April 2006 - Posts
Categoriz, a directory of Web 2.0 products and services. (Found via Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion.)
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Jeff Jarvis on Microsoft's new newspaper-reader: "Why not design the next frontier for the sharing of news that takes advantage of all the new opportunities technology permits — linking, conversation, multimedia, search, selectivity, depth, currency?
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This fight is probably not going quite the way ad agency Warren Kremer Paino expected when it sued blogger Lance Dutson.
If the strategy was to intimidate a small-fry blogger, well, the small-fry blogger is now making his case to a national audience,
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JP Rangaswami: "I believe that it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfilment and conversation. I believe that weaknesses and corruptions in our own thinking about digital
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A New York ad agency, Warren Kremer Paino Advertising, has filed a seven-figure lawsuit against a Maine blogger.
Here's a version of events by the blogger, Lance Dutson of the Maine Web Report; here's the lawsuit; here's media-critic Jeff Jarvis'
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From an email to CIOI in response to Ed Baker's thoughts on net neutrality: "I work for a major telecom and I think that the efforts to control content and defeat 'net neutrality' guarantees are shameful and an affront to the consumer. The internet
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Net neutrality lost a vote in the House, but Save the Internet says "[W]e expected that loss. What we did not expect was the narrow margin...many of the Congressmen both for and against this campaign mentioned the blogs and angry constituents...now members
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BlogAds, the seminal advertising network for personal websites, has released its latest user survey, and Kate Kaye from ClickZ has a report on the details.
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TechCrunch: "Facebook, which is rumored to be generating about $1m per week in revenue, is now allowing new users from corporate networks to join their social network (based on email address) in addition to high school and college students."
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Wall Street Journal (subs req): "For years, the fiber-optic communications industry has been awash in spare capacity that sent prices for data transmission plunging. Now, thanks to continued growth in Internet traffic, demand is beginning to catch up
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Dave Winer says Dan Rather may start blogging when he leaves CBS...and speculates on what might have been:
"What if CBS News had decided to blog…or had sought the diversity of the blogosphere to look at the National Guard story from...What if, in addition
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CNET's Anne Broache has the scoop on a Senate bill that would increase the taxes "subsidizing broadband service in 'unserved' locales," and keep cities "free to go into the Wi-Fi business." Nothing in it about net neutrality.
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More on net neutrality: Paul Misener, Amazon’s VP for global public policy, testified today before the House Judiciary Committee.
And a group called the Net Neutrality Coalition launched with ads in DC newspapers Roll Call and The Hill. Lots of big
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Jonathan Schwartz blogs some thoughts on Scott McNealy.
"I think it was 1992 or '93. Before you could actually explain the internet to your parents.
"I remember he talked about network computing in a very strange way - he just assumed the future, he'd
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John Dvorak in PC mag: "I think it can now be safely said, in hindsight, that Microsoft's entry into the browser business and its subsequent linking of the browser into the Windows operating system looks to be the worst decision—and perhaps the
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On my way to work this morning I heard a talk-radio caller railing against the gas tax.
We do have a hefty rate here in North Carolina, but I'm not sure the caller would prefer the method under consideration in Oregon: replacing the gas tax with a tax
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With Scott McNealy stepping down as CEO at Sun, Jonathan Schwartz becomes the biggest-time exec in American business with a weblog.*
Another Sunblogger, Tim Bray, puts it this way in a post titled The Transition, Explained: "It’s not that complicated,
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Robert Scoble, Microsoft's most famous public blogger, talks about his doppelganger, the anonymous in-house critic known as Mini-Microsoft.
People around the company ask Scoble how Mini-Microsoft should be dealt with. Shut him down, they say.
No, says
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Om Malik pushes back on the net neutrality issue.
I don't find his arguments terribly convincing, on Save the Internet's strategy or the underlying question of internet toll roads.
Of course this campaign is US-centric -- that's where the battle
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Chris Anderson, writing at his Long Tail blog, says Lego is "emerging as a surprising best-practice case study in how to extend Web 2.0 techniques to a traditional consumer products company."
Read the whole thing.
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Doc Searls in Linux Journal: "Point is, there isn't much keeping Linux from being the benchmark desktop and laptop OS."
He's going to thumb-wrestle Rob Enderle at the Desktop Linux Summit on Monday, too.
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From Dan Gillmor's latest CIO Insight column: "It's getting harder to keep a lid on what people can see. In a world of edge-in communications, the tools of media creation and distribution are being democratized in powerful ways. For companies, as well
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A heterogeneous group of political bloggers is joining with techies and web activists in the fight to preserve network neutrality.
Their site is Save the Internet, and their slogan is "Don't let Congress ruin the Internet."
And of course, they've
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My 12-year-old daughter and I were talking yesterday about Spanish surrealist artist Joan Miro.
Not our everyday subject of conversation, to be sure, but she had seen the special Miro-style Google logo honoring the artist on his birthday,
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Mary Jo Foley reports on Micrsosoft's push to market a "virtual hard drive" before Google gets in the game.
More at TechCrunch.
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Jeff Rothfeder in CIO Insight: "A typical search-engine ad will likely attract, at best, a mere 1 percent to 2 percent of Web surfers who see it, while the response rate for banner ads is well below that, and falling rapidly. And just a small fraction
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Amanda Congdon interviews Dave Winer.
He's the one with the beard.
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TechCrunch: "Jingle Networks, which runs a free 411 service called 1-800-Free411, has raised $26 million in a Series B financing...Free411 is now handling 7 million calls per month - out of a total of 500 million directory assistance calls per month in
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Computers these days are so powerful that they can run more than one operating system at once, so companies are saving money by buying less hardware and getting full use from the machines they do purchase. Using the same computer to run multiple systems
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Google is working with Oracle and Salesforce.com to "blend their features together," reports Ben Charny. Corporate users will also be able to search intranets using the familiar Google interface. "The new relationships with incumbent enterprise software
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Dave Winer is planning another BloggerCon, the latest in his series of confabs by and for bloggers.
In San Francisco, the week of 6/19.
These conferences -- unconferences, Dave calls them -- are noncommercial and open to anyone who signs up on time.
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Dave Sifry of Technorati has posted his latest update on the state of the blogosphere.
"A better indicator of the growth of the blogosphere than simply the number of new blogs created each day is the rate of postings to those blogs. Daily Posting Volume
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Is it a stretch to call the New Orleans Times-Picayune's Pulitzer Prize an award for blogging?
Perhaps.
But as Jeff Jarvis and Rex Hammock point out, something important has changed. The Pulitzer went for material that did not first appear in print.
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RFID was one of those technologies whose future was always in front of it...until Wal-Mart CIO Linda Dillman made it a priority at the ginormous retailer, and thus for companies who want to sell to the ginormous retailer.
Wal-Mart was the power
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Belmont University in Nashville used to employee a well-known local blogger, Bill Hobbs, on its marketing and communications staff.
Now Hobbs has resigned after a local paper reported on some intensely political blogging he had done at a personal
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Sun's James Gosling on the "black magic" of creating AJAX components: We can make it pretty easy to use AJAX components...Creating them is extremely hard. Not because programming JavaScript is hard, but because all these flavors of JavaScript
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Dave Winer: "Will I change? Of course not. Calendars are the most locked-in app imaginable. Once you commit to one, it's hard to contemplate changing. My editorial judgment: Google should invest more in the search engine, that's where they are built-in,
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John Battelle on life after GooCal: "Google is a portal, plain and simple. The company made its name, its brand, and its money on being one thing - a non judgmental service that quickly moved you from intent - your search query - to content - someone
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Forrester's Charlene Li digs the new Google calendar tool, calling it a "game changing product."
From her blog: "I’ve been trying a slew of the new AJAX calendar products that promise to be an improvement over my existing online calendar (I currently
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So much to chew on in this New York Times article by Matt Richtel about the remote call centers used to take orders at some McDonalds restaurants.
Turns out that trip to the drive-thru may involve routing your request for a burger and fries to a call
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We often speak in code when it comes to immigration.
It's understood that high-tech jobs are filled by Asian immigrants, while Latino immigrants do the lower-tech labor.
But speaking of code...here's an article about Microsoft's successful recruitment
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Jeff Jarvis on Disney's plan to push programming, free and on-demand, over the web: "TV has finally exploded. And if other media — newspapers, magazines, and even online companies — don’t watch out, they may lose the broadband internet to TV
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Anil Dash: "How to keep blogs from scaring the hell out of people."
Yes, he's trying to sell you something. Dude works at a blog company, after all.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't read what he's got to say.
(via Steve Rubel).
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Everything you think you know about the delay of Windows Vista is probably wrong.
Ditto the impact of Boot Camp, the magic software that lets Macs run Windows.
That's what Robert Cringely says, and I find myself believing him.
Cringely: "Bill Gates
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I went to Chapel Hill this weekend for a symposium at the UNC law school about blogs in the workplace.
The program had a sensational name: Attack of the Blog: Legal Horrors in the Workplace. I understand that lawyers are trained to fear risk and uncertainty,
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Last time we checked, Salesforce.com customers seemed to accept outages as a cost of using software on demand, and the vendor was promising that outages would become less common...but last week, more of the same.
Salesforce is the poster child for enterprise
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At our story meeting today we argued about the productivity benefits of IT. Greenspan believes in them. Some people question them.
What I don't understand is how any journalist can deny the productivity boost provided by IT, at least in the field of
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A roundup of Apple's Windows strategy -- Boot Camp, and who cares -- in eWeek.
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One of the good things about working with the smart, capable people at CIO Insight is working with the smart, capable people at CIO Insight.
Which is to say, I'm off to New York for a story meeting, and my laptop is ill, so I'll post as I can today...
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Michael Arrington says online video sites are "breeding like rabbits."
One big rabbit, YouTube, just raised another $8 million in venture funding. The TechCrunch writer identifies "two distinct types of video sharing services. The first is
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I wrote a few thousand words about the woes of Morgan Stanley, but none more important that these: "At some point, technology is a cultural issue within a firm, not just a toolkit and a budget item."
This story was built from the ground up.
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The 2010 US census will use mobile devices running Microsoft software -- lots and lots of mobile devices, representing a big win for MSFT as it tries to wean the world from BlackBerries.
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Big important biz-tech article of the day: John Markoff in the New York Times on the decentralization of software development on the web. "The Internet is entering its Lego era. Indeed, blocks of interchangeable software components are proliferating on
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Morgan Stanley's retail brokerage business has lagged even as the Wall Street firm has posted strong numbers. One big problem with the former Dean Witter: underinvestment in technology.
New CEO John Mack has pledged to fix the problems, which could
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One of the must-read books of 2006 will be Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, built on his seminal Wired article.
Meanwhile, at his blog, Chris says that the music industry may be healthier than you think.
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Mike Arrington reports on the latest Memeorandum subject: baseball.
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Slate: "Until very recently, being computer-savvy hasn't been considered much of an asset in the FBI, and clues were something you kept to yourself."
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Dave Winer: "Today is the 8th birthday of XML-RPC."
Dave was writing about this kind of stuff before the word "blog" was invented.
Are you paying attention yet? Is your company?
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