Friday, December 27, 2002

News.Com Hot links, cool trends on the Web

"Schatz said search terms also are reflecting the increased Web activity of teenage girls. Anything related to the prom or a young, male actor is on the rise, he said. "It's really amazing how many searches those heart-throbby actors get," said Schatz, who lists "Hulk" star Eric Bana and high-school basketball star LeBron James as hot commodities for the coming year."

"One interesting year-end finding came from AltaVista, which unlike most other search sites does not filter out generic terms. According to the site, the word "sex"--always a top search term on the Web--posted the biggest decline among surfers during the holiday season."

Ananova Internet searchers 'stuck in the nineties'

"The UK's internet users are stuck in the nineties, according to a new survey."

"One interesting year-end finding came from AltaVista, which unlike most other search sites does not filter out generic terms. According to the site, the word "sex"--always a top search term on the Web--posted the biggest decline among surfers during the holiday season."

redux [12.08.02]
The New York Times Postcards From Planet Google
[requires 'free' registration]

"Google is taking snapshots of its users' minds and aggregating them. Like a flipbook that emerges when successive images are strung together, the logged data tell a story."

"Despite its geographic and ethnic diversity, the world is spending much of its time thinking about the same things. Country to country, region to region, day to day and even minute to minute, the same topic areas bubble to the top: celebrities, current events, products and computer downloads."

The New York Times Magazine Approximating Life
[requires 'free' registration]

"Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated, intelligent people squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn't that complicated. Maybe we just say the same few thousand things to one another, over and over and over again. If Wallace was right, then artificial intelligence didn't need to be particularly intelligent in order to be convincingly lifelike. A.I. researchers had been focused on self-learning ''neural nets'' and mapping out grammar in ''natural language'' programs, but Wallace argued that the reason they had never mastered human conversation wasn't because humans are too complex, but because they are so simple."

Thursday, December 26, 2002

Star Tribune Record labels grapple with CD protection

"For three straight holiday seasons, record executives say, Internet piracy has been the Grinch of the music business, undercutting album sales and labels' year-end profits."

"Music and technology executives vow that this will be the last holiday season without widespread use of technology that prevents songs from being transferred from CDs to the Internet. Of course, they've made that prediction before."

redux [11.18.02]
Wired News Fox Exec Wants Help Ending Piracy

"More importantly, Chernin will propose that effective antipiracy technologies will pull the tech sector out of its economic slump, by encouraging more and different kinds of digital content. He will cite stats showing the potential upside in sales of broadband connections, home networking gear, digital-rights management software and backend media servers.

"In the long run, the piracy of content may hurt the technology business more than it affects the media business," he said. "If we can work together to solve piracy, I think it could be a driving force for the growth of the technology business.""

redux [04.08.02]
SFGate Copyright's Next Chapter

"Nearly a century ago, the music industry argued that its future was threatened by a new method of creating and distributing multiple copies of a performed song.

The new technology? The player piano roll."

"Throughout history, new technologies -- from the Gutenberg printing press to Napster -- have posed a threat to the owners and creators of music, movies, books and other artistic works. Those publishers, writers, artists and other owners of copyrighted work have always responded with lawsuits and calls for stronger laws."

redux [10.15.01]
MIT Technology Review Owning the Future: Content Discontent

""Content": in the modern lexicon, the term denotes everything from the information delivered daily to our doors on newsprint to the multimedia clips streamed over the Internet; from the music carried on the airwaves to the interactive software on CD-ROMs. This so-called content is produced by an increasingly broad and diverse segment of the economy, including not just writers and artists, but also software programmers and other high-tech researchers who create new intellectual property.

And here's the most interesting part. Time and again, the distributors - such as publishers, broadcasters and record labels - recoil in the face of technological advances that could diminish their role."

redux [10.09.01]
Dan Bricklin Copy Protection Robs The Future

"Copy protection, like poor environment and chemical instability before it for books and works of art, looks to be a major impediment to preserving our cultural heritage. Works that are copy protected are less likely to survive into the future. The formal and informal world of archivists and preservers will be unable to do their job of moving what they keep from one media to another newer one, nor will they be able to ensure survival and appreciation through wide dissemination, even when it is legal to do so."

redux [08.03.01]
Ars Technica Intellectual Property and the Good Society

"Many of the voices in online debates around IP fall into one of two camps. I won't take the time to do more than very briefly summarize these two positions, because we're all familiar with them by now. The first is the "information wants to be free" camp, which advocates the free and communal sharing of information and rejects any notion that products of the intellect can or should be understood, legally or philosophically, as property. At the other extreme is a camp that is comfortable drawing direct, strong analogies between concepts of ownership of physical property and concepts of ownership of intellectual property. Furthermore, this camp is intent on letting the "free" market determine a value for information, much as it determines a value for more traditional types of property. This second camp usually feels that the anti-IP rhetoric coming from the first camp is merely a rationale for piracy, while the first camp feels that members of the second are mindless shills for the corporate machine.

Somewhere in between these two extremes lies a large majority who find both extremes attractive for different reasons, but who can't in good conscience commit to one stance or the other."

redux [06.08.01]
ZDNet Technology and the corruption of copyright

"Interestingly, with the onslaught of technology and promises of greater opportunity to share and communicate, copyright is now a hindrance to these ideals, serving only the moneyed interests of owners."

"Historically, copyright protections were afforded to promote expressive discourse fundamental to a democratic society. Today, the very notion of intellectual property serves to commoditize expressive ideas, rather than fostering their dissemination. Whereas initially the provision of an economic benefit was secondary to the promotion of original works, modern copyright inverts this ideal in a continuing effort to establish a marketplace for ideas."

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."

Wednesday, December 25, 2002

The New York Times:Editorial/Op-Ed Peace on Earth
[requires 'free' registration]

"The purest expression of that seasonal hope has always been universal peace. The familiar phrase is "Peace on Earth" — so familiar, in fact, at this time of year that it seems like mere metaphor as you sing it while harking to herald angels. And perhaps that metaphorical quality, that sense of near-impossibility, is what we were meant to hear in the gospel when, in the words of the King James Version, the angels proclaimed, "Peace on earth, good will toward men." Have humans ever been able to bring this entire globe to peace at once? The answer is almost certainly not. But that answer is no deterrent to trying to do so, no obstacle to the hope that renews itself with particular freshness at this time of year. In a world of grim politics and seemingly native cynicism, the very hope of universal peace may appear naïve. But the most important hopes are often the naïve ones, the ones that re-express a forgotten innocence. In all the clutter of Christmas meanings, in the rush and burden that almost engulfs this day, that hope is still its truest meaning."

Tuesday, December 24, 2002

CNN Santa's reindeer free to fly over N.J.

"State Environmental Commissioner Bradley Campbell issued the edict last week after several first-graders at the High Bridge Elementary School sent letters to his office, concerned that the state's ban on the importation of deer and elk would be applied to reindeer.

The students feared that the ban, which was designed to guard against the spread of chronic wasting disease, would force Santa to bypass the state and, therefore, force Christmas to be canceled."

Monday, December 23, 2002

Rocky Mountain News IMing - the 21st century telephone

"Instant messaging (or IMing for short) is becoming to the dawn of the 21st century what the telephone was to the beginning of the 20th - a normal way of communicating in real time across previously uncrossable distances, making faster, if not better, typists of us all.

How different it is, and how little we realize it. Could human beings really have once existed in a world where we had to communicate by paper, where ink-smeared messages took weeks, even months to cross oceans and inform recipients that someone far away loved them? Today, that old absence that once made the heart grow fonder is assuaged by the new-message notification. Souls that once ached across impassable divides wondering and waiting can now connect in seconds - via satellite."

redux [12.07.01]
CIO.Com Patterns of Progress

"Despite all the fanfare about interactive applications and e-commerce, the killer app for the Internet is the same today as it was two decades ago—person-to-person communication. Although Web traffic is 20 times the volume of e-mail traffic, it is e-mail that delivers the highest value to consumers and businesses. And in the wireless data business, short-messaging service—used to send messages of up to 160 characters to mobile phone customers—is the unheralded killer app, not the fancy mobile commerce, news and entertainment applications that service providers love to talk about. The lesson is that value hides in the strangest of places, and killer apps sneak up on you from directions you least expect."

redux [10.16.01]
The Economist Looking for the pot of gold

"What can operators do to boost traffic and maximise transport revenues?

The answer seems obvious: person-to-person communication. The success of text messaging relative to WAP shows that people like to use their phones to communicate with each other, rather than to download information from content providers. In the words of Andrew Odlyzko, a former AT&T researcher who is now at the University of Minnesota, "Content is not king - connectivity is more important." Indeed, he argues that the killer app for 3G phones might turn out to be increased voice traffic."

redux [03.19.01]
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 [06.21.01]
Newsbytes 'Instant-Messaging Generation' Emerges

"The Internet is used by almost three-quarters of U.S. teen-agers, a new report says. And nearly all of them are using instant-messaging technology in ways that may be transforming the manner in which kids deal with one another.

"It's kind of like having lots of telephones," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which conducted surveys late last year that were used in the 46-page report. "Because it's synchronous conversation, it's the quick-hit kind of stuff that a phone conversation would have, except you're having it in many cases with many, many people.""

redux [05.09.01]
Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies Conversational Technologies

"Conversations are an important part of our daily lives. For most people, in fact, they are the most important way to acquire and spread knowledge during a normal working day."

"Conversations provide a comfortable medium in which knowledge flows in both directions, and where contributors share an inherent context through their subjects and relationships. In addition to old forms of conversations--direct interaction and communication over the phone and in person--conversations are becoming an increasingly important part of the networked world. Witness the popularity of email, chat, and instant messaging, which enable users to increase the range and scope of their conversations to reach those that they may not have before."

"Still, little attention has been paid in recent years to the popular Internet channels that most naturally support conversations."

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."