July 2006 Archives
A recent Slashdot post confirms the passage of a bill by the House to ban social site (Myspace, Friendster, Facebook...) access on public terminals (libraries, schools...). The bill seeks to protect children from predators who use the social platforms with evil intentions. I call bullshit. This is another example of a completely backwards, wholly political, absurdly rhetorical slap-fest. Bills and regulations such as these won't prevent child predators from lurking the streets of America and cyberspace. They might as well try to stop global warming by nuking the ozone.
Does the web really have to turn into a sensationalist tabloid-modelled idiot-fest? The ratings-driven cable-tv model is more and more being placed onto the WWW, with frightening results. Ridiculous and inflamatory controversy for controversy's sake - no, for ratings' sake... This is not what the internet was meant for. This is a waste.
* DISCLAIMER: The inflamatory tone of this post in context is an example of what normal, well-adjusted and intelligent social creatures call tongue in cheek. Ironic composition. But really, it's a serious issue
Bob Frankston wrote a well-informed article (story, really) on net-neutrality. The story explores the telco's greed using the metaphore of sidewalks in a planned community. The settings are frighteningly Orwellian, where Big Brother is not the government, but a junta of corporations existing under the guise of consumer-beneficial competition.
Why does UIE.com (User Interface Engineering) look as though it was built with MS Front Page? Maybe they should should consider a name-change. I would suggest: BAIPBIE (Boring Anachronistic and Innapropriate Paper-Based Interface Engineering).
Two articles on the blogging phenomenon today—one in the Washington Post, the other in the NY Times. Both offer a statistical view of those who make up the content propogators of the blogosphere and attempt to get a handle on the meat of it all. Shouts.
Good read on messaging proxies and identity over at Bakardo.
The Washington Post has an article on Peter Morville (author of O'Reilly's Ambient Findability) and his take on information architecture. Nice to see this kind of content in a rag like the Post. Morville points interested readers to this article on user experience design, also a good read.
Ran across these comics. Good humor with just the right cynicism.
Good read (albeit a little disjointed) over at Open Gardens re: alternative mobile networks. Fish gives a broad overview of the 2 key types of mobile networks, Wi-Fi and WiMax. The article contains much postulation on what customers really want and/or expect — what type of network will succeed; though in this the point seems to be lost.
The final statement struck me as naive and, well, silly.
In my view, the winner will be the customer and the customer will define and decide what exactly they mean by a mobile network and whether it will succeed.
In my mind, the customer does'nt really decide, the customer is given, sold. That's what customers are by definition — sold. The product with the most coverage and accessibility is going to prevail. Even if that products coverage is garbage, and is not all that accessibile, because getting into this business is so expensive. The telcos already in place will decide.
Or maybe I'm just being cynical. I hope so.
An interesting article on a dispute between Tim Berners-Lee and a Google exec Peter Norvig on artificial intelligence and the semantic web. Berners-Lee consistently argues for the adoption of AI-readable meta in internet-published content. I tend to agree with him — for the most part. Computers need help in understanding content in context. Norvig raised the issue of data-integrity, worrying that deception is immenent — the intentional misuse of the aforementioned computer-readable meta-tags. Of course, Norvig is correct in his fears. But this isn't new. The issue needs to be solved with [human] peer-review, filtering, and intelligent analysis from the actual artificial intelligence.
This is probably the nerdiest thing I've read today. And that's saying a lot. What's worse? It makes sense...
Wish I had this article 2 weeks ago... snakes on a plane. I really can't explain my relationship with JSP/Servlets/Ajax in words, it's just that profound, inexplicable. Object-oriented Java bastardized with semi-strict JSP scripting and Javascript... garbage. Still can't justify working in any of the Ajax frameworks out there — they all just seem so limited — in the same way that RubyOnRails is limited.
I'm pretty sure no-one likes spam. Even spammers must not like getting bombarded with hudreds of obnoxiously incoherent emails containing links to medical prescriptions, African bank scams, and pron.
Spam sucks. Blog-comment-spam sucks. Maybe I need to implement some fanzy bayesian filter to cull out the garbage.
An article on Cnet reports on growing spam issues in the blogosphere and in social networks.
