Subscribe to this blog in Radio:
Didn't find what you were looking for?
E-mail this blog's author, Bruce Umbaugh:  |
|
 |
Tuesday, January 13, 2004 |
Business Week: Yahoo's Risky Antispam Gambit. A unilateral move from a powerful commercial entity such as Yahoo, however, threatens to overtake the Internet's governing bodies and could effectively cede control of e-mail technology standards to the mammoth ISPs. [Tomalak's Realm]
10:09:03 PM 
|
|
Dave:
 One of the innovations flowing out the Share Your OPML site is the idea of reading lists. An expert in a given area puts together a set of feeds that you would subscribe to if you want a balanced flow of information on his or her topic of expertise. You let the expert subscribe to feeds on your behalf. I've gotten the first taste of what this is like by reading the aggregator page on the Share Your OPML site. As new sites come on the Top-100, as the aggregated interests of the community shift, I automatically start reading sites I wasn't reading before. I don't have to do anything. I like this. So at last Thursday's Berkman meeting I asked two of our regulars, Rick Heller and Jay McCarthy, to start doing these reading lists, and Rick is ready with what he calls a list of "political blogs that provide a balanced diet of liberal and conservative views." Now I have more work to do, to create a user interface that lets Rick edit his list at will, and presents an easy way for you to subscribe to his list so he can automatically subscribe you to new feeds (and unsubscribe you from others). The technology is not that hard, but it's essential, imho. Two comments. 1. I'm talking with other developers about building around this idea, so there will be another round of open formats and protocols building on RSS, OPML and XML-RPC; and 2. No patents.
5:10:08 PM
|
|
Doggone it.
I'll try again to point at Karen's post
on defecting from Mormonism. (It somehow broke yesterday. (And this
morning. (But I think I've got it, at last.)))
The Catholic religion brought us the Spanish inquisition;
it sheltered Nazis and it fomented the sex abuse scandal. But the
Catholics have also brought us Liberation Theology, and a spate of
other democratic movements for human dignity. Despite the Pope's claim
that he speaks for God, a Catholic tradition of heterodoxy has
undeniably made it feasible for numbers of Catholics to question church
policy and church leaders, yet remain Catholic. I credit a stream of
Catholic heretics and dissidents over the ages, whom the church has
finally tired of routing out, with liberalizing that faith enough to
allow for vigorous dissent from within.
Relative to Catholicism, Mormonism is a young religion, less than 200
years old. Perhaps its youth, as much as any other factor, has kept the
church monolithic in character. Those Mormons who have openly
questioned the church have done so, not as part of an established
Mormon liberal tradition, but as lone voices in the wilderness. Their
way has been hard. Mormons and former Mormons who have openly
challenged the church position on women, or its official
interpretations of L.D.S. history, have described being summoned for
intrusive interviews by Mormon officials, who rescinded their church
privileges or excommunicated them.
2:22:38 PM
|
|
Three from today's BNA News:
- NEW SMS TRACKER ALLOWS PARENTS TO MONITOR KIDS
Parents will be able to track their teenagers 24 hours a day
using secret bounce-back SMS messages. Privacy experts warn
pedophiles and stalkers could hack the system and engage in
secret tracking.
Herald Sun story
- CHINA'S INTERNET CENSORSHIP EXAMINED
The LA Times runs a story examining the recent attempts by
China to censor online activities. The article highlights
the large number of arrests of cyber-dissidents and the
thousands of people employed to monitor online traffic.
LA Times story
- PENN STATE NAPSTER LAUNCHES
The launch of Napster's online music service for Penn State
students generated about 100,000 downloads or
streaming-audio requests yesterday. As spring semester
classes got under way, more than 2,600 students had
registered for the Napster 2.0 service, which comes free
with their tuition. All 17,000 on-campus resident students
are eligible to use the service.
Washington Post story
10:22:01 AM
|
|
Seth: Mathematics of ordinary-blog non-influence. I've come up with a simple way to explain what's wrong the idea of "One blogger is worth ten votes". Now, the sense of this idea is clearly that it's worthwhile to recruit recruiters. But the unintended consequence is that... [Infothought]
6:48:27 AM
|
|
Lessig: and the winners are. MoveOn's Bush-in-30-Second campaign has announced its winners. They are in four categories, and each is brilliantly done. I hope the same is done by the other side, when the Democrats finally find a candidate. Because what's great about this is that it marks the real beginning of iPolitics -- bottom-up media made real. Citizen-bloggers and digital media -- when Madison finally returns to "Madison Avenue."
I understand that RNC is confused about the nature of this campaign. No doubt the folks responsible for the RNC ghost-written letters to the editor were sure that there could only be a media effort if it was controlled and directed from the top, so that when 2 out of the thousand entries (not 2 out of the 15 finalists) mentioned Hitler, they thought that MoveOn must have sponsored that message. But now that that confusion has been cleared up, I hope they too will enlist the public to make the President's message clear. If they do, we've got the tools to help spread the messages far.
6:42:28 AM
|
|
Random Acts of Spamness. One of spammers' latest tricks is messages that include random lists of words. This type of message may have no meaning, but it certainly has a function -- defeating filters. By Michelle Delio. [Wired News]
6:39:40 AM
|
|
|
