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13. februar 2005
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Selling BlogLines to Ask Jeeves was a very good business move, since this is a product that can never make money any other way.
Congratulations and respect to Mark for having the sense to dump the business now when it has some perceived value. However, I can tell you clearly there is no business model for web-based news readers, and in two years 95-99% of the RSS reader market will be consolidated into three of the following players: My Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express, Google’s RSS reader (if and when it comes out… I have no inside information here), and maybe an Open Source version integrated into Firefox and/or Thunderbird.
I still prefer BlogLines to standalone RSS readers, but I guess that may change if some good reader comes out. The crucial argument against an RSS aggregator as a busines model, however, is pretty obvious:
Mark from Bloglines said something really dumb on a Jupiter blog a little while back about selling ads against Engadget and Gizmodo. Uhhh… you’re going to sell ads to my advertisers against my readers?!?!? Are you nuts?!?!!? Why don’t you scrape the New York Times website, email it to people and put ads around? People did that back in 1996 and they got smacked down real quick.
Exactly. You can't take other people's content and put your own ads around it to make money. This is the reason Google News, extremely popular as it is, will probably never run with advertising, and may stay in beta until the end of time.
10:18:52 PM 
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The story about German unemployed women being forced to take work in brothels or lose their unemployment benefits was popular in the English-speaking press in January. The theme was how legalizing prostitution was the start of a slippery slope into, in effect, state pimping.
But the story is not true.
In fact, the origin of this story was evidently a 18 December 2004 article published in the Berlin newspaper Tageszeitung (also known as TAZ) which did not report that women in Germany must accept employment in brothels or face cuts in their unemployment benefits. (Although it claimed there had been "isolated cases" of such, it did not provide any source or documentation to back up that statement.)
The Tageszeitung merely presented the concept of brothel employment as a technical possibility under current law; it did not provide any actual cases of women losing their benefits over this issue. The article also quoted representatives from employment agencies as saying that while it might be possible for employment agencies to offer jobs as prostitutes to "long-term unemployed" women, they (the agencies) could not require anyone to work in a brothel. (The agencies noted that brothels used "other recruitment channels" anyway.)
It should be possible to legalize prostitution as an expression of tolerance without actually encouraging it. And that seems to be what is happening.
4:18:28 PM
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To nobody's surprise, the broad Shia coalition assembled by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani won the Iraqi election handily, winning more than 48% of the 8.5 million votes cast. A Kurdish alliance made second place with around 26%, while Iyad Allawi's party came third with around 14%.
The turnout was a quite stunning 58%. In the Sunni areas, as we know, the turnout was low.
There will now be a three day period where the election commission is open for complaints about the result, and if no successful challenge is made, the results will be final.
Then the politics will change. Bargaining is already on between the different parties (and, I suspect, within the parties) for different posts within the new Shia-led coaltion. Hopefully the winners make good on their promise to include moderate Sunni groups in the constitution building.
I have heard many complaints from Iraqia that western observers are overinterpreting the importance of the ethnic/religious divide. Voters, they say, are Iraqis first and Sunni Arab, Kurd and Shia second.
I suspect prime minister Allawi regrets not joining the Shia list.
Zeyad of Healing Iraq looks ahead: Next Step, National Reconciliation
Invitations should be open to all Iraqi political and social groups, regardless of their repsective ideologies and their current stand from the occupation and the ongoing political process in the country. It is also essential that this conference includes elements of the former political order if possible, provided that they have not committed crimes against Iraqis whether in the past or in the present, as well as delegates from the largest and most influential tribes in the dissident areas and senior clerics from all over the country, encompassing religious and sectarian differences.
Many political groups that boycotted the elections are now softening their tone and are sheepishly asking for a role in the political process, trying as much as they can to save face at the same time. The Association of Muslim Scholars, the Pan-Arab, Nasseri, and Socialist movements, the Khalisi group and the Sadrists are among the first groups to call for such a role. Had there been no elections, this could not have been possible.
There is already a consensus among the different political powers that drafting the permanent constitution should not be done solely by the elected National Assembly. This in order to safeguard the interests of the part of the population that did not participate in the elections and to reassure Iraqis that everyone has a say in their future. No longer will one group, no matter how large its support base, dominate over others.
I truly hope that Iraqi politicians realise this and can work to achieve it, leaving aside their personal interests and differences for one moment, putting the prejudices of the past behind them, and listening to what Iraqis have to say. For it is Iraqis, and Iraqis alone, that are the key to solving this whole mess.
Iraqis showed great courage and determination in going out to vote. They will need the same strength to go forward with the political process.
3:23:26 PM
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Michael Barone writes about the difference between the left and the right blogosphere. The left is all about hatred of George Bush, the more extreme left the better. The right blogosphere, on the other hand, disagrees with Bush about many things, is indeed quite centrist, but hates the mainstream media (MSM).
So what hath the blogosphere wrought? The left blogosphere has moved the Democrats off to the left, and the right blogosphere has undermined the credibility of the Republicans' adversaries in Old Media. Both changes help Bush and the Republicans.
True that.
1:46:49 PM
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Tim Blair notes this outragous statement reported by Reuters, related to the UN now banning all sex between UN peacekeepers and locals in Congo:
UN regulations for soldiers usually forbid sex with anyone under 18 and forced prostitution. But often officials found there was a fine line between forced and willing sex.
How was it again: Only the United Nations has "moral authority"?
1:52:21 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.03.2005; 01:30:20.
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