Saturday, February 08, 2003

Will Europe Make Microsoft Obey Law?. Washington Post: In Europe, Microsoft Faces a Harder Sell. An investigating team working for Monti, the competition commissioner for the... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 5:07:50 PM    comment []

The Shy One In The Axis Of Evil - What's Really Going On In Iran?. Plastic::Politics::Politics: Developments in Iran might turn out to be more significant in the long run than the result of the Iraq confrontation. [Plastic: Most Recent] 8:01:29 AM    comment []

Cut-N-Paste Makes British Intelligence Look Stupid. Plastic::Politics::Failure: British Intelligence follow a generation of can't-be-bothered schoolkids and lazy journalists by making up a report from a bunch of stuff they found on the Internet. [Plastic: Most Recent] 8:01:02 AM    comment []

Dave: Tuesday's live session at Harvard will be at 6:30PM at Lewis International Law Center, room 301. Here's a map of the law school campus. Dan Bricklin will be there. Peter Rukavina is coming from Prince Edward Island. This is so cool. As always the Web brings people together like nothing else before it. Derek Slater is a Berkman student who would like to see Harvard wake up to weblogs. Let's work together on that. (He'll be there on Tuesday too.) 7:56:44 AM    comment []

Blog on. David Sifry has been making improvements to Technorati. He writes about them here and here. Also, Connected: Nodes & Networks is a new Corante blog by Sarah Lai Stirland, whose eponymous blog is at that last link. [The Doc Searls Weblog] 7:52:09 AM    comment []

Rudy Rucker reviews William Gibson's Pattern Recognition in Wired. [Hack the Planet] Gibson exploits the inherent tension between the monoculture and the emergence of novelty. On one hand, the monoculture lives by assimilating originality. On the other, new art has nothing but the monoculture to launch itself from. It's one of the happy paradoxes of modern life. Gibson pulls you in with big ideas that make solid material for word-of-mouth proselytizing. But Pattern Recognition's essential quality is the sensual pleasure of its language. Gibson has a knack for choosing - or coining - the right phrase. With a poet's touch, he tiles words into wonderful mosaics. An expressway is Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution. The Tokyo skyline is a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you somehow wouldn't see elsewhere, as if you'd need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home. Who needs sci-fi when you've got Japan? Gibson deftly taps the eccentricities of modern civilization to make our world look like an alien planet. This ultracool sensibility lets Gibson tell us something new about the events of 9/11. . . . and more. I'm looking forward to the book. 7:50:38 AM    comment []

SBC Said to Be in Talks to Buy DirecTV [New York Times: Technology] 7:43:41 AM    comment []

"One of the articles the dossier is plagiarized from, complete with typos and grammatical errors." [Daypop Top 40] 7:43:05 AM    comment []

"had to post a link to this ridiculous exchange between o'reilly and the son of a 9/11 victim who is anti-war. o'reilly is an uber-blowhard and a member of a subspecies distantly related to humanity (more oily than a coelacanth) but he pulls in viewers so ..." [Daypop Top 40] 7:40:42 AM    comment []

Scoble: I was talking with someone who works closely with Microsoft on a variety of initiaties and he said Microsoft wants to help webloggers and others build strong communities like Slashdot around their products. With a thoughtful semi-rant about it, including nine reasons why Microsoft-centric ''communities'' do not thrive. Valuable for the ideas, first of all, but also as early warning. 7:23:21 AM    comment []