"Information science operates with a binary logic of reflection which results in multiple paths, but these paths are always circumscribed by laws of combination (Deleuze, & Guattari, 1987). In this manner the fragmented space and time of information flows is reordered and directed toward specific objectives. But the objectives of information processing within the capitalist dynamic are not end points-- they are aimed at an accumulation of knowledge that is always an impetus for further accumulation, for multiplying the flow, opening out into every horizon. But this flow is at the same time stored up in a central memory which traces the exact paths of this flow, connecting geographic spaces and matching up the temporal locations of dispersed market centers. This central memory system functions through command trees, centered systems and hierarchical structures that attempt to fix possible pathways of the network and thus to limit the possible variations immanent in the network. The definitions of information formulated within information science and information economics derive from and serve this modeling of the system. As we have seen, information defined as nonsemantic discrete bits flowing across space and then directed and stored substantiates information as the object of control. Thus, the enemy of the information scientists and economists is heterogeneity, disorganization, noise, chaos. They want an uninterrupted flow, but at the same time a destruction of the unnecessary. This encloses or territorializes information; it becomes a part of capitalism’s mapping of space and time. But what we have found is that information’s function is precisely to disorganize, interrupt, to remain itself and at the same time to disperse. Information may, in fact, be a keyword connecting the phenomenon we have examined, but not as an element, nor as a content, but as a heterogeneous remapping of space and time. If the information society is to be our society, let it be disorganized. "

"In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.

Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."

Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity."

"There is an unarticulated war currently raging among those who make web sites. Like the war between dark- and light-skinned blacks in Spike Lee's School Daze, this conflict is one that only its participants recognize. The war is not between commercial sites and experimental sites. It's not between "Bloggers" and "Flashers." This war is between usability experts and graphic designers."

"What's just as interesting, though, is the account of how two normally mortal enemies - human factors engineers and visual designers - worked together to come up with an innovative and creative solution to a user problem.

In scenes of tolerance and understanding only ever hinted at in Revelations, human factors lay down with visual design, with each party gaining some of the sensibilities of the other.

"Abomination!", you cry. Not so."

"Yet a growing body of research by automakers is finding that buyers of these two kinds of vehicles are very different psychologically. Sport utility buyers tend to be more restless, more sybaritic, less social people who are "self-oriented," to use the automakers' words, and who have strong conscious or subconscious fears of crime. Minivan buyers tend to be more self-confident and more "other-oriented" -- more involved with family, friends and their communities."

"Dr. Rapaille looks at the intellectual, emotional and "reptilian," or instinctual, reasons why people buy consumer products. He said sport utilities are designed to be masculine and assertive, often with hoods that resemble those on 18-wheel trucks, vertical metal slats across the grilles to give the appearance of a jungle cat's teeth and flared wheel wells and fenders that suggest the bulging muscles in a clenched jaw.

Sport utilities are designed to appeal to Americans' deepest fears of violence and crime, Dr. Rapaille said. People's earliest associations with sport utilities are wartime Jeeps with machine guns mounted on the back, he explained. Sport utilities are "weapons" and "armored cars for the battlefield," he said."

Thousands download and pay for King novel

"Stephen King's latest online publishing effort got off to a smooth start Monday as thousands of users downloaded the first installment of "The Plant," a new serial novel."

King E-Novel Short of Expected Demand

"In a closely watched test of the Internet's potential to transform the book business, the horror writer Stephen King yesterday became the first major author to self-publish online. But demand for his new electronic book fell far short of his last, an event in March that seemed to foretell a revolution in publishing when more than 400,000 fans jammed computer servers trying to download it in the first two days after it appeared."

"Websites must tone down their individual appearance and distinct design in all ways:

- visual design
- terminology and labeling
- interaction design and workflow
- information architecture"

"Even as websites become more similar and appearance design becomes more simplified, there will be a large number of design decisions that still need to be made in order to optimize the usability of each individual site.

Most important, each Internet service needs to be based on a task analysis of its specific users and their needs. You can combine standardized user interface elements in many ways, and the better sites will support the way users want to approach the problems."

"This piece is the promised follow-up to Nielsen's June 25th piece, which dissected Microsoft's .NET announcement. In that piece, Nielsen argued that since the network is the new user experience, individual sites will no longer "supply a complete user experience, [instead] each site will supply a component of the overall user experience that is coordinated by the new nexus."

To put it bluntly, Nielsen has it backwards."

"Nielsen believes that this network-centric world will demand that all websites look and act alike, since we'll be traversing amongst multiple sites even more frequently than we do today. This makes very little sense to me. If information can move freely, why should I have to jump from site to site to have an "overall user experience?" If all information is networked, why should I have to travel the web to find it? Why shouldn't it come directly to me, in a user experience that's uniquely tailored to my needs?"

"Standard methods of exchanging and delivering information will open up opportunities for Internet application developers to provide more distinct user experiences for more distinct target markets. If there's a market for a particular type (or brand) of user experience, information standards will only help create that market, by helping users avoid information-based application lock-in (a la Microsoft Office), and forcing developers to cater to the user interface and functionality needs of their particular audience.

This is just the beginning of web design. Not the end."

"Microsoft's latest announcement, called Microsoft .NET, while touted by the likes of Fortune Magazine as a huge "revolution", is really nothing but vaporware, and I think it proves that something has gone very, very wrong in Redmond.

With vaporware, you promise all kinds of features and products that you simply can't sell because you don't really have them. Of course, Microsoft doesn't have one line of .NET code. But .NET is worse than vaporware. In their blasé loftiness, Microsoft isn't even bothering to provide the vapor itself."

"Ya see, the bright side of vague documents like the .NET white paper is that they are a kind of Rorschach test. People read them with preconceived ideas, and since the document is so vague, they think that Microsoft is reiterating their ideas. Dave Winer, president of UserLand software, has many interesting, innovative ideas about software. When he read about Microsoft .NET, he assumed that Microsoft was finally recognizing the same ideas that he'd been talking about for two years. Dave, you give them too much credit. They are completely clueless compared to you. They are playing the trick of psychic hotlines and newspaper horoscopes: by feeding you cloudy, meaningless generalizations, you fall into their trap of thinking that they read your mind. "Today the planetary alignment is such that you will take a big step forward to achieve your goals." The difference is that Dave has real, concrete ideas that can translate into real software, while Microsoft is still in the kind of lalaland they were in 6 years ago when they were talking about how "Cairo" would provide "Information At Your Fingertips," a vision that the Internet fulfilled and Cairo didn't."

"I'm absolutely certain that Net devices will become ubiquitous and will change our relationship to computing and to information. However, I'm just as certain that the industry suffers from a surfeit of hype, which is to be expected in any new, explosively-growing industry.

International Data Corp. (IDC) says there are currently only 560,000 wireless Internet subscribers in the U.S. This is a trivial number given the hype wireless Internet has received. Even if this number were twice as high, it would barely cover early adopters.

CIDCO recently bragged that its MailStation e-mail appliance has sold a total of 17,400 units through the second quarter. The device has been on the market for a year.

While Net devices will eventually become ubiquitous, the devices, applications and content still aren't mature or compelling enough to capture the broad public's interest. Sorely lacking are multi-purpose devices with sharper displays and killer apps. Besides personal information management, telephony and e-mail, we need acceptance of applications such as device-based payment systems,PayPal, and e-books before broad-based acceptance can occur."

"Somehow you still believe that the reason for Microsoft's inability to make IE standards compliant has something to do with a lack of competition. I've read their posts in your mailing list. I know better. You do, too.

Standards have had nothing to do with Netscape's declining market share, and if you can show one statistic that says otherwise, I'd love to see it. The reason for Netscape's declining share is nothing more than Microsoft's monopoly control over the browser marketplace. I would venture that half of the "86%" of users who are using IE now have never even seen Netscape's browser. Remember, in the past two years, more and more people have come on the 'Net -- what's that percentage? half of the current Internet users? -- and the first and only application they use is IE. Even if some have made the effort to switch to Netscape, the fact remains that the integration of the IE browser into the Operating System has played more of a role in the decline in Netscape's market share than any "standards compliance" issue. To deny that is to take a myopic view of the browser wars."

"The WSP has taken exactly the wrong attitude. Instead of heaping scorn on Netscape (and, by association, the Mozilla effort), you should be supporting -- nay, advocating -- the standards compliance that Mozilla and Netscape 6 will bring to the market. You should be advocating for Mozilla's standards goals that you so quickly took credit for a year and a half ago.

You should be encouraging the work of the many developers who are fighting an uphill battle against a monopolist. You should be encouraging the WSP members who are putting a serious effort into the Netscape and Mozilla product.

The WSP so easily turned its back on Netscape and the Mozilla effort. Do you know what your goals really are?"

"MSN and all the other Web properties in Microsoft are incredibly irate at the IE team for the cookie catcher feature. They claim they talked to MSN about the feature. Well, they did, *after* they had already implemented and coded it and Brad Chase and his team gave them an earful.

"What doesn't come out in the Wired article is how obtrusively the third-party cookie notification feature is implemented. If you enable this feature (and right now it's enabled by default), every time you hit a page with a banner that sets a third-party cookie, a warning dialog pops up. Every page. That's not a behavior that anyone's going to tolerate. And the all the Web sites will not be able to respond, even if they're willing, quickly enough.

End result: users will turn off the feature."

"This giant selection of systems to choose from may be great for keeping out of work open source programers fed, but it will hurt the "information" being shared. One of the big features for any of these networks is the ability to quickly find whatever content you're looking for. When it was just Napster (and just mp3's) you could fire up your client, search for Van_Morrison-Brown_Eyed_Girl and *boom* you'd find every type of file under the planet available, things are much cloudier."

"As more distributed filesharing systems are deployed, the value of all the systems will drop (there are various Laws of nature and the Internet to back up this kind of statement). Either Darwin (survival of the best network) or standards will have to be the saviour. And winning via Darwinnian methods can be a painful process."

"It is both a community hangout where hackers cluster, jotting down daily tidbits of info in publicly accessible diaries, and a forum for discussion, like Slashdot. There's also an extra twist: On Slashdot, readers can rate the value of posts as part of a not-always-perfect filtering mechanism. But at Advogato, people rate one another."

"What's revolutionary about Advogato's model is that like the Net itself -- and unlike VeriSign's top-down bureaucracy -- it's self-organizing, self-repairing and therefore hard to corrupt or otherwise compromise. "In all previous systems, once you get a certain number of wrong certificates, the whole thing falls apart," says Levien. In Advogato, at least in theory, the system should continue to function even if abuse is widespread."

"1.Initial enthusiasm (people introduce themselves, and gush a lot about how wonderful it is to find kindred souls).
2.Evangelism (people moan about how few folks are posting to the list, and brainstorm recruitment strategies).
3.Growth (more and more people join, more and more lengthy threads develop, occasional off-topic threads pop up).
4.Community (lots of threads, some more relevant than others; lots of information and advice is exchanged; experts help other experts as well as less experienced colleagues; friendships develop; people tease each other; newcomers are welcomed with generosity and patience; everyone -- newbie and expert alike -- feels comfortable asking questions, suggesting answers, and sharing opinions).
5.Discomfort with diversity (the number of messages increases dramatically; not every thread is fascinating to every reader; people start complaining about the signal-to-noise ratio; person 1 threatens to quit if *other* people don't limit discussion to person 1's pet topic; person 2 agrees with person 1; person 3 tells 1 & 2 to lighten up; more bandwidth is wasted complaining about off-topic threads than is used for the threads themselves; everyone gets annoyed).
6.Finally:

1.Smug complacency and stagnation (the purists flame everyone who asks an 'old' question or responds with humor to a serious post; newbies are rebuffed; traffic drops to a doze-producing level of a few minor issues; all interesting discussions happen by private email and are limited to a few participants; the purists spend lots of time self-righteously congratulating each other on keeping off-topic threads off the list).
OR
2.Maturity (a few people quit in a huff; the rest of the participants stay near stage 4, with stage 5 popping up briefly every few weeks; many people wear out their second or third 'delete' key, but the list lives contentedly ever after)."

"My real feelings is that content management is going to be the basis for all future operating systems. We have too much information stuff, and we want all of our personal information sphere to interoperate will our environment. We need something to manage all this. And we need it to work in a way that doesn't require a call to an engineer to make changes. "

"The basic message to that article is that you'll be better off writing a custom Content Management System for your company than you will be if you use one from a vendor like Vignette. Those tools (pre-packaged CMS's) require so much customization that you end up writing most of a CMS anyway, they claim.

What I think the author misses is that it's a lot of work to write the underside of a CMS. Sure, Vignette's system has a lousy reputation among those who actually use it, mainly because their workflow system sucks... but what so many companies will find is that it's an awesome amount of work to try to develop the services that Vignette provides in your own in-house product... and then you have to try to support it. If IT staffs were static, that would be fine, but they're not."

""Most Internet entrepreneurs treat the users' attention as a Third World country to be strip-mined," said Jakob Nielsen, a Silicon Valley expert on software usability."

""To say that all people are giving their permission for Scour to do this is wrong," said Bruce Forest, director of new-media projects for Viant Inc., an Internet services firm. "The average lug can't configure a VCR, let alone a secure Internet connection.""

"Is this all the web is for, trying to bring the world to us and measure our success in hits and links? Or is the gift of the web its potential to bring our true selves to the world? Not our mundane musings and shout outs to people who recognize us on their home page because we use the same stupid software, but the depths of what is within us. What if everyone spoke their minds and actually put some effort into it? How about presenting who you are - what you are made of - what drives your inner being? Take a chance and create without bounds. Don't waste the power the web has given us in a hit-seeking circle jerk."

"Should we be surprised at the idea that telling the untold stories of the mundane can be perceived as an act of such potential violence that the mere reference to mundane activities needs be banned from the public domain? Not, I submit, if we keep in mind the interrelation between the mundane, storytelling, the untellable, untold story and the construction of the human. In my discussion of Bohannon and the Tiv, I mentioned the manner in which spelling out the story of the mundane makes us strangers to ourselves. If storytelling produces and perpetuates our construction of the human, and the limits of stories are humanity's limits, the mundane rests on precisely that crux: its presence is necessary for being human, but its story cannot be told -- for investigating the parameters of the mundane will radically distort our assumption of our own humanity."

"And if looking at the mundane can reveal how the limit of our humanity lies deep inside us, rather than somewhere in our outer reaches, we may well be in a position to recognize our identity with and responsibility towards the infinite diversity of beings who share our planet."

"Like everyone else in an organization, IT professionals are aiming to pick up their pace and their reach. But while many companies are addressing the escalating demand for information by creating larger "storage bins" and making sure they can pull more information through their expansive networks, others have begun to realize that it's just not going to be that easy."

"Andersen Consulting's Institute for Strategic Change asked IT executives if they had a process for developing actionable information, and they answered with a resounding no. Eighty-six percent reported that they have no process or that they plan to use the traditional IT requirements definition and data-modeling processes. These are the same processes that have been instrumental in creating today's nonactionable information environment. In either case, they aren't talking about an information design process."

"All of the sites owned by Automatic Media will share a common advertising sales force, technology and administrative resources, a move that should cut costs and increase the efficiency of individual sites. The Webzines will maintain their distinctive brand names and editorial voices, though they plan to weave hyperlinks to each other throughout their respective sites."

"Automatic Media doesn't expect most of its growth to come from hiring teams of high-paid journalists and writers to expand editorial operations. Instead, the company plans to place a growing emphasis on user participation in discussions about the stories and columns on Feed, Suck and other editorial sites. That approach, aimed at attracting advertisers as the user base grows, has the double advantage of being highly interactive and relatively cheap."

"The Web is not a mirror of the print industry, that's why advertising is not so important. The unique thing about the Web is that it's interactive. We all know that. The challenge is to squeeze quality, high-integrity writing out of the readers, and present it back to them with your seal of quality. That's a much employing writers and running ads as the print industry does.

I was disappointed to see that Automatic Media is using SlashDot-style conferencing for the Suck-Feed combination. I strongly believe this is the wrong approach. Better to start new Sucks and Feeds using the traditions of sarcasm and literacy that each of these pubs have done such a great job of starting."

"Alison MacLean's film may appear to be another in a rather truncated and peculiar line of movies that perhaps began with Drugstore Cowboy: the needle nostalgia film. These are movies about people shooting heroin and questing for meaning in the seventies, made, one surmises, for people who may or may not have quested for meaning and shot heroin in the late eighties and early nineties while wearing seventies clothes. I hope this doesn't sound too glib and dismissive, however, because Maclean's movie, like the much-revered short-story collection by Denis Johnson on which it is based, happens to be a real work of art, which these days is about as rare as finding someone who still shoots heroin, as opposed to snorts it."

"Ask anyone who works on the editorial or design side of a media Web site what the worst part of their job is. After they exhaust themselves on the number of hours they work and how little their options are now worth, talk often turns to the publishing tools they use to manage their site and how much they hate them."

"Tribune Interactive, which runs chicagotribune.com, is in the process of moving off Vignette to a home-grown platform, as is CNet itself. Similarly, washingtonpost.com is said to be walking away from a reported seven-figure investment in customizing the FutureTense product (now owned by OpenMarket) in favor of a system its employees and contractors are building. ''We couldn't wait for them to fix all the problems anymore,'' says one person familiar with the washingtonpost.com decision to build its own system. ''There are profound holes in their system, like workflow, which is the most important part of a content-management system. I mean, come on already.''

The head of product development at one New York-based media site who has supervised development on both homegrown and packaged systems says: ''These programs are huge, expensive and about as useless and clumsy as you can imagine. Never again, I promise you.''

"''We're extremely committed to the Vignette platform,'' says an Internet CEO to me a year ago who had recently signed a large six-figure check for the system. ''What does the Vignette platform do?'' I asked him. After an uncomfortable 10 seconds, he moved his hands in circles and said, ''You know, puts the stuff up.'"'

"Despite the dot-com downturn, Silicon Valley is embarking on one of its favorite pastimes: investing in a full-blown technology fad. This one, called “peer-to-peer” computing, is inspired by the controversial music-sharingservice Napster Inc."

"Attention Napster fans: Are you aware that when you trade songs on computers you're engaged in the hottest new business model to pique venture capitalists' interest? Yep, according to the Wall Street Journal, the "latest tech fad" turned buzzword is P-to-P, or peer-to-peer. You know, your computer talks to my computer and we share information without going through a middleman server anywhere. OK, we dumped the middleman, but God, don't let us lose anything else: You wouldn't want to be a participant in this "hot space" and be referred to as "just another PP.""

"Babies born weighing less than five and a half pounds are almost four times less likely to graduate from high school by age 19 than their normal-birthweight siblings, according to a study in the June issue of the American Sociological Review."

"The Scottish company behind Dolly the sheep has been criticised for inserting a woman's DNA into thousands of sheep without her knowledge." "Dr Sue Mayer, director of GeneWatch, said: "People give blood and organs thinking they will be shared freely with other people. They are given as a gift. "Certainly most donors do not think their DNA will be patented, inserted into animals or bacteria and used to boost the profits of some company."