Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Working press. I started working with Andrew Leonard at Salon when he joined us in early 1997, and for several years I happily served as editor for his inspired technology reporting. At the height of the Internet boom I helped him conceive and execute a book project that we unfolded, chapter by chapter, online, in an early instance of a practice that has now become positively trendy. The Free Software Project had to be scuttled as Salon's business went south, but even in its incomplete form I think it represents some of the best writing anywhere on the history of open source software development. Today Andrew and Salon unveil the latest effort of this technology writer par excellence -- a blog called How the World Works, in which Andrew will dig into some of the thorniest, gnarliest and most complex stories that reveal the strangely mutating dynamics of early 21st-century global capitalism. You can read Andrew's introduction here. Or read about the strange saga of the run on polysilicon. The How the World Works RSS feed is here (or will be very soon!). [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 10:49:16 PM    comment []

Dave: Jon Udell: "A blog can be used to narrate the key events and accomplishments in your professional life, to establish your reputation as an authority on subjects in your areas of expertise, and to educate the world about your company's products and services." 10:48:53 PM    comment []

Wired News: Old Rips: May They Rest in Peace. Members of the Napster generation, who blissfully piled up free tunes while they could, are realizing that the quality of low-bitrate MP3s sucks. Part one of a three-part series. By Dan Goodin. The Digital Audiophile's Toolbox. With a little work and the right software, you can get your digital music collection humming. By Dan Goodin. Music Man Cracks DRM Schemes. A computer-science grad student with a flair for reverse engineering matches wits with the recording industry whenever it releases a new copy-protection scheme. Guess who's winning? By Quinn Norton. 10:48:14 PM    comment []

Illegal short messages. "China's government said it stepped up monitoring of short message services (SMS) sent between the nation's 383 million mobile-phone users to prevent fraudsters,pornographers and other "unhealthy elements" from exploiting the technology",Asia Media reports."Police found 107,000 illegal short messages and shut down 9,700 cellphone accounts since the start of last month,Wu Heping,vice minister of the Ministry of Public Security,said at a briefing in Beijing yesterday that was broadcast on the Internet." CHINA:Beijing boosts surveillance of SMS [Smart Mobs] 10:43:17 PM    comment []

LA Weekly on Nintendogs. Mark Frauenfelder: My eight-year-old daughter and every one of her girlfriends has a Nintendo DS and the Nintendogs cartridge. She has been playing it daily for a couple of months and she and her friends talk about their virtual puppies all the time. Joshua Berman at the LA Weekly has nice essay on Nintendogs, about how "virutal pets represent a new development in the man-machine interface." Therein lies Nintendogs inexorable pull: It’s the first game powered by empathy. These things are much more convincing than the Tomogatchis, those rudimentary keychain creatures from the first virtual pet craze a decade ago. Nintendogs go a long way toward satisfying a sort of canine Turing test: If they look and act enough like dogs, then at a simple cognitive level, they’re a pretty good substitute. It’s rewarding when your digital dogs bring you a present, upsetting when they try to eat trash on walks, and they’re so cute that when you find a big green floppy hat you want to make them wear it until you see in their little faces that they know the big green floppy hat is really a form of humiliation and you half-reluctantly take it off. Link [Boing Boing] 10:43:06 PM    comment []

Fantastic report on "fair use" in film. The Center for Social Media has released a fantastic report on "fair use" in film. The aim of the report is to try to state, and hence establish, norms or "best practices" that should govern "fair use" for film. This is an important effort and Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi deserve thanks for the hard work pulling the team together to produce this. Download the report here. [Lessig Blog] 10:41:44 PM    comment []

Venture-Capital. Notoriously tight-lipped, venture capitalists have recently begun to open up through blogs (and even podcasts) that offer insightful commentary and witty observations on the venture capital industry and broader technology trends. The blogs featured here are from some of the industry's preeminent investors and well-known observers. All of the blogs included in the Top 10 Sources are from actual venture capitalists.  There are more than just ten great sources for venture capital info so besides those featured here, check out Will Price's blog, Burnham's Beat by Bill Burnham, and Jeff Jarvis' Buzz Machine (even though Jeff isn't a venture capitalist  - VCs read Jeff's blog). Also, although updated infrequently, Steve Jurveston's J Curve has some very good in-depth posts. [TopTenSources] 5:57:43 AM    comment []

A College That Specializes in Dropouts Is Under Siege. A New York State report on Interboro Institute highlights some of the difficulties of commercial schools. By KAREN W. ARENSON. [NYT > Education] 5:57:14 AM    comment []

Warner Music attacks specialized web-browser. Cory Doctorow sez: Jamie Zawinski sez, PearLyrics is a program that displays the lyrics of the currently-playing track in iTunes: it gets the lyrics from the ID3 tag in the MP3 file, or if they aren't in there, it searches for them on a few different web sites, and then saves them into the MP3s. It's very handy: I managed to use it to download the lyrics for almost half of my music collection in one fell swoop. Except that the author got a "Cease and Desist" letter from Warner/Chappel Music, who seem to think that his program -- which is, basically, nothing more than a specialized web browser -- is somehow in violation of their copyrights. But, the author doesn't have the time or money to risk a lawsuit, so he panicked and pulled it. Link (Thanks, JWZ!) [Boing Boing] 5:57:09 AM    comment []