Thoughts and wanderings around the internet, e-government and geekdom.
Amazing that PayPal can get away with it. The US normally regulates this kind of stuff – amazing that it’s slipped under the radar.Gartner have definitely got the point about the internet and large companies. You ain’t seen nothing yet. Hype and Anti-Hype
After having read the code book by Simon Singh, the idea of an unbreakable code is an interesting one!This will bear reading a couple of times, I think: Concept Map Software.Useful list of IA software Strange.
Useful article on what Interaction Architects might deliver: Defining IA Deliverables.Interesting anti-rant on Flash.I guess I’m not a user then: Species of help desk callers.Some great gee whizz graphs.Microsoft’s plan for domination of the digital music industry: own the platform.Great post on what web items actually work. “Much to my chagrin, we discovered that the more obnoxious the button, the higher the click-through. Fuchsia and lime green with blinking text were by far the winners.”
Extraordinary. Someone else thinks he owns the web.A funky and rather silly magazine: Mappa.Mundi.Interesting article from a Napster bod: Why Gnutella Can’t Scale.ISPs can now put ads directly on your screen. Isn’t this like putting up a new ad on a billboard, and therefore illegal?Frightening suggestion: charge users just for buying equipment that might be used to make copies of music, video. Sheesh, there will be a tax on memory before too long. I can sing, therefore I break copyright.Very interesting summary of an Alexa survey on how people navigate the web. Key message: a significant number of people just type hotmail.com into the search box, rather than in to the URL field. This means that the MSNs of the world who take over our home pages may actually be winning!
Cracking quote in this NY Times piece:Only three obstacles stand in its way: the laws of physics, the laws of supply and demand, and the laws of Mexico. There may be a fourth: It would take many billions of dollars in American investment in Mexico to make it happen.More seriously, it shows some of the worries we had about Dubya are well-founded.I particularly like the one that involves taping a second floppy drive inside the box with a floppy in it: Evil Windows Tips.Good insight from Clay Shirky into Peak Performance Pricing. People pay up front for peak performance, not on a pay-as-you-go basis for continual service. Napster et al have managed to start using and therefore putting a price on the value of the ‘performance gap’ between what people have paid for and what they actually use.Reasonable article on what’s going on in the fight over copying digital tv broadcasts. Once Divx and related codecs are fully distributed, there is no way anyone is going to be able to stop someone, somewhere being able to get a digital copy of a digital medium.I don’t quite understand this Secure Audio Pathway stuff, but it sounds worryingly like the proposal to have DRM built into hard disks. In this case its for audio, but is still frighteningly close to MS controlling what you do on your PC without you being able to see what or how.Very useful windows resource: ActiveWin. Not necessarily the ultimate, as it claims, but that’s marketing, huh?Courtney Love gets it exactly right on this Napster | Speak Out page. The record industry is worried that the enforced bundling of content into a CD form factor means that filler is often used that music-lovers really don’t want to buy.Some pretty good rules about reply emails from customer service sites. It’s not 100%, but is a long way down the road. Example: I think ticket number is better than ticker.
Extraordinary picture of earthlights from space.Maybe worth checking out this as it progresses: Small Pieces Public Draft.Booz.Allen article that mirrors my Rapid Pilot idea. I’m not quite sure of either the word hyperinnovation or of iterative capital. However, the concepts are solid.WinNT auditing tools for the seriously paranoid: u n d e r g r o u n d s e c u r i t y s y s t e m s r e s e a r c h.Vital research: Blondes Earn Less?.Caroline had this idea bout a year ago: E-tail Invades the Real World.Looks like e-Procurement has just hit Asia.General usability resource: Usability.gov. It’s surprisingly good.Breakthrough Books in a wide range of subjects.Interesting article from Strategy + Business.Good new (to me) toon: For Better or For Worse.
Long and good article on XML and Databases. Is XML a database?Eric Raymond’s first four chapters of The Art Of Unix Programming. Some good programming guidelines here.Rubberhose is a great idea, with a great name. It’s a cryptographically deniable transparent disk encryption system. Obvious really. What does this mean: you can give out a password for your encrypted information that will allow the user to see a basic level of information on the disk, but will not see a further level of encryption that only you know is there.Vital: Urban Legends Reference PagesSensationalist, of course. But then it is extraordinary. IBM and the holocaust.Long but interesting article about Making a Semantic Web.So now the record companies (or their agents) are watching Napster downloads (using automated tools) and messaging people who look like fans of a particular group or type of music. The Napster parasites. Interesting quote which shows that the industry doesn’t quite get it yet: ‘converting a fringe-level fan to an album-buying fan’.Another good look at why the major cost savings from the internet will come from p2p communication (or b2b in this example). The example here is invoicing.Mini rant about the digital copyright issue (Whigs and Tories on the Internet). “The Lockean idea of natural rights became the idea of maximum monopoly”.
Some interesting stuff on Arnold Kling’s personal web page. I like the bubble calculator – shame there isn’t a historical side to it.Great guide to tweaking your system for better performance, compatibility, etc.Interesting summary of how Ford Direct came about.McAfee.com World Virus Map. Is it interesting? Don’t really know: it basically says that places with more PCs have more viruses.Good Pfeiffer report on DRM. Key message: think of the customer, not what you might lose through piracy. If using the system is too difficult, the customer won’t buy.Useful hints as to which types of .viral marketing work or don’t.Berkeley study on the quantity of information produced in the world each year. I particularly like their option for level of information overload.Common User Agent Problems. Slightly odd article from W3C with some useful info hidden away.How to make money with an online news web site. Summary: “Keep your site simple; use Open Source software instead of high-maintenance proprietary software packages whenever possible; don’t let your sense of hubris get the better of you and make you believe your site will get more readers than it really deserves; and don’t hire more people than you can afford to feed.”
The World Economic Forum’s knowledge navigator is packed full of ‘groovy’ technology, but is nearly unusable. PS it includes stuff from thebrain.com who have a patent out on thinking.
Vital: translations of Jabberwocky.
Looks like the serious email bugs are starting to happen. It will be interesting to see how this works. This site explains how to turn off Javascript in the various affected programs.
