So, maybe this paperless voting thing is not such a great idea
after all.
Huh. Wish
somebody had said
something about this
earlier.
Google owns Blogger, the popular blogging service.
Blogger is making some high-profile users very unhappy as they try to upgrade to a new version.
That includes
Atrios, aka Duncan Black, and Wisconsin law prof Ann Althouse, who
says she is "bursting with hate for Blogger" and that Google is not providing any useful support.
This leads Glenn Reynolds, author of the influential Instapundit blog, to comment, "Google's success depends on things working right, because if they don't,
there's nobody to call, and they quickly transform from cute-but-big
company to hated uncaring corporate monolith."
In late 2005, I had some trouble transferring the large archives
of my personal blog from a completely different platform (Radio) to TypePad -- but vendor Six
Apart was very helpful, and I am a satisfied customer.
Customer service matters, a lot. Even as Google rolls in the dough, it needs to keep an eye on its customers.
Scott Rosenberg discusses MSFT Vista and software development in
this radio interview.
Jonathan Schwartz on Sun's deal with Intel.
Larry Sanger has decided that
Citizendium, his
alternative to Wikipedia, can grow faster and be better by creating original articles from the ground up, rather than editing Wikipedia entries as originally planned. He
writes:
Citizendians (or maybe we’ll be “Citizens”) are just disheartened by
the fact that their first obligation seems to be to edit mediocre
Wikipedia articles. After all, that’s what forking Wikipedia seems to
require. I myself have said we’ll be cleaning out the Augean Stables.
Here’s your shovel!...
...When you come down to it, it’s a question of our identity. Do we want to be Wikipedia 2.0–but still a version of Wikipedia? Or, instead, do we want to be the Citizendium, a newer and better project, with its own identity that takes the best of Wikipedia’s process
and jettisons all sorts of stuff that hasn’t worked for Wikipedia? If
we start over, then we can create our own more distinctive culture, and
we can take more pride in our articles and in the processes we
develop. In short, we can be ourselves. And putting yourself into a piece of work is what gives you passion in creating it.
Nick Carr posts about "
the dubious link between IT and innovation" and wonders if Web 2.0 for business is
just another doomed catchphrase.
Dave Winer has been
critical of Apple for not opening its devices to other software and outside devleopers (Dave, might the answer to
your question about Charles Fitzgerald and MSFT be to drop the "s" in "scrappy"?)
All of which led me back to the
story on eBay and its
openess to developers who can innovate and improve its core services.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a report on the 2006 elections. Micah Sifry has a report on the report.
Short version: lotsa folks using the internets to follow and participate in politics.
Cisco general counsel
Mark Chandler blogs about his company's trademark infringement case against Apple.
"Apple is a very aggressive enforcer of their trademark rights. And that needs to be a two-way street."
State-of-the-art corporate communications.
NYT: "Companies spend millions on systems to keep corporate e-mail safe. If only their employees were as paranoid.
"A
growing number of Internet-literate workers are forwarding their office
e-mail to free Web-accessible personal accounts offered by Google, Yahoo
and other companies. Their employers, who envision corporate secrets
leaking through the back door of otherwise well-protected computer
networks, are not pleased."
Interesting story. Read the whole thing.
Bill Gates used to think you wanted to be Captain Kirk, but now he thinks you want to be Scotty, as King Steve the Eschewer looks past 2.0 hype to create "exquisite" devices...just
go read Nick Carr (and his commenters, too...)
Where does a US Senator go to discuss his populist message on net neutrality?
To YouTube, of course.
Byron Dorgan: "I want to keep the Internet open and free. That's what's been the genius of the Internet. It's the ultimate in cemocracy. And the Internet Freedom Preservation Act will give us the opportunity to preserve the Internet as we've known it."
Watch the whole thing here.
From CIOI: "Scott Rosenberg has written an important and entertaining book about the way software projects work—or don't. Dreaming In Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software (Crown, 2007), chronicles an open-source effort to build a better personal information manager. Published this month, the book also delves into the history and culture of software development in an attempt to answer a fundamental question: Why is software so hard?"
Read my interview with Scott here. Amazon page for the book here. Rosenberg blogs about related stuff here.
From our conversation: I hope people will come away from the book with a deeper understanding of what happens in the making of a piece of software. I felt that in so many books about making technology, you'd get to the point where people actually start creating the software and then it would be kind of like the sex scene in an old movie: They would just skip it, cut to the next morning, cut to the marketing team getting ready to ship the product. It was like people would avert their eyes from the actual act of making software. Maybe they were afraid readers would be bored, or didn't understand software.
UPDATE: Lots of interesting conversation -- and some funny cracks, too -- over at Slashdot.
