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Monday, November 21, 2005 |
Benton Headline:
IN RISKY MOVE, A NEW AT&T BETS ON INTERNET TECHNOLOGY
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Peter Grant peter.grant@wsj.com
and
Almar Latour almar.latour@wsj.com]
Don't call it SBC anymore; the new AT&T is placing a risky bet that its
future will depend on delivering content to television, wireless phones
and
computers on a network using Internet technology. In doing so, the
merged
company hopes to play a central role in the seismic changes under way in
the media and telecom businesses. Only 23% of AT&T's revenue will come
from
the residential landline phone business that for decades was the main
engine driving the venerable company founded in 1885. That business,
along
with most other wired voice services, has been suffering anemic or
negative
growth for years because of new technology and new competitors. A key to
AT&T's new growth strategy is to deliver video, data, wireless calls and
phone traffic over a single network to consumers and large corporate
customers. AT&T executives say the technology will let it offer a new
form
of television with 1,000 or more channels available to consumers within
the
next 18 months. The company also plans to beam TV content to cellphones;
offer targeted advertising on TV, much like Google offers on the
Internet;
and eventually provide thousands of programs and movies on demand.
Yahoo,
which has been working on ventures with SBC since 2001, will work
closely
with AT&T in this effort and will help develop search technology and
advertising.
(requires subscription)
*
Cingular will be sold under name of AT&T
12:22:21 PM 
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Josh Glenn on utopian ideas hidden inside dystopian sf.
Josh Glenn writes a terrific column for Boston Globe called ideas. This week, he wrote "a long-form essay I've written for today's Ideas: It's about Fredric Jameson's new book on the utopian possibilities of dystopian science fiction by the likes of Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Samuel R. Delany."
 Because of the Cold War emphasis on dystopias, Cold War writers like Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Samuel R. Delany had to find radical new ways to express their inexpressible hopes about the future, claims Jameson. At this moment of neoliberal triumphalism, he suggests, we should take these writers seriously - even if their ideas are packaged inside lurid paperbacks.
In Dick's uncanny novels, the author demands of us that we decide for ourselves what's real and what isn't. ''Martian Time-Slip" (1964), for example, is partly told from the perspective of a 10-year-old schizophrenic colonist on Mars, where civilization is devolving into ''gubbish." And ''The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" (1965) is a psychedelic odyssey of hallucinations-within-hallucinations from which no reader emerges unscathed.
Delany, meanwhile, is best known for ''Trouble on Triton" (1976), a self-consciously post-structuralist novel that depicts a future where neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality is the norm. Le Guin, author of a fantasy series for children, ''The Earthsea Trilogy," explores Taoist, anarchist, and feminist themes in novels like ''The Left Hand of Darkness" (1969) and ''The Dispossessed" (1974). Fans of Dick, Delany, and their ilk warn neophytes not to read too many of their books too quickly: Doing so, as this reader can attest, tends to result in pronounced feelings of irreality, paranoia, and angst.
Link
Josh adds: PS:
I'm also working on essay for the forthcoming issue of the journal n+1; I published something on what I call invisible-prison theory in their first issue. Watch this space
If you've never seen my column, which takes the form of three short items every Sunday (that makes 156 items a year) they keep it here.
And what the heck, as long as I'm at it, here are the only other two essays I've written for Ideas, one on the poet Fanny Howe and one on the significance people have managed to attach to beekeeping through the ages. [Boing Boing]
6:40:43 AM
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Increasing the traffic to less popular sites?.
The Economist looks at a paper that questions whether search engines make popular sites more so."Google works by analysing the structure of the web itself.Each of its billions of pages can link to other pages and can also,in turn,be linked to by others.If a page is linked to many other pages, it is flagged up as being important.Furthermore,if the pages that link to this page are also important,then that page is even more likely to be important.The algorithm has been made increasingly complex over the years,to deter those who would manipulate their pages to appear higher in the rankings,but it remains at the heart of Google's success.Google is not alone in this.Many search engines take account of the number of links to a website when they return the results of a search.Because of this,there is a widespread belief among computer,social and political scientists that search engines create a vicious circle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular websites.Pages returned by search engines are more likely to be discovered and consequently linked to by others.Not so,according to a controversial new paper that has recently appeared on arXiv,an online collection of physics and related papers.In it,Santo Fortunato and his colleagues at Indiana University in America and Bielefeld University in Germany claim that search engines actually have an egalitarian effect that increases traffic to less popular sites".
Egalitarian engines
The search engine edges towards email.
Search engine use shoots up in the past year [Smart Mobs]
6:37:55 AM
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Saving the Net.
In a very long essay (14 pages when printed), but absolutely essential to read, Doc Searls looks at the future of the Net.
The title of his essay is pretty explicit: "Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes."
Here is the first paragraph.
We're hearing tales of two scenarios--one pessimistic, one optimistic--for the future of the Net. If the paranoids are right, the Net's toast. If they're not, it will be because we fought to save it, perhaps in a new way we haven't talked about before. Davids, meet your Goliaths.
His article is divided in three sections.
- Scenario I: The Carriers Win
- Scenario II: The Public Workaround
- Scenario III: Fight with Words and Not Just Deeds
Even if this essay is focused on the situation in the U.S, it's still a must-read article for everyone. Please read it and pass the pointers to other people around you.
Links: Doc Searl's article in Linux Journal, November 16, 2005; Doc Searls Weblog [Smart Mobs]
6:35:00 AM
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