Tuesday, March 16, 2004

BMW/MINI robot hoax. Did you know that if enough people link to a website with a specific term, like, say phony robot or marketing hoax or viral marketing ploy, that the page in question will actually start showing up in Google searches for that term? Not that it matters in this case, since the phony robot page created to market the BMW/MINI brand to technophiles was no doubt designed to have a short shelf life, but one can dream... [Purportal.com Headlines] 8:24:23 PM    comment []

Howard Rheingold's Keynote at SXSW. I just got back from SXSW in Austin. Media dietician Heath Row blogged my keynote for Fast Company. I made a couple minor corrections .... [Smart Mobs] 5:19:08 PM    comment []

My experience as an Election Judge in Baltimore County, by Avi Rubin. 1:34:23 PM    comment []

Lessig sez: the future is Free Culture. On March 25, Penguin will be releasing my new book, Free Culture. (Hmm, you'd think a book by "Penguin" about "Free Culture" would be released ...). All reviews (both good (Jonathan Schwartz in the American Lawyer) and bad (Stephen Manes of Forbes)) will be collected on a soon to be announced site, along with totally objective reviews of at least some of the reviews provided by the author (me). I'll be doing a couple events around the book. The first is next Tuesday at the 92d Street Y in New York. The day the book goes on sale, I'll be debating James DeLong of the Progress and Freedom Foundation at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Other events can be inferred from my calendar. Stay tuned for more surprises. 6:24:05 AM    comment []

Honey, I Shrunk the URL. Among Web savants, TinyURL.com has become an indispensable tool for shortening unwieldy URLs before dispatching them in e-mails or IMs. They have a fanatical unicyclist to thank for the site. By Katie Dean. [Wired News] 6:18:24 AM    comment []

Dave notes: Chapter two of Dan Gillmor's book is up. He tells his side of a meeting that I remember very well. As we were working on Manila in the spring of 1999, I was keeping Dan briefed step by step, but it didn't really come together until we had a demo at his office at the Merc. He, along with my uncle and Jamis MacNiven at Buck's became our first users that summer. Dan's class at the University of Hong Kong was among the first educational institutions, if not the first, to do weblogs. 6:11:28 AM    comment []

Experts publish 'how to' book for software exploits. A new book by leading security researchers on writing code to exploit security flaws in software, including Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system, has caused some raised eyebrows in the technical community for publishing "zero day," or previously unknown, techniques for exploiting vulnerable systems. [InfoWorld: Top News] 6:05:14 AM    comment []

Thanks to BoingBoing for the pointer to this very cool application of RSS, which shows the last five entries on the Kerry weblog, adjacent to the last five entries on the Bush blog. [Scripting News] 5:43:16 AM    comment []

Apple's iTunes sales hit 50 million. The company says it has sold 50 million songs through its iTunes Music Store, with about 2.5 million songs being downloaded each week. [CNET News.com] 5:40:26 AM    comment []

Wolves Come Back (On Their Terms). In a quiet recovery, gray wolves have returned to an area surprisingly close to human population centers. By James Gorman. [New York Times: Science] 5:32:31 AM    comment []

Wi-Fi bandwith breakthroughs leave consumers behind. As the market for wireless networking products continues to grow, vendors are constantly one-upping each other with performance claims for their products. However, it's a moot point to millions of U.S. and European home users stuck with Internet connection speeds far below the bandwidth promised by new 802.11g products. [InfoWorld: Top News] 5:29:12 AM    comment []