Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Congrats to the Lessigs on the occasion of the birth of Willem Dakota Neuefeind Lessig! 9:46:47 PM    comment []

Two from Cory: von Lohmann on RIAA Amnesty How to sell an iTunes track (At BoingBoing: http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106322156965479216 and http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106322148641479109 respectively.) 9:35:54 PM    comment []

P2P group: We'll pay girl's RIAA bill. A Grokster-backed peer-to-peer trade group has offered to cover costs for a 12-year-old girl who agreed to pay record labels $2,000 to settle a file-swapping suit. [CNET News.com] 9:30:51 PM    comment []

Probably important analysis on Google to make Blogger Pro free. According to Ev, Blogger Pro's features will be folded into the free version of Blogger. Ev: "Google has lots of computers and bandwidth. And Google believes blogs are important and good for the web." Susan Mernit asks these questions about the announcement: Is this the rich company Microsoft-like tactic of offering a free product that will undercut people trying to charge? Is this an expression of the belief, "We're no longer in the product development business, the real money is in selling ads on this thing - and everywhere else in the universe for that matter?" Or is it a corporate branding issue - i.e., Google does not charge for premium services. It makes its money from search results and paid search and ad word placements. Therefore a product offered by Google should fit into those models. Or it it they're so loaded they don't give a %$%K ? ( I don't believe that one.) She thinks its No. 2. After my hour on blogs and RSS yesterday at Seybold, one of the questions I got was about why Google may have bought Pyra and exactly this question of whether they were planning to monetize it somehow. I explained my theory that: Google values the "memex" trails that bloggers leave as they provide custom indexes of the Web, filtered with a human perspective And, with a BlogThis! button on Googlebar 2.0 and AdSense, Google is approaching a very tightly held content input, indexing, and retreival infrastructure with a financial component. A barrier to entry of even a small payment doesn't help them. Still, I wouldn't rule out Susan's explanation No. 1, despite Google's "don't be evil" dictum, (which Craig Newmark quoted yesterday in his personable and well received talk about what he's learned from Craigslist and how it fosters a community of trust). [Radio Free Blogistan] 9:27:52 PM    comment []

Congress mulls worm defense tactics. Lawmakers express frustration over the exploding problems caused by malicious viruses, asking whether additional laws and criminal prosecutions are necessary to protect the public. [CNET News.com] 5:34:53 PM    comment []

Hacker Accused of Running Up $300,000 Charge at The Times. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged a man with hacking into the computer network of The New York Times and running up $300,000 in database research charges. By Benjamin Weiser. [New York Times: Technology] 6:37:28 AM    comment []

Absent Macs in South Africa. My Mac laptop is one of only a couple of Apple computers at the Highway Africa conference in South Africa.... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 6:35:11 AM    comment []

Picking up on the recent Tufte push on the issue (but not mentioning David Byrne), David Coursey addresses What's wrong with PowerPoint--and how to fix it. Reasonable advice. (I see there's been a variety of interesting PowerPoint coverage here at A blog doesn't need a clever name.) 6:12:17 AM    comment []

Eliot on the sad state of [blogging] discourse, revisited. 6:04:45 AM    comment []

jpfoley: What Bill Gates has in common with Venus and Serena. 5:58:14 AM    comment []

Finding the Face of Terror in Data. Misconceptions about the Terrorism Information Awareness program should not lead Congress to cancel financing for its invaluable contribution ot the war on terror. By John M. Poindexter. [New York Times: Opinion] Read that sentence literally--Misconceptions about the Terrorism Information Awareness program should not lead Congress to cancel financing for its invaluable contribution ot the war on terror--and I think we can all agree. 5:49:40 AM    comment []

Cambodian National Technology Plan Takes Shape 4:24:48 AM    comment []