Sunday, April 23, 2006

(Selections from) other Rex's i facebooked your mom: Amazon's Most-Edited Wikis. NYT Biz: Making money with MySpace. (Onion: New MySpace Security Measures infographic.) Onion: iTunes To Sell You Your Home Videos For $1.99 Each. Be honest, you spent your Sunday reading the Google/China NYT Mag story too. Blender (on AOL?): The 50 Worst Things To Ever Happen To Music. [Fimoculous.com] 6:31:27 PM    comment []

Irina Slutsky interviews Mitch Kapor, Danny O'Brien and Esther Dyson about the future of email. [Scripting News] 1:57:38 PM    comment []

(Selections from) Roland's Sunday Smart Trends #107. MySpace for the Office: Social Networking Goes Corporate Visible Path isn't the first social networking site to target Corporate America. LinkedIn also courts the business and professional market. The hope is that social networking will follow the trend of other communications, such as e-mail and instant messaging, which got a foothold among tech-savvy youngsters before gaining traction in business. Visible Path is hoping to harness the popularity of Web-networking to create a tool for businesses. The closely held company in Foster City, Calif., has just raised $17 million in a second round of venture-capital funding. Source: Steve Rosenbush, BusinessWeek Online, April 18, 2006 Mobile browsing becoming mainstream A global increase in cell phone ownership and a rise in the use of wireless services by people over 35 may lead cell phones to dominate Web browsing, a new study says. Source: Candace Lombardi, CNET News.com, April 18, 2006 New RFID travel cards could pose privacy threat Future government-issued travel documents may feature embedded computer chips that can be read at a distance of up to 30 feet, a top Homeland Security official said Tuesday, creating what some fear would be a threat to privacy. Source: Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com, April 18, 2006 Neil Young's protest album to get Web premiere Neil Young's newly recorded protest album "Living With War," including a song calling for the impeachment of President Bush, will be posted for free Internet streaming next week, his label said on Friday. Source: Reuters, via CNET News.com, April 22, 2006 [Smart Mobs] On that RFID story, let me mention again the Everyware discussion on Well, featuring Adam Greenfield: Computing devices shrink ever smaller and become invisible, while at the same time we interact with them and they communicate with one another. Rather than carrying phones and PDAs, our desks, rooms, and clothing, our food and our sex toys converge, interconnect, and interact. Their connectedness is hidden from us, we don't control the information they record, and there's no "Undo" key. "Great, another loopy novelist in the Inkwell, extrapolating from a random headline in a trade journal," you say. It's not loopy fiction, according to Adam Greenfield. Instead, it's the form computing will take in the next few years, and it behooves us to think it through in advance, in order both to understand it and humanize it. That's the subject of "Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing." Join Adam Greenfield from the beginning of the conversation or catch up on the latest posts. 1:57:12 PM    comment []

Bush Meets With Think Tank On Iran. Bush Meets Privately With Think Tank Promoting Military Strike On Iran: "This tidbit about President Bush's schedule was buried in today's Washington Post: Bush traveled Friday night to Stanford University, where he met privately with members of the libertarian Hoover Institution to discuss the war. He concluded the day with a private dinner held by George P. Shultz, a Hoover fellow and former secretary of state. Why is this significant? The Hoover Institution is a think tank that has been aggressively promoting the viability of a preemptive military strike in Iran." (Think Progress) [Follow Me Here...] 1:56:17 PM    comment []

College, My Way. Today's campus-hopping millennials want the right program, the best schedule, the perfect fit. If at first you don't succeed, try again -- someplace else. By KATE ZERNIKE. [NYT > Education] 1:55:50 PM    comment []

Politics is Architecture. When it comes to building a new movement, the converse proposition, “politics is architecture” holds true as well. The architecture (structure and design) of political processes, not their content, is determinative of what can be accomplished. Just as you can’t build a skyscraper out of bamboo, you can’t have a participatory democracy if power is centralized, processes are opaque, and accountability is limited. Politics needs a new architecture, not just a new coat of paint. We need to renovate the house (and Senate). The architecture team, that is, those who collectively will determine the structure of political processes cannot be composed of an elite, whether technical or political. Who is sitting at the table as the new politics is designed and implemented and the experiences and perspectives they represent matter enormously. The internet, if kept open and accessible to all, is a tool we can use to reform our politics and create new democratic processes and institutions. By using the internet and building upon its open decentralized architecture, we can help give every person a voice and offer them a forum to participate in creating a healthy politics. The internet provides the tools to build bottom-up systems that are both globally interconnected and locally controlled. As the printing press was the technology that helped birth modern self-government, so the internet can be the tool to build a new democratically controlled participatory politics. [Mitch Kapor's Blog] 1:55:44 PM    comment []