“Our exploratory user study on the use of a major portal site in Belgium shows that a category of “skeptical Internet users” has abandoned searching the web. The skeptical Internet user has made a return-on-investment evaluation of his Internet experience, and has come to the conclusion that the return on some sites is just not worth the investment of his personal time and energy. What about your site?”
interesting interview with cybergeography.org founder, martin dodge, over at write the web :
“Cybergeography is also somewhat of a counter reaction to much of the off-hand reporting of the net that it makes geography redundant, that implies that distance, location, and place no longer matter. That cyberspace has enabled anything, anytime, anywhere. The classic utopian fantasy that you can transcend material world and exist in the digital ether. Clearly, this not happening, cyberspace is not immaterial, it is very much an embodied space.
However, cyberspace is *changing* geography, it is warping space, shrinking distance and reconfiguring our sense of place. It is this warping and distorting that is very much the heart of cybergeography. It is also increasing of interest to geographers.”
i’ve been hankerin’ to start my own radio station. on the internet, of course. but, right when i was just about ready to give it a go, webcasting: doing it legally made me a little jumpy:
“If you want to operate an internet radio station legally, you need to do these things:
- Follow the play limits and other restrictions on content
mentioned in the DMCA, and summarized above;- Fill out the licensing forms from
ASCAP,
BMI, and
SESAC,
and send each of them at least a couple hundred dollars a year;- Fill out the webcasting licensing
form for
RIAA,
and expect them to start hitting you with a large bill some time
next year.”
i think, though, if i want to forego the licensing fees, i can use a service like live365.com or myplay, although i think i need to do some decision trees and flowcharting to understand the play limits and restrictions.
it seems that i may be beating this netscape thing to death, but at least i’m in good company. in the discussion on yet another great educational bit by joel called netscape goes bonkers, cam unloads a great list of links on managing open source projects:
“Many of the issues Joel raises are more related to the usability of Netscape 6 than they are to the way it was developed. These usability issues can be easily solved, if Netscape took the time to build them in. Unfortunately, Netscape pushed the product out the door too early based on marketing deadlines (Comdex) instead of deadlines based on software quality. So, many of the things that should have been solved during the normal quality assurance process were neglected. Open source software development is a very intriguing concept, and Netscape has almost made it work by using the Mozilla codebase. Unfortunately, because Mozilla is a true open source project, the kinds of project management you find in commercial software development are almost non-existant. This problem is being addressed by many people in the open source software developmeny community:
- How open source manages code
- Managing Projects the Open Source Way
- An Introduction to Open Source Software Development
- The path to open-source systems
- Open Source Projects Manage Themselves? Dream On
- Presenting Open Source to the Enterprise – Rules of Engagement
- Stanford Open Source Research Project
- Is the OSS Model Failing?
- Moving `Open Source’ Into the Mainstream to Bridge
the Software GapAnyway, I agree that Netscape 6 is a fine example of poor or non-existant software project management, but am a strong believer in what open source can do for the software industry. The innovations in Mozilla alone are enough to provide a solid application framework to compete against Microsoft’s upcoming .NET services framework. But that’s another discussion altogether.
— Cameron Barrett (camworld@camworld.com), November 21, 2000″
i’ll add one more link that i found in a recent discussion on the mythical man month and open source, entitled Brooks’ Law and open source: The more the merrier?:
“An aphorism from some twenty years ago, Brooks’ Law, holds that adding more programmers to a project only delays it. But if this is so, what accounts for Linux? Paul Jones gathers perspectives on the open source development method and whether it defies conventional wisdom.”
some syndication links:
meerkat: the xml-rpc interface:
“Meerkat, O’Reilly Network’s Open Wire Service, extends its open API with XML-RPC, affording a more standardized XML-based interface to its aggregated RSS database.”
an introduction to rss news feeds:
“RDF Site Summary (RSS) is catching on as one of the most widely used XML formats on the Web. Find out how to create and use RSS files and learn what they can do for you. See why companies like Netscape, Userland, and Moreover use RSS to distribute and syndicate article summaries and headlines. This article includes sample code that demonstrates elements of an RSS file, plus a Perl example using the module XML::RSS.”
“10.am aggregates links to the latest technology based content on the web. This includes links to News stories, articles, Usenet announcements, software updates and much more, all from a huge number of continually indexed sources .
Once ‘harvested’ these links are categorized by their subject into a familiar browsable and searchable directory structure. This allows you to quickly get at the up to the minute information you want, track down that elusive article or just find something interesting to read.
Think of 10.am like a fine tuned ‘realtime’ search engine. Rather than randomly trawling the web 10.am knows what to get and where to get it, constantly updating its content.”
i think the saddest thing about barbera walters pimping her integrity [sic] is how many people actually don’t recognize the fact that ‘the view’ isn’t news – it’s entertainment.
“You wouldn’t think modern TV would go this far, says Robert Thompson, a professor of TV, film and pop culture at Syracuse University. The shocking thing about this is that nobody is trying to disguise it. There’s always a sneaky way to do product placement. But there’s usually a little shame associated with it. Here, it’s absolutely shameless.”
beating a dead horse on multiple platforms”
“Netscape 6. What an abortion. What a visual scar on my desktop. So many things on it screaming for my attention. The really horrible ´just register, no, go on, it´s easy, please, no, really, I insist, no, REGISTER, why? BECAUSE no one knows how to make money in this ´free sofware model´ and we´re going to sell your demographics by changing our privacy policy when you´re not looking´ approach is messed up.
It´s not so much that Microsoft won the browser war through any of its normal ´cross-platform anticompetitive leveraging´ tricks (as one judge described it), but simply because, like Apple, Netscape has proven themselves completely inadequate for the task.
You know, imagine if Microsoft wasn´t around! We´d be STUCK with this miserable aberration called Netscape Navigator 6. Strategically, it doesn´t bode well with this´concession of defeat´ by Netscape, but well, Microsoft must be really laughing now.”