Salon Microsoft's .Net: Visionary or vaporware?
"My first thought on hearing last week that Microsoft has dubbed its new technology scheme ".Net" was, There they go again. "

"Microsoft's gamble on XML as the Net's next-generation lingua franca makes bold sense. But the company's plan to be all things to all people on all devices smacks of a lack of focus.

While Microsoft is fumbling around trying to get every piece of its giant universal everything-machine to work together, the next Napster developer will be inventing some specific cool tool that works today and captures the fancy of millions. While Gates places his chips all over the table, others will place their bets on the winning squares -- and quite possibly walk off with the game.

Of course, at that point Microsoft can still revert to Plan B: What it hasn't built, it can always buy."

Dan Gillmor .Net initiative is close to all Microsoft, all the time
"TALK about integration. The Microsoft.Net (pronounced dot-net) initiative is the ultimate merger of the Windows operating system, Microsoft's other core products and just about everything else -- including the Internet itself.

It's monumentally Microsoft-centric, far more than necessary. It's also a move in the right direction, if you have accepted that the Internet has become the most important computing platform of all and that software is morphing into Net-based services."

"Anyone who doubted the company's intention to use its desktop monopoly as leverage in the next generation of computing just isn't paying attention. The .Net platform isn't all Microsoft, all the time, but it's close.

Despite some share-the-wealth rhetoric from Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, the overall message seemed clear enough to me: You won't be required to use Windows and other Microsoft products, but if you don't, you'll fall irretrievably behind the curve."

The New York Times The Search Engine as Cyborg
[requires 'free' registration]
"Five ears ago, search engines seemed like the Web's salvation. Today, they need some saviors of their own."

"It is not just the vastness of the Web that is causing problems. Consider the way people search: Typical users enter single keywords, cross their fingers and hit the search buttons. And when they are faced with lists of 1,000 results, they usually click on the first few options instead of refining their searches by adding keywords or trying new terms.

The confluence of technological limitations and simple searching methods means that only two kinds of online searchers are well served: those looking for very popular terms and those who are using uncommon words to hunt for specific things. But the majority of searchers, whose requests fall somewhere between, are finding searching as frustrating as ever.

To cope, many search engines have concluded that simply indexing more pages is not the answer. Instead, they have decided to rely on the one resource that was once considered a cop-out: human judgment. Search engines have become more like cyborgs, part human, part machine."

First Monday The Work of Information Mediators: A Comparison of Librarians and Intelligent Software Agents
"Intelligent software agents promise to traverse and organize information spaces for us, alert us, remind us, call for a refrigerator repair-person, communicate with each other ... to fundamentally alter how we accomplish many of our daily tasks. These red-hot and revolutionary software critters have a lot to learn from their closest human peers: librarians. As I read and think about how intelligent systems reason, search, classify, and filter information, I'm struck repeatedly with how librarians do exactly these same tasks. Both act as information mediators for the end user: both negotiate information spaces and retrieve information relevant to a particular user or goal. Librarians have been efficiently accomplishing many of the tasks at which the artificial intelligence community is now working to make software agents competent. Therefore, the development of software agents can be informed by a look at how human information agents do their work.

This paper will examine the characteristics of agency, the work of librarians as information mediators, the differences between human and software agents, the possible tasks for software agents in libraries, and speculate on the future of human and software agency."

redux [06.15.00]
The New York Times The Library as the Latest Web Venture
[requires 'free' registration]
"When Carrie Larkworthy, a student at Harvard University, is faced with a research project, getting a book out of the library is the last thing on her mind. Instead she sits in her dormitory room and logs onto the Web, starting with Harvard's online system for searching and retrieving journal articles. "I hate the library, so I try to avoid it," Ms. Larkworthy said. "It's such a big facility that you have to search through.""

""...But new efforts are afoot to change that. Several companies are racing to put the full texts of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, old and new, on the Web."

"These electronic library projects are not attempts to compete with the budding electronic book industry, which offers books for downloading to handheld devices and is focused on popular fiction, like Stephen King's recent Web-only novella, "Riding the Bullet," and on other newly published trade books. The library projects have very little to do with the debate over the promise or pitfalls of gadgets that let people read novels electronically from the comfort of their beds.

In fact, the new effort to build an electronic library is not about reading at all. It is about the power of electronic searching."

Digital LIbrary Magazine Who Is Going to Mine Digital Library Resources? And How?
To partially answer the questions raised in the title of this paper -- "Who is going to mine digital library resources? And how?" -- today’s end-users are not capable of mining today’s digital libraries, let alone the more comprehensive digital libraries of the foreseeable future."

"Today’s attention to database creation and better search engines fails to address a critical consumer need. Better digital libraries and more powerful search engines will not get quality materials into the hands of the end-user. Developers of digital libraries must work with content experts to develop an array of information products that help users identify and understand the available resources."

The Standard Consumers Fight Back, Anonymously
"Over the last few years it's become an accepted truth that as technology advances, privacy recedes. E-mail, computer hard drives and Internet surfing trails have become rich fields mined by marketers and law enforcement for information individuals previously assumed was sacrosanct.

Now, that may be changing. The tables are turning as new technologies emerge that return to consumers some of the control over their private information once thought lost."

"It's unlikely that in the future everyone will choose total online anonymity. But the new privacy technologies have implications that go beyond the short-term questions of law enforcement and marketing.

"The real dimension here isn't the choice between privacy and disclosure," says Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. "The real story is the impact it has on our sense of identity. The fact that we can selectively disclose things on the Internet is changing the nature of social interactions. If you can change your persona at will in cyberspace, that begins affecting what you think of your own identity and who you think you are.""

redux [04.30.00]
The New York Times Magazine The Eroded Self
[requires 'free' registration]
"A liberal state should respect the distinction between public and private speech because it recognizes that the ability to expose in some contexts aspects of our identity that we conceal in other contexts is indispensable to freedom, friendship, even love. Friendship and romantic love can't be achieved without intimacy, and intimacy, in turn, depends upon the selective and voluntary disclosure of personal information that we don't share with everyone else. Moreover...privacy is also necessary for the development of human individuality. Any writer will understand the importance of reflective solitude in refining arguments and making unexpected connections: in an odd but widely shared experience, many of us seem to have our best ideas when we are in the shower. Indeed, studies of creativity show that it's during periods of daydreaming and seclusion that the most creative thought takes place, as individuals allow ideas and impressions to run freely through their minds without fear that their untested thoughts will be exposed and taken out of context. "

"We are trained in this country to think of all concealment as a form of hypocrisy. But perhaps we are about to learn how much may be lost in a culture of transparency -- the capacity for creativity and eccentricity, for the development of self and soul, for understanding, friendship and even love. There is nothing inevitable about the erosion of privacy in cyberspace, just as there is nothing inevitable about its reconstruction. We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. What we need now is the will."

redux [01.31.00]
The Christian Science Monitor "Database Nation" -- Big Business, not Big Brother, greatest danger to privacy
"While issues of privacy have been far more debated in this day and age then environmental concerns were in Carson's era (for instance, polls consistently show that the public does care very much about privacy, both online and off), Garfinkel's work is the first time a writer has decisively and persuasively marshaled all the information together to show how our right to privacy is under constant attack, often by people who claim to have our best interests at heart. "

redux [04.30.00]
Salon Twilight of the crypto-geeks
"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."

Computers Freedom & Privacy Conference 2000 Audio Transcripts: Neal Stephenson Dinner Speach

News.Com Keep it simple, Handspring co-founder urges
"As founder of both Palm and Handspring, which makes a PDA (personal digital assistant) based on Palm's operating system, Hawkins referred to his own misconceptions of the device market, as well as to industry-wide missteps, many of which were driven by misreading consumer needs and interests, he said.

"It's not so easy to do," he said. "People get swept up in conventional thinking, which is often wrong."

Hawkins pointed to the idea that computers should adapt to people intelligently as an example of such misguided thinking. Rather than expecting so-called smart devices, designers should create practical tools that people will want to learn to use, like the keyboard, he said."

ZDNet Smart Homes, Dumb Ideas
"I've been getting a lot of press releases lately from newcomers to the computing scene who expect to make a killing when the "smart home" comes into its own. This pipe dream has been floating around the business for years and always reemerges during boom times when people are rich and can't seem to figure out what to do with their disposable income. There's nothing like wasting your money on a smart home.

The idea sounds reasonable on the surface: Create an energy-saving home that monitors itself and make everything networked and coordinated. But the basic idea always expands into something silly."

OReilly.Com Dialog with an Internet Toaster
""Why haven't you given me any new scripts to run for the past two months?" whined my toaster.

I was so surprised I almost dropped my Wheaties on the floor. It didn't bother me that the toaster spoke out of turn; I had installed the adaptive interface as a lark when I got the thing six months ago. What threw me was simply how many months had passed since I became bored with writing scripts to rotate English muffins or adjust the top-brown feature to the thickness of the cheese.

"Hardware problems," I said to gain time. Jeez, what was the world coming to--how could I let my own toaster make me feel guilty?"

redux [06.15.00]
Fast Company Design Vision
""We know how to do amazing things," [Thackara] says, "and we're filling the world with amazing devices. But we cannot answer the most important question: What is this stuff really for?""

"The time has also come, he says, to shift some of the focus of innovation away from work and toward everyday life. The early users of digital devices are almost always business users, so product designers have a natural inclination to create and design products with the workplace in mind. But that tendency can make for bad design, especially when those products migrate beyond business. People put up with technical difficulties in their work lives that they would never tolerate in their personal lives. So forget "personal" computing, Thackara says, and embrace "social" computing. "As computing migrates from ugly boxes on our desks to something that suffuses everything around us, a new relationship will emerge between what's real and what's virtual, what's mental and what's material. There are few limits to the number of services that we could develop if we simply took an aspect of daily life and looked for ways to make it better.""

redux [04.13.00]
The New York Times A Chip in Every Pot
[requires 'free' registration]
"Russell Robertson was grappling with an unusual assignment.

As an industrial designer, his mission was to figure out how kitchen appliances will be designed when, as he put it, "the fridge talks to the coffee pot."

His eyes twinkled as he spoke, but he was not kidding about the basic concept. In fact, while the idea may have once sounded ridiculous, predictions of the advent of such devices are now becoming almost clichéd."

"But predicting whether a technology will be adopted is critical for companies that want to succeed, or even survive, in the marketplace. The ones that can figure out what will be deemed useful, superfluous or downright ridiculous will win. And today, as tiny, wireless computer systems are being perfected and the Internet is allowing the distribution of data in seconds, dozens of appliance manufacturers are betting that some sort of pervasive-computing devices will come to be considered as necessary as a telephone. The trick, for them, is to figure out which ones."

""But one of the main reasons that companies with new products stumble, Professor Utterback said, "is that they fail to appreciate or investigate the marketplace." Many companies simply ask, "What can we do with the technology?" And once they determine what they can do, he said, they assume that people will want it."

redux [02.03.00]
NetFuture The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers (Part 2)
"The subtitle of this series of articles is "Why We'd Be Better Off without the MIT Media Lab". Let me broaden that here. What we'd be better off without is every organization that pushes purely technological "solutions" as if they were what could make us better off.”

CNN Genome announcement 'technological triumph'
"Declaring a new era of medical discovery, U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Monday praised the efforts of an international team of scientists to decode the genetic makeup of humans.

Researchers in London announced earlier in the day that they had completed a rough draft of the human blueprint after 10 years of work.

"This is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind," Clinton said in Washington. "I congratulate all of you on your achievement."

If the project proves anything, Clinton said, it is that "the most important fact of life on this Earth is our common humanity.""

Wired Human Genome: Because They Could
""How it's going to help me develop drugs or do anything, I really don't have a clue," said Craig Rosen, executive vice president for research and development at Human Genome Sciences."

""It's like being given the best book in the world, but it's in Russian, and it's incredibly boring to read," said Ewan Birney, a team leader at the European Bioinformatics Research Institute, part of the Sanger Centre, one of the major labs working on the Human Genome Project."

The New York Times Scientists Complete Rough Draft of Human Genome
[requires 'free' registration]
"The teams' leaders, Dr. J. Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics, and Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, praised each other's contributions and signaled a spirit of cooperation from now on, even though the two efforts will remain firmly independent."

"The joint announcement is something of a shotgun marriage because neither side's version of the human genome is complete, nor do they exactly agree on the genome's size. Neither side has sequenced -- meaning to determine the order of the chemical subunits -- the DNA of certain short structural regions of the genome, which cannot yet be analyzed."

"The two sides even differ on the size of the gene-coding part of the genome. Celera says it is 3.12 billion letters of DNA, the public consortium that it is 3.15 billion units, a 30 million letter difference. Neither side can yet describe the genome's full size or determine the number of human genes.

"The public consortium has also fallen somewhat behind in its goal of attaining a working draft in which 90 percent of the gene-containing part of the genome was sequenced. Its version today has reached only 85 percent, suggesting it was marching to Celera's timetable."

MSNBC Celera maps human genome, but its profits seen years away
Now that Celera Genomics has stirred wonder by sequencing the human book of life, can the Maryland company decipher how to make a buck? Based upon its share price, many investors are optimistic the genomics company will also solve that eternal riddle — despite the fact some analysts don’t expect Celera to turn a profit for five years or longer."

Wired Amazon Sold Down the River
""Thank God I don't own Amazon!" portfolio manager Paul Meeks said Friday after a quick glance at the erstwhile Wall Street darling's sickening stock swoon. "

"And deservedly heartfelt after two of the company's biggest cheerleaders, analysts Mary Meeker and Henry Blodgett, suggested Amazon might not meet earnings forecasts. Their comments followed those of a Lehman Brother's analyst, who called the company's financial condition "more distressed than even mediocre real world retailers." Amazon's stock promptly plummeted 20 percent Friday to $33.88, its 52-week low. "

""When you get the company's two biggest cheerleaders pulling the plug, that is a problem," said Bill Fleckenstein, who heads Fleckenstein Capital in Seattle and has a short position on the stock. "My guess is that they got wind of something bad.""

redux [05.31.00]
MSNBC Home is where the heart is for Bezos
"Amazon.com is in this jam because so far it hasn’t been able to make any money. Yet, in violation of what might properly be termed the First Rule of Holes (when you’re in one, stop digging), the company keeps pushing ahead with a business plan in which the more you sell, the more you lose"

"At some point, it all gets old and too familiar. Been there, done that, heard it all before. For more than half a decade now, Wall Street’s sell-side analysts have been talking up the Internet investment story to a willing audience of eager investors who thought that stocks went only one way: Up! Now those same investors are passing the same sell-side analysts on the way back down, and fewer of them are likely to be seduced a second time by the oldest pitch Wall Street has going: Give me your money today, and I’ll make you rich tomorrow."

The New York Times Tough Times for Online Drug Stores
[requires 'free' registration]
When the online drug store business was born last year, the first startup companies in the fledgling industry talked about reducing the hassles of shopping and saving consumers time and money.

They didn't talk much about profits."

"Caught off guard by the sudden change of investors' attitudes -- and with profits still years away -- the share prices of online pharmacies were punished. The two leading independent online pharmacies -- PlanetRx.com and Drugstore.com-- have seen their stocks plunge more than 80 percent this year."

"The move also led some industry observers to question the long-term viability of online pharmacies, particularly those not closely linked to a retail chain or rich parent company."

News.Com Net consolidation is a natural, accelerated business cycle
"Is the digital economy doomed?

Hardly. Although disruptive to employees and stock markets, the business of the Internet is simply experiencing the kind of natural consolidation that recast many other industrial landscapes, from automobiles to banking. But along the way, the so-called new economy is beginning to endure some difficult growing pains, felt more acutely than in previous cycles because of the Net's hyper-accelerated pace.

Unlike today, where an explosion of technology companies compete for venture capital, experts predict the Internet economy of 2005 will be a network of established businesses whose influence comes from and stretches around the world. And it will be full of old-world names that many investors have been ignoring--behemoths such as Procter & Gamble, Chevron, Coca-Cola and Boise Cascade.

"The Internet considerably shrinks the size of our universe," said Kenin Spivak, chief executive of Los Angeles-based Telemac, a private wireless technology company. "However, once past the euphoria, the business model for success is no different than any other industry.""

The Standard Pure-Play: A Losing Model?
"Almost two-thirds of Net retailers believe that they will not be profitable by the end of next year. Thirty-eight percent claim they won't see profitability until 2002. McKinsey & Co. and Salomon Smith Barney research analysts think they know why.

A recent study by the two firms, provided exclusively to The Standard, analyzes the business models of online retail pure-plays and offline retailers with e-commerce operations. The findings reveal that most offline businesses will find the Internet a profitable sales channel. However, few online retail pure-plays are expected to have long-term success without an offline partner or investor."

The Economist Napster’s wake-up call
"Napster’s success is significant for many reasons. It shows that online distribution of music is technically feasible; if record companies are not making greater use of the Internet, it is because they have chosen not to. They have, in fact, spent ages bickering over digital-rights management, and especially over producing a secure version of MP3 for online distribution as part of a “secure digital music initiative”. Their delays have merely left the field open to nimbler pirates."

"Most important, Napster shows that consumers find the idea of a huge online archive of recorded music very appealing. Since record companies have not provided it themselves, it has sprung up on its own. For many, if not all Napster users, its attraction lies as much in its convenience as in the fact that it is free. Indeed, according to one survey, more than half of college students who use Napster would be prepared to pay a monthly fee of $15 for a similar service. Evidently, there is much latent desire for online music-on-demand; yet the only way to satisfy it at present is to break the law. "

"There is thus a clear opportunity for a legal, commercial, universal jukebox service that could provide features that unofficial services such as Napster lack, on a subscription or pay-per-song basis. Switching to a new pricing model such as this might be painful (though online distribution would also cut costs). That is no doubt why record companies, reluctant to give up their huge margins, have been so glacially slow to respond to the Internet’s arrival. But that slowness is in turn why so many people are using Napster."

redux [05.13.00]
The Wall Street Journal Despite Lawsuit, Napster Offers A Model for Music Distribution
"...the record companies just don't get it. Like most entrenched interests facing a revolutionary business innovation, they are reacting to it purely as a threat, not as an opportunity. Even the few music companies that plan this year to put some name-brand music online are thinking of charging prohibitive amounts, like $2.50 a song, and building in all sorts of restrictions on usage.

Amazon.com, the biggest Web CD retailer, and RealNetworks, the biggest digital audio company, have told me in recent days that they stand ready to help the industry construct and manage an official version of Napster. Both are in Seattle. If I were a music executive, I'd be on the next plane there."

redux [03.25.00]
Salon Artists to Napster: Drop dead!
" Ask singer-songwriter Aimee Mann what she thinks of Napster, the ingeniously simple and wildly popular tool for exchanging MP3 music files, and you get a very concise response: "Artists should get paid for their work." It's a time-honored notion, but one that seems to be getting lost amid the Napster buzz."

Salon Courtney Love does the math
"Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software.

I'm talking about major label recording contracts.

"Since I've basically been giving my music away for free under the old system, I'm not afraid of wireless, MP3 files or any of the other threats to my copyrights. Anything that makes my music more available to more people is great."

redux [05.02.00]
Infoworld Napster sends a message to music industry: 'Your customers aren't happy'
"The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway. There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers. And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt."

MSNBC Napster holds talks with record labels to settle lawsuits
"Napster Inc. is in talks with the record industry to settle lawsuits that threaten to shut down the popular Internet music-sharing site next month.

“Someone has to pay the piper for what has happened,” the participant in the Napster talks said."

The Freedom Forum What's really happening with 'struggling' online news
"What's the future of media, new and old? What are all the rumblings about struggling online media about?"

Pundits and gossips and entrail-readers were excited in recent weeks, the jitters touched off by announcements of layoffs at Salon and NBC and CBS.com and by the near-death experience of the strange crime-news site APBNews.com, which dismissed its staff, then brought some back unpaid in an attempt to keep publishing.

Was all of this a watershed moment for new media? Was traditional journalism about to rise, Dracula-like, from its technologically dug grave?

"Not likely. If there is a central idea that conventional media have willfully failed to grasp, it's that the future of information belongs to Open Media. The meaningful distinction isn't Old vs. New, it's Open vs. Closed."

"Open Media aren't uninterested in profit; quite the opposite. Their advocates, understanding how new technologies operate, have simply perceived a radically different principle with which to make money — by sharing information rather than controlling it."

MediaCentral Newsweek, MSNBC launches site
"Newsweek.MSNBC.com went live early Sunday morning, executives at Newsweek, The Washington Post and MSNBC.com must have let out a deep sigh of relief at finally having inked a very complex, and perhaps unprecedented deal.

"This is probably the most ambitious editorial, promotional and business sharing deal that may have ever happened without one company buying another," said Newsweek.MSNBC.com's editor and GM Michael Rogers. "This is a different model than say a Time Warner/AOL deal. Here, we are able to create powerful synergies while retaining our independent voices. That seems like a pretty good deal to me.""

""Once you're on the web, there's a whole new set of competitors," he added.

redux [04.04.00]
Editor and Publisher Weblogs: From Underground to Mainstream
"Weblogging by nature has been a solitary pursuit, and its practitioners are mostly independents. But as Gillmor and Cooper are showing us, the model can work on a corporate level — if news organizations are willing to be more free with their notion of what is acceptable content for their Web site.

Gillmor says eJournal is an experiment in what the Web experience can be. "We're still trying to figure out what it is," he says. "That's part of the fun." While the columnist is (obviously) at the center of the Weblog with what he writes, Gillmor sees it as facilitating a multi-way conversation between he and his readers, and readers and other readers. "

Reason Magazine Horizontal Cities
"For those of us who grew up in "suburbia"--that geographic and psychic region that has long been synonymous with all that is "plastic" and "soulless" in American life--the April 9 edition of The New York Times Magazine was a real stunner. Who would have expected one of the nation's great arbiters of taste and sensibility to sanctify "The Triumph of Burbopolis" with a special issue that actually had some good things to say about the suburbs? One story even went so far as to praise Levittown, Long Island, that reportedly irradiated Ground Zero of the post-war suburban explosion: "Held up as an example of conformity and monotony, Levittown's 17,000 identical capes have mutated into an exuberant architectural Babel: the sparrows on a wire have each grown their own distinctive plumage."

Such thoughts underscore a significant shift in elite opinion regarding suburbia, the place where most Americans--138,231,000 of them, according to the Census Bureau--now choose to live."

redux [04.08.00]
The New York Times Magazine Exiles on Main Street
[requires 'free' registration]
"If drug dealers drove minivans, this is the kind they'd drive. I'm in a black-on-black, top-of-the-line Dodge Grand Caravan ES, with phat spoilers, muscle grillwork, road-hugging fog lights and 10 Infinity speakers blasting out alternative rock. I'm in my element weaving through the suburban streetscape of Bethesda, Md. I'm hunting for a parking spot, passing by the Ancient Rhythms furniture gallery, the Outrage Cafe and Terra Cognita, a Material Culture-type store that sells tribal rugs, folk art and kilims. Parking is supposed to be easy in the suburbs, but it's always tough in a retail hub like Bethesda. My eyes narrow with that sharp, hungry look I used to get when I lived in Manhattan, hunting for an apartment or on rainy evenings desperate for a cab. Finally, I spot an empty space up the street in front of Three Dog Bakery, which makes fat-free apple-oatmeal biscuits, cheese and herb treats and gourmet carob chips -- for dogs. "

Feed Sprawl of America
"You're stuck in traffic again. As you creep along a highway that was widened just three years ago, you pass that awful new billboard: "Coming soon: new homes!" Already the bulldozers are plowing down pine trees, and a thin layer of mud is oozing onto the roadway. How could this be happening? Over the years, you've seen a lot of forest and farmland replaced by rooftops, but these one hundred acres had been left unscathed, at the whim of a wealthy owner. Now, it is said, the owner has passed on, the children have cashed out, and the property has fallen victim to the incessant pressures of growth.

Why, in this country in which growth is considered tantamount to well-being, in which economic health is measured in "housing starts," is the prospect of these particular houses starting near yours so threatening? What has happened to our manner of growth, such that the thought of new growth makes your stomach turn?

How did sprawl come about? Far from being an inevitable evolution or a historical accident, suburban sprawl is the direct result of a number of policies that conspired powerfully to encourage urban dispersal."

Christian Science Monitor California nearly 'sprawled' out
"In a story with hard implications for the frontier American mindset - the dream of a family home with a yard - a soaring number of people in America's end-of-the-rainbow state say they have reached the end of the line, and their wits, over sprawl.

After a decade of population influx averaging 600,000 people per year, as many as 18 million more - the current population of New York State - are due before 2025.

The threats to farming, water quality, clean air, and quality living have prompted several moves to help force regionwide solutions to state problems. Groups such as the Great Valley Center in the mid-Central Valley, the Fresno Business Council to the south, and Valley Vision Regional Action Partnership in Sacramento are building regionwide coalitions that include environmentalists and farmers, business people and residents. The idea is to pool resources and ideas, create long-term agendas, and open dialogue between antagonistic sectors."

The Standard Shopping With Your Cell Phone
"Motorola (MOT) , Symbol Technologies (SBL) , AirClic and Connect Things are pooling $500 million to form a new company that will facilitate e-commerce from wireless devices. The company will allow consumers to make purchases simply by pushing a button or scanning a bar code."

"The participants share an ambitious vision: They want to embed minuscule scanners into high-tech mobile devices, and billions of sophisticated bar codes on ads in publications, and then distribute millions of the mobile devices to customers. The participants hope that people would use the gadgets to scan bar codes (or, as the participants call them, "Web codes") of a product they want and purchase it instantly."

ComputerWorld Report debunks early potential of wireless e-commerce
"Anyone planning to make a fortune in mobile e-commerce — the new-millennium version of last year's dot-com frenzy — should think twice about where to invest their money, according to a hype-busting report from Ovum Inc., a Boston-based consulting firm."

"The report discounts consumer interest in new mobile wireless services, warning wireless-wannabes to focus on business users and "genuinely unique" consumer services. Dennis Brown, co-author of the Ovum report, said that even business users "won't pay a premium for existing (wireless) services, which are easier and cheaper to access using their phone or PC . . . if suppliers are to survive and prosper in the long term, their early offerings will have to be very targeted and very compelling.""

Infoworld Oh the horror, the horror: The new world of wireless commerce runs amok
"Stop and ask yourself: "Just because we're developing the capability of purchasing via mobile systems, does that really mean people are going to develop a sudden and inexplicable Pavlovian desire to buy all the time?" Do we really expect the world to be gripped by the same fever that drives the Home Shopping Network? My bank account just happens to be a few orders of magnitude smaller than Bill Gates', so I actually don't want to spend money all the time."

"M-commerce -- no, make that successful m-commerce -- will not be about purchases. M-commerce will be about providing information which facilitates a purchase. Don't think commerce, think communication. There's a Grand Canyon-sized gap between those two ideas. It's the difference between offering a gadget for sale via handheld and giving access to information about that gadget -- the reviews, who's put it on their Christmas list, etc. -- and the ability to make a note to one's self: "Check this out, I might want it.""

The New York Times Is Linking Illegal?
[requires 'free' registration]
"A crucial aspect of online journalism is the ability to garnish articles with hyperlinks that instantly refer readers to Web sites related to newsworthy issues.

But suppose one of those sites contains material alleged to be illegal--a pirated copy of an author’s book, perhaps, or an unlawful software program. Is the publisher who did the linking in hot water?

The answer, according to legal papers recently filed by eight motion picture studios in a closely-watched federal case in Manhattan, is sometimes yes and sometimes no. "

redux [05.30.00]
Release 1.0 The Web Goes Into Syndication
"The shape of content and business relationships on the Web is tied to an old concept. Syndication, drawn from the closed world of traditional media, may be the model that allows the Web to remain open as it grows.

As with any new medium, the Net incorporates elements of media that came before. From Oprah to Dilbert, syndication deals are the lifeblood of today's broadcasting, cable and newspaper industries. In such arrangements, entities that create content license it out to distributors who integrate it with their own and other offerings. Several major Web-based companies adopted the syndication approach early on, though the market has remained fairly limited.

Online syndication is now poised to explode. But even as it changes the Net, the Net will change syndication. On the Web, the concept applies to commerce as well as content, and soon it will extend to dynamic applications. Syndication will evolve into the core model for the Internet economy, allowing businesses and individuals to retain control over their online personae while enjoying the benefits of massive scale and scope."

DaveNet A Bright Future for Syndication
"In our system, each story has a *single* location, the site where it originated. We think this is the way new information is obtained. Comments from readers can add new facts and ideas and link to other related stories. And the portal sites, the ones with the huge flow, can play a big role, because in this model, they get paid for many (but not all) of the hits they deliver. It's a micro-payment form of what they already do so well on a much larger scale."

The New York Times Legality of 'Deep Linking' Remains Deeply Complicated
[requires 'free' registration]
"When a federal judge issued a decision last week in a case involving "deep linking," many reports suggested that the controversial Internet practice was now unambiguously legal. But the story is more complex than that. In fact, deep linking -- the practice of linking to a page deep inside another Web site, bypassing its home page -- still appears to be in legal limbo."

Fast Company Design Vision
""We know how to do amazing things," [Thackara] says, "and we're filling the world with amazing devices. But we cannot answer the most important question: What is this stuff really for?""

"The time has also come, he says, to shift some of the focus of innovation away from work and toward everyday life. The early users of digital devices are almost always business users, so product designers have a natural inclination to create and design products with the workplace in mind. But that tendency can make for bad design, especially when those products migrate beyond business. People put up with technical difficulties in their work lives that they would never tolerate in their personal lives. So forget "personal" computing, Thackara says, and embrace "social" computing. "As computing migrates from ugly boxes on our desks to something that suffuses everything around us, a new relationship will emerge between what's real and what's virtual, what's mental and what's material. There are few limits to the number of services that we could develop if we simply took an aspect of daily life and looked for ways to make it better.""

redux [04.25.00]
Doors of Perception The design challenge of pervasive computing
"What happens to society when there are hundreds of microchips for every man, woman and child on the planet? What cultural consequences follow when every object around us is 'smart', and connected? And what happens psychologically when you step into the garden to look at the flowers - and the flowers look at you?"

"The signs of such a change are there for all to see. Enlightened managers and entrepreneurs understand, nowadays, that the best way to navigate a complex world is through a focus on core values, not on chasing the latest killer app. (This picture illustrates the core values of the French train company, SNCF). Business magazines are full of talk about a transition from transactions, to to a focus on relationship. We are moving from business strategies based on the domination of markets, to the cultivation of communities. The best companies are focussing more on the innovation of new services, and new business models, than on new technology per se. They are striving to change relationships, to anticpate limts, to accelerate trends." [via idvilla]

IBM Systems Journal At what cost pervasive? A social computing view of mobile computing systems
"With the advent of pervasive systems, computers are becoming a larger part of our social lives than ever before. Depending on the design of these systems, they may either promote or inhibit social relationships. We consider four kinds of social relationships: a relationship with the system, system-mediated collaborative relationships, relationships with a community, and interpersonal relationships among co-located persons. In laboratory studies, the design of pervasive computers is shown to affect responses to social partners. We propose a model of how pervasive systems can influence human behavior, social attributions, and interaction outcomes. We also discuss some implications for system design. "

Hive Distributed Agents for Networking Things
"Hive is a distributed agents platform, a decentralized system for building applications by networking local system resources. This paper presents the architecture of Hive, concentrating on the idea of an ``ecology of distributed agents'' and its implementation in a practical Java based system. Hive provides ad-hoc agent interaction, ontologies of agent capabilities, mobile agents, and a graphical interface to the distributed system. We are applying Hive to the problems of networking ``Things That Think,'' putting computation and communication in everyday places such as your shoes, your kitchen, or your own body. TTT shares the challenges and potentials of ubiquitous computing and embedded network applications. We have found that the flexibility of a distributed agents architecture is well suited for this application domain, enabling us to easily build applications and to reconfigure our systems on the fly. Hive enables us to make our environment and network more alive."

The New York Times Magazine The Library as the Latest Web Venture
[requires 'free' registration]
"When Carrie Larkworthy, a student at Harvard University, is faced with a research project, getting a book out of the library is the last thing on her mind. Instead she sits in her dormitory room and logs onto the Web, starting with Harvard's online system for searching and retrieving journal articles. "I hate the library, so I try to avoid it," Ms. Larkworthy said. "It's such a big facility that you have to search through.""

""...But new efforts are afoot to change that. Several companies are racing to put the full texts of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, old and new, on the Web."

"These electronic library projects are not attempts to compete with the budding electronic book industry, which offers books for downloading to handheld devices and is focused on popular fiction, like Stephen King's recent Web-only novella, "Riding the Bullet," and on other newly published trade books. The library projects have very little to do with the debate over the promise or pitfalls of gadgets that let people read novels electronically from the comfort of their beds.

In fact, the new effort to build an electronic library is not about reading at all. It is about the power of electronic searching."

Digital LIbrary Magazine Who Is Going to Mine Digital Library Resources? And How?
To partially answer the questions raised in the title of this paper -- "Who is going to mine digital library resources? And how?" -- today’s end-users are not capable of mining today’s digital libraries, let alone the more comprehensive digital libraries of the foreseeable future."

"Today’s attention to database creation and better search engines fails to address a critical consumer need. Better digital libraries and more powerful search engines will not get quality materials into the hands of the end-user. Developers of digital libraries must work with content experts to develop an array of information products that help users identify and understand the available resources."

First Monday Web-Wise Conference: A Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World
"The conference demonstrated that there is a great deal of interest and activity in digitization within the museum and library communities. Of the approximately 100 participants who completed conference evaluations, 75 percent said they are currently engaged in digitization activities and another 15 percent are planning such activities. Over 80 percent found the conference "very relevant" to their needs and virtually all of the attendees who responded to the follow-up evaluation stated that they had made contacts that will be valuable to them in their future endeavors concerning digital libraries. Comments included phrases such as "consciousness-raising," "a hotbed of inspiration," "it gave us our first 'sophisticated' project idea" and "[my colleagues have not] grasped the enormity of what is going on in the realm of digital libraries. With the background provided by the substance of Web-Wise, I have improved my chances of influencing policy decisions at my museum." Many participants encouraged IMLS to convene more conferences on this topic."

redux [04.09.00]
The Seattle Times Mike Eisenberg teaches UW's doctors of data overload how to recognize what's valuable
"For years, colleges cranked out the people who create information or create machines that spew it. But where are the guides? Who can weed through this stuff to decide what's valuable?

Eisenberg has this vision of Lucy and Ethel in a famous "I Love Lucy" episode. But instead of chocolate candy coming at them faster and faster on the conveyor belt, it's information."

"Eisenberg trains his students to see information as soon as they open their eyes. Traffic. Weather. News. Instead of being overwhelmed, they think: How can I organize it? How does the information flow? How can I pull out what's valuable and leave the rest behind?

Some of The Information School's graduates will be librarians. The need is growing and the prestige rising.

But others will go into business with titles such as "information architect" and "business intelligence manager." They'll tackle Web site content and complex database systems. They won't all be librarians, but they will all have a librarian's "helper-sharer gene""

SiliconValley.com Librarians are heroes of Net censorship fight
"HEROES OF FREEDOM: They are champions of some vital principles, "the unsung heroes of the fight for free expression, intellectual freedom and access to the Internet.''

"Librarians help us find things. They help us read. They help us learn. And lately they've been fighting the good fight for their patrons' right to have access to the unfiltered resources of the newest information resource -- the Internet.”

Wired About Those Fat Net Mags
"Lugging around a couple of magazines that cover the Internet and technology industries might qualify as a workout these days, with their bulked-up editorial staffs churning out a record number of pages to keep up with demand for advertising space.

The trend, which shows little sign of slowing despite a nascent dot-com shakeout, has at least some industry watchers wondering if these publications are growing a pace that may be setting them up for a big letdown -- just like some of the once high-flying companies they cover. "

""We believe it's not a good thing being a fat 400-to-500-page vehicle. We don't think readers want that," said Steve Thompson, senior vice president and group publisher of the Industry Standard."

redux [03.21.00]
Salon My dot-com business mags have fallen on me and I can't get up!
"It's no great mystery what's fueling the ungainly growth in these magazines. "There's a huge information overload going on right now," says venture capitalist Andrew Anker, a partner at August Capital. "It's being driven by marketers trying to spend dollars, not by users saying 'I need this content.'"

Web companies spent more than $700 million on magazine advertising alone last year. That's 348 percent more than they did in 1998, according to Competitive Media Reporting. Plus, with almost $25 billion flowing from venture capitalists into Net companies in 1999, 66 percent more than the previous year, there's a lot of business-to-business advertisers itching to reach the newly cash-rich dot-commies who need to quickly find somewhere to put all that capital to work."

""Are we too big? Of course, we're too big," says Jason Pontin, editor of the Red Herring, which is putting out a whopping 488 pages in April. "I recognize that we're getting uncomfortably large.""

Freedom Forum Web news scores above print, broadcast on credibility
"The most-credible Internet news sources are Web sites run by network or cable TV outlets or national newspapers, according to a new survey. Such well-known Internet names as America Online, Netscape and Yahoo! ranked higher on credibility than lesser-known sites."

"Among news media, continuing a trend, the Pew poll found key segments of the nation's news audience, particularly younger and better-educated Americans and those seeking financial information, are turning increasingly to the Internet."

""Increasingly, news organizations that are going to be successful have to offer news on a 24-hour basis..."

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press Investors Now Go Online for Quotes, Advice
"Traditional news outlets are feeling the impact of two distinct and powerful trends. Internet news has not only arrived, it is attracting key segments of the national audience. At the same time, growing numbers of Americans are losing the news habit. Fewer people say they enjoy following the news, and fully half pay attention to national news only when something important is happening. And more Americans than ever say they watch the news with a remote control in hand, ready to dispatch uninteresting stories. To some extent, these trends are affecting all traditional media, but broadcast news outlets -- both national and local -- have been the most adversely affected. "

redux [04.20.00]
Editor and Publisher Online Newspaper Sites Must Adjust To Life Without 'Editions'
"An online news site is more akin to a wire service than a printed publication, because it can (and should) publish news on around-the-clock basis. While the notion of "editions" still prevails at many news sites, the trend is more toward a constant publishing cycle, where news is published whenever it breaks.

Newspaper Web sites are in a period of transition, as more and more of them move into publishing news throughout the day instead of posting stories at specified times. While the idea of publishing Web "editions" is a comfortable one for a newspaper company, editions are really counter to the nature of the Internet publishing medium. Ideally, a news Web site will publish news without a set schedule."

The Washinton Post On Web, Newspapers Never Sleep
"As the journalistic precincts of cyberspace turn increasingly competitive, newspapers are transforming themselves into 24-hour news machines, in part by asking their print reporters to do double duty. The result has altered a tradition-encrusted newsroom environment that has never had to deal with round-the-clock deadlines."

""You're building a relationship with a new generation of young people for whom newsprint holds no magical qualities," said Ken Paulson, executive director of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University."

The Round Table Group Young Adults Most Often Get Info From Net - Study
"Young adults say the Internet, not newspapers or television, is their number one source of information, a Round Table Group survey has found.

Fifty-nine percent of Internet users in the 18- to 24-year-old age group say that their household gets more "useful information" from the Net than from newspapers; 53 percent say they receive more information from the Internet than from TV.

Fully 84 percent say that their household is more likely to use the Internet to find useful information than to go to the public library. For specific questions, 68 percent are more inclined to consult the Internet than turn to a newspaper and 67 percent are more likely to go to the Net than rely on television. "

Online Journalism Review What the Pulitzers Missed: What makes a Newspaper a Newspaper? Welcome to the 21st Century, Joseph Pulitzer, where ya been?
"In the wake of this year's Pulitzer awards and the various complaints and gripes about who should have been recognized, we would like to suggest a dig deeper into the psyche of the Pulitzer policy: the question of why online news publications were not allowed to submit applications. The answer, according to the rules of the Pulitzer committee, is that only "newspapers" may apply."

"...what makes a newspaper? It's daily, it's printable, it's news, commentary and reporting and is, ostensibly, read by someone. Merriam Webster defines a newspaper as "paper that is printed and distributed usually daily or weekly and that contains news, articles of opinion, features, and advertising.""

redux [02.02.00]
First Monday Interactive Features of Online Papers
"According to McAdams, who helped create the Washington Post's online service, "A journalist with little online experience tends to think in terms of stories, news value, public service and things that are good to read, but a person with a lot of online experience thinks more about connection, organization, movement within and among sets of information and communication among different people". Journalists today must choose. As gatekeepers they can transfer lots of information, or they can make users a smarter, more active and questioning audience for news events and issues. Making users smarter means involving them in a collaborative experience; i.e. interaction ”

The Standard Dot-Com Backlash
"In the midst of Microsoft's travails, lesser struggles – to be the next president, to get startup funding – still go on. Although reporters generally hope you'll forget their predictions, here are two I'll be willing to stand by: Al Gore's prospects will look better in October than they do now. And the Internet's image, in the press and popular culture, is about to look worse."

Wired Dot Coms? They're for Losers
"If 1999 was the Year of the Dot Com, 2000 might very well be the Year of the Not Com.

A lot of start-ups that stuck a trendy dot com at the end of their names to woo investors in last-year's Net-obsessed market are finding they may have hopped on the wrong bandwagon."

"Now that shares of many highly hyped dot-com companies have taken a tumble, executives are reconsidering the all-important process of choosing a company name. As a result, many start-ups are opting not to use those once-ubiquitous i- and e- prefixes and -- gasp! -- even dropping the dot coms from their official names."

""Take away the dot com and what do you have? Pets," he said. "It's just so generic. It's hard to get an emotional feel for a word like pets, and just putting a dot com on the end of the word doesn't make it sound special.""

The New York Times Magazine Dot-communist Manifesto
[requires 'free' registration]
"What Marx had hoped would occur because of a new dawn in human economic relations has been made possible instead by a new form of human technology. Once we enter the Web, we become like medieval peasants entering their village commons; almost everything is shared. The only difference is that, unlike the Middle Ages, our modern ability to duplicate everything instantly means that property isn't even "shared." It's possessed simultaneously by everyone. By turning physical property into endlessly duplicable e-property, the ancient human problem of "mine-thine" has been essentially solved. There was once the parable of the loaves and the fishes; there is now the parable of copy and paste. For the first time since Plato first dreamed of it in "The Republic," communism is actually feasible. And for the first time since Marx christened it, it makes sense."

redux [05.22.00]
Washington Post e-power to the people
"Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape Communications and a former chief technology officer for AOL, compares Gnutella to a benevolent virus, a "revolutionary" program that spreads the power of publishing from an elite set of corporations to anyone who has a computer."

"The decentralization of power that Gnutella represents has revived the romantic dream of many a cyberspace pioneer--that of a truly free realm where no information gatekeeper exists and where all property is commonly owned. But those who hope to profit handsomely from the Internet's transformation into a global marketplace--record companies, book publishers, movie makers and practically everyone else with a stake in selling information--regard Gnutella as a device for thievery."

Dan Gillmor Technology creates threat to economy
"WHEN people can easily copy anything digital, who's going to make $100 million movies?

That question, asked by a colleague recently, is the crux of the debate over the growing genre of software that lets people share music around the Internet. The fight over Napster and its progeny is about something much bigger: Soon enough, technology will allow people to share any kind of digital information -- music, movies, software programs, you name it -- and it's taking a meat ax to some modern business models.

It's also at the heart of a question we'll need to answer in not too many decades from now. When people can replicate anything, who'll go to the trouble or expense of designing a new passenger airplane or life-saving medical device?"

"The open-source software movement, where programming instructions are freely available and improvements to the software are supposed to be returned to the larger community, may be a template for such a world. If we literally eliminate scarcity except for a few, rare items...They'll create things because they want to, because they want recognition or some other non-financial reward."

redux [03.04.00]
The Washington Monthly Reboot! How Linux and open-source development could change the way we get things done
"Imagine a scale with all the advantages of a proprietary model on the left and all the advantages of an open-source model on the right. Pretend everybody who wants to solve a problem or build a project has a scale like this. If it tips to the left, the proprietary model is chosen; if it tips to the right, the open model is chosen. Now, as connectivity increases with the Internet, and computer power increases exponentially, more and more weight accumulates on the right. Every time computer power increases, another household gets wired, or a new simulator is built online, a little more weight is added to the right. Having the example of Linux to learn from adds some more weight to the right; the next successful open-source project will add even more.

"Perhaps the next boom in open source will come from the law; perhaps from drug X; perhaps it will be something entirely different. Although it's difficult to tell, it is quite likely that the scale is going to tip for some projects and that there will be serious efforts at open-source development in the next decade. Moreover, it's quite likely some of these projects will work."

redux [05.22.00]
ZDNet Linux leaders: Beware of Napster
"Leaders of the "open source" software movement have a message that some of their followers may not want to hear: Beware of Napster."

""Piracy is bad," says Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, when asked about the matter. "Of course you should be able to sue over copyrights. The one good lawsuit in the whole Napster case is the one by Metallica: a suit by the actual authors. While it's probably motivated mostly by money, I can still at least hope that there is a strong feeling of morals there, too."

Larry Wall, developer of the Perl language, has a similar perspective. "Open source should be about giving away things voluntarily," he says. "When you force someone to give you something, it's no longer giving, it's stealing. Persons of leisurely moral growth often confuse giving with taking."

redux [05.16.00]
Suck Pirate Flags
"Intellectual property rights seem a quaint notion these days — the antiquated, Elizabethan remains of the Old Economy with all the here-and-now applicability of lace collars. Intellectual property is a fairy tale, told by dot-commers to make their interns laugh, like stories of stockholders who expect a profit and journalists who check their sources. The idea of owning what you create has become a sad little joke."

"The near-universal disregard with which intellectual property is treated leaves anyone with even the slightest interest in their own rights thinking that the population of the Internet consists almost entirely of beady-eyed, slack-jawed warezd00dz. But moralizing never got anybody anywhere, save nailed to a tree. And since piracy is going to continue no matter what the courts or copyright-holders do, Metallica and the AP and anybody else with complaints about the state of intellectual property rights on the Web is going to have to do some hard thinking fast.

"First one with a business plan wins."

PCWorld Predictions for a Wired World
""Washing machines will soon be surfing the Internet, and electronic paper will start making telephone calls, technology guru Nicholas Negroponte told the International Advertising Association on Wednesday.

In a future-gazing keynote speech to the IAA's World Congress, Negroponte, who is director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that in the next three years, machines rather than people will be the heaviest users of the Web.

"He cited the Italian white goods manufacturer Merloni, which has developed a washing machine with an internal cell phone that communicates with the company. It will scan the washing instructions of clothes and the correct temperature for the water. It will also be able to download upgraded software from the Web.

"Advertisers will have to advertise Tide to the machine, not to the housewife," he said. ""

redux [04.13.00]
The New York Times A Chip in Every Pot
[requires 'free' registration]
"Russell Robertson was grappling with an unusual assignment.

As an industrial designer, his mission was to figure out how kitchen appliances will be designed when, as he put it, "the fridge talks to the coffee pot."

His eyes twinkled as he spoke, but he was not kidding about the basic concept. In fact, while the idea may have once sounded ridiculous, predictions of the advent of such devices are now becoming almost clichéd."

"But predicting whether a technology will be adopted is critical for companies that want to succeed, or even survive, in the marketplace. The ones that can figure out what will be deemed useful, superfluous or downright ridiculous will win. And today, as tiny, wireless computer systems are being perfected and the Internet is allowing the distribution of data in seconds, dozens of appliance manufacturers are betting that some sort of pervasive-computing devices will come to be considered as necessary as a telephone. The trick, for them, is to figure out which ones."

""But one of the main reasons that companies with new products stumble, Professor Utterback said, "is that they fail to appreciate or investigate the marketplace." Many companies simply ask, "What can we do with the technology?" And once they determine what they can do, he said, they assume that people will want it."

Wired Honey, There's a Bug in My Car
"Bugs that lurk in computer systems around the world are poised to leap into the new era of post-PC computing -- and that could spell trouble for technology consumers and security experts.

Manufacturers are starting to equip a range of products from cars to refrigerators with programmable computer chips and Internet access -- and since everything that's connected can become infected, the new world of computing will hold invisible threats."

redux [02.03.00]
NetFuture The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers (Part 2)
"The subtitle of this series of articles is "Why We'd Be Better Off without the MIT Media Lab". Let me broaden that here. What we'd be better off without is every organization that pushes purely technological "solutions" as if they were what could make us better off.”

The New York Times Software Executives Say Consumers Will Pay for Piracy
[requires 'free' registration]
"If copyright laws are not more broadly and aggressively enforced on the Internet, software developers will be forced to resort to cumbersome technological protections that consumers will not like, an industry leader warned Wednesday.

"You're going to have a piece of music that will only play on one Walkman," said John E. Warnock, the chairman and chief executive of Adobe Systems, during a panel discussion on Capitol Hill involving 10 key software executives. "You're going to have a piece of software that will only work on one machine. It will provide enormous inconvenience.""

"We would like government to set an example, to send a message that this is breaking the law and the law will be enforced," he said.

SiliconValley.Com Study: 13 million Americans have downloaded music for free
"It's not just college students who are downloading music for free on their computers. A new study of Internet users estimates that 13 million Americans are music freeloaders."

"Freeloading is "a huge threat to the music industry now and it is a harbinger of the trouble the Internet will pose to other entertainment forms like the movies,'' said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project."

redux [05.02.00]
Infoworld Napster sends a message to music industry: 'Your customers aren't happy'
"The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway. There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers. And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt."

redux [05.13.00]
The Wall Street Journal Despite Lawsuit, Napster Offers A Model for Music Distribution
"...the record companies just don't get it. Like most entrenched interests facing a revolutionary business innovation, they are reacting to it purely as a threat, not as an opportunity. Even the few music companies that plan this year to put some name-brand music online are thinking of charging prohibitive amounts, like $2.50 a song, and building in all sorts of restrictions on usage.

Amazon.com, the biggest Web CD retailer, and RealNetworks, the biggest digital audio company, have told me in recent days that they stand ready to help the industry construct and manage an official version of Napster. Both are in Seattle. If I were a music executive, I'd be on the next plane there."

MSNBC New virus spams mobile phones
"Antivirus firms say they’ve found the first-ever virus with a payload aimed at mobile phones. “I-Worm.Timofonica” is an “ILOVEYOU”-type virus with a twist. After infecting computers, it generates random phone numbers from a range of known mobile phones in Spain, then sends spam messages at those phones."

"“Two or three viruses down the road we might see these things taking out phones,” Takata said. A future virus could access a victim’s telephone address book, for example. Things could get ever worse with new mobile phones, which are becoming more and more like small computers. They allow Web browsing, online trading and plenty of other functions that could be used by virus writers or hackers."

Fox News Next-Gen Cell Phones Could Be Targets for Viruses
"As next-generation communication devices become smarter and more PC-like in functionality, they may also become the target of virus writers who will unleash a new breed of malicious payloads."

"While today's devices aren't at too great a risk for viruses, next-generation cell phones will be more susceptible because of the two things cell phone users want the most: programmability and Internet access."

BBC Ericsson unveils Bluetooth
"Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson has unveiled its first mobile phone using the Bluetooth wireless technology.

The Bluetooth technology provides wireless connections between the phone and other electronic devices such as computers."

"The new phone will be WAP-enabled, allowing the user to hook up to the net with their phone, sending and receiving data at high speed."

Crypto-Gram Computer Security: Will We Ever Learn?
"If we've learned anything from the past couple of years, it's that computer security flaws are inevitable. Systems break, vulnerabilities are reported in the press, and still many people put their faith in the next product, or the next upgrade, or the next patch. "This time it's secure," they say. So far, it hasn't been. "

"No one is paying attention because no one has to.

Computer security products, like software in general, have a very odd product quality model. It's unlike an automobile, a skyscraper, or a box of fried chicken. If you buy a product, and get harmed because of a manufacturer's defect, you can sue...and you'll win. Car-makers can't get away with building cars that explode on impact; chicken shops can't get away with selling buckets of fried chicken with the odd rat mixed in. It just wouldn't do for building contractors to say thing like, "Whoops. There goes another one. Sorry. But just wait for Skyscraper 1.1; it'll be 100% collapse-free!"

Software is different. It is sold without any claims whatsoever. Your accounts receivable database can crash, taking your company down with it, and you have no claim against the software company. Your word processor can accidentally corrupt your files and you have no recourse. Your firewall can turn out to be completely ineffectual -- hardly better than having nothing at all -- and yet it's your fault. Microsoft fielded Hotmail with a bug that allowed anyone to read the accounts of 40 or so million subscribers, password or no password, and never bothered to apologize. "

The New York Review of Books Sign Language
"The idea that reality itself is brought into being by acts of interpretation is clearly wrong, but there is another thesis—often confused with it—which is not similarly absurd, and to which Eco also assents. This is the thesis that all awareness of the world is mediated by interpretation—that there is no such thing as direct, interpretation-free cognition of reality. We impose categories on the world as we interpret the signs all around us; it is not that the world simply reveals its categories to us. We are always taking one thing to be a sign of another, performing an act of symbolic inference, decoding something.

This process is to be clearly distinguished from merely bringing things under some general category, as when you perceive an apple as red or think of an acquaintance as untrustworthy. It is a virtual truism that all mental representation is "aspectual," in the sense that it cannot represent everything about an object but only some aspects of it; but this is quite different from saying that all mental representation involves interpreting one thing as a sign of another."

"Of course, to be aware of signs, as of anything else, involves classifying the sign in some way, perceiving it as having certain properties: for example, one hears the sound of the word "London" as having a certain auditory quality. But it is a mistake to refer to this mental act as interpretation, since interpretation must always involve interpreting one thing as a sign of another, and not merely seeing an object under a certain aspect. Conflating the latter with the former converts a truism into a highly controversial and (as I have argued) self-defeating theory about how cognition of objects is achieved. The culprit in all this is a loose and ambiguous use of the word "interpretation," probably one of the most misused words in the contemporary humanities."

The ThreePenney Review The Social Construction of What?
"For the point is, to see a lamp is itself an act of interpretation, and this is true of all seeing. Seeing is a matter of classification and recognition. What we see is not a colored patch but a lamp or a house or a table. Admittedly, we sometimes say that we cannot make out what something that we are looking at is. (Is it a haystack or a castle? We cannot be sure, because we cannot determine how far away, and therefore how big, it is.) But this merely goes to confirm the crucial point that all seeing is a matter of “seeing as.” Thus Kuhn’s analogy of the Gestalt switch—“the duck-rabbit shows that two men with the same retinal impression can see different things”—is beside the point. Equally he is surely wrong to suggest that, even hypothetically, one might get behind mental “paradigms” to the “raw data” of experience and construct some neutral observation language, “designed to conform to the retinal imprints that mediate what the scientist sees.” Retinal imprints or images cannot come into the matter; they are no doubt the precondition of seeing, but they play no part in the experience of it. It was Kuhn’s triumph to explain how it is that scientists on one side of a revolutionary paradigm shift cannot, and cannot be expected to, communicate fully with those on the other. But in this, the metaphor of seeing is more of a hindrance to him than a help."

"Feed Yield. Merge. Exit. Freak Out.
"Even the simplest symbol, the most streamlined dot head, becomes inseparable from a distinct historical moment. The modernist impulse towards universality was always dubious. Visual language is nothing more than the wreckage left when concept and technology collide, and those pedestrian signs are a perfect example. No matter how pure your intentions, the tools used to produce icons end up dating them. Go look at one of those school-crossing signs. See what you see. It probably won't be what you remembered, but it'll look a lot like us. "

redux [04.21.00]
George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System
"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."

Feed Daily
"THERE'S AN OLD journalistic cliché for determining when you've got a story: two is coincidence, three's a trend. Here's three pieces of evidence. On "Let's Get High" from his recent Chronic 2001 album, Dr. Dre declares, "I just took some Ecstasy/Ain't no tellin' what the side effects could be." In hipster music mag The Wire's end-of-1999 issue, El-P of the underground hip hop outfit Company Flow listed among his year's highlights the fact that "I tried ecstasy for the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth time." And gangsta rap crew Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's new album BTNH Resurrection contains the song "Ecstasy," inspired by the group's recent introduction to MDMA and featuring some private reports of B-boys buzzing on E at New York's most hardcore rap club the Tunnel, and persistent rumors about an exceedingly famous rapper-cum-mogul with an MDMA habit, and you got yourself a trend, friend: Hip Hop America Discovers Ecstasy."

Salon "Better Living Through Circuitry"
"People are alienated. They want to find, or make, some of the things missing in their lives. What's missing? Community. Safe spaces. The raves, then, are like big family parties. The unexplained phenomenon is why seemingly one-half of the ravers look like spoiled babies hopping around with pacifiers and candy bracelets. Is the weird, almost disturbing infantilism an attempt by dancers to reconnect with their inner babies? One raver says that she favors the philosophy of "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." There are no other theories. "Better Living Through Circuitry" can't bring itself to remind us that safe spaces disappear when raves end. After that "one-night oblivion where nothing else matters," there is all the stuff that does."