Guardian Unlimited Observer Modern boys and mobile girls
"The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku -hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not."

The New York Times Movie Industry Frowns on Professor's Software Gallery
[requires 'free' registration]
"Prof. David S. Touretzky, a computer scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University, says he has never watched a movie on DVD, much less copied one illegally. So why is the movie industry calling him a pirate?

The answer can be found on a university site which houses an unusual Web project launched by Professor Touretzky - a project which has turned him into something of a celebrity in Internet legal circles. His site is a gallery devoted to representations of a piece of software that has been deemed illegal because it can be used to break through the copy-protection system on DVD movies."

SecurityFocus Stanford law dean to argue DeCSS case
"Kathleen Sullivan, dean of prestigious Stanford Law School, will represent Eric Corley before an appeals court in the ongoing legal battle over publication of a DVD descrambling computer program, adding more legal heft to a case that many observers believe is destined for the Supreme Court.

Corley, publisher of 2600, The Hackers Quarterly, was the target of a motion picture industry lawsuit filed in New York last year after he put a copy of DeCSS on his publication's web site."

The Register DeCSS makes the funny pages
"The world's most illegal computer program made an appearance on the comics page this week, and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) isn't laughing.

Two consecutive installments of the popular syndicated comic strip "The Boondocks" slammed opponents of DeCSS, an open source program that allows users to bypass the scrambling system used to protect DVDs. The strip appears in 250 daily and Sunday papers in the US, according to distributor Universal Press Syndicate."

Business 2.0 Paradise Lost?
"Transmitting a pulse of light faster than the speed of light is the kind of mind-bending, prestige-building discovery that the NEC Research Institute (NECI) was built to produce. So when Lijun Wang actually performed that astonishing feat last year, no one seemed to care that commercial application of his research is probably many years in the future. The kudos from the scientific community and terrific publicity were justification enough. But with parent company NEC struggling to boost profits, that kind of payoff may no longer be sufficient."

redux [03.21.00]
The Standard Blinded With Science
"Bell Labs is the last vestige of AT&T's bygone phone monopoly. In the serene, uncompetitive days before its 1984 breakup, there was plenty of room for the company to engage in endless research, file countless patents and create enough technology to overwhelm any adversaries. It hired the best scientists and engineers, and let them loose to pursue their dreams. The results included many of the seminal advances in contemporary technology, from the computer chip to the communications satellite.

But that approach was already looking like a luxury a decade ago, and over the past few years rivals that leave the science to others have managed to outmaneuver Bell Labs. "Traditional research has its place, but it's much smaller now," says Marek Wernik, director of disruptive market and business solutions at Nortel."

BusinessWeek Research Labs Get Real. It's About Time
"Xerox' woes might seem to provide evidence that there's something wrong with the U.S. system of corporate R&D. That's not the case. Innovation is rife in the U.S., from industrial labs to contract research outfits and Silicon Valley startups. Says Martin N. Baily, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers: ''We've been able to generate a fertile breeding ground because we have a range of funding mechanisms.''

Start with the corporate labs, which once resembled ivory towers. Today, their PhDs are getting their hands dirty on real-world customer problems. But ''Xerox has been relatively slow'' to latch on to that trend, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Rebecca M. Henderson, an expert on corporate R&D.

Companies that get more pragmatic about research aren't dropping the ''R'' to do more ''D.''"

CompuKiss Engines of Tomorrow
"Change is inevitable, especially in the corporate world. Robert Buderi believes the important factor is how a company initiates and handles that change. His book, Engines of Tomorrow, focuses on the research division of corporations and claims that a company's central research operation is the bedrock of corporate change. Buderi strongly believes that the research process provides the technologies that spur growth.

If you are interested in the history of corporate research as well as corporate development, you will find this book fascinating."

MSNBC Open-source hardware
"A cadre of hardware developers is trying to bring concepts from the open-source software world to the hardware business. Engineers around the world, connected via the Internet, are seeking to develop a vast library of freely available hardware designs, similar to how Linux developers and other open-source programmers share intellectual property."

"“We can combine the know-how from all over the world and build and improve on technologies and products,” Usselmann said. “I’m certain that it will become a big success. As we develop more and more cores and address different areas of applications, people are starting to pay more attention to us and what we are doing.”

redux [03.04.00]
The Washington Monthly Reboot! How Linux and open-source development could change the way we get things done
"Imagine a scale with all the advantages of a proprietary model on the left and all the advantages of an open-source model on the right. Pretend everybody who wants to solve a problem or build a project has a scale like this. If it tips to the left, the proprietary model is chosen; if it tips to the right, the open model is chosen. Now, as connectivity increases with the Internet, and computer power increases exponentially, more and more weight accumulates on the right. Every time computer power increases, another household gets wired, or a new simulator is built online, a little more weight is added to the right. Having the example of Linux to learn from adds some more weight to the right; the next successful open-source project will add even more.

"Perhaps the next boom in open source will come from the law; perhaps from drug X; perhaps it will be something entirely different. Although it's difficult to tell, it is quite likely that the scale is going to tip for some projects and that there will be serious efforts at open-source development in the next decade. Moreover, it's quite likely some of these projects will work."

EE Times Free 32-bit processor core hits the Net
"A loose-knit organization called OpenCores is offering a free 32-bit processor intellectual-property (IP) core in a move that could undermine such commercial IP licensors as ARM and MIPS."

"...analysts say the offering, and others like it, may eventually alter the semiconductor IP landscape as radically as Linux"

Jim Tully, EDA analyst with Gartner Group's Dataquest subsidiary in Egham, England, said, "Who's to say that this couldn't evolve into something the industry could use? Before Linux came along, who would have said that [the Linux phenomenon] could happen?" Tully said, "People will be paranoid about [OpenRISC's] background, its provenance, its quality. On the face of it no one would want to look at it, but no doubt people will download free cores and try them out in low-risk situations. If OpenRISC works, it could migrate up."

redux [01.08.01]
strategy+business Open for Business
"A marketplace of ideas is not inherently in conflict with a community of ideas. Then again, those tensions and conflicts that do exist can and will lead to further innovations.

What all of these books do well is capture the grand themes and the subtle nuances that explain why it makes more sense to have an untraditional community drive innovation than to have a traditional marketplace do so. The point of these books is that communities of people can come up with codes of conduct — rules of engagement — about how ideas can and should be shared.

The software that really matters is not what is programmed in computer code but rather the shared assumptions and ideals that let people exchange ideas. That ultimately is what will shape the global ecology of innovation."

redux [04.20.00]
The New York Times Open-Source Software Arouses Researchers' Curiosity
[requires 'free' registration]
"WHEN technology stocks took their sharp tumble last week, many companies appeared to lose one of their most important assets -- the ability to lure talented employees with options. To attract and hold the best, you have to offer the chance to strike it rich.

Or do you? What are we to think when the best of the best -- the elite programmers that industry wisdom deems 100 times more productive than the typical competent coder -- donate their precious time to develop software anyone can use without charge? That is the puzzle the open-source movement, most famous for the Linux operating system, presents to economists."

"While its development looks like a marketplace, open-source software itself is a classic public good. You can use it without contributing to its maintenance and without paying a cent to all those programmers who created and improved it.

Hence the economic puzzle. As Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School and Jean Tirole of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ask in a recent paper: "Why should thousands of top-notch programmers contribute freely to the provision of a public good?"

Salon Finland -- The Open Source Society
"Why Finland? In the 21st century, there's hardly a nation in the world that doesn't want to be a role model for the information society. What made Finland so special? Was it an accident of history, the luck of the draw, or some more complex intersection of cultural evolution and the activist will of an entire people? More to the point, was it possible that the deep structure of Finnish civilization encourages an open-source way of life?"

eCompany Would You Buy a Patent License From This Man?
"In all likelihood, you have never heard of U.S. Patent 5,253,341. But if you have a website, you may be in violation of it. And someday soon, a man named Tony Brown might ask you to pay for this transgression."

"Patent 5,253,341 was granted in 1993 to two inventors, Anthony Rozmanith and Neil Berinson, and it covers a process whereby a computer user at a terminal asks a remote server for information, receives it, and then decompresses it on his computer. This, as it happens, describes what takes place pretty much anytime someone looks at a picture or listens to an audio file on the Internet. When they submitted the patent application in 1991, Rozmanith and Berinson couldn't have known how common this would become, but they happened to secure the license on something that happens millions of times each day."

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."

redux [03.04.00]
Salon Patently Absurd
"Contrary to popular belief, business-method patents have flowed from the Patent and Trademark Office for over 100 years. Many appear at least as obvious as Amazon's. For example, patent 44,778, awarded to Isaac Bates on October 25, 1864, covers a "method for teaching penmanship," specifically an innovative position of arm, pen and hand. Meanwhile, patent 660,255 protects a method for teaching speaking and reading to the deaf. It was issued in 1900."

The New York Times When Linking Isn't Better Business
[requires 'free' registration]
"Links, it can be argued, are the fundamental innovation of the World Wide Web. The ability to click on a word or phrase and be transported to another page on a distant Web site is the catalyst for the Internet's unprecedented growth.

But not everyone loves hypertext links. Take the Better Business Bureau, for example."

redux [06.16.00]
The New York Times Is Linking Illegal?
[requires 'free' registration]
"A crucial aspect of online journalism is the ability to garnish articles with hyperlinks that instantly refer readers to Web sites related to newsworthy issues.

But suppose one of those sites contains material alleged to be illegal--a pirated copy of an author’s book, perhaps, or an unlawful software program. Is the publisher who did the linking in hot water?

The answer, according to legal papers recently filed by eight motion picture studios in a closely-watched federal case in Manhattan, is sometimes yes and sometimes no."

redux [05.30.00]
Release 1.0 The Web Goes Into Syndication
"The shape of content and business relationships on the Web is tied to an old concept. Syndication, drawn from the closed world of traditional media, may be the model that allows the Web to remain open as it grows.

As with any new medium, the Net incorporates elements of media that came before. From Oprah to Dilbert, syndication deals are the lifeblood of today's broadcasting, cable and newspaper industries. In such arrangements, entities that create content license it out to distributors who integrate it with their own and other offerings. Several major Web-based companies adopted the syndication approach early on, though the market has remained fairly limited.

Online syndication is now poised to explode. But even as it changes the Net, the Net will change syndication. On the Web, the concept applies to commerce as well as content, and soon it will extend to dynamic applications. Syndication will evolve into the core model for the Internet economy, allowing businesses and individuals to retain control over their online personae while enjoying the benefits of massive scale and scope."

DaveNet A Bright Future for Syndication
"In our system, each story has a *single* location, the site where it originated. We think this is the way new information is obtained. Comments from readers can add new facts and ideas and link to other related stories. And the portal sites, the ones with the huge flow, can play a big role, because in this model, they get paid for many (but not all) of the hits they deliver. It's a micro-payment form of what they already do so well on a much larger scale."

The New York Times Legality of 'Deep Linking' Remains Deeply Complicated
[requires 'free' registration]
"When a federal judge issued a decision last week in a case involving "deep linking," many reports suggested that the controversial Internet practice was now unambiguously legal. But the story is more complex than that. In fact, deep linking -- the practice of linking to a page deep inside another Web site, bypassing its home page -- still appears to be in legal limbo."

The Christian Science Monitor 'Trust, but encrypt' is new theme for Internet
"It's a yearly gathering of those who don't trust the Internet folks who say "trust me."

The Eleventh Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy was held earlier this month in Cambridge, Mass. Items discussed included Carnivore, the FBI e-mail filtering software that has raised serious questions about the integrity of e-mail examined during FBI searches; UCITA, (the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act), a law proposed for enactment in all 50 states that would standardize the licensing of software and, if its critics are correct, possibly jeopardize consumer rights; and gadgets that "sky" - new consumer devices that phone home automatically, sending information via phone or wireless to the companies that build the devices.

Yet for all the good sessions offered, one of the best was Phil Zimmermann's. In the online privacy community, Mr. Zimmermann is a legitimate hero, an individual who literally took on the US government and some of its most shadowy intelligence operations ... and won."

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy
"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""

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."

Salon Twilight of the crypto-geeks
"Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cultlike following among the technologically minded and author of the classic "Snowcrash," has given an over-long, hugely digressive -- and brilliant -- speech. After many, many turns and a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets around to saying that the best defense for one's privacy and personal integrity turns out to be not cryptography but, what do you know, "social structures." He is not explicit about the exact nature of these structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every sort of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties. The slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social trust. The circles widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a trusted space.

Stephenson is making a point about code: Without a sociopolitical context, cryptography is not going to protect you. He singles out PGP for criticism, saying that relying on the encryption scheme is like trying to protect your house with a fence consisting of a single, very tall picket. A slide shows the lone picket rising into the sky, a bird considering it with bulging eyes."

The Standard Blinded With Science
"Bell Labs is the last vestige of AT&T's bygone phone monopoly. In the serene, uncompetitive days before its 1984 breakup, there was plenty of room for the company to engage in endless research, file countless patents and create enough technology to overwhelm any adversaries. It hired the best scientists and engineers, and let them loose to pursue their dreams. The results included many of the seminal advances in contemporary technology, from the computer chip to the communications satellite.

But that approach was already looking like a luxury a decade ago, and over the past few years rivals that leave the science to others have managed to outmaneuver Bell Labs. "Traditional research has its place, but it's much smaller now," says Marek Wernik, director of disruptive market and business solutions at Nortel."

BusinessWeek Research Labs Get Real. It's About Time
"Xerox' woes might seem to provide evidence that there's something wrong with the U.S. system of corporate R&D. That's not the case. Innovation is rife in the U.S., from industrial labs to contract research outfits and Silicon Valley startups. Says Martin N. Baily, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers: ''We've been able to generate a fertile breeding ground because we have a range of funding mechanisms.''

Start with the corporate labs, which once resembled ivory towers. Today, their PhDs are getting their hands dirty on real-world customer problems. But ''Xerox has been relatively slow'' to latch on to that trend, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Rebecca M. Henderson, an expert on corporate R&D.

Companies that get more pragmatic about research aren't dropping the ''R'' to do more ''D.''"

CompuKiss Engines of Tomorrow
"Change is inevitable, especially in the corporate world. Robert Buderi believes the important factor is how a company initiates and handles that change. His book, Engines of Tomorrow, focuses on the research division of corporations and claims that a company's central research operation is the bedrock of corporate change. Buderi strongly believes that the research process provides the technologies that spur growth.

If you are interested in the history of corporate research as well as corporate development, you will find this book fascinating."

SatireWire REVOLUTION FINALLY COMES, BUT TIMING PROVES INCONVENIENT FOR RULING CLASS
"The long-awaited Revolution, when the oppressed and disenfranchised break the chains of economic servitude and social injustice and put the tyrants and plutocrats up against the wall, finally arrived yesterday, but quickly fizzled after the ruling classes said they just didn't have time for it.

"It was 8 o'clock at night, we had guests over, I was introducing a new line of cookware in the morning, and suddenly my employees want to overturn the status quo and establish a classless society?" said Martha Stewart, CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and one of those slated to be "first up against the wall" when the Revolution came. "Of course I said 'No.'""

The Register Email is 'third revolutionary step in human communication'
"Email, or communication using Internet technology, is the third revolutionary step in mankind's ability to communicate, the first two being learning how to speak and how to write, a leading authority in linguistics claims."

"People can take the third paragraph of an email, copy paste and respond to that. They can take the fifth paragraph and do the same. This flexibility (and presumably speed is an essential aspect) has not been possible before, he argues.

In another example, David points out that a chatroom enables 30 or so to communicate at the same time. This would be impossible in any previous form of communication (although people often try it in pubs)."

Slashdot Clay Shirky Explains Internet Evolution
"Email is the gateway drug of the internet, because once email is in place, people begin to expect full interoperability."

"In fact, in a news flash that seems to have caught the entire telecommunications industry by surprise, people who buy mobile phones often like to communicate with one another. Had this not been such an absolutely unpredictable occurrence, maybe somebody at the WAP consortium could have predicted that when you add text to the phone, users might like to communicate with one another via text.

Access to email is the #1 feature customers want in a wireless text device (duh), and all those wireless auctions where the telcos spent 22 gajillion Zlotys to own the customer now look like a giant shell game, because the users don't want to get headline news. They want to talk to one another, and they will switch carriers until they are allowed to. Email is the thin end of the interoperability wedge, and this will be true of interactive TV as well."

redux [02.18.01]
First Monday Content is Not King
"The Internet is widely regarded as primarily a content delivery system. Yet historically, connectivity has mattered much more than content. Even on the Internet, content is not as important as is often claimed, since it is e-mail that is still the true "killer app."

The primacy of connectivity over content explains phenomena that have baffled wireless industry observers, such as the enthusiastic embrace of SMS (Short Message System) and the tepid reception of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Combined with statistics showing low cell phone usage, this also suggests that the 3G systems that are about to be introduced will serve primarily to stimulate more voice usage, not to provide Internet access.

For the wired Internet, the secondary role of content will likely mean that the dangers of balkanization are smaller than is often feared. Further, symmetrical links to the house are likely to be in greater demand than is usually realized. The huge sums being invested by carriers in content are misdirected."

redux [01.15.01]
Nando Times The power of e-mail
"Nicole Thompson's third-graders can tell you all about the penguins and killer whales that populate Antarctica. They know about the months of darkness that grip Iceland each year and the fine tea that grows in Darjeeling, India. The Greenbriar Academy children have learned those facts - and countless more about countries large and small - thanks to a simple e-mail message from Thompson that has raced around the globe and brought more than 20,000 responses in six weeks.

It's crazy, just crazy," Thompson said. "At most, I thought we'd get about 2,000 replies.""

Davenetics Looking Forward to 2001
"Email will become the killerer app. It continued to work when all else failed. Communication - not consumer storefronts - is the core value provided by the net and email is the star. The best things on the net make things easier and faster. Seems simple, but many of the failed business propositions of the past year seemed to go in the opposite direction."

redux [02.04.00]
The Guardian Online Why content isn't king
"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."

"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."

Feed IBM: The Final Solutions Company
"Still, the relatively quiet response is hard to explain. Maybe it's boredom. We have a Holocaust Museum now (that displays a Hollerith machine prominently). Most of the survivors are dead or dying. Multinational corporations have long seemed to exist beyond the law. But we can't assume the moral dilemma is behind us. Imagine if Milosevic's regime were still in power and Serbia were in need of a Web interface for tracking its population. Imagine if some struggling dot.com decided to increase shareholder value by providing just such a system even as thousands of Muslims were killed and displaced. Would our somnolence persist then?"

redux [09.09.00]
Salon Data mining mutilations, beatings, murders
""Technology has leveled the playing field between human rights organizations and intelligence services," says Ball. "Back in the '70s, intelligence services all over the world were getting pretty impressive computer hardware. This gave them the ability to track activities, peaceful civilian activists as well as violent [individuals], in pretty precise ways, to infer patterns and to use the data analysis as the basis for oppression."

Today the same tools can be used to build an irrefutable record that documents a history of oppression.

Ball's work is "incredibly important," says Harvey Weinstein, associate director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley. "Patrick has the capacity with this statistical knowledge to develop hard, incontrovertible statistical data to provide the kind of evidence that people need to get a good sense of the kind of human rights violations that occur in these difficult situations. He is one of the leaders in the field of trying to develop and use statistics to provide substantiation for human rights abuses.""

AAAS Science and Human Rights Program Making the Case: Investigating Large Scale Human Rights Violations Using Information Systems and Data Analysis
"Telling the truth in such a way that it cannot be denied is the first need of a truth commission established in the aftermath of gross human violations. The magnitude of violations is often so great that individual researchers cannot apprehend the complex nature and multiple patterns of such crimes, building an official history from a collective memory is essential to truth telling. This is our concern in these proceedings: building such a collective memory, and the analysis of the past through examination of that memory.

While the primary goal of truth telling is to provide massive and objective support for historical facts and patterns that cannot be denied, it also serves an "internal" role for those who analyze the past to make the official record. Without an accurate and precise collective memory that can be readily accessed, they will not be able to check their assumptions about the process of violations, or provide credible analyses.

The official record is derived from the collective memory, and the collective memory is based on information and data. The systematic arrangement of the information and data is the basis of the information management system.

These proceedings are about all aspects of how to build, manage, and generate analyses from such a system."

Human Rights Complaint Analyzer for the Federation of Bosnia Herzegovina How to build a human rights violation analyzer
"This manual has been written for human rights advocates around the world who use the Internet to spread information about patterns of human rights violations. It is based on the development of one such innovation and experiment, the Human Rights Complaint Analyzer. The Analyzer was developed by the Fund for the City of New York for the Ombudsmen of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with principal funding provided by United States Institute for Peace. It is now located on the Web site of the Chicago-Kent College of Law. "

"The basic project methodology was simple, to compile existing information from the complaint database of the Federation Ombudsmen, purge that information of any data that might put anyone at risk of identification, and transfer the information to the project computer in New York. The purged data was then displayed in an interactive query system."

NPR: All Things Considered Dot-Com Media
"Linda Wertheimer traveled to New York City to look into the viability of Web sites run by three news organizations; ABC News, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. All three sites have not reached profitability but all of them have made a firm commitment to remain online. The Wall Street Journal site is the only one that requires subscribers to pay. Recently, advertising revenue has diminished which is making it even harder for these sites to make a profit. ABC News and the New York Times have recently had significant layoffs in their digital divisions. (12:30)"

redux [01.30.01]
Media Guardian Prophets of doom at online news profits
"Leaning down from the stage, Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation, made it clear that the honeymoon with online news was over. "I just don't see how you can make money out of it."

Since that comment, at an annual meeting last November, many other media bosses have started to wonder whether they will ever make money online. After years of worrying that their business would be eaten up by upstarts staffed by twentysomethings, the new era finds them wondering whether they will ever recoup the millions invested in new staff, new technology and new advertising."

redux [01.22.00]
The New York Times Rethinking Internet News as a Business Proposition
[requires 'free' registration]
"The first era of newspaper experiments on the Internet, fueled in part by the fear that the Web would devour profits, is over. A new era of newspaper experiments on the Internet, fueled in part by the fear that the Web will not generate profits, has begun.

Where will it lead?"

Editor & Publisher Online What's Wrong With Today's News Web Sites
"It's that time of year for me again. As one of the 30 judges of the annual Editor & Publisher EPpy Awards (which honor the best Web sites of the newspaper and news industries), I've spent a lot of time in the last few weeks poring over newspaper sites.

In a nutshell, here's what I've noticed: Over the years that I've been volunteering as an EPpy judge, news sites have grown to be more comprehensive and feature more and better content. But comprehensive, while an admirable trait, is not always enough to get users to make visiting and using a site a habit."

redux [01.26.00]
Online Journalism Review Soul-Searching Time at Online News Units
"As nearly every week brings word of a new round of layoffs and cutbacks in new media, current and former online staffers, executives and industry analysts are surveying the wreckage and wondering whether the reluctant, often testy romance between media companies and the Internet has come to an end. My God, was it all ... just ... a meaningless fling?

The consensus so far? Media companies have begun some serious retrenchment and rolled back a number of initiatives, but they have not yet begun a full-scale retreat from the online medium. While the Holy Grail of online publishing -- a profitable business model -- remains elusive, the quest continues."

Editor & Publisher Online MSNBC.com TO REDUCE SPENDING
"A"We're certainly not reducing our coverage of news," said Nicol, when E&P asked him about the letter. Several hundred employees work for MSNBC.com, which shares bureaus with NBC News to complement newsgathering efforts.

For MSNBC.com, the past year had some months with record profitability, but other months fell short. Although planning is not completed, targeted cuts will be made in travel and entertainment, freelance expenses, and other discretionary spending, Nicol said. Some open positions around the company will be eliminated, but hiring will continue for critical positions."

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 Edge Rebooting Civilization
"Computer scientist and AI researcher Rodney Brooks is puzzled that "we've got all these biological metaphors that we're playing around with — artificial immunology systems, building robots that appear lifelike — but none of them come close to real biological systems in robustness and in performance. They look a little like it, but they're not really like biological systems." Brooks worries that in looking at biological systems we are missing something that is already there — that has always been there. To Brooks, this might be called "the essence of life," but he is talking about a biochemical phenomenon, not a metaphysical one. Brooks is searching for a new conceptual framework that, like computation, does not involve any new physics or chemistry — a framework that gives us a different way of thinking about the stuff that's there. "We see the biological systems, we see how they operate," he says, "but we don't have the right explanatory modes to explain what's going on and therefore we can't reproduce all these sorts of biological processes. That to me right now is the deep question.""

redux [06.05.00]
The New York Review of Books Sign Language
"The idea that reality itself is brought into being by acts of interpretation is clearly wrong, but there is another thesis—often confused with it—which is not similarly absurd, and to which Eco also assents. This is the thesis that all awareness of the world is mediated by interpretation—that there is no such thing as direct, interpretation-free cognition of reality. We impose categories on the world as we interpret the signs all around us; it is not that the world simply reveals its categories to us. We are always taking one thing to be a sign of another, performing an act of symbolic inference, decoding something.

This process is to be clearly distinguished from merely bringing things under some general category, as when you perceive an apple as red or think of an acquaintance as untrustworthy. It is a virtual truism that all mental representation is "aspectual," in the sense that it cannot represent everything about an object but only some aspects of it; but this is quite different from saying that all mental representation involves interpreting one thing as a sign of another."

"Of course, to be aware of signs, as of anything else, involves classifying the sign in some way, perceiving it as having certain properties: for example, one hears the sound of the word "London" as having a certain auditory quality. But it is a mistake to refer to this mental act as interpretation, since interpretation must always involve interpreting one thing as a sign of another, and not merely seeing an object under a certain aspect. Conflating the latter with the former converts a truism into a highly controversial and (as I have argued) self-defeating theory about how cognition of objects is achieved. The culprit in all this is a loose and ambiguous use of the word "interpretation," probably one of the most misused words in the contemporary humanities."

The ThreePenney Review The Social Construction of What?
"For the point is, to see a lamp is itself an act of interpretation, and this is true of all seeing. Seeing is a matter of classification and recognition. What we see is not a colored patch but a lamp or a house or a table. Admittedly, we sometimes say that we cannot make out what something that we are looking at is. (Is it a haystack or a castle? We cannot be sure, because we cannot determine how far away, and therefore how big, it is.) But this merely goes to confirm the crucial point that all seeing is a matter of “seeing as.” Thus Kuhn’s analogy of the Gestalt switch—“the duck-rabbit shows that two men with the same retinal impression can see different things”—is beside the point. Equally he is surely wrong to suggest that, even hypothetically, one might get behind mental “paradigms” to the “raw data” of experience and construct some neutral observation language, “designed to conform to the retinal imprints that mediate what the scientist sees.” Retinal imprints or images cannot come into the matter; they are no doubt the precondition of seeing, but they play no part in the experience of it. It was Kuhn’s triumph to explain how it is that scientists on one side of a revolutionary paradigm shift cannot, and cannot be expected to, communicate fully with those on the other. But in this, the metaphor of seeing is more of a hindrance to him than a help."

Feed Yield. Merge. Exit. Freak Out.
"Even the simplest symbol, the most streamlined dot head, becomes inseparable from a distinct historical moment. The modernist impulse towards universality was always dubious. Visual language is nothing more than the wreckage left when concept and technology collide, and those pedestrian signs are a perfect example. No matter how pure your intentions, the tools used to produce icons end up dating them. Go look at one of those school-crossing signs. See what you see. It probably won't be what you remembered, but it'll look a lot like us."

redux [04.21.00]
George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System
"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."

Feed You Own Your Own Metadata
"A COMPANY THAT CONTINUES to cling to a business model that refuses to offer its customers the data collected on them is vulnerable to the process of disintermediation -- that is, it risks being cut out of part of the direct relationship it currently enjoys with customers. Only it won't just be the hackers who find a work-around to these business models; full-blown companies will spring up to take advantage of the situation (examples could include price-comparison shopping bots like MySimon and DealTime, as well as such "lamprey"-like music taste and preference gleaners as Uplister, Kick and Friskit). While most customers might not be able to make hide nor hair of logfiles and SQL databases, there is, at the very least, a modicum of metadata about their preferences and choices that can and should be shared with them in an encrypted, sync-able, download/uploadable format (á la fusionOne) to do with as they please."

Wired News All That Data, All That Secrecy
"Big Brother may know who you are, but do you know who Big Brother is?

If you showed up at the Federal Trade Commission's workshop on the privacy implications of database marketing Tuesday, the answer is probably still no.

The Commission took a hard look at the likes of Acxiom and Abacus, massive marketing databases that cover the purchasing habits of at least 90 percent of America's 100 million households."

redux [05.01.00]
First Monday The COMsumer Manifesto: Empowering Communities of Consumers through the Internet
"The Internet is changing business models and empowering consumers to create new communities that combine the power to aggregate rich sources of individually personalized data in real-time activities. Large-scale data aggregators are emerging to navigate and mediate info markets. While information records are proliferating, new standards for content capture and management are appearing. Most companies continue to hope they will control their customers' information assets. However, what if this is not true or becomes impossible? What if consumers decide to band together and control their own personal information? Are you ready to freely give your customers their data records? Are you prepared to live up to the COMsumer Manifesto?"

The Washington Post Who Blew the Dot-Com Bubble?
"Henry Blodget, Wall Street's loudest cheerleader for Internet stocks, made it to the front page of the New York Times last week. And thereby hangs a tale about the media and the bubble."

"For it was the mainstream media -- which now take such delight in scolding those involved in the dot-com mania -- that helped push the idea that anyone could get rich by playing the market.

"The media invented Blodget," says Christopher Byron, a columnist for Bloomberg News and MSNBC. "In a bull market everyone loves to cheer, and Henry Blodget was everyone's first phone call. . . . Where were they when companies were trading for 150 times revenues? They were repeating the words of these guys. It's disgusting."

Salon Why I'm still scribbling for a living
"One former editor at the Merc once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at a banquet, but couldn't bring himself to say a word to the billionaire. He told me later he didn't know what to say to Ellison, whom he noted was at the time the wealthiest man in Silicon Valley.

How is it possible for an editor to be so awed by power, money or influence that he could not even shake another man's hand? Such insecurity in the face of the area's increasing wealth and sophistication is a sad commentary on the people who should be telling the valley's stories. While Silicon Valley tries to form itself, the one thing that brings people together is business. For better or worse, right now, money is the bond -- and if they're going to do their job, journalists can't be cowed by fantastic wealth or power."

The Boston Globe Rated X, for Xtra Insight
"The Oracle of Cambridge is up at the whiteboard, drawing a graph with a dry-erase marker.

The Oracle intends the graph to show important technology changes over the last 20 years. On this graph, the adoption of client-server computing in the 1980s and the commercialization of the World Wide Web, in 1994 and 1995, are mere twitches. What really rattles the line up the Richter scale, in 2001, is something the Oracle, better known as George Colony, founder of Forrester Research, has dubbed X Internet."

Salon Do you kick Yahoo?
"Remember, Yahoo still expects revenues of $800 million this year, and has been consistently profitable while other dot-com flashes-in-the-pan burned through their venture capital with nothing to show for it but some outré TV commercials. Yahoo isn't perfect, but it has maintained its lead as the top Web portal by consistently putting its users first, and its sites remain models of simplicity and service.

All of which raises the obvious question: Plainly, the market's pundits were way off a year ago, at the pinnacle of Net stock mania; so why should we put any more stock in them now? Their downside is looking just as insane as their upside."

The New York Times AIDS Drugs in Africa: If Cedes to When
[requires 'free' registration]
"This week, the unthinkable happened in Africa: the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies were forced into a painful negotiation over patent rights and the price of AIDS medicines. Suddenly, the question is no longer whether Africans will get life-saving drug cocktails, but how."

""The global society needs to be serious about the problem," said Per Wold-Olsen, Merck's president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. "What the governments of the rest of the world need to do, together with the World Health Organization, is to start a process of building the health care infrastructure, distribution systems and the enormously important process of education.""

redux [02.07.01]
The New York Times Indian Company Offers to Supply AIDS Drugs at Low Cost in Africa
[requires 'free' registration]
"In a move that could force big drug multinationals to cut the prices of their AIDS drugs in poor countries, an Indian company offered today to supply triple-therapy drug "cocktails" for $350 a year per patient to a doctors' group working in Africa."

"Cipla is offering to sell the agency as many doses as it is wants at $350 a year. Dr. Hamied said that his company would lose money at that price, but that he would supply "10,000 doses or 20,000 or 30,000, however many they want.""

redux [01.28.01]
The New York Times Magazine Look at Brazil
[requires 'free' registration]
"Since 1997, virtually every AIDS patient in Brazil for whom it is medically indicated gets, free, the same triple cocktails that keep rich Americans healthy. (In Western Europe, no one who needs AIDS treatment is denied it because of cost. This is true in some American states, but not all.) Brazil has shredded all the excuses about why poor countries cannot treat AIDS. Health system too fragile? On the shaky foundation of its public health service, Brazil built a well-run network of AIDS clinics. Uneducated people can't stick to the complicated regime of pills? Brazilian AIDS patients have proved just as able to take their medicine on time as patients in the United States."

" Brazil is showing that no one who dies of AIDS dies of natural causes. Those who die have been failed -- by feckless leaders who see weapons as more alluring purchases than medicines, by wealthy countries (notably the United States) that have threatened the livelihood of poor nations who seek to manufacture cheap medicine and by the multinational drug companies who have kept the price of antiretroviral drugs needlessly out of reach of the vast majority of the world's population."

redux [08.09.00]
The Observer How Dr Dre sings out for the Big Six
"Dre v Napster is the musical sideshow of the bigger war over ownership of intellectual property, ranging from ditties to DNA. In my last column, I described how the Clinton administration blocked South Africa's purchasing of low-cost drugs to stem the spread of Aids. To protect the right of Glaxo-Wellcome to embargo cross-border sales of AZT which don't meet the company's terms, Clinton threatened South Africa with trade sanctions under the World Trade Organisation's Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (Trips).

Today I can report that one nation has finally displayed the huevos to stand up to America's bully-boy enforcement of WTO dictat: the US."

"But then, hypocrisy is the oxygen of the new imperial order of thought ownership. Every genteel landlord of fenced-in intellectual real estate began life as a thief. Under WTO and US law today, how many products built on the ideas of others could never have made it to market? As Isaac Newton would say now: 'If I see further than others, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants too dumb to patent their discoveries'."

MSNBC Frays, both small and big, emerge after AOL, Time Warner merger
"In the Time Inc. division, which is the largest magazine outfit in the U.S., concerns are multiplying faster than staffers initially imagined. Some at Time Inc. are increasingly wary that the magazine business could be threatened by AOL’s lack of journalistic savvy and the huge pressure to meet AOL Time Warner’s extremely aggressive financial goals — including increasing cash flow 30 percent this year — amid an ever-deteriorating advertising climate."

"AOL Chairman Steve Case’s answer: The pressure would force people to abandon old ways of thinking and forge new relationships across its various units."

redux [02.21.01]
BusinessWeek AOL Time Warner: Newsstand or Publisher?
"From the Web's beginning, in 1995, a debate has simmered over the ethics of online journalism. Most established media have maintained as clear a distinction online as they do in print between news and commerce. Pure dot-coms, by contrast -- and so-called portals, in particular -- have been willing, even eager, to pair editorial and sales in ways that aren't entirely transparent to readers.

"AOL's purchase of Time Warner and its Time Inc. publishing unit -- a prominent ASME member -- has, overnight, transformed the world's largest and most profitable dot-com company into the world's largest and most prestigious magazine publisher as well. It has thus moved the debate over the Web's journalistic ethics from the realm of the theoretical to the intensely practical. The issue is: Whose standards should prevail -- those of AOL Time Warner the publisher or those of AOL Time Warner the newsstand aggregator? "

redux [04.11.00]
USA Today AOL to newspapers: Your future is online
"America Online's president sees home entertainment and communications as a collection of boxes. The TV set is the ''tell-me-a-story box.'' The personal computer - ''the manage-your-life box.'' The CD player? ''The give-me-a-mood box.''

The roles for those machines may be quickly evolving and the lines between them blurring. But Bob Pittman still sees plenty of room in American life for the newspaper out in the mailbox."

"In remarks that were part pep talk, part cautionary tale, he said practitioners of the written page can thrive in the new communications age if they are aggressive about getting their content online and don't defy a consumer-driven Internet culture that wants more and more at little or no cost."

redux [03.21.00]
Online Journalism Review A Post-Mortem, With Great Prejudice, of the Online Journalism Conference
"The choice of Sacks as primary attraction of a journalism seminar -- he's senior vice president and general manager of America Online -- was controversial enough to make one editor of Online Journalism stay home in protest. Yet it was strangely invigorating to hear this smug megacorporation executive lecture on his own importance, and how all journalists will play by AOL/Time-Warner's rules from now on, because, as Sacks said, "We're the biggest guys. We're big, and we're bad."

""If our goal was to publish bad magazines, by the way, we could have done that without a $120 billion merger." Before Sacks finished, he had happily proclaimed, "We do no original news," and described the new world of reporting as "an integrated consumer experience." Gives you an idea about how AOL might cover a famine."

Freedom Forum AOL-Time Warner merger raises questions about journalism, concentrated ownership
“AOL has been ethically challenged throughout its existence,” wrote Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor... “I hate to see Time Warner, which has had its own ethical troubles but generally shows high journalistic standards, fall into such hands."

"“[W]hen the biggest online company controls the biggest traditional media company, you'd be wise to turn to other sources for reliable information on, for example, e-commerce and its biggest players,” wrote Gillmor."

Feed This is Planet Earth
"Globalization. Clearly something is happening to humankind. "Everybody's in everybody else's business," is how the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whom I visited on the first day of my journey, puts it. The question, a lot of people's question at the moment, is what this great and growing overlap in humankind's business means. What does globalization portend, to narrow the subject just a little bit, for those sets of idiosyncrasies, habits, prejudices, and accumulated wisdom we call human cultures?"

redux [08.07.00]
First Monday Negotiating the Global and the Local: How Thai Culture Co-opts the Internet
"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."

The New York Times It Takes the Internet to Raise a Cambodian Village
[requires 'free' registration]
"Overlooked in last month's Group of 8 discussions about the challenge of a growing "digital divide" between the information rich and the data deprived was the work of Bernard Krisher, a 69-year-old former journalist who is trying to bring the Internet to one of the poorest regions in Asia."

"Though the effort is on a small scale, Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist who is also engaged in the effort to aid Cambodian villages, said the project demonstrated that the global impact of the Internet could ultimately serve to reverse the disparity between urban wealth and rural poverty.

"The Net will reverse urbanization," said Mr. Negroponte, director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory. "The past 150 years of development have been one of urbanization. To be rural has meant to be poor. The Net could bring some of the same opportunities to the rural world and maybe even turn being rural into being rich.""

redux [04.23.00]
The New York Times When Villages Go Global: Ho