weight; tell him that he will be better prepared for all-night Doom marathons if he is in better physical shape. It's all about becoming more "efficient.""

The New York Times British Authorities May Get Wide Power to Decode E-Mail
[requires 'free' registration]
"As the Clinton administration formally enters the debate about law enforcement surveillance in cyberspace, the British government is about to enact a law that would give the authorities here broad powers to intercept and decode e-mail messages and other communications between companies, organizations and individuals.

The measure, which goes further than the American plan unveiled on Monday in Washington, would make Britain the only Western democracy where the government could require anyone using the Internet to turn over the keys to decoding e-mails messages and other data."

redux [07.11.00]
MSNBC FBI’s system to covertly search e-mail raises privacy, legal issues
"The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is using a superfast system called Carnivore to covertly search e-mails for messages from criminal suspects."

"Word of the Carnivore system has disturbed many in the Internet industry because, when deployed, it must be hooked directly into Internet service providers’ computer networks. That would give the government, at leasttheoretically, the ability to eavesdrop on all customers’ digital communications, from e-mail to online banking and Web surfing.

The system also troubles some Internet service providers, who are loath to see outside software plugged into their systems. In many cases, the FBI keeps the secret Carnivore computer system in a locked cage on theprovider’s premises, with agents making daily visits to retrieve the data captured from the provider’s network. But legal challenges to the use of Carnivore are few, and judges’ rulings remain sealed because of the secretive nature of the investigations."

Dan Gillmor Draconian cyber-surveillance near in Britain
"BRITAIN'S Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has been talking up the Internet and technology, vowing to bring the United Kingdom firmly into the emerging digital economy and culture. Yet despite real progress toward this worthy goal, Blair's Labor government is undermining its promise with proposals for pervasive, intrusive cyber-surveillance -- quite possibly the most Draconian in the Western world.

The legislation is called the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill, or RIP, and its passage in Parliament may be imminent. Growing recognition of the bill's potentially disastrous impact has triggered some second thoughts. But the government is pressing ahead, and foes of the legislation say their chances of heading it off remain, at best, 50-50."

"Internet service providers don't like the bill. Some, but not all, would be required to install equipment allowing the government to tap communications in something close to real time. The government hasn't explained very well why a criminal with even half a brain would use such an ISP instead of a provider that wasn't part of the surveillance network.

One ISP told the Independent newspaper that it was exploring a move offshore if the bill passes. Its clients include unions and activist non-governmental organizations that have a rational concern of unbridled government power."

Salon Can a labeling system protect your privacy?
"P3P, the new Internet privacy protocol unveiled last month by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has been both lauded as the answer to everyone's privacy worries and castigated as a Trojan horse that will divert public attention from real problems. The truth is, it's neither. It's merely a potentially nifty tool that might help ensure privacy in cyberspace -- if the government gets its act together.

"But P3P isn't technology, it's politics. The Clinton administration and companies such as Microsoft are all set to use P3P as the latest excuse to promote their campaign of "industry self-regulation" and delay meaningful legislation on Internet privacy."

"Ultimately, though, Americans shouldn't be put in the position of having to decide whether or not they want to give up their privacy in order to partake in the pleasure of viewing pages on the Internet: We should have base-level privacy protections in law. We do this in other areas, such as food, drugs and the environment. Likewise, there should be certain privacy guarantees that are fundamental to our society; privacy guarantees such as the right to see information that a company has collected on you and the right to have erroneous information expunged.

P3P can't create these rights and it can't enforce them. But P3P will make it easier to cut through the legalese and tell the difference between Web sites that are truly committed to protecting privacy and those that are information sharks -- provided, of course, that both kinds of Web sites post P3P policies that are comprehensive and accurate. And, of course, there's a fat chance of that happening without meaningful legislation."

GoodExperience Surviving the Bit Infinity
"Though Microsoft is not the first to do so, Microsoft is absolutely right in identifying the new problem of technology. The age of the bit infinity is now beginning, in which users will increasingly demand some way to help sift through the bits that deluge them. E-mails, voice mails, IMs, and other bitstreams are just the beginning. Bits are virtually free and almost infinitely replicable, and their sheer number will continually lower the quality of any bitstream.

As bits increase in users' lives, users need to take more personal responsibility for their bits -- using good software, yes, but not by ceding responsibility to the software. The awareness of and responsibility for one's own bits is what I call "bit literacy." This process of bit literacy can make users effective, despite the increase in bits."

"Microsoft's solution to the increase in bits, however, is at best risky and at worst misguided -- and it's definitely not bit literate. Instead of showing users a path to regain control of their tools and their lives, Microsoft has done the opposite: its solution is to let the software decide for the user what bits to engage at all."

The New York Times Microsoft Sees Software 'Agent' as Way to Avoid Distractions
[requires 'free' registration]
"Attention, please.

Hoping to shed its longstanding industry reputation as a mere imitator, not an innovator, Microsoft is spending heavily on research in a wide range of software technologies that include hand-held computing and voice recognition. But the most intriguing project may be taking place in the cramped office of Eric Horvitz, a devotee of an obscure, 17-century statistical technique that plays a key role in his current work."

"In essence, Horvitz and his team of researchers are trying to make it possible, in the age of information overload, to reclaim the right to pay attention."

"In the view of many computer-design experts, restricting electronic interruptions to only the most urgent ones has become a pressing necessity in the Internet Age.

"Most Internet entrepreneurs treat the users' attention as a Third World country to be strip-mined," said Jakob Nielsen, a Silicon Valley expert on software usability."

redux [06.29.00]
First Monday The Work of Information Mediators: A Comparison of Librarians and Intelligent Software Agents
"Intelligent software agents promise to traverse and organize information spaces for us, alert us, remind us, call for a refrigerator repair-person, communicate with each other ... to fundamentally alter how we accomplish many of our daily tasks. These red-hot and revolutionary software critters have a lot to learn from their closest human peers: librarians. As I read and think about how intelligent systems reason, search, classify, and filter information, I'm struck repeatedly with how librarians do exactly these same tasks. Both act as information mediators for the end user: both negotiate information spaces and retrieve information relevant to a particular user or goal. Librarians have been efficiently accomplishing many of the tasks at which the artificial intelligence community is now working to make software agents competent. Therefore, the development of software agents can be informed by a look at how human information agents do their work.

This paper will examine the characteristics of agency, the work of librarians as information mediators, the differences between human and software agents, the possible tasks for software agents in libraries, and speculate on the future of human and software agency."

redux [04.25.00]
Doors of Perception The design challenge of pervasive computing
"What happens to society when there are hundreds of microchips for every man, woman and child on the planet? What cultural consequences follow when every object around us is 'smart', and connected? And what happens psychologically when you step into the garden to look at the flowers - and the flowers look at you?"

"The signs of such a change are there for all to see. Enlightened managers and entrepreneurs understand, nowadays, that the best way to navigate a complex world is through a focus on core values, not on chasing the latest killer app. (This picture illustrates the core values of the French train company, SNCF). Business magazines are full of talk about a transition from transactions, to to a focus on relationship. We are moving from business strategies based on the domination of markets, to the cultivation of communities. The best companies are focussing more on the innovation of new services, and new business models, than on new technology per se. They are striving to change relationships, to anticpate limts, to accelerate trends." [via idvilla]

NPR : All Things Considered Failure
"A new magazine arrives on-line today, after a few false starts. Failure magazine is, as its title implies, about failure: battles lost, sports blunders, products that didn't catch on. The fact that someone would even come up with an idea for such a magazine suggests that, in an age when dot-coms come and go like buses, the very notion of failure may not have the stigma it once did when Willie Loman first walked the boards."

redux [06.03.00]
The New York Times Magazine I'm a Loser
[requires 'free' registration]
"If you go back to the early 1800's, to be a failure meant basically one thing: to go bankrupt in business. Today if we say I feel like such a failure, we think generally of someone who's a loser, somebody who has so me defect in his personality. The meaning of failure has fundamentally changed from being a crisis you pass through to being more of an identity. My understanding of the failure ethic in Silicon Valley is that the profits of success are so enormous that the risk of failing is worth it."

Wired Signing Up to Be Surveilled
Forget the pager number and don't bother calling.

One company is making it easier for folks to "track" anyone, by allowing them to pull up a map of the person's location on a personal digital assistant (PDA) or computer.

"Cell-Loc isn't the only company to come out with location-sensitive devices. After all, the industry is expected to bring in a whopping $3.9 billion by 2004, according to the Strategis Group.

The same Strategis study showed that people didn't mind being tracked down for emergency situations like roadside assistance."

redux [05.25.00]
USA Today Denver may track workers by satellite
"It could be getting harder to hide from the boss.

After allegations that some city employees are loafing on the job, Denver officials said Monday they want to spend $1.5 million to track city vehicles with the military's Global Positioning System satellites."

"One labor expert said it might be counterproductive for an employer to try to scrutinize its workers so closely."

redux [04.11.00]
Salon Japanese firm developing tool to track stray grannies
"Johnny: "Mom! Grandma's missing again!"

Mom: "Don't worry, dear, the satellite will find her.""

"According to Reuters, a Japanese company has come up with a new way to track down grandmas, grandpas and anyone else who forgets where he or she is supposed to be, by using a satellite-based global positioning system and cellular technology."

Applied Digital Solutions What is Digital Angel?
"The Digital Angel™ transceiver can be implanted just under the skin or hidden inconspicuously on or within valuable personal belongings and priceless works of art. When implanted within the human body, the transceiver is powered electromechanically through the movement of muscles. It can be activated either by the "wearer" or by a remote monitoring facility."

Business 2.0 Semantics of the New Economy
"The struggle over monetizing the digital economy is now a war, if we follow the rhetoric of its leaders. The battle over music and movies is inspiring Charlton Heston-like images, most recently from Edgar Bronfman, head of Universal Studios (whose last widely distributed quote came years ago when he declared the Internet the "CB radio of the ’90s"), in a speech at Real Conference 2000 in May. "

""I am warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose," Bronfman said. "I have moved these lawyers…not to attack the Internet and its culture, but for its benefit and to protect it."

Bronfman justified his fight as defense of his "intellectual property rights," and those of creators everywhere. "You own a home. You own a car. They’re yours–they belong to you. Well, your ideas belong to you, too. And ‘intellectual property’ is property, period." In pursuit of pirates, he said, "we must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide."

"The semantics of the issues intrigue me, and came to my attention through Richard Stallman, who suggests that terminology is a foundation for our ideas, and that words such as consumer, protection, piracy, and intellectual property reinforce faulty premises."

redux [04.15.00]
MIT Technology Review Freedom—Or Copyright?
"Once upon a time, in the age of the printing press, an industrial regulation was established for the business of writing and publishing. It was called copyright. Copyright’s purpose was to encourage the publication of a diversity of written works. Copyright’s method was to make publishers get permission from authors to reprint recent writings.

Ordinary readers had little reason to disapprove, since copyright restricted only publication, not the things a reader could do. If it raised the price of a book a small amount, that was only money. Copyright provided a public benefit, as intended, with little burden on the public. It did its job well—back then.

Then a new way of distributing information came about: computers and networks. The advantage of digital information technology is that it facilitates copying and manipulating information, including software, musical recordings and books. Networks offered the possibility of unlimited access to all sorts of data—an information utopia.

But one obstacle stood in the way: copyright. Readers who made use of their computers to share copyright infringers. The world had changed, and what was once an industrial regulation on publishers had become a restriction on the public it was meant to serve."

redux [02.05.00]
Reason Magazine Copy Catfight
"There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you've written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision... On one hand, as information has grown more valuable, copyright and trademark law has become increasingly restrictive. At the same time, there has been, in the words of MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, an "explosion of grassroots, participatory culture," a new high-tech folkway that not only draws on pop culture but appropriates from it more easily than ever before, and disseminates itself on a wider scale."

redux [05.16.00]
Suck Pirate Flags
"Intellectual property rights seem a quaint notion these days — the antiquated, Elizabethan remains of the Old Economy with all the here-and-now applicability of lace collars. Intellectual property is a fairy tale, told by dot-commers to make their interns laugh, like stories of stockholders who expect a profit and journalists who check their sources. The idea of owning what you create has become a sad little joke."

"The near-universal disregard with which intellectual property is treated leaves anyone with even the slightest interest in their own rights thinking that the population of the Internet consists almost entirely of beady-eyed, slack-jawed warezd00dz. But moralizing never got anybody anywhere, save nailed to a tree. And since piracy is going to continue no matter what the courts or copyright-holders do, Metallica and the AP and anybody else with complaints about the state of intellectual property rights on the Web is going to have to do some hard thinking fast.

"First one with a business plan wins."

Yahoo! News Online Music Fight Comes to Capitol Hill
"Grunge music blared, computer monitors glowed, and rock stars got out of bed before noon as music-industry heavyweights and Internet moguls brought their fight over the future of music distribution to Capitol Hill."

"Sen. Orrin Hatch the Utah Republican who chairs the committee, quizzed witnesses on what they considered to be reasonable music duplication. Hatch, who recently released his own CD of Christian pop music, asked whether making cassette copies of CDs to play in the car or swapping digital files on the Internet was acceptable."

Inside Music Hatch Warns Labels, Don't Make Me Come Over There and Spank You
"Facing a veritable who's who of the music-copyright wars, Chairman Hatch threatened -- in surprisingly direct terms -- to force the music labels and publishers, by legislation, to make their content digitally available for a standard fee if the record business continu