Monday, September 29, 2003

Smart People in the News: Rheingold, Gosling. In "How Will "Smart Mobs" Play Out?," BusinessWeek asked questions to Howard Rheingold, who published the "Smart Mobs" book at the end of 2002. Rheingold talks about the emergence of the picturephone, especially outside the U.S. He adds that future business applications for smart mobs might start anywhere in the world, like "finding out about the spot labor market in [an] African village." For his part, James Gosling, the leading guy behind the Java programming language, is interviewed by Red Herring, in Social smarts. He talks about the social implications of the Internet by looking at the Brazilian National Medical System. Gosling also talks about the entertainment industry which deeply hates Internet, and about the open source movement, of which he is a big fan. And of course, that leads him to talk about Microsoft. This summary contains some excerpts of both interviews. [Smart Mobs] 8:03:05 PM    comment []

LA Times: Law Won't Deter Spam, Experts Say. That's the conclusion of a range of experts on the plague of electronic advertising known as spam. They say the new law, touted by state politicians as the toughest in the country, is at best a toothless, feel-good measure and at worst might spur frivolous lawsuits. [Tomalak's Realm] 7:58:32 PM    comment []

Oh, my. Doc] with Magnidudes. Early this year, in a conversation with Ev, I said I believed that in reality there might be as few as maybe thirty or forty thousand active blogs. He disagreed. And he was right. Dave Sifry just announced that Technorati has gone past one million blogs watched, and that a new blog is being created about every twelve seconds. Amazing. 7:54:57 PM    comment []

For the last 10 years, typographer Michael Everson has... [Communications-Related Headlines] 7:51:34 PM    comment []

Feds nab second suspect in worm attacks, by Robert Lemos, CNET News.com. 7:26:57 AM    comment []

A.C.L.U. Challenges Music Industry in Court. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a motion to stop attempts by the music industry to obtain the name of a college student who is accused of being a large-scale file trader By John Schwartz. [New York Times: Business] 7:22:11 AM    comment []

xian on Imminent death of blogging predicted -Film at 11. Written in the mode of a jaded Internet old-timer (how weak is that?), a New York Press Media & Politics item points out the deep irrelevance of weblogs, noting that they are "a circle jerk" and that the best bloggers long to be media columnists like ol' no-signature who penned the slam. You have to scroll down from the link given above to the item (Best Loyalty: To Print). Something the Press could learn from blogs about online journalism is to give make each item uniquely addressable. Of course that would require the use of permalinks or some equivalent, which would involve knowing more about the so-called new form than this jaded "ho-hum I had a homepage in 1996" journo has bothered to do. Let's set our watches to check this prediction around October, 2004: The blog is a dead form within two years. On the outside. Speaking of the web address for the column, it uses a raw (unescaped) ampersand in its URL. Sniff. [via Elizabeth Spiers - in whose comments see also an encomium from Peter Jurew at the New Yorker, who says "Keep on writing!"] 7:20:58 AM    comment []

Andrew reports that he has finished reading Quicksilver. I have not, though I am *tens* of pages into the book. And having much fun. More when there's much more to say. 6:45:27 AM    comment []

Borders union nixes contract, By Mike Hughlett, Pioneer Press. The unionization of the uptown Borders was never significant for its numbers; it only involves about 20 workers. Instead, it was important because it was the first — and still only — tangible success of a novel organizing campaign directed at retail workers. South St. Paul-based United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789 began its retail campaign two years ago, targeting large discount stores such as Target. But it is also trying to attract any and all retail workers, an inherently difficult group to organize, primarily because of high employee turnover. . . . The union has demanded a starting wage of $9.33, which is based on a "living wage" as defined by the Minneapolis City Council. Borders, which starts workers at $7.50 to $7.55, has said no to the $9.33 proposal. The company has also rejected the union's demand to adopt Local 789's health care plan, which includes 100 percent employer-paid insurance premiums. . . . Meanwhile, about 60 union workers at a large Borders store in Ann Arbor are preparing to take a strike authorization vote early next month. Workers there overwhelmingly voted last December to join a Michigan local of the United Food and Commercial Workers. 4:45:08 AM    comment []