Archive for July, 2001

Interview: Fredrick Marckini on

Published by Tom on 31/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

Interview: Fredrick Marckini on Search Engine Positioning, Pt. II. 3:23:13 PM

Interactive Week: Report: ‘Pop-Under’ Ads Mostly Ignored. Good news: they may get loadsahits, but don’t sell anything. 3:21:47 PM

The Webification of TV is happening. Interesting to see that the new “digital” TV is learning from the web. Maybe that’s all it was: a big product prototype for the telly. 3:21:10 PM

30-July-2001 — Mapping a Conceptual Interface to a Physical Interface. There’s some good stuff in there somewhere, but it does come over awfully German… 3:20:18 PM

Yahoo! Explorer ads the wave of the future? (via RRE) Taking over your browsing in the name of advertising. Dull. More televisual, I suppose. 3:19:41 PM

Welcome to the “public draft of a new book by David Weinberger.” [Scripting News] 3:19:08 PM

John Robb: “The total cost of ownership (TCO) of a Website is more than the purchase price of a content management system.” Response to feedback: “TCO is not a game most of these big players like to play. Cost is not a factor they want to address right now.” 3:18:42 PM

Stewart Alsop: “Real entrepreneurs never let money out the door for any reason that doesn’t strictly advance the business of the company.” Tatoo that on your forehead. 3:17:07 PM

ZDnet: Intel’s monopolistic 90-day-update-cycle scam. More of the MS kind of stuff. 3:16:41 PM

AOL memo describing responses to XP. Just what you’d think, but interesting to see it written down. 3:16:04 PM

FBI case highlights high-tech spying. There’s a lot going on here - you wonder how much of a general hold the government has on e-communication. 3:12:17 PM

Curl. will deliver everything Java and HTML offer and more. Hmmm. They want to charge on a volume-based model. This makes absolutely no sense. Give the plugin away and charge for the dev kit, fine. A toll on all your web use. No. 3:11:23 PM

NY Times: Jail Time in the Digital Age. Another good Lessig article showing that the US’s DMCA blows apart traditional copyright legislation. 3:02:11 PM

Portugal Decriminalises Drug Use. The Guardian last week reported that Portugal recently decriminalized all drug use (not just cannabis). The Portugese have decided to treat drug use “as a social problem rather than a criminal one”. Quite amazing. Interesting to see how it pans out. 2:59:30 PM

New Laws: Thou Shalt Patch. Interesting thought: force companies by law to spend money based on unworkable software…maybe this will force MS, etc to release working software. 2:58:56 PM

Web Music Fight Plays Out in D.C.. “The final arguments over payments for streaming music are occurring in the U.S. Copyright Office, which will decide how much webcasters should pay the recording industry. Andrew Osterman reports from Washington.” I liked the potential acronyms in the article. 4c per listner sounds like quite a lot for net radio stations. As does 15% of revenue. Both of them will kill streaming media stone dead. 2:48:51 PM

Face Scanners Turn Lens on Selves. “Are random facial scans in public places a violation of your privacy?” 2:47:25 PM

Icons Cluttering up Windows Space. So MS’s backdown wasn’t that at all. If AOL there, MSN sure as hell ought to be. These are astonishingly large issues that everyone should be aware of - it’s pure inter-monopolistic power plays. 2:46:53 PM

More stick fighter action!.

Published by Tom on 27/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

More stick fighter action!. Cracking fun, and with a great story (2Mb download!) 1:06:58 PM

An interesting twist: AOL can (potentially) buy out Amazon.. That would be a major player… 1:06:32 PM

Forbes: Isn’t It Cheaper To Give It Away? And while it has posted a per-article charge, Inside.com is doubtless hoping that users will opt for its $3.95 monthly subscription fee, or $39 annual fee instead. That’s because the cost of processing the single-article tab will eat up most, if not all, of the revenue. 12:53:42 PM

The End of the End-to-End Argument. Agreed: smart networks = greater usage tolls. 12:53:21 PM

The Usability of Usability. Good interview with Jared Spool. Especially interesting (if not entirely believable) is the stuff on the link between valid categories and purchase. 12:21:14 PM

Sick of ringing cell phones?. “Then cheaply and effectively jam the signals with a device like the Wave-Shield pocket jammer. They’re illegal in the U.S., but that’s not stopping some people.” 12:15:42 PM

Dot-Biz: An Illegal Lottery?. It’s pretty important that we sort out the DNS system and soon. Silly amounts of money going to no-gooders. 12:06:57 PM

Britannica or Nupedia? The

Published by Tom on 26/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias. I like the idea of Neupedia/Wikipedia. 3:23:07 PM

All The World Over, Your Stolen I.D. 3:22:30 PM

NYPress: Synopsis of the globalisation scam, plus Zimbabwe 3:13:55 PM

“America Online is quietly

Published by Tom on 24/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

“America Online is quietly rolling out a new unified sign-in service, similar to Microsoft’s Passport, across its properties and partner sites. Codenamed “Magic Carpet” and currently promoted as the “Screen Name Service,” visitors will be able to sign in with a single click and seamlessly browse sites supporting the new technology.” Interesting. A true competitor to MS. 4:51:13 PM

Great series of trials on how to avoid telemarketing. 3:33:44 PM

Scott Handy Tells What’s Up With IBM and Linux. Who he, Who that, What that? 1:48:44 PM

Companies Encouraged to Mine Your Email Messages for Marketing Information.. “Companies should be adding code” to your HTML-based e-mail messages, recommends an analyst from Jupiter. That’s why I use Chilton Preview. 1:48:10 PM

Adam Engst: Where Webvan (the e-grocer) Went Wrong. Good analysis. 1:46:59 PM

Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To It. Right. 1:46:25 PM

Dan Gillmor: “One of these days, it may be a crime to talk about anything that displeases the control freaks who run the entertainment and software industries.” ! 1:45:55 PM

Nando Times: In bow to the computer age, CNN Headline News, ESPNEWS revamping. It’s interesting that the TV is learning from the net. TV, where US viewers spend a lot of time surfing is very similar to the net. In UK/Europe this may not go down so well. 1:45:18 PM

SJ Mercury: Case highlights law’s threat to fair-use rights. Frightening stuff - even though it may not be so in the UK. 1:44:08 PM

Distributed Authentication Schemes. Interesting stuff in there, but difficult to read. Summary of comments: why not use Kerberos - it’s tested and it works… 1:43:19 PM

Windows XP ‘Denial Of Operating System’ attack. So if a virus could remove the WPA files from your drive, you couldn’t do anything. Alternatively (as per the article) someone might hack your number and spread it over the net. One day your PC locks up saying: you’re a pirate! 1:38:23 PM

Bill Seitz: “Sometimes recent Microsoft behavior seems like a conspiracy to totally discredit the Dept of Justice by engaging in unbelievably outrageous behavior, daring them to take action. It’s like somebody actually raping Kitty Dukakis on camera, watching Mike to see what he would do.” Old but interesting. 1:36:55 PM

IBM: Metering and accounting for Web services. I think I may have posted this already. Anyhow, it is interesting. 1:36:17 PM

They rule.. Really fascinating look at the human links between corporations at the top level. 1:29:59 PM

The Fulifier turns any site “Ful” which means bloody awful in Swedish. I think. 1:29:09 PM

Run away! Run away!. The trebuchet is back in business, only this time with cows. To be honest, maybe they used to chuck rotting / dead meat into the siegees to spread disease? 1:28:14 PM

Low Brow. Cracking stuff. “My brother came back into an interview after visiting the toilet and he had toilet paper hanging out of his trousers.” Keep reloading. 1:27:03 PM

OpenFlow. “is a workflow engine created with python and Zope. With OpenFlow, you can define a map of the activities to be performed, conditional paths and parallel activities.” Interesting? I quite like Zope and this could help with online project planning. 1:26:03 PM

Argus ACIA: Q&A with Seth Gordon. How we’re now becoming stable revenue streams for some site, and a nice two-way usability test: frustration vs false completion. 1:25:10 PM

Avi Ben-Abraham, man of a thousand and one faces:. So this guy basically reinvents himself every couple of years, and no-one has a chance to check up. Great life, no? 1:24:08 PM

Great article from Amartya

Published by Tom on 23/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

Great article from Amartya Sen re: globalisation / Genoa, etc. Inequality is the issue, not globalisation. Fix the inequality and you may or may not have globalisation - that depends on the solution. 5:55:52 PM

Wired: What if Napster was the answer? “Doubts are so strong about the future that some record industry bigwigs are wistfully longing for the good old days of Napster.” Damn right. Markets are conversations and all that - why didn’t the labels talk to users? Because the users know they’re being ripped off by the labels - they’d rather give their money straight to the artist. 5:46:44 PM

Interactive Week: Copyright Tug O’ War. Levies on recordable media to recover revenue for IP owners seem to legitimise the whole practice of copying. That can’t be right. 12:33:03 PM

Subscribing to a New Music Theory. Find a nice piece of hardware, load it with music, then sell it to the consumer. The new mantra of music companies is to sell subscriptions as part of a pre-packaged deal to consumers looking for a device on which to play their music. Quite neat to hook up online sites with hardware vendors. I’d probably use something like this. 12:29:41 PM

Fast Company: Don’t Shout, Listen. “A year ago, it was a stodgy, nondescript site where no one other than investors and job seekers had any reason to go. Today, when you log on to it, you see a consumer-friendly portal that proudly announces P&G’s responsibility for “more than 300 brands you know and trust.” Interesting article about using customers to self-create products. 12:28:43 PM

All class - the bad writing winners are in. As good as the Darwin awards. 11:47:35 AM

Great series on gambling (this is the last with links to the previous ones). 11:21:25 AM

Surely creative accounting like this should be made illegal. Big Blue has made pretty well no extra cash recently and is estimating a 10.5% return from its defined benefit pension scheme. It’s just rubbish, no? 10:12:12 AM

“In outlining the strategy

Published by Tom on 20/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

“In outlining the strategy for Office on the Mac and .NET, one has to wonder if users will see the Microsoft Office suite as a product that you purchase and install (for use on and offline) or a service. Personally I want my word processor to be a product, one that I can use over and over again, without having to tally up micro-payments in my head.” Damn straight. 1:45:50 PM

Terabyte File Server for $5,000. Not in itself interesting, but it’ll cost $1,000 in three years and this means that you’ll be able to have your entire Blockbuster video library in your front room. This plus last mile delivery means a new business model. 1:45:04 PM

Freenets: a good Wi-Fi

Published by Tom on 18/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

Freenets: a good Wi-Fi piece. I should do this. 11:19:36 AM

Best thing since sliced Bread?. Researchers at Oklahoma State University have completed a formula for sliced peanut butter that will be packaged like sliced cheese. Only in America! 10:49:33 AM

So this has been created by the market: to keep it’s growth on track, Microsoft has to screw more money out of its customers. That’s why they’re changing their licensing terms. 9:39:30 AM

Interesting article about SAS. Not the swing through windows on ropes dressed in black lot. 9:18:35 AM

AOL is muscling its

Published by Tom on 16/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

AOL is muscling its way into online journalism. Be afraid.. Damn right. 12:59:30 PM

Aspiring DJ’s - Leave your records at home. One for Dodgy. 12:32:58 PM

Rich People Are Lucky Bastards. Science and Finance magazine with an interesting article that suggests that the flows of money in an economy approximate a random walk. So we’re stuck with rich and poor, pretty well regardless. 11:13:55 AM

Nice parody of MS: the Open Legs Initiative. 9:33:40 AM

Text a cab in

Published by Tom on 12/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

Text a cab in Dublin. “Sounds crap, but this is actually a really good idea”. I do like the Reg’s style. 7:11:04 PM

US dotcom keeps ownership of SouthAfrica.com. South Africa the country backs down. US Corporate power continues unabated. 7:10:11 PM

What happens to the

Published by Tom on 11/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

What happens to the stars of Big Brother afterwards?. Big Brother 2 is in full swing in the UK, and just starting in the USA. Here, Jon Ronson investigates what happened to the original contestents on BB1 in the UK. 5:21:11 PM

Web Photos that Pop. Silly title, useful article. This all works in the GIMP too. 3:54:08 PM

JavaScript Resources. Having trouble finding that last bit of JavaScript information you need to perfect your page, deliver your DHTML, or secure your syntax? Not a bad list of pages for that ever-necessary help with JavaScript. 2:56:06 PM

I bet you’ve never seen Star Wars quite like this. Bored? 12:27:38 PM

Good interview with Drucker, who’s still firing on most cylinders. Nails the dot-com crunch - mostly stock exchange gambles and greed. 10:37:55 AM

Microsoft is now inventing

Published by Tom on 10/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

Microsoft is now inventing business terms. Nothing huge in this method of defining business value from IT investments. Too many MBA’s, lightbulbs, etc. 5:57:02 PM

Diary of a dotcom demise. Brighthand founder documents his own boom to bust. Ouch. 12:32:34 PM

Don’t suck!. “Statistical analysis for this heretical popular music marketing idea.” Interesting look at who the real stayers are in the music biz, and why the current record industry structure may really mess them up. 12:32:16 PM

Peer-to-Peer Taxation.. I didn’t get to the end of this, but it seemed interesting enough. 12:31:19 PM

Great article summarising the recent Microsoft ruling. Essentially the company is pretty well guilty or not proven on all of the charges. Nothing was really removed from the ruling, just some legal niceties. 9:20:32 AM

Adobe: Q&A with Jeffrey

Published by Tom on 09/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

Adobe: Q&A with Jeffrey Zeldman. There is a tremendous amount of talent in the community. Particularly over the past two years, it seems to have grown exponentially. But what I see lacking in every aspect of Web development (not just design) is an ability to see the big picture… 1:57:39 PM

The Economist: Patently absurd? Some believe that, in certain industries, strengthening intellectual-property protection accomplishes nothing positive. Others think that it may actually do some harm. If these economists are correct, patent-holders themselves may soon start clamouring for weaker, and not stronger, protection. [Tomalak's Realm] 1:55:52 PM

My Cat Hates You Dot Com. Class. 1:45:56 PM

Industry Standard: Startup Thinks It Can Lick the Last-Mile Problem. “Actelis may have come up with a solution to the last-mile problem: Its technology enables data to travel over copper lines at speeds as high as 155Mbps, comparable to fiber-optic networks.” If this works, then we’d be pretty happy, I think. 1:39:29 PM

Ouch. “It’s difficult to tell how good they are. If they played a wrong note or lost the rhythm, no one but the composer would notice. Music is dead, and here is the corpse, embalmed on two slices of plastic hell. ” 1:34:22 PM

Describing a New Entropy. A reformulation of Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy by one Constantino Tsallis is causing quite a buzz/stir in the theoretical physics community. Basically upgrading the existing concept to allow for situations where the total entropy of two systems is not simply the sum of their individual amounts. 1:27:23 PM

ASFRecorder. Pull those streams right off of the Internet in Windows Media Format. I imagine we’ll be seeing quite a few more tools like this as content providers try to move us over to a “lease not own” model of song, etc ownership. 12:47:36 PM

CIO WebBusiness: From April 1, 1999; Mazed and Confused. Useful discussion of usability testing with Schwab, etc. Middle of the boom, so should be taken with a pinch’o’salt. 12:09:19 PM

DaveNet: The Micro Channel

Published by Tom on 06/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

DaveNet: The Micro Channel Architecture. Interesting, although his historical facts are wrong. The general trend seems right though: quite often, people have tried to kill something that users like. The users tend to route around this. 4:53:57 PM

iomart mops up OnCue’s punters. Failed broadband provider sells off customers cheap. Hmmm. One of my mates worked there. 3:23:06 PM

Wired via ark: The original ‘AI’ story by Brian Aldiss. 3:21:15 PM

Google Reveals Popular Search Patterns. Interesting but not groundbreaking. 3:02:31 PM

Some great feedback on the Memento story a while ago. Additionally, a reprint of the story that inspired it. 12:48:34 PM

A good reason not to upgrade Walt Mossberg: “If you’re one of the millions of consumers with multiple PCs in your household, and you plan on upgrading them to Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows XP operating system, you’re in for a rude surprise.” 12:35:11 PM

Business 2.0: Design for

Published by Tom on 05/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

Business 2.0: Design for Process, Not Products. Unusual these days, a good article from Jakob Nielsen. The idea is to design around processes / tasks, rather than some idea of how the web works. 3:36:42 PM

Industry Standard: Microsoft Could Hold Passport to Net. It’s less of a passport and more of a tollgate. Dreadful reading, but fascinating at the same time. 2:42:28 PM

Miller makes a mountain out of Mudpie.. “If this is truly to become the vision we expect, it will be the most expensive computer game ever.” I like mad geniuses - they must have been similarly laughed at for releasing Myst only on CD. 2:17:02 PM

A New Way to Thumb a Ride. “SMS-crazed Ireland is about to experience the debut of E-Taxi, where cab-seekers with a mobile phone can hail a ride by punching in a text message.” Surely not. Why not make the call? 2:15:07 PM

Copyrights and copywrongs.. Useful discussion of the current state of US copyright law. 2:01:55 PM

Business 2.0: Hidden Treasure.

Published by Tom on 04/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

Business 2.0: Hidden Treasure. Analysing conversations in newsgroups, websites is definitely a clever way forward for marketers. Gives you essentially free, unguarded market research. What happens when the competition starts to add noise to the signal? 12:40:59 PM

Getting Paid for Content: from micropayments to shareware models. I still am not convinced that any micropayment type system will work until we have a global passport-type service. Or we pay micro-amounts through existing billing infrastructure (phone, gas, cable, etc). 12:38:18 PM

Must be rubbish.. On July 6, 2001 Transdimensional Technologies, LLC will unveil the next evolutionary step in propulsion. A small prototype “lifter” will rise to the height of four feet without an engine, moving parts, conventional thrust, or propellant. Application of this technology is possible within one year, and a vehicle that is lifted and propelled by this force is possible in three years.

Video clip here. 10:48:19 AM

The most horrible page

Published by Tom on 03/07/2001 in General. 0 Comments

The most horrible page on the internet.. Terrifying. 11:50:25 AM

602 Office software suite is free for any use and is a remarkably good copy of Word / Excel / Photo Editor. Roll on their version of PowerPoint. I could seriously contemplate using this. 11:49:57 AM

Interesting article about Brand New Branding. How does the web affect branding from a number of reasonable pundits. 10:21:46 AM