The Standard The 'X' in What's Next
" With great fanfare, Forrester Research announced last week that the Web is dead. With so many failing dot-coms, that news wouldn't be so hard to believe - if it weren't that Forrester has spent the past few years touting it as an engine of unrelenting hypergrowth.

But Forrester may be doing more than just trying to unhitch itself from the crazy train of the Web. In some ways, the veteran research firm's latest move shows the analyst business at its finest: giving the industry a rosy spot on the horizon to focus on, a clever name for that spot and a forecast with lots of zeroes in it to throw investors and entrepreneurs into a frenzy."

redux [03.12.01]
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."

redux [03.13.01]
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."

The New York Times Bell Labs: A Bit Abstract and Always Curious
[requires 'free' registration]
"Bell Labs and its parent company, Lucent Technologies, are still giants of innovation despite recent management fumbles and business failures, many industry experts say.

"Their technology strength is four or five times" that of Alcatel , the French electronics giant that was trying to acquire Lucent, said Francis Narin, president of CHI Research of Haddon Heights, N.J., which tracks companies' inventiveness by analyzing their United States patent portfolios and by tallying how often other companies rely on them."

"But for decades, critics have called Lucent and its predecessors slow in turning the bright ideas into market-leading products that produce a steady flow of revenue."

redux [03.28.00]
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."

The Standard Crunch Time at Time Inc.
"The history of Time Inc. - the very fact that it has a history - separates it from AOL, a company founded on the principle of throwing out the old, not guarding it. Just how difficult it will be to truly integrate the two companies is providing endless fodder for speculation, gossip and anxiety. And nowhere is there more potential for a cultural collision than in the hallways of the magazines. It may not be the largest part of the new corporate empire (accounting for just 12 percent of AOL Time Warner revenues last year and 9 percent of earnings), but it is the most visible, publishing 64 titles, including People, InStyle, Money and Entertainment Weekly. Some magazine staffers insist that they see no signs of AOL transforming their workplace - and indeed, many have barely encountered the new guys from Dulles, Va.

But the cultural differences are dramatic."

redux [03.09.01]
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."

The New York Times I.B.M. Meets With 52,600, Virtually
[requires 'free' registration]
" "Intuitively, people feel there should be immense value in knowledge sharing, but no one has gotten their arms around how you do it in a large organization and how you measure its effect," said Steven L. Telleen, an analyst at the Giga Information Group, a technology research firm based in Cambridge, Mass.

Jonathan Spira, chairman of Basex, a New York firm that studies online communities and knowledge management, said the experiment was fascinating for more than its scale. The audience WorldJam tried to corral for focused brainstorming was so broad that many members had little in common, which is typical of many far-flung enterprises in business and government." [ via tomalak ]

IBM Research Fostering the Collaborative Creation of Knowledge: A White Paper
""Good" HCI design practice then, is viewed here not simply as a more practical way to improve productivity on a specific job. It is conceived of as part of larger movement to use technology to foster a more community-based, more contextualized, more systems-oriented view of human knowledge. The consequences include greater chances for improved productivity in the small, but also, in the large, the consequences may include a move toward greater trust and cooperation; less feeling of isolation; more feeling of connectedness; hence, ultimately, more ecologically sound behavior."

First Monday It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age
"The old adage, "It's not what you know, but who you know," could, paradoxically, be the motto for the Information Age. We discuss the emergence of personal social networks as the main form of social organization in the workplace. A dazzling new battery of communication technologies enables workers to connect to diverse, far-flung social networks. The seemingly sudden appearance of people in restaurants talking into their cell phones, the smash success of the Palm products, the increasing use of instant messaging at the office, the chirp of pagers in meetings - all herald the intense moment-by-moment communication activity of workers plugging into their social networks. Castells described the network society in the large (Castells, 1996). We report our ethnographic study of the ways people wield their personal social networks to get things done at work. Our investigation provides a worm's eye view of the network society."

redux [05.24.01]
Fortune I Know What You Mean. And I Can't Do Anything About It.
"Knowledge is power.

No, it's not. This deceitful truism is the Big Lie of the Information Age. For most people in most organizations, knowledge confers impotence, not power.

Why? Because more often than not, managers and employees are expressly forbidden from acting on what they know."

"That's not to say that enterprises should err on the side of concealing rather than revealing knowledge. But it is in everyone's best interest to be honest about the organizational reality that knowledge is seldom power. On the contrary, knowledge confirms the absence of meaningful power. Working with that proposition is the true challenge for those zealots who advocate "knowledge management.""

Michael H. Zack If Managing Knowledge is the Solution, then What's the Problem?
"Load, from a knowledge perspective then, is the amount of knowledge processing that a firm must perform within some time interval to manage complexity, uncertainty, equivocality and ambiguity to perform its tasks and execute its strategy, as well as to adapt to change and maintain the organization itself. Overload occurs when the organization is unable to perform the amount of processing required because that amount is too great, given the time and resources available. The challenge is for the organization and its members to develop sufficient intellectual resources and processing capabilities to manage or reduce equivo cality, ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty. Alternately, the organization may manage the knowledge environment generating that load (for example, by reducing the number of customers, serving more stable markets, or taking on simpler or more familiar tasks) to bring it into balance with its capabilities. Strategicaly, organizations must maintain a balance between overload and underload, in that overload reduces performance effectiveness by exceeding capabilities while underload reduces performance effectiveness by a lack of challenging experiences, stimulation for learning, and inefficient use of resources (Hedberg 1981, Tushman and Nadler 1978)."

Knowledge Media Institute Oracles, Bards, and Village Gossips, or, Social Roles and Meta Knowledge Management
"Knowledge management systems are used widely in many different organisations, yet there are few models and theories which can be used to help introduce and apply them successfully. In this paper, we analyse some of the more common problems for knowledge management systems. Using this background, we adapt models and theories from social and organisational psychology and computer supported collaborative work, and discuss a variety of different knowledge management systems in these contexts. We argue that knowledge management systems routinely adopt different social roles within an organisation, and that these social roles can have a major influence on a system's acceptability. With these principles in mind, we draw out some general practical lessons, and a 'character space' framework, which can help to inform the design of future knowledge management systems, so as to minimise the problems of acceptability within a given organisation."

Opinion Journal Going Ape
"There are inner monsters, too, which connect the smooth modern present with the unruly dangerous past before excellent medicine and lawsuits for remedial damages. Nightmares don't only occur during sleep."

"And it remains a favorite tactic of degraded statecraft for a group in power to define a subordinate one as a kind of nonhuman monkey man, perhaps by requiring it to wear a version of species marker such as the yellow star for the Nazis. Now we have the Muslim Taliban's up-to-the minute innovation, requiring Hindus to wear specially colored garb, like clowns. They are saying: We fear you because you are different. But we will prevail and box you in. We will make a monkey-man out of you yet.

Salon Show me the monkey!
"These stories always translate interestingly. Not just because America's funny about developing nations, or because foreign emotions tend to dilute en route, but because we can't help getting anthropological. Now that colonizing is frowned upon, we conquer the Third World with definition. Magazine articles like this one forever speculate coolly about why various cultures yield various incidents. A man or monkey who mysteriously appears before people waving metal claws becomes a case study, a metaphor or just entertainment.

Indeed, it's hard not to read about the monkey-man as allegory."

Newsbytes After Dot-Com Bust, What Is The Next Step For Content?
"Michael Stroud, iHollywood Forum's CEO and founder, brought together a panel of industry experts to discuss the future of content distribution, including film, television and music, and how these varied media can work across multiple technology platforms."

"Just a little over one year ago, Stroud noted, a slew of content-related dot-coms seemed poised to change the way people view entertainment. Now, most of those companies are gone, including Pop.com, which was backed by industry titans Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard.

Stroud asked the panel two questions: what was wrong with the model, and what is it being replaced by?"

Bob Frankston Content vs. Connectivity
"The consumers' connections to the Internet are controlled by companies who are in the business of delivering content and services funded by advertising. Consumers who wander the Internet represent lost revenue. Customers who use IP telephony no longer make phone calls. Customers who experiment with creating new services are called abusers. As long as these companies control connectivity, we do not have a marketplace for the connectivity services vital to the growth of the Internet and necessary for innovation and the benefits we have come to expect.

We must allow for a marketplace by preventing players with interests opposed to connectivity from controlling connectivity. It is a dramatic case of conflict of interest and antitrust violation. We cannot afford to tolerate such behavior. It is allowed and abetted by accepting the self-serving fallacies of the existing players. We must challenge their claims and create the opportunities so necessary for our continued prosperity."

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 [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."

Online Journalism Review Blogging as a Form of Journalism
"Back around 1993, in the Web's neolithic days, starry-eyed Net denizens waxed poetic about a million Web sites blooming and supplanting the mainstream media as a source of news, information and insight.

Then reality set in and those individual voices became lost in the ether as a million businesses lumbered onto the cyberspace stage, newspapers clumsily grasped at viable online business models, and a handful of giant corporations made the Web safe for snoozing.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Web's irrelevance: the blogging phenomenon, a grassroots movement that may sow the seeds for new forms of journalism, public discourse, interactivity and online community."

Fortune I Know What You Mean. And I Can't Do Anything About It.
"Knowledge is power.

No, it's not. This deceitful truism is the Big Lie of the Information Age. For most people in most organizations, knowledge confers impotence, not power.

Why? Because more often than not, managers and employees are expressly forbidden from acting on what they know."

"That's not to say that enterprises should err on the side of concealing rather than revealing knowledge. But it is in everyone's best interest to be honest about the organizational reality that knowledge is seldom power. On the contrary, knowledge confirms the absence of meaningful power. Working with that proposition is the true challenge for those zealots who advocate "knowledge management.""

Michael H. Zack If Managing Knowledge is the Solution, then What's the Problem?
"Load, from a knowledge perspective then, is the amount of knowledge processing that a firm must perform within some time interval to manage complexity, uncertainty, equivocality and ambiguity to perform its tasks and execute its strategy, as well as to adapt to change and maintain the organization itself. Overload occurs when the organization is unable to perform the amount of processing required because that amount is too great, given the time and resources available. The challenge is for the organization and its members to develop sufficient intellectual resources and processing capabilities to manage or reduce equivo cality, ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty. Alternately, the organization may manage the knowledge environment generating that load (for example, by reducing the number of customers, serving more stable markets, or taking on simpler or more familiar tasks) to bring it into balance with its capabilities. Strategicaly, organizations must maintain a balance between overload and underload, in that overload reduces performance effectiveness by exceeding capabilities while underload reduces performance effectiveness by a lack of challenging experiences, stimulation for learning, and inefficient use of resources (Hedberg 1981, Tushman and Nadler 1978)."

Knowledge Media Institute Oracles, Bards, and Village Gossips, or, Social Roles and Meta Knowledge Management
"Knowledge management systems are used widely in many different organisations, yet there are few models and theories which can be used to help introduce and apply them successfully. In this paper, we analyse some of the more common problems for knowledge management systems. Using this background, we adapt models and theories from social and organisational psychology and computer supported collaborative work, and discuss a variety of different knowledge management systems in these contexts. We argue that knowledge management systems routinely adopt different social roles within an organisation, and that these social roles can have a major influence on a system's acceptability. With these principles in mind, we draw out some general practical lessons, and a 'character space' framework, which can help to inform the design of future knowledge management systems, so as to minimise the problems of acceptability within a given organisation."

Reason Techno Baby Steps
"In the past month, a coterie of prominent naysayers have strongly condemned a new biomedical advance as going dangerously beyond what they regard as the ethical pale. While shrouded in the usual mystifying and hyperbolic rhetoric--we're creating Aldous Huxley's Brave New World! say critics--such attacks on what most people view as progress are instructive. The critics argue that science and medicine are advancing at a rate that far outstrips our ability to make wise and informed decisions. The only proper course of action, they say, is to stop what we're doing immediately.

This point of view packs a certain emotional wallop, but it is based on a completely mistaken understanding of how societies actually develop and adopt new technologies. History has repeatedly demonstrated that, far from promiscuously embracing every new scientific and medical procedure that comes along, societies incorporate them gradually and incrementally--and while working out important practical and ethical concerns."

redux [08.28.00]
MIT Technology Review Not by Reason Alone
"In a recent Wired magazine article, Bill Joy argued that the consequences of research on robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology may lead to “knowledge-enabled mass destruction...hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.” His medicine: “relinquishment...by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.” I don’t buy it.

What troubles me with this argument is the arrogant notion that human logic can anticipate the effects of intended or unintended acts, and the more arrogant notion that human reasoning can determine the course of the universe."

"I suggest we broaden our perspective to the fullness of our humanity, which besides reason includes feelings and beliefs. Sometimes, as we drive the car of scientific and technological progress, we’ll veer because our reason says so. At other times we’ll follow our feelings, or we’ll be guided by faith. Most of the time, we’ll steer with all three of these human forces guiding us in concert, as they have guided human actions for thousands of years. As we do so, we should stay vigilant, ready to stop, when danger is imminent, using our full humanity to make that determination. If we do so, our turning point will be very different from where it may seem today, based on early rational assessments...that have failed us so often. Let us have faith in ourselves, our fellow human beings and our universe. And let’s keep in mind that our car is not the only moving thing out there."

redux [06.01.00]
Reason Joy, to the World
"... Joy is worried, really worried–20,000 words and five months of writing worried–that 21st-century technologies threaten to make human beings extinct. The threats are intelligent robots, nanotechnology (the ability to build things on the atomic level), and genetic engineering. All of them, he acknowledges, offer wonderful advantages, but they are, in his view, simply too dangerous to develop. We should stop investigating these ideas, he argues, before they become uncontrollable realities."

"Bill Joy is a lot smarter than I’ll ever be. But he is also incredibly foolish, in the parochial, reality-dodging way that geniuses sometimes are. And he is willing to sacrifice an awful lot of other people’s lives and liberty to his fantasies of power and control.

If—then statements are a staple of computer programming. Here’s one to consider: "If we could agree, as were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous–then we might understand what we can and should relinquish." (Emphasis added.) How, exactly, does a species of more than six billion intelligent individuals, with their own plans and purposes, agree on anything? Joy imagines the world as a small, technological elite and assumes away the problems of politics. He and his friends will just get together and agree on what to do."

redux [03.12.00]
Wired Magazine Why the future doesn't need us.
"Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials.

In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence. "

MediaChannel.Org The Myth In Journalism
"The information model of journalism, already in great disrepair, will be dismantled by the marriage of myth and new media. News is losing whatever franchise it had on whatever information is. Information is no longer some scarce resource, a commodity that newspeople can cull and sell. Our society rapidly moved from information explosion to information overload. Information is everywhere. From online events calendars to live, continuous congressional coverage, anyone can give and get information online. If news is only information, news is nothing.

Yet information overload offers opportunities to news: as myth. In the throes of all this information, the need for myth increases. People grapple with the meaning of rapidly changing times. People seek out ways in which they can organize and explain the world. People need stories."

MSNBC A painful affair of the Internet heart
"At least hundreds, if not thousands of Webloggers and other Netizens spent the past year rooting for 19-year-old Kaycee Nicole, who was battling leukemia and chronicling her incredible efforts online. They sent hats when her hair fell out. They sent Amazon gift certificates so she had reading material. They even sent money when mom lost her job to be at Kaycee’s bedside. There was a worldwide groan May 14 when Kaycee’s passing was announced, followed by an online wake. Only one problem: There was no Kaycee Nicole."

MSNBC The Day I Got Napsterized
"As a spectator, I found it easy to be sanguine about the raging Internet intellectual-property debates."

"BASICALLY, MY TAKE was that the Net had simply opened up a powerful mode of distribution, most fully realized in the Napsterlike peer-to-peer (P2P) model, where everybody could help spread the word (and the music). Artists and merchants alike would eventually figure out how to reap bucks from that bounty, and until then I’d sit back and enjoy the fun as Metallica and Courtney Love duked it out.

That was before I got P2P’d."

redux [04.27.01]
The New York Times Does an Anti-Piracy Plan Quash the First Amendment?
[requires 'free' registration]
"There's a long-accepted notion in the publishing world that between the right of an author to control the uses of his book and the right of a reader to engage in free speech is the safety valve known as "fair use." "

"But there's a related question that has never been settled by the courts: Does fair use, which has its roots in the First Amendment, entitle the scholar, reporter or others to gain access to the copyrighted work in the first place -- -- especially when the material is guarded by a technological device designed to prevent digital piracy?"

redux [08.29.00]
MSNBC Napster heralds new business model
"Napster’s place in history may extend far beyond the e-commerce world."

"AT THE heart of the controversy is a clash that goes far beyond the music industry. What we’re witnessing is the beginning of an epoch struggle between two great economic systems. On one side of the divide lies the old market-based economy made up of sellers and buyers. On the other side lies the new network-based economy made up of servers and clients. In markets, the parties exchange property. In networks, the parties share access to services and experiences."

"By the mid decades of the 21st century — markets — the hallmark of conventional capitalism, will have largely disappeared, replaced by a new kind of economic system based on network relationships, 24/7 contractual arrangements and access rights."

redux [01.23.01]
Cryptome What's Wrong With Content Protection
"Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task. Such a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the entire world economy, making billions of new winners and new losers. We will be extremely lucky if by 2030 we are prepared to end scarcity without massive social turmoil, including riots, civil unrest, and world war. If we are to find a peaceful path to an era of plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW, transforming the industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text, audio, and video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be replaced by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models and expertise for other industries, which will need to change when their own inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication ten or fifteen years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would send us in exactly the wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that the law and some fancy footwork with industrial cartels can maintain our current economic structures, in the face of a hurricane of positive technological change that is picking them up and sending them whirling like so many autumn leaves."

redux [12.17.00]
Bad Subjects Beyond Copyright Consciousness
"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."

"At the Internet Archive, a nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco, a small group of engineers backed by a philanthropist are trying to create a new paradigm for access to archival material, in this case historical film from my own archives. By doing this, we're making a concrete move toward building an IP preserve."

The New York Review of Books Can Science Explain Everything? Anything?
"One evening a few years ago I was with some other faculty members at the University of Texas, telling a group of undergraduates about work in our respective disciplines. I outlined the great progress we physicists had made in explaining what was known experimentally about elementary particles and fields—how when I was a student I had to learn a large variety of miscellaneous facts about particles, forces, and symmetries; how in the decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s all these odds and ends were explained in what is now called the Standard Model of elementary particles; how we learned that these miscellaneous facts about particles and forces could be deduced mathematically from a few fairly simple principles; and how a great collective Aha! then went out from the community of physicists.

After my remarks, a faculty colleague (a scientist, but not a particle physicist) commented, “Well, of course, you know science does not really explain things—it just describes them.” I had heard this remark before, but now it took me aback, because I had thought that we had been doing a pretty good job of explaining the observed properties of elementary particles and forces, not just describing them""

redux [09.13.00]
Scientific American A New Paradigm for Thomas Kuhn
"Kuhn wrote: "The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community." Fuller has confidence in the intelligent good sense of ordinary folks and properly calls for "the right to be wrong." But do statements such as "the universe is light-years wide," "the earth is billions of years old," "all life is related by common descent," "organisms are composed of cells that contain double-helix DNA," and so on really have no greater claim on "reality" than the Genesis stories of creationists or the popular consolations of astrology? If the answer is no, as Fuller comes dangerously close to asserting, then most scientists would throw in the towel and get jobs flipping burgers.

Fuller underestimates the highly evolved "fitness" of the methodologies, sociologies and conceptual paradigms of normal science. The deprofessionalization of science and the establishment of a citizen marketplace of ideas are not likely to happen without the sociopolitical equivalent of an asteroid impact, and no such potential upheaval looms on our intellectual radar screens. Certainly, science studies lacks the weight to do it."

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."

Wired Magazine Andy Grove's Rational Exuberance
"I suppose - but the boom was healthy too, even with its excesses. Because what this incredible valuation craze did was draw untold sums of billions of dollars into building the Internet infrastructure. The hundreds of billions of dollars that got invested in telecommunications, for example. You know, when the information highway was the craze, the question I would ask [then-Bell Atlantic CEO] Ray Smith and [then-TCI chair] John Malone was, Who the hell is going to spend the billions of dollars it will take to build this thing out? You guys? The federal government? It's not going to happen. And no one could give me an answer as to who was going to pay. Well, it turns out that the answer was the investing public, who rabidly ran and shoved the money into the hands of the infrastructure builders. It is probably true that the infrastructure would have gotten built anyway. But instead of it happening over 15 years, it happened over 5, because of the gold rush mentality and all these investors trying to get in on it. So the boom accelerated the deployment of the infrastructure, and I'm talking about the Amazons of the world as much as the JDS Uniphases. Amazon's database is a kind of infrastructure - commerce-related infrastructure. When [Merrill Lynch analyst] Henry Blodget projected Amazon would go to $400 and the investing public rushed in, they were funding the deployment of Amazon's infrastructure, which is part of the totality of the Internet infrastructure. And all I can think is, How would this all have happened any other way?"

Doc Searls Bet on nature
"Infrastructure has three fundamental characteristics:

1. Nobody owns it
2. Everybody can use it
3. Anybody can improve it

We need free & open source geeks to generate more infrastructure. We also need commercial and closed source geeks to do the same, contributing as much as they can, to the ubiquitous infrastructure that makes our new world."

"The free software and open source movements, for example, love to talk about licensing, which is really a set of social contracts that attempt to reconcile ideas about the nature of software with ideas about the nature of business."

News.Com Singing hosannas for Linux
"Open source is good for business. Now I should add that open source is not for everything in software. We have a very large and successful software business, and we're going to retain that. But open source is great for infrastructure code. The reason is that to make open source work, there has to be an overlap between the people who care about the software and the people who make the software better."

Wired News Worldwide Copyrights a Quagmire?
"Richard Stallman has a simple message for the U.S. government about a proposed copyright treaty: Don't even think about signing it.

Stallman, the bearded, irascible creator of GNU Emacs and a spokesman for the free software movement, showed up at a U.S. Copyright Office roundtable on Tuesday to warn that the draft measure would imperil American programmers by encouraging frivolous software patents."

""It appears disastrous for program developers," Stallman said. "Many countries have laws about what kinds of software can be developed.... Everything relating to information should be taken out of this convention.""

Slashdot U.S. Intellectual Property Law Goes Global
"Toward the end of the day Jamie Love said, "There hasn't been a single American newspaper article about this treaty, and here you are getting ready to create the Magna Carta of cyberspace."

Love didn't blame the people on the U.S. delegation for working in comparative secret. "I've called reporter after reporter [about this] and their eyes glaze over," he said."

The Tech Lessig Examines Law And Freedom Online
"Technologists are to blame for passively allowing freedom on the Internet to fade, Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig told a crowd of technologists in 34-101 yesterday.

And now the only way to keep that freedom from disappearing entirely, he explained, is for technologists to speak up and teach the lawyers (and everyone else) why the Internet was created the way it was.

“Teach us, in terms you know, of the justice, or freedom, that was imbedded in the code you built,” Lessig said, “and show us how the changes that code is now undergoing will quickly erase that same justice or freedom.”"

redux [07.27.00]
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."

The Standard Sony Kicks Into Warp Speed With AOL TW Alliance
"Sony's got mail, and AOL Time Warner's got game.

One of the world's most prominent game-console manufacturers and the world's largest media company have formed a sweeping strategic alliance aimed at transforming Sony's PlayStation 2 from just another videogame console into an entertainment appliance infused with online communications and gaming features. The result will bring the PlayStation 2 closer to the "Trojan Horse" living-room entertainment appliance concept that Sony hyped when it originally launched the PS2."

MSNBC Sony, AOL to put PS2 online
""There will be a whole new generation of games that will take advantage of these features, which are unique. It’s not just adding a commodity connection to a game. (This) deal takes it beyond that,” said Peter Ashkin, AOL president of product strategy, in an interview."

The Register Sony, AOL to bring Net to PlayStation 2
"Sony is also preparing a hard drive, XGA LCD panel, mouse and keyboard, all of which will help turn console into a computer. All that's missing is an operating system, and we can't help but wonder if Sony might end up buying Be after all. The OS vendor is certainly looking for a buyer or a white knight, and its BeIA Net appliance-oriented OS is already being used by Sony for the consumer electronics giant's eVilla appliance.

Whatever, with Microsoft now defecating on Sony's digital doorstep, we'd be surprised if Sony doesn't line up other anti-Microsoft partners."

Gaming Age Sony and AOL Join Forces!
"Underlying the alliance between Sony and AOL Time Warner is a coming collision among the personal computer, online and video game industries that will tend to blur the lines between the different markets in the home.

"Both of these technologies are running into each other pretty hard," said Rob Enderle, a vice president at the Giga Information Group, a market research firm based in Cambridge, Mass. "Sony dominates the game market, but Microsoft has the channel to take it in the future.""

Context Magazine Future Imperfect
"When we look at wireless, we see the same exuberance we see whenever there is a new technology. People make wild predictions. What people typically miss are the deeper patterns that govern how people will actually use their new possibilities."

"Companies are chasing applications that people don’t care about—especially those that foster shopping—and the devices being produced are vastly too slow and confusing."

redux [08.13.00]
The Standard Deconstructing the Web
"The Web is disintegrating into bits. When the dust settles, what's important for a successful long-term strategy is not Web site design but the flexibility of your information architecture."

"New Internet devices and applications are different not only because they are designed to do different things, but also because the mindset of the person who uses them influences the kind of interaction that makes sense. You cannot shove a Web page onto a cell phone's tiny screen. Even if you could, it wouldn't make sense from the user's point of view. The information I want delivered to my cell phone is different from what I want on my home computer. Web pages are designed for sedentary, reflective use. The phone is for urgent, short communications."

redux [06.15.00]
Fast Company Design Vision
""We know how to do amazing things," [Thackara] says, "and we're filling the world with amazing devices. But we cannot answer the most important question: What is this stuff really for?""

"The time has also come, he says, to shift some of the focus of innovation away from work and toward everyday life. The early users of digital devices are almost always business users, so product designers have a natural inclination to create and design products with the workplace in mind. But that tendency can make for bad design, especially when those products migrate beyond business. People put up with technical difficulties in their work lives that they would never tolerate in their personal lives. So forget "personal" computing, Thackara says, and embrace "social" computing. "As computing migrates from ugly boxes on our desks to something that suffuses everything around us, a new relationship will emerge between what's real and what's virtual, what's mental and what's material. There are few limits to the number of services that we could develop if we simply took an aspect of daily life and looked for ways to make it better.""

redux [02.03.00]
NetFuture The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers (Part 2)
"In part 1 of this series I voiced my first complaint against the ubiquitous technology pushers: by letting their work develop out of a one-sided preoccupation with the technological milieu rather than immersion in the meaningful contexts affected by their inventions, they inflict technological "answers" upon us without any serious reference to the supposed problems."

"The subtitle of this series of articles is "Why We'd Be Better Off without the MIT Media Lab". Let me broaden that here. What we'd be better off without is every organization that pushes purely technological "solutions" as if they were what could make us better off.”

NPR : All Things Considered People Who Like Fake Dogs
"Robert Siegel talks with Sherry Turkle, professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Turkle has studied people's relationships with computational objects for the past 20 years. She says recently some computers have been designed to ask humans to "nurture" them and humans respond. Turkle says that the attachment of AIBO owners to their robot dogs raises questions about what it means to love an object that doesn't know you're there."

redux [10.27.00]
Wired News Is Tech a Partner, Pet or Master?
"Determining what it means to be human has never been easy, and recent advances in artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and genetic engineering haven't helped.

"The definition of what it means to be human is going to become even more slippery over the next 20 years," said Harvey Ardman, co-chair of this year's Camden Technology Conference."

"Joy and others argue that many tech enthusiasts have avoided asking some vital questions. One of the key questions, Ardman said, is whether these tools are "partners, pets or superiors?"

"We'll be looking at what changes we're going to be asked to make or explore in this new age," Ardman said. In many ways, it will be an exercise in cultural anthropology."

redux [09.88.00]
Wired Congratulations, It's A Bot!
""When kids play, they create an entire world that's alive, and it never objects to them. A kid's imagination is a completely open architecture, and there are no bounds to what a toy can do," he explains.

"That's the future of toys. Technology's role is to become transparent. If you give the cues of autonomy, the imagination fills in the blanks, because that's what it's meant to do."

As processing power and sensors improve, the difference between simulated autonomy and actual autonomy will blur. Already it's difficult to relate to these new technological creatures without imputing to them the sorts of feelings we routinely discover in, say, our pets. And when you throw in realistic human behavior, not to mention silky skin, things become rather surreal.

"These are not toys anymore," says Chung as the screwy signal scrambles his face again. "These are way beyond toys."

"So what are they?" I ask. For once, Chung pauses. "They are the next iteration of our attempt to re-create life.""

redux [05.25.00]
The New York Times What Do You Mean, 'It's Just Like a Real Dog'?
[requires 'free' registration]
"What do children think about what it means to be alive? And at what ages can children distinguish mechanical objects from real animals or people? Research into these questions is still in its earliest stages. There was a flurry of interest in children's reactions when Tamagotchis, virtual pets from Japan, first appeared a few years ago and then started dying on their young owners. But the topic is attracting more attention now as seemingly intelligent toys and other robots appear on the market in increasing variety and numbers. "

"Again and again... researchers have asked the children: ''Is it alive? Is it like a real pet? Does it know you?''

"Strikingly," Ms. Audley said, "often the answer they settled on was, 'It's not alive in a human or animal kind of way, but in a Furby kind of way.' "

redux [04.21.00]
The Third Culture A new kind of object: From Rorschach to Relationship
"I have studied the effects of computational objects on human developmental psychology for over twenty years, documenting the ways that computation and its metaphors have influenced our thinking about such matters as how the mind works, what it means to be intelligent, and what is special about being human. Now, I believe that a new kind of computational object ? the relational artifact ? is provoking striking new changes in the narrative of human development, especially in the way people think about life, and about what kind of relationships it is appropriate to have with a machine. Relational artifacts are computational objects designed to recognize and respond to the affective states of human beings?and indeed, to present themselves as having "affective" states of their own. They include children's playthings (such as Furbies and Tamagotchis), digital dolls that double as health monitoring systems for the homebound elderly (Matsushita's forthcoming Tama), sentient robots whose knowledge and personalities change through their interactions with humans, as well as software that responds to its users? emotional states and responds with "emotional states" of their own."

"By accepting a new category of relationship, with entities that they recognize as "sort-of-alive", or "alive in a different, but legitimate way," today's children will redefine the scope and shape of the playing field for social relations in the future."

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."

First Monday The Impact of the Internet on Myanmar
"In the present paper, I explore how the Internet has affected the flow of information between in and outside Myanmar (Burma). I show that there is a strong difference between the way information was presented before and after the introduction of the World Wide Web.

Within the last century, the country has been marked by political instability (Eliot, 1997; Freedom House, 2000). Particularly since its separation from British colonial rule in 1948, Burma has witnessed significant political change, violence and unrest. Since the early 1960s, Burma has essentially been an isolated state, with closed borders and a military government. However, the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War seem to suggest that isolationism is growing less common worldwide. Importantly, meteoric advances in communications have also paralleled the fall of isolationism.

In my study, I examine two political events in Myanmar connected to student uprisings, in the hope of documenting how the Internet - as an easily researched symbol of modern communications - may be affecting the political strategies of one of the last isolated states."

redux [01.20.01]
The Guardian Unlimited Filipinos rally to oust the president: C U @ the revolution
"Millions of ordinary Filipinos, communicating with each other via mobile phone text messages, swarmed on to th