sweet jesus! we must stop the tab-as-a-design-metaphor madness! i guess this parody that was getting chuckles a few weeks ago isn’t so far off the mark.
the internet bubble monitor makes a great point about friday’s market ‘correction’:
“The purpose of the Bubble Monitor was to point out the absurdity of the valuations given to Internet stocks. This was an amusing activity until this week. Now, it feels more like piling on.
This does not mean that I think we have reached bottom. Consider:
Each of the stocks on the Bubble Monitor is higher than it was 6 months ago. (WEBM only went IPO two months ago, of course.)
None of the stocks is in any danger of being “cheap” relative to earnings or sales. Yahoo’s P/E ratio still is well over 500, and the others have no earnings.”
a few days ago i posted a few links on cryptography, privacy and safety with a few controversial statements by neil stephenson. salon has also recently elaborated on the issues and draws out a few interesting points:
” 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.”
up until recently deapleap had been following the stealth marketing manifesto perfected by transmeta. however, now they are in ‘beta’ and attempt to describe what deapleap is:
“We’re here to introduce you to something incredibly cool – an online assistant that can help you out with whatever you’re doing, wherever you go on the Web. Deepleap is a free, Web-based application that provides simple, immediate access to content and services related
“When you’re looking at a word or a phrase on a Web page, or a Web site in general, you can use Deepleap to get additional relevant information, or save or email that information, without visiting dozens of other sites or launching multiple applications. Plus, you can do all sorts of fun and useful things like save items to a universal Wishlist, keep track of your Bookmarks from anywhere on the Web, do price comparisons, search any site… and of course there’s more – why would we stop there?”
it’s still a little vague – conjurs up visions of a souped-up alexa. deapleap CEO, Lane Becker, gives a little more detail on userland:
“…the reality, right now, is that we’ve built Deepleap as a *platform* for doing this sort of contextual relating between sites, and what we’re demonstrating with the beta is more the general concept. So if you pop up Deepleap on an Amazon.com product page, for example, it will give you a set of tools based around buying a product — comparison shopping, reading reviews, etc. Or if you highlight the name of a movie, and activate it, that will bring up a series of movie-related options, like getting movie times for your neighborhood, or checking for the soundtrack at Reel.com. Find a selection of text that you like — an interesting quote, maybe? Highlight it, save it to the Deepleap web site. Useful tools, when you need them.”
sounds interesting enough to bang it around. here’s the privacy policy.
Interested in those new-fangled computer thingies? Can’t afford MIT tuition? Well, Dan Gillmor writes about ArsDigita University which operates via Philip Greenspun’s ArsDigita Foundation. The University plans to, “…provide nothing less than MIT- or Stanford-level computer-science instruction.” According to Greenspun, “”We decided we could afford to spend a million a year” on the tuition-free school…” Apply here. The program features a no money back guarantee.
two points make a trend? following on the heals of yesterday’s post on the demise of the .coms, forrester has also observed the future sky and reported that it’s falling:
“Most Internet retailers will go out of business by the end of next year because of funding problems and competitive pressures, said Forrester Research, a well-respected electronic-commerce research company.”
“”I think there are probably not going to be more than three leaders in each online-retail category,” said Forrester senior analyst Joe Sawyer.”
of course – these predictions are being made by the same companies that hyped the run-up in the first place. hi. ho.
i scooped slashdot with my prior post today regarding cell phone spamming; however, there is an interesting thread that addresses whether or not simple text messaging spamming is illegal under these restrictions on telephone solicitation (see part iii):
“a.No person may
1.Initiate any telephone call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice,
i.To any emergency telephone line, including any 911 line and any emergency line of a hospital, medical physician or service office, health care facility, poison control center, or fire protection or law enforcement agency;
ii.To the telephone line of any guest room or patient room of a hospital, health care facility, elderly home, or similar establishment; or
iii.To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call; ”
i’m not a lawyer and i don’t play one on tv, but i will bet that a few distinguished members of the bar will take up both sides of the cause and drag this out to the bitter end while the early adopters of the wireless web are paying to get spammed.