"The two companies are developing a new subscription service to let Net users swap songs copyrighted by the recording giant. Members of the proposed service would be able to search and download songs--legally--from Bertelsmann's entire catalog of artists, including Santana, the Dave Matthews Band, Christina Aguilera and Whitney Houston.

Bertelsmann said it will drop its lawsuit against San Mateo, Calif.-based Napster once the service successfully launches. For now, the company will offer a loan to Napster to create the subscription service."

"[It] involves sending and receiving homing bits to a user's PC from multiple locations and then studying them to "triangulate" its geographic location. Quova, based in Redwood City, Calif., is a leader in this approach. It has scattered computers in about 20 cities around the world that are now constantly bouncing bits off of Internet addresses. The computers study both the route those signals take--which servers and where--and how long it takes them to reach their destination. Quova says it can provide a Web surfer's city in one-fiftieth of a second with 90% accuracy."

"The heaviest of the 150 sites surveyed was JC Penney, with 451KB. The chubby bubby was more than twice the weight of the second heaviest contender, Spiegel, which weighed in at 216KB.

Scantly-clad Victoria's Secret models parade on the third fattest site, which weighed in at 173KB."

"Chris Johnson writes: "I've just finished an interesting scientific analysis of several mp3 encoders and have my findings up on the Web. The process involves differencing a 'sonogram' image from an encoded test signal with the image of the original signal, and then producing response curves showing the disparity in direct signal volume, and over time. Umm . . . which is just to say this is probably the most rigorous analysis of any encoders anywhere on the web, and very geeky (in a good way). LAME carries the day, but BladeEnc shows that it has a completely distinctive sonic approach- and Fraunhofer proves unacceptable (in the version I tested) for audiophile use, though it's unbeatable at very low bit rates."

""Really, all hell has broken loose," said Douglas Eymer, the creative director at Partners & Simons, a Boston-based marketing communications firm that works with many startups. "It used to be that designing a business presentation was a slow, deliberate process. Now anyone can create a PowerPoint presentation very quickly, and the design standards have really been dulled down.""

"When you cast your vote this month, you're not directly electing the president--you're electing members of the electoral college. They elect the president. An archaic, unnecessary system? Mathematics shows, says one concerned American, that by giving your vote to another, you're ensuring the future of our democracy."

""Experts, scholars, deep thinkers could make errors on electoral reform," Natapoff decided, "but nine-year-olds could explain to a Martian why the Yankees lost in 1960, and why it was right. And both have the same underlying abstract principle.""

"Instant Runoff Voting is a winner-take-all system that ensures that a winning candidate will receive a majority of votes rather than a simple plurality. In plurality voting -- as used in most U.S. elections -- candidates can win with less than a majority when there are more than two candidates running for the office. In contrast, IRV elects a majority candidate while still allowing voters to support a candidate who is not a front-runner. IRV is a sensible method in single winner elections.

IRV allows voters to rank candidates as their first choice, second choice, third, fourth and so on. If a candidate does not receive a clear majority of votes on the first count, a series of runoff counts are conducted, using each voter’s top choices indicated on the ballot."

" It's a dilemma many voters face whenever there's still a serious third or fourth candidate for president after the primaries. This year, let's say your first choice would be Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan. But is voting for a candidate with no serious chance of winning just "throwing away your vote"? Worse, is it in effect a vote for the less desirable of the two realistic candidates? Is it wrong to vote for Nader if you would prefer Al Gore over George W. Bush? Or for Buchanan if you would prefer Bush over Gore?

The answer is ultimately subjective, but objective analysis will take you further than you might have thought."

"A year ago, few would have predicted that a simple software application written by a college Freshman would capture the international media main-stage. Fewer still would have anticipated that this modest computer-science project would quickly swell to grotesque proportions, terrifying the mighty Titans of Hollywood's entertainment industry, taxing the best wits of US judges and high-priced legal teams. But all this, and more, it has managed to do.

Stunning performance for a Freshman project to be sure; but a perverse complex of acrimonious and absurdly convoluted political contests in Washington, in which a conservative Senator has aligned himself against his own legislation, and of which Napster forms the raw core, has outshone even these considerable achievements."

"Corporate executives can talk until they're blue in the face about wireless Web strategies, and they can point to all manner of sophisticated technologies used in building a wireless Web infrastructure. There might even be promising applications on the horizon: wireless IP-based radio, perhaps, or less-expensive global positioning systems for your car. But so far, the wireless Web looks like a giant sinkhole, with a lot of money and talent pouring in to solve problems that don't really exist. Right now, there's not much evidence that "the Web on your phone" is anything but dead on arrival, just another tech bubble getting ready to burst."

"The overall assessment of Wired News' performance on this story must be negative. Its original article was harshly polemical and misleading on several counts. Its second, short article was part of the emerging and misleading media consensus. Its third, much longer article was also harshly polemical, falsely asserts that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet, and wraps up this false assertion with two additional false assertions about Gore that it recycled from the conservative press. None of these articles was remotely balanced or fair, and none of them reported a single scrap of positive information about Gore's contribution, except to portray it in a negative light. Finally, Wired News' most recent article is misleading about the contents of the earlier articles and grossly disingenuous in the way that it supplies positive evaluations that were entirely missing from the earlier articles.

Wired News' articles about Al Gore and the Internet did not simply contribute an urban myth to American culture. They were part and parcel of a hysterical campaign of character assassination against an innocent man based on lies and distortions. This campaign should bring disgrace to Wired News and all of the other media organizations that were part of it. It should also cause sober reflection on the corrupt state of public discourse in this country."

"Carnivore, the FBI's controversial email snooping program, is part of covert surveillance triad known inside the bureau as the "DragonWare Suite", according to recently declassified documents. The documents also outline how the DragonWare Suite is more than simply an email snooping program: it's capable of reconstructing the Web surfing trail of someone under investigation.

According to an analysis of the declassified documents by SecurityFocus, a California-based computer security firm, the DragonWare Suite can "reconstruct Web pages exactly as a surveillance target saw them while surfing the Web"."

""DragonWare suite? What were they thinking?" house majority leader Richard Armey (Republican, Texas) asked incredulously."

"Babies born prematurely have significantly smaller brains and may have learning problems later in life, a study suggests."

"The risks of problems later in life increased the earlier the birth. A baby whose birth weight was less than two pounds or 1,000g was at particular risk.

"They found that children born prematurely were at risk of having lower IQs, and were more likely to need special education or have to repeat a year at school.

The risks of problems later in life increased the earlier the birth. A baby whose birth weight was less than two pounds or 1,000g was at particular risk."

"Writing in the medical journal Chest, Dr Stephen Rennard, said that he had always found that his grandmother's chicken soup - made in traditional Jewish style complete with matzo dumplings - had been helpful during bouts of illness.

He decided to run laboratory tests not only on his family's own recipe, but on 13 different commercial chicken soup brands.

"They found that many of the varied ingredients of the soups helped to stop the movement of white blood cells called neutrophils, which are a key body response to the challenge of viral infections."

"The scalability of a Gnutella network to accommodate more users performing more searches is limited by the lowest bandwidth links prevalent within the network. Usage of the public Gnutella network has grown to the point that a "Dial-Up Modem Barrier" has been hit, with the result that network usability has degraded considerably."

"From millions of measurements of the public Gnutella network taken by Clip2 DSS over a period of months, we have become intimately familiar with the technical issues facing Gnutella networks. Our reports on these issues have been read by tens of thousands and generated considerable discussion. We are now proud to announce the availability of the Clip2 Reflector, a pivotal application that can simultaneously address some of the problems on which we have reported and expand the possible uses of nutella.

The Reflector is a super peer, the first of an entirely new species of Gnutella application. The Reflector can shield a network against unnecessary traffic from the public Gnutella network, bringing relief to network administrators frustrated by the bandwidth costs of allowing their users to run Gnutella. Using the Reflector as a cornerstone, anyone can set up an efficient filesharing system in minutes, either isolated or connected to the public Gnutella network. Public-access Reflectors connected to the public Gnutella network can simultaneously provide a better user experience for users on slower connections and improve overall network performance. Technically, the Reflector enables a brokered peer-to-peer model for Gnutella while co-existing with Gnutella's pure peer-to-peer structure. Best of all, it is fully compatible with the majority of the installed base of end-user Gnutella software."

"I think all this hooey is simply public self-expression. And it's a good thing. If it makes you happy to call it a blog, go for it. You could call it a desk for all I care. Just keep doing it. I believe, now more that ever, that all this self-expression is going to change the world.

Haven't you noticed? It already has. How many people do you know who you've never met? Or, how many people have you met online? How much has being online changed your perceptions and ideas? Where do you go when you need to connect with other people? How much of your time is spent conversing with people who aren't in the same room with you? Where do you get your music? Your fun? Your ideas? Your ... faith?

Now think about life before you got online. See the difference?

Put simply, expressing yourself online is a gift to the web, because it lets strangers see the world through your eyes, if only for a moment. And if we all did that a little more, I think the world would be a more tolerant place."

"What would you say if I told you that you can create your own diagnostic tools using nothing more than commonly available software you can download over the Internet and some simple CSS? You'd probably say I was crazy. You might be right, but so am I. You really can save yourself a lot of time and headaches with a combination of a browser and some fairly simple CSS.

How? As we'll see, simple user stylesheets can be used to:

• See exactly how tables are structured
• Figure out how table cells are aligned
• Quickly see which images on a page still need ALT text
• Point out where you still have FONT tags lurking in your markup
• Expose the overall page structure
"

"Adar and Huberman argue that the anonymous nature of Gnutella is a key factor in its apparent demise. "In order for distributed systems with no central monitoring to succeed," they conclude, "a large amount of voluntary cooperation is required, a requirement that is very hard to fulfill in systems with large user populations that remain anonymous."

While Gnutella may indeed be suffering from a tragedy of the commons, I don't believe that removing anonymity would make much of a difference. Leaving aside the obvious legal implications of adding user identities to the Gnutella network (wouldn't the RIAA just love that), it's not the ideal architectural solution to the Gnutella problem. Even if there weren't legal repercussions to logging on as Michael Sippey and sharing that bootleg copy of Kid A that I happened to get my hands on, I'd still just log on, point my Gnutella client to an empty directory on my hard drive, and search away. After all, the incentive of people knowing that they swiped Kid A from me isn't enough to encourage me to share. And conversely, the disincentive of people knowing that I'm searching without sharing isn't enough to encourage me to point my Gnutella client to a richer directory.

A more appropriate solution to the Gnutella problem would be a market-based approach, where the content itself is used as currency."

"Home-brewed currency, or "Mojo," lies at the core of this new world. Users cannot simply take and give as they do with Napster and every other file-sharing service. Rather, those who download the free, open-source new release in November must use Mojo to buy and sell content for prices that they themselves determine.

This is how it works: Download a free Mojo Nation "agent" and set it loose. The 2,000 users who are testing the beta version earn 1 million Mojo just for signing up, but new members can earn currency only by sharing what they already have -- unused computer power on their desktop. Mojo Nation will pay users Mojo for letting the network "rent" their computer's disk space, processing power or whatever else the system needs. The prices change according to the rules of supply and demand: The more people want of what you've got, the more you can expect to earn. "

"Common sense dictates that you shouldn't stick anything in your ear, not even your finger – unless you want to make a phone call with the latest innovation from a Japanese telecom researcher."

"To hear incoming calls, the wearer puts a finger in one ear. The caller's voice is converted to vibrations, which travel through the hand, the finger and into the ear canal. The wearer talks back via the wristband's microphone.

That's not the only sleight of hand necessary. To answer the phone, called Whisper because incoming calls cause the wristband to vibrate, the wearer taps their thumb and index finger together."

"In an earlier work (Buxton, 1986), I speculated on what conclusions a future anthropologist would draw about our physical make-up, based on the tools (namely computers) used by our society. The objective was to point out that these tools reflect a very distorted view of our physiology and the motor/sensory skills. For example, the near absence of pressure sensors reflects a failure to exploit a fundamental and well-developed capability of the hand. The impoverished use of sound reflects a waste of our ability to use audio to make sense out of our environment.

The paper dealt primarily with the domain of the visible and tangible. Nevertheless, things have changed very little in the intervening years. Furthermore, it can well be argued that things are even more distorted if we look at how the technology reflects less visible human traits such as cognition, or social interactions.

In what follows, we use a technology-as-mirror metaphor. One intent is to provide some human-centred criteria for evaluating designs. Another is to help foster a mind-set that will lead to improved designs in the future. "

"Our metaphor is one of three separate mirrors, each reflecting one of these levels. In order to be judged acceptable, designs must provide an acceptable degree of fidelity in how they reflect each of these three aspects of human makeup and activity."

"This study compared voice browsing with traditional mouse-based browsing. It attempted to identify which of three common hypertext forms (linear slide show, grid/tiled map, and hierarchical menu) are well suited to voice navigation, and whether voice navigation is helped by numbering links. The study shows that voice control adds approximately 50% to the performance time for certain types of tasks."

"The essence of the Bayesian approach is to provide a mathematical rule explaining how you should change your existing beliefs in the light of new evidence. In other words, it allows scientists to combine new data with their existing knowledge or expertise.

The canonical example is to imagine that a precocious newborn observes his first sunset, and wonders whether the sun will rise again or not. He assigns equal prior probabilities to both possible outcomes, and represents this by placing one white and one black marble into a bag. The following day, when the sun rises, the child places another white marble in the bag. The probability that a marble plucked randomly from the bag will be white (ie, the child’s degree of belief in future sunrises) has thus gone from a half to two-thirds. After sunrise the next day, the child adds another white marble, and the probability (and thus the degree of belief) goes from two-thirds to three-quarters. And so on. Gradually, the initial belief that the sun is just as likely as not to rise each morning is modified to become a near-certainty that the sun will always rise.

In a Bayesian analysis, in other words, a set of observations should be seen as something that changes opinion, rather than as a means of determining ultimate truth."

"...in the five years that Cheney headed up Halliburton, the company garnered some $2.3 billion in federal government contracts, nearly double the amount of government business the company did in the five-year period preceding his arrival. In all, Halliburton managed to obtain some $3.8 billion in government contracts and taxpayer-insured loans during Cheney’s tenure. These gains occurred while the company more than doubled its contributions, from $534,750 to $1,212,000, to the political parties and members of Congress. Halliburton’s lobbying expenditures also substantially increased while Cheney ran the company, from $280,000 in 1996 to $600,000 in 1999. Tracking the escalating lobbying expenses from year to year during that period, Royce and Heller note that the "upward trend parallels the increasing success Halliburton has had in winning government contracts, loans and guarantees under Cheney’s direction.""

""My world has gone nuts for liking computers too much and not seeing them clearly for what they are," he says in an interview with Salon about the essay.

What they are, Lanier argues, is far from the omnipotent engines of destruction envisioned by other scientists-turned-cautionaries such as Sun Microsystems' Bill Joy. Nor are they saviors, declares Lanier. Neither the evil nanobots of Joy's nightmare, nor the poverty-curing "mind children" that Moravec envisions are possible, says Lanier. Simply put, software just won't allow it. Code can't keep up with processing power now, and it never will.

"Software is brittle," he says. "If every little thing isn't perfect, it breaks. We have to have an honest appreciation for how little progress we've made in this area.""

"Agents make it possible to communicate from a Jabber client to virtually any other instant messaging system. When you have installed support for the client you want to emulate, i.e. ICQ, you can use your WinJab client in the same way as your ICQ client or your MSN client. With the help of agents WinJab can work as a client for all systems that has agent support. The agents are installed centrally at the Jabber server as transport protocols and appear dynamically in your WinJab client under "Agents". You never have to download these agents separetely, they appear automagically in your WinJab."

"This recent startup has taken a grand leap forward by restoring the sense of collaboration and camaraderie that disappeared with the advent of the web. Using their patented technology, web site owners can lay out content spatially, generating a 2D overhead landscape view that unites web content with people.

This 2D stuff is very important. Not only are we still a decade away from having displays with resolutions sufficient for life-like 3D, their 2D view is so natural that it seems familiar—and, being pure HTML, its pretty easy to convert a web site over to the new view.

When you wander a store powered by Urbanpixel, you don’t see laundry lists of products. Instead, you traverse a virtual store with clustered displays of items, just like in the real world. And, like the real world, you see people, in the form of iconic avatars, wandering through the store with you."

"Information architects assert that 3-D creations encourage communication, enhance education, clarify complex data and stimulate online sales, along with giving Web surfers a more lifelike environment.

On the Internet, 3-D "is going to change the world," said Neil Trevett, president of the Web3D Consortium, an industry group trying to establish the technical standards for delivering 3-D data online. "The question is when, not if.""

""We live in a three-dimensional world," Mr. Thwaites said. "Historically, representations of that world have been flat, so people have constantly been trying to make them more like the real world. We've been chasing virtual reality for a long time, from cave paintings all the way up to computer-immersive environments."

"Most abstract information spaces work poorly in 3D because they are non-physical. If anything, they have at least a hundred dimensions, so visualizing an information space in 3D means throwing away 97 dimensions instead of 98: hardly a big enough improvement to justify the added interface complexity.

In particular, navigation through a hyperspace (such as a website) is often very confusing in 3D, and users frequently get lost. 3D navigation looks very cool in a demo, but that's because you are not flying through the hyperspace yourself. Thus, you don't have to remember what's behind you or worry about what remote objects are hidden by near-by objects. The person giving the demo knows where everything is (the first law of demos: never try to actually use the system for anything; simply step through a well-rehearsed script that does not touch anything that might cause a crash).

Avoid virtual reality gimmicks (say, a virtual shopping mall) that emulate the physical world. The goal of Web design is to be better than reality. If you ask users to "walk around the mall", you are putting your interface in the way of their goal. In the physical world, you need to schlepp between shops; on the Web you teleport through cyberspace directly to your destination using a navigational topology that conforms to user needs (assuming good information architecture, of course). "

"This page is intended to serve as a public forum for exploring and extending my in-situ WYSIWYG web editor, written in JavaScript for the Internet Explorer 5 browser and DOM. An earlier version was featured in this article by BYTE columnist & web-groupware guru Jon Udell. (Thanks Jon!)

Here you'll find the latest incarnation of the editor script and the JS bookmarklets to enable anyone using IE 5 to outfit their browser for instant, as-you-surf, rich content editing of any HTML document on the Web. The editor is embedded in this page, so you can Try It Now! - go ahead, give it a spin! - but only if you're viewing the page with IE 5. Apologies to Netscape users; as NS 6 oozes its way into beta, I'm hoping to create a Mozilla & W3C-friendly cross-browser version."

"A Magic Problem Solver is technology that non-technologists believe can dissolve stubborn problems on contact. Just sprinkle a little Java or ODBC or clustering onto your product or service, and, voila , problems evaporate. The downside to Magic Problem Solvers is that they never work as advertised. In fact, the unrealistic expectations created by asserting that a technology is a Magic Problem Solver may damage its real technological value: Java, for example, has succeeded far beyond any realistic expectations, but it hasn’t succeeded beyond the unrealistic expectations it spurred early on."

"XML makes it even more imperative than ever that an enterprise understand and resolve the different words and meanings that it uses to refer to things important to it. To illustrate, people may variously be called customers or clients or debtors – all terms used to refer to people or organizations that buy from the enterprise. These different terms indicate semantic differences. An organization must know the different meanings of its data (as meta data) that are used throughout the business. It must then define standard terminology – and establish agreed meaning – as integrated meta data to be used by the enterprise. Only then can these terminology differences be resolved so that semantic integrity is maintained."

"We may rehearse this fundamental axiom of descriptive markup in terms of a classical SGML polemic: the doubly-delimited information objects in an SGML/XML document are described by markup in a meaningful, self-documenting way through the use of names which are carefully selected by domain experts for element type names, attribute names, and attribute values. This is true of XML in 1998, was true of SGML in 1986, and was true of Brian Reid's Scribe system in 1976. However, of itself, descriptive markup proves to be of limited relevance as a mechanism to enable information interchange at the level of the machine.

As enchanting as it is to contemplate the apparent 'semantic' clarity, flexibility, and extensibility of XML vis-à-vis HTML (e.g., how wonderfully perspicuous XML <bookTitle> seems when compared to HTML <i>), we must reckon with the cold fact that XML does not of itself enable blind interchange or information reuse. XML may help humans predict what information might lie "between the tags" in the case of <trunk> </trunk>, but XML can only help. For an XML processor, <trunk> and <i> and <booktitle> are all equally (and totally) meaningless. Yes, meaningless.

Just like its parent metalanguage (SGML), XML has no formal mechanism to support the declaration of semantic integrity constraints, and XML processors have no means of validating object semantics even if these are declared informally in an XML DTD. XML processors will have no inherent understanding of document object semantics because XML (meta-)markup languages have no predefined application-level processing semantics. XML thus formally governs syntax only - not semantics."

"In any case, regular folks must be able to create their own content and contribute it to the Internet. This sounds easy enough, but is actually quite a challenge. The biggest problem is that most people are (and always have been) bad content creators. That's why we have professional writers, graphic designers, filmmakers, speakers, musicians, and other types of media professionals. When an average person tries to create content, they typically don't have much to say and what they do say is often said badly.

The vast wasteland of Geocities confirms this. Giving users a home-page editing program does not turn them into good writers."

"How can we increase the number of people who contribute content to the Web? I see a few promising approaches."

"Weblogs are of so highly varying quality that I don't consider them a true solution to the problem. Somebody who is a good writer and has something to communicate will make a good weblog, for sure (see, for example, my current favorite: Doc Searls). But the average weblog is unreadable.

However, I agree with Evan that there are aspects of the weblog format that lend themselves to improved content:

• The basic idea is that you write a short observation or note whenever it occurs to you: this is surely less intimidating than having to write an entire article.
• You can get away with the short notes even for substantial issues because of the weblogs' reliance on links to other sites as the way to present the full story.
• Even if your own writing is not that great, you will still provide a valuable service if you can identify sources of other good content on the Web and link to it. Thus, weblogs are a form of selection-based content creation: you have the entire Web to choose from and you get to post a few links every day. The best current example is Tomalak's Realm: he usually doesn't write anything, so the editorial selection of links and quotes is the only service provided by the site and that is enough to make it the second-most useful site on the Web today (after Google)."

"...Well, you know, we all want to change the world.” The Beatles defiantly made this statement on their enormously popular White Album in the late 60's. Some 30-odd years later, this tune has been running through our minds, in seemingly never-ending techno-ambient fashion, as the Internet industry routinely uses the “R” word in trade press and business plans. We are deluged with “revolutionary technologies,” “revolutionary new business models,” and “revolutionary revolutions” to the point that the word doesn't carry any clout anymore (other examples of formerly reserved words diluted by marketing hyperbole include “visionary,” “pioneer,” and “guru”). Over the past year, we have been hearing much ado from the various factions and fighting from the front lines of the Blogging Revolution. This Web trend certainly has the earmarks of an uprising, as well as its fair share of passion from all sides, but is that enough to categorize it with other great revolutions throughout history? Since the craze began, commentary on weblogs has run from the astute to the absurd. Since we are all slaves to Internet time, we decided to throw our own hat into the ring by providing metacommentary on the craze, while the latest rash of historical retrospectives are still fresh in our RAM."

"The fact is - with very few exceptions - e-business never packs the impact of the independent content producer. These are the people who are pushing the boundaries, harnessing the power of the web, and building the things people want and need.

No one throws large amounts of money at them, and the stock market doesn't rise and fall on their pronouncement, but they are the heft, the substance, and the texture of the web.

They are what makes the web go. That hasn't changed.

Like the individuals they are, their contributions are varied: some catalog the strings of the web, while others spin breathtaking tales. People are building communities and raising awareness. They share their tools, their ideas, their passions, and their dreams.

These are the people who make a difference.

I want you to make a difference."