John Battelle gives a nice summary of the Google IPO, focusing on the letter from the founders. I can see Wall Street running a mile from this kind of thing - there’s plenty of cash elsewhere in the private sector, and there won’t be a tech-related bubble for several years now. Then again, maybe they’ll re-write the financial landscape. I’d bet on Wall Street any day.
Archive for April, 2004
PCWorld.com - Is E-Voting Safe?. We must be able to fix e-voting. I mean really!
A Service Oriented Approach to e-Government Architecture is an interesting paper about loosely coupled service architectures in government.
The long-awaited Priority Services Paper is out. Not as many changes as I’d expected / hoped from the consultation. However, this is the e-Government agenda in the UK for the next 20 months, so off we go!
Burningbird has moved away from Movable Type to Wordpress. This is at the back of my mind as well. Roll on some time to do it!
Gigablast looks like a reasonable new search engine with highlights from Google and others (such as categorisation, suggestion of related searches, spell checking).
Sony’s Electronic Paper eBook Bound For Greatness says Gizmodo. I doubt it - the first to market is never normally the category killer. However, I’m looking forward to the general availability of light, usable, high definition ePaper.
Model may give two-year warning of El Niño. It would be fantastic if this were true - a staggering effect on world poverty and potential response to environmental changes.
News Editorial: A clear abuse of trust looks at an alleged gravy train / conflict of interest in the national project sector. Personally, I think more power to the alliance. If they can get a coalition of suppliers together and provide something of use for them (such as access to local authorities) then why shouldn’t they? This is the expression of the free market we’re always told that government needs. However, it has to be said that the way they’ve gone about it is pretty cack-handed. [Disclaimer: Julie Vindis did some (excellent) work for us on LAWs]
Pricelessware has a useful list of free or nearly so software for our delectation and delight.
Now that’s an idea for the next cold war.
Nice wiki on how to make money from blogs.
Interesting research that shows that mobile phone conversations are more irritating than louder two-way converstations next to you.
William Lind on the chaos in Iraq. There’s a great (long) article on what we know about the US government’s activities in the build-up to war.
Haystack looks interesting as an information management tool.
THE BBC is upping the stakes in the reality TV ratings war by recruiting former SAS soldiers to spearhead humanitarian operations in the world’s trouble spots.
Just unbelievable. But maybe worthwhile? What happens when the first one is kidnapped, injured or killed?
The Indy had a great article on Sharon’s plans this Sunday. There are a number of interesting points:
- The Sharon / Bush agreement says that over 50% of the Israeli settlers in the West Bank will be bribed to return to Israel proper
- Sharon wants to get rid of enough of the Hamas leadership to be able to say that it wasn’t them that caused the retreat. You can read a nice summary of why decapitation won’t work with terrorist organisations.
- A proportion of the remaining six settlements are likely to be disbanded over the next few years.
To my mind, this gives some comfort, despite the generally horrific state of affairs out there at the moment.
Apparently we still don’t do enough. We should see how this hooks up with LAWs / INLAWs.
Update: This is a repost from e-government bulletin.
Continue reading ‘Search engines and e-gov websites’
