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Saturday, November 27, 2004 |
In a reasonably long post, My New Hedge Fund, Mark Cuban proposes a gambling fund as superior in many respects to stock funds: better information about performance, enforcement of rules, and so on.
7:58:51 PM 
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To Know Me, Know My IPod. When a colleague recently sold me his iPod with more than 3,000 songs still on it, his musical tastes showed me a side of him I had never seen. By JOHN SCHWARTZ. [NYT > Technology]
7:56:12 PM
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Doc quotes Seth on power laws and blog power, in What it isn't:
In Dan Rather: Park Avenue Ordinary, Jay Rosen portrays (accurately, it seems to me) Dan Rather as a walking contradiction: a "Bigfoot" news anchor who still sees a humble reporter in the mirror; a speaker to the nation who himself has a spkesperson. Whatever the reasons for Dan's downfall, however, the dude was clearly delusional.
Anyway, I'm not here to write about Jay or Dan. I'm here to point toward one standout among the many thoughtful folks commented on Jay's piece: Seth Finkelstein.
After a comment by JennyD, Seth says,
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
12:52:05 PM
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Rough Reception for DNA Law. California voters approve an aggressive DNA-collection program -- basically anyone held in connection with a felony will be tested -- and that has privacy advocates worried. By Julia Scheeres. [Wired News]
8:50:12 AM
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Iran's Lonely Crowd. For journalists and intellectuals in Iran, being political means keeping your mouth shut. By By FAROUZ FARZAMI. [NYT > Opinion]
When Friday Prayer here finishes at about two o'clock in the afternoon, hundreds of worshipers parade toward waiting buses east of Tehran University, shouting canned rhetoric against America and Israel, defining themselves by their animosity toward others. Watching this ritual, one cannot help but ask a soul-searching question: "How can such a small minority of vocal people - totally orchestrated worshipers and their security guards - set the agenda for a nation of 70 million people?"
The short answer is lack of free speech - or, more accurately, the absence of freedom after speech. The state has a monopoly on public discourse, and intellectuals, whether they are religious, atheist or agnostic, are simply not heard. The mullahs in Qom, the holy city two hours drive southwest of Tehran, can dial the phone number of any revolutionary judge in Iran and order the persecution of anyone who dares to question the authorities and their divine agenda.
Learning is thus made irrelevant. The educated must rely on the government to earn their living. I have dozens of friends who hate the religious regime but, to earn a subsistence salary, work as translators of confidential bulletins that keep the ruling theocracy abreast of what the "unfriendly" foreign news media think about Iran. "It is like preparing your own cross for your own crucifixion," said a friend who works for Iranian Radio & TV, which is controlled by the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
. . .
I know at least 10 journalists, public supporters of the reforms advocated by President Mohammad Khatami, who have sought asylum in Europe. I sympathize with this resigned approach, but am encouraged by the more determined newcomers. The chairman of the Iranian Press Managers Board, Issa Saharkhiz, has urged journalists to protest more actively, saying: "Enough is enough. What are you waiting for? What worse can happen to you?"
He criticized those reporters who practice self-censorship, trading away their freedom of expression in hopes that their publications will survive the government crackdown. He called for journalists to end the "vicious circle of getting permission to publish and after a while being closed down."
. . .
The vast majority of people here cross their fingers for a sudden explosion, or pray for American successes in Iraq and Afghanistan to increase the price of suppression by the theocracy in Iran. But that is the limit. Just as minimalism is the fashion in short-story writing today, I suppose we must accept minimalist politics as well.
8:50:08 AM
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The 'blog' revolution sweeps across China.
In the current Chinese cyberspace, bloggers may not be as loud as their American counterparts. But they are potentially certainly no less subversive to the dominant paradigm. Hope will be born from their whispers.
The New Scientist published an interesting article of Xiao Qiang on the Chinese blog revolution. The following is a condensed abstract of the original.
Ever since the Communist party took power in 1949, the Chinese media has been tightly controlled by the government. Online publishing is a real threat to that control, and the government is clearly worried. A crackdown in 2003 closed websites and internet cafes and saw the arrest of dozens of online commentators. The government fears that uncontrolled online information will cause the regime to collapse.
Technology writer Fang Xingdong in Beijing, started a news and commentary website, BlogChina.com, which covers the development of China's IT industry.
Fang coined the Chinese term bo ke to mean blogger. He encouraged his readers to try blogging by registering on blogger.com. "Blogging is a true revolution," he wrote. "One needs zero technology training, zero institution and zero cost to become a blogger."
By January 2003, China had about 2000 bloggers when, without warning, the Chinese government blocked all access to blogspot.com, the server that hosts all blogs registered on blogger.com.
The net police do not make the reasons for such actions public, but Chinese bloggers point out that DynaWeb, an anti-censorship service run by overseas Chinese, had been using a blog on blogspot.com to publish proxy server addresses that allowed users to get around the Great Firewall. The authorities' blanket blockade affected all China's bloggers, leaving them suddenly unable to reach their journals.
The censors probably did not anticipate the bloggers' response. For many, blogging had become an addictive activity. With nowhere else to go, many followed Mao's lead and started to look for solutions inside China.
Three small start-ups offered them a refuge; Blogcn.com, Blogdriver.com and Blogbus.com. All were blog-hosting services started just a couple of months earlier by people who had first gathered on Mao's website. All were based inside China, and inside the Great Firewall.
In early 2003, most Chinese who wanted to comment online were using not blogs, but online forums like bulletin boards and chat rooms. These allowed people to express themselves anonymously and therefore safely, and were already beginning to have a social impact.
Meanwhile blogging seems set to grow as a national hobby for the younger generation. Providers of China's 300 million mobile phones are beginning to provide "moblogging" services, with which users can send text and photos directly from their phones to their blogs. For now, most blogs are personal, but their potential for building networks of people and disseminating news cannot be underestimated.
Xiao Qiang is the director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley. He runs China Digital News blog at chinadn.org.
[Smart Mobs]
Other coverage of China here at A blog doesn't need a clever name.
8:30:39 AM
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Fast Company: She Reads Customers' Minds. That's Alissa Kozuh's job at Nordstrom.com. Kozuh, 28, who formerly worked on search-related projects for Microsoft, is now the editor of Nordstrom.com, where her most important role is to analyze the words that people put into the site's search engine every month. All 45,000 of them. [Tomalak's Realm]
8:27:20 AM
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