90% Crud

Orkut on eBay

Want an Orkut invite? Try eBay. Since Orkut is an invitation only version of Friendster, invites can be hard to come by for people with more money than social skill. That's where eBay comes in, with people selling invites for "Buy It Now" prices of $3.50 - $11, with one auction actually fetching $11.00. I wonder how these auctions mesh with eBay's Downloadable Media Policy?
[Update: When I sent this to three friends via IM, they all responded with one word replies: "Crazy", "Sick" and "Nice."]
[Update 2: You can get them for $2.00 a pop (via Many-to-Many]

Tune Recycler

Downhill Battle announced today Tune Recycler, wherein they plan to accept codes from Pepsi's iTunes promotion. Downhill Battle opens their announcement saying "Pepsi is about to dump 100 million free iTunes songs into circulation." I have to question how the songs are in circulation if you can't resell them, but I have bigger concerns with this campaign.

The first is their assertion that Pepsi pays Apple full price for every song on the promotion. Why would Apple charge full price for free advertising? I wouldn't be surprised if the labels cut their rates as well, but since their agreement is secretish, I doubt the public will know. If their source is rumor, well, uh, I heard a rumor that Pepsi isn't dumb enough to pay full price to advertise Apple.

Second, why do the Downhill Battle people get to choose what music deserves to be supported? I realize that this campaign is for people who don't use the iTunes Music Store, but why not allow people to choose which artist and song they want to support? Do the Downhill Battle people think that they have better taste in music than the people supplying their purchasing power? If they want to further their political agenda, they could limit it only to artists not belonging to the RIAA.

It's an interesting idea, but they seem more focused on what they want to do instead of enabling people to help them out.

SneakerNetting

The Reg has a story about Netflix, which includes the statistic that whey they're busy they ship out "around 5,000,000 gigabytes per day." That's around 5 Petabytes of data. In a day. There's an old saying, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tape," which could probably use some updating. (via PVRBlog)

IE Security

So there's yet another IE vulnerability (which isn't to say Mozilla or Safari are perfect) so let's see what Microsoft has to say about avoiding malicious hyperlinks. From Knowledge Base Article 833786:

The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

Social Software Hatin'

There's a lot of hatin' going on in the social software arena, so I either launched the SongBuddy beta at the best or the worst time. Warren Ellis doesn't see any value in them. Cory Doctorow is tired of the same old introduce-me-to-a-friend shit. Jason Kottke needs full-time help managing these social sites. So where does SongBuddy fit in?

For Warren, SongBuddy provides a separate value than the standard gallery-of-freaks. It provides a way to explore the music that your friends listen to, that their friends listen to, and so on. If you do want to meet people, though, you can do worse than being able to talk to them about music.

For Cory, all the profile data on the site is available in FOAF format. Example: this is my SongBuddy profile. This is the FOAF file it generates. This is what my FOAF file looks like to the FoaF Explorer. This is what my FOAF file looks like to Plink. This is what my FOAF file looks like as a blobby thing. Also, Cory will appreciate that all that FOAF data is available under a Creative Commons license.

As for Jason, I'm working on it. In the meantime, learn about FOAF and how it can provide a distributed "meta Friendster" with an open format. SongBuddy is a FOAF producer right now, but I intend to turn it into a FOAF consumer shortly. What that means is that you could type in the URL to a FOAF file on another service, and it would create the friend-links on SongBuddy that you have on another site. For example, once LiveJournal supports FOAF you would be able to add http://www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/foaf to SongBuddy, and SongBuddy would put all your LJ friends (that have SongBuddy accounts) on your Buddies list.

Hopefully by supporting open formats and doing something other than the same-old-same-old (in the announcement I wrote "an attractive, smart, well liked person such as yourself already has all the friends that they need") SongBuddy will be a service worth using. Check it out and judge for yourself.

[Update: Wired agrees that there's a problem]

Announcing SongBuddy Beta

Kicked out of Orkut? Done with all these social networking sites that just hook you up with friends? I mean, an attractive, smart, well liked person such as yourself already has all the friends that they need. But what about your music?

SongBuddy is a friending site with a cause: to hook you up with good mp3s. The premise is pretty simple: you add your buddies to your list of buddies and you add links to mp3s on your Catalog. You can browse your buddies' music or just hit play and listen to it all. Rinse and repeat until you've found the Next Big Thing. Check out my profile on the site to get an idea of what's going on.

Where do these mp3s come from? The way the recording industry is acting, they'd like you to think that mp3s are illegal. But smaller, independent labels know that mp3s are the best way to get the word out which is why they put them on their sites for you to listen to. SongBuddy lets your friends point you to the good stuff.

So get on SongBuddy, get your Catalog going and get the word out!

(Thanks to all the friends who helped test it out and offered suggestions and reminded me that I had to still keep building it. And thanks to David for the design I butchered for the site.)

For the geekier among you, here are some tech specs:

The site is running on the LogiCreate PHP application framework. As I wrote before, it's a breeze to program for. You'd do well to check it out and figure out how to make a module.

The site supports some pretty nifty things, like RSS for keeping up with your buddies' songs. It also exports your user profile and Catalog in FOAF format. I'm working on reading external FOAFs, once that is going you'll never need to add your friends once the next social site flavor of the week comes along. Hooray for open formats!

Speaking of open formats, to play the music the site generates an m3u file which lists the URLs for the songs in the Catalog or Buddies List that you want to listen to. Your media player will take care of the rest. iTunes for Mac users might want to read "How can I get iTunes to create a new playlist when I click Play""

All the data on the site is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 Creative Commons license so if you think you can do something cool with the data, I'd love to hear about it.

Bloglines Revisited

I've been using Bloglines a lot more since my last review of it. Mark Fletcher did a pretty good job of taking care of my caching concern, and known bug in Safari. So I got some of the bad out of the way, what's good?

First off, the UI is top notch. I can't think of a better running ECMAScript interface on the web. Then there's the fact that Bloglines does a pretty good job at handling RSS feeds and updates. When using a computer based system, I run into the two big problems: it doesn't update when my computer is shut off and it doesn't synchronize what I've read. Bloglines does both of these.

But Bloglines also does things that standard news readers don't or can't. It lets you create searches across all RSS feeds, which you can recreate with Feedster. It lets you create email addresses that you can read like RSS feeds, which you can recreate with dodgeit. It can turn your RSS feeds into a Blogroll, which you can kind of recreate with BlogRolling, although it's not automatic. It uses collaborative filtering to create recommendations for RSS feeds you might like, which I have yet to find a service that does.

Finally, you can show off your own subscriptions, which I've found to be a pretty effective way to show people how cool RSS feeds are. So if I dissuaded you from looking at Bloglines before, give it a shot. It's become my RSS reader of choice.

Hey Ya, Charlie Brown!

Another fine video in the form of "juxtaposing children's cartoons with music," Hey Ya, Charlie Brown merges Outkast and Peanuts. I wonder what album this would be on, Snooponia? It reminds me of the Pokemon Bitches video, which I assume is at that link but won't play in Safari.

No updates

There won't be that many updates this week, because of my super secret project. As it just so happens, my super secret project will be announced here on Monday the 26th, but there's a hint about it in the URL for this entry. Another hint is what I've been posting about today.

MagnetLinks and the DMCA

Magnet Links is a proposal for being able to link to files on any P2P network. I remember back in the day I listed my mp3 collection on my website and build napster: URIs to link to. This seems like a useful tool, because it's an open specification any P2P tool can implement it.

One thing to remember is that you should triple check that anything you link to isn't infringing on anyone's copyright. Why? Because linking to infringing material "might be a contributory infringement of the work's copyright." Sort of like if you tell someone where a crack house is you're guilty of selling crack, or at least you would be if all laws used the logic of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I am not a lawyer though, so the preceding paragraph may be bunk.

Remember kids, only MagnetLink to stuff in the public domain or licensed with a Creative Commons license. Wow, only 2 days old and MagnetLink is already a verb. Still, it won't necessarily catch on, it's not like feed:// URIs are useful yet.

Wha?

I'm not sure I understand what's going on in this DMCA notification to Speakeasy:

This site, which we accessed on 7 May 2003 14:07:22 EDT (GMT -0400), offers approximately 0 sound files for download. Many of these files contain recordings owned by our member companies, including songs by such artists as Creed.

I know Creed isn't exactly music, but now they're not even sounds? WTF is wrong with the RIAA when they're suing people for not sharing music?

The web's equivelant of 42

I finally found it, the link that explains everything. Want to know why the world is so weird? Click that link. The middle east? Explained in that link. Your parents? Check. In case it's too subtle right now, the content is from CNN. Created with the Website Mixmaster. (via MeFi)

What I learned from other bloggers

From Stephen: Your weblog represents you, make it look good. (still on the todo list)
From AAIO, Murph, Rob, Steven and all the ArborBlogs: You have to live somewhere, write about it.
From Warren: Put a picture in your post whenever you can.
From Cory, Xeni, et all: Use the <ins> and <del> tags liberally.
From Andy: Dig deeper in a story when possible. Fact check, research, add any value you can.
From Josh: Find a voice and have some standards about what you write.
From Denis: Exercise some control over what you post.
From Leslie: Keep a LiveJournal around for the personal stuff, keep a weblog around for the geeky stuff.
Finally, last but most importantly, from Jenny: This is worth doing.

Bullfight de la pequeña persona

This video (2.5MB QuickTime) is just about the greatest thing since Citizen Kane. It's got everything: Action! Drama! Romance! A midget bullfighter! Spanish! If anyone ever claims that bullfights are cruel, you can point them to this video to show the fondness that the contestants share for each other. (via David)

20 steps to fix OS X

macosxhints has an article titled Twenty steps to help diagnose and fix system issues. Keep the URL somewhere safe (for example by posting it to your weblog so that you can search your archives for it in the future) because it's fairly sound advice and in a pretty good order. Next time your OS X system starts acting up try these steps.

MI Democratic caucus coming up

Sign up now to vote for the Michigan Democratic presidential caucus. You can vote online or by mail, and you can sign up with that link until the 31st. The actual vote is Feb. 7th. Remember, Al Sharpton was the road manager for James Brown, that's got to count for something. (via Stephen)

Carol Moseley Braun, Geek?

It had to happen, there wasn't any other way. Within 12 hours of announcing to me (and possibly the rest of the country) that she was a geek, Carol Moseley Braun dropped out of the presidential race. It seems fitting that the geekiest candidate since Diamond Joe Quimby said "Welcome futurists, cyberphiles, and the rest of you dateless wonders" would drop out of the nation's second most important popularity contest (behind American Idol) after showing her true self to us.

It wasn't a race or a gender thing, it was a nerd thing. People might point to Dean and say that he's a geek. He does have Larry Lessig and other neterati behind him. That's nothing compared to Braun's stunning admission last night.

What's that? You didn't hear about it? Obviously the jock controlled media is keeping the nerd message out of the papers. But the Daily Show, which had Braun on as a guest, was bold enough to air her interview. During the interview she said "Live long and prosper," which is hardly conclusive of nerdhood. It's a phrase available to anyone who's turned on their TV in the last 20 years. What really showed her true nerdity was when she said "Fear is the mind killer," a Dune reference, in response to Bush's War on Terror™.

It's only fitting that the first publicly proclaimed nerd resign from the presidential race so soon after outing herself. Now she can go back to the Senate, where she can help set up the A/V equipment, help the other senators with their homework and do everything in her power to keep her lunch money. Still, it would have been nice to get a presidential decree to digitally remove Jar Jar...

Milan High School 0wned by the copyright cops

According to an LJ user a teacher at Milan High School was forced to resign for downloading software (also here), presumably for educational purposes. I couldn't find anything on Google News about this but it may have happened during the current news cycle. Although I have no way of knowing that they were involved it sounds like the BSA, up to their usual antics.

Meanwhile schools creating their own problems by requiring students to learn MS applications. Granted MS Office currently dominates the business landscape, but that domination is through users who learned on WordStar or WordPerfect. By using free software schools wouldn't have to worry about piracy copyright infringement and they would teach kids how to be adaptable.

[Update 2: I just spoke to Superintendent Dennis McComb at the school and he said that they had not been visited by anyone from the FBI and that no computers had been seized. Sounds like I just got played by a high school prank.]

[Update: Reading the text again, it looks like the teacher may have inadvertently been sharing software. The description in question reads "they had downloaded bearshare, and over the network, many other people have downloaded over 6000$ worth of software." I know that the industry likes to frame the argument in terms of theft (and murder/rape) but when you give something away are you the thief or the victim? Does the same apply if you accidentally leave a software CD where it can be stolen?]

Cult of the Dead Cow endorses Dean

The cDc has announced its endorsement for Howard Dean, or at least cDc member Obscure Images has. This can only mean that Dean will emerge not only President, but possibly some sort of Godhead for the next thousand years.

I think that the best chance that we have for getting the Shrub and his filthy ilk out of the White House is to support Howard Dean. As soon as I get some extra money, I'm going to be sending it his way. This will mark the first time I've ever contributed money to a political candidate.

That's as ringing an endorsement as I've ever heard, at least from a member of the cDc not talking about drugs, alcohol, or their own cult activities. More on the cDc is available on their website or at your local library.

Daniel, Daniel, Daniel

Daniel is understandably excited about the microcosm of American consumer culture that is The Price Is Right. Is he mentally impaired or just on drugs? Which drugs? Either way, you need to watch this video (5.6 Mb Windows Media file) right this second. (via Jenny)

TiVo To Go and Free PVRs

TiVo has just announced TiVo To Go, their plan to make the shows TiVo records viewable on computers. This is a bittersweet announcement for TiVo fans. Matt sounds excited, Cory sounds pissed.

Very briefly, if you've been living under a cave or in a rock somewhere, let me state my feelings on TiVo: it is the second greatest invention of my lifetime. I would give up cable TV before TiVo. You can have my TiVo when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

The deal is that you can watch your shows on your computer if you have their special media software and a cryptographic key that I suspect is tied to your TiVo account. My initial reaction is the nagging suspicion that their software won't run under OS X, which means that this would be all academic anyway.

Why are they doing this? Well they are getting competition. They've had competition before, but not like this. Comcast is rolling out a DVR, which people won't need to pay the initial $200 - $300 hardware purchase. On the other front, they're aware of Freevo and MythTV, free software that allows people to create their own DVRs. Before the end of 2004 I predict that someone will be selling a "beige box" DVR with one of these free software packages pre-installed. The cable companies are beating them on price and the free DVRs are beating them on features.

What can you do with the free DVRs that you can't with TiVo? You can play video files that you've downloaded over the Internet; play emulated video games; get weather information; (the most important tenet of free software) extend it yourself and our original subject: exporting shows. The downside is that you don't benefit from mass production or subscription subsidies that lower TiVo’s cost (you can spend around $1,200 building a MythTV box)and they’re not exactly user friendly.

So why is TiVo trying to piss Cory off? Like everything with TiVo it’s a compromise between what users want (unlimited access to the shows they recorded) and what the TV companies want (TiVo to go to hell). Why walk the line? ReplayTV tried to appease the consumers at the expense of the industry and they went tits up. Meanwhile, TiVo has its investors like NBC to worry about, so the last thing it would do is give their customers what they want. Do you really think that a company would pick its (notoriously loyal) customers over its investors?

UUCP in 2003... err... 2004

I found the depraved rantings of a psychotic on ONLamp strangely compelling. I mean, can this insanity be real? Can UUCP be the solution for mobile email? What's next, Gopher based RSS readers? I love retro protocols, but finding a well reasoned article explaining their current usefulness is too much.

Some of the benefits (a twofold, really): It supports automatic resume, so if your connection dies you can pick up where you left off and you only need one port for sending and receiving.

Maybe I'll add this to my mobile arsenal, along with an IP over DNS setup. Why the second? Because most for-pay wireless and wired internet access services (like those in coffee houses, hotels, etc) still allow DNS queries. If you can tunnel your internet traffic through DNS, you can get free Internet access. Whether you should is left up to your own ethical compass.

Then again, I won't need to work on the mobile arsenal until I start leaving my apartment.

Comment spammers

If you're wondering what the weblog comment spammer plan of attack is, they are discussing it out in the open. The best part is that when one spammer accuses another of being too ethical, the other gets defensive:

>You're becoming too ethical and
>that is stopping you from doing better than you can.

You assume too much, when it comes to making money I lower my ethics
considerably. What I don't have though is unlimited time and so I put
my time where I believe long term it will produce most rewards and
right now I don't see spamming blogs, guestbooks etc... giving long
term rewards.

Don't be evil (unless there's money in it)

So Google has a new service called DomainPark. It's basically AdSense for sites without content - parked domains. While there are certainly are legitimate uses for domain parking (such as for newly registered domains) I doubt those sites generate the 750,000 page views needed to get into the Google program. All that's left are domainsquatters and typosquatters. One of Google's driving principles is "Don't be evil." How does that mesh with paying people who prevent legitimate site operators from getting descriptive domains?

Happy Keynote Day

It's that time again, the second christmas for Apple fans. The Jobs, the black turtlenecked christ figure, gave his keynote speech to his adoring fans. The rumor sites were abuzz as always, this time predicting a $99 and $199 miniPod, and of course the nay sayers were predicting disappointment. My cow orkers and I had some thoughts as we watched the keynote, which I've faithfully stolen to post below.

The first thing the Jobs talked about was the classic 1984 commercial, directed by Ridley Scott. Ironically, the Jobs invoked the very same imagery as he stood in front of his giant screen. I was waiting for someone to run down the aisle to throw a sledge hammer through the screen. That or for Steve to say "Oh, and one more thing," then levitate and announce himself Godhead of Cupertino.

Lay off the Microsoft lady. She sounded like she was from Fargo, not Hairlipistan. The guy from Microsoft was animated, but he was no Omar. The note taking feature in Office 04 seemed pretty cool.

There must be a new mandate at 1 Inifinate Loop that every employee must do everything in his or her power to include the cube effect in their software. Never have I seen so many cubes! The rotating cube will be the new star wipe.

Last keynote (the speech), when Keynote (the software) was announced, the Jobs spent way too much time on themes. That probably happened because he didn't have much else to talk about, aside from iPod snowboarding jackets. This time it was iMovie themes. We don't need to see all of them, quit boring everybody!

iPhoto is taking a cue from iTunes and creating Smart Albums. I guess "smart" is another word for "query" these days. As long as apps are supporting it who am I to complain? They only demonstrated it with dates, the example was to get all the pictures from Dec 15 to Jan 5 for every year as a holiday album. I wonder if it works for other EXIF fields (EXIF contains metadata for JPEGs, little bits of information about your pictures). Some cameras these days are even storing GPS data which means that you could automatically create photo albums based on locations! Let's hope that it's that cool.

I have zero interest in GarageBand, but I'm sure some people do. My mom might like it, you'd have to ask her. I think it stems from the Jobs' fascination with his own taste in music. It could be a democratization of music, or it could be like the clipart desktop publishing revolution of the 1980's.

The MTV guy in the iLife video needs to calm down, but he's still not as creepy as Omar. This is what drugs do to you, kids.

As for the iPod mini, well I'm sure you've figured it out for yourself. $249 for a 4 GB iPod mini or $299 for a 15 GB iPod, I know that I would pay the extra $50. On the other hand, if the had gone (been able to go?) cheaper they would have been cannibalizing sales of their more expensive iPods. If there's one thing Apple is afraid of, it's cannibalizing sales. That's where their pricing schemes come from, that's where the mac clones went, that's what almost killed Apple during Gil Amelio's reign. On the other other hand, I know of about $2,000 that Apple isn't getting because they couldn't come out with a sub-$200 (and I don't mean $199) iPod. Hopefully this is temporary and we'll see the rumored prices in a few months.

Like all holidays, the anticipation is usually more fun than the actual gifts. I look forward to seeing the numbers on iPod sales, and what GarageBand winds up creating.

Made in the USA... sorta...

While I'm being pedantic, this was on the back of a package for fuzzy dice that a cow orker received:

If you can't read my picture, I don't blame you. It says "Sterling, AN AMERICAN COMPANY" and "Package and Product Designed in the U.S.A. MADE IN CHINA." Although not in the picture, below the recycle icon the box it says "PLEASE RECYCLE." That implies that they recycle, although if they did actually they would explicitly state that. It's like they have a company mandate to print the exact opposite of what they do on their packaging. When someone who makes fuzzy dice doesn't have the convictions to stand behind their iconography, haven't the terrorists already won?

I know those words,but that sign doesn't make sense

Can anyone explain to me what this means? All I know about it is that when I clicked on it, it took me to a page that makes Geocities look like K10k. WTF does it mean?

Plink and FOAF

Plink is a new Friendster clone with one big difference: it's completely open. It uses the FOAF specification for describing relationships between people. Because you create and store this data on your own, you are in complete control of it, and it can be used for other tools as well.

For example, my FOAF created my PLINK profile. Unfortunately, it's having problems recognizing my friends, but that's probably why they say it's still in Beta. [Why am I giving it an easier time than Bloglines? Because the Bloglines caching bug made the site unusable, PLINK is still usable to me.] [Update: Dominic was right (see the comments) - my FOAF wasn't validating. It looks good now, be sure to validate your FOAF!]

The interesting stuff happens when different FOAF tools play together. TypePad uses FOAF to generate its blogroll, so that whenever you update your blogroll your friends on PLINK gets updated. LiveJournal is still working on FOAF and head honcho Brad Fitzpatrick gives it thumbs up. Imagine a spam tool that sees if an email is from someone in your friend network before allowing it.

So how do you get started? The easiest way is to use the FOAF-a-matic to create your file, then throw it up on your webserver. Then add your FOAF to PLINK and you're in.

Hyper cyber virtual laser keyboard

I've been hearing about these for a while now but it looks like they're actually on the way to stores. The Virtual Laser Keyboard projects an image of a keyboard on any surface and then watches where your fingers tap.

It's made for PDAs and laptops, and a cell phone version is coming at the end of the year. It looks like it'll cost $100, a surprisingly low price point for something like this. We'll see how well it works without tactile feedback though. The reason touchscreen remote controls are teh suck is because your fingers can't feel their way around a smooth surface. The VLK could suffer the same fate.

Barcode reader for craphounds

Bri pointed me to the IntelliScanner Collector, a combination barcode scanner/personal library manager. You just scan in the stuff you own and it pulls images and information down from the Intarweb. It seems perfect for people like me who force people to borrow their books and movies. Supposedly it can also create web pages for you to show off your collection, but I couldn't find an example to link to. Also, it's $200 which is understandable (they provide a scanner) but still a hard pill to swallow. It doesn't do video games, either, which I lend out all the time.

One thing that I would really like to see from software like this is Distributed Library integration, so that you could make your collection lendable to anyone with enough whuffie. Still, the package looks pretty strong and if I could get a cheaper version that worked with my CueCat I would be all over it.

Fat City, USA

Detroit was declared the fattest city in the country (via Rob) today, taking the title from Houston. Houston city councilwoman Carol Alvarado was magnanimous in defeat, saying "Congratulations, Detroit." Weirdly, the 5:00 Simpsons rerun on channel 50 (Detroit's UPN affiliate) was Sweets & Sour Marge. The one sentence TiVo synopsis is "When Springfield gets the name 'fattest town on Earth,' Marge puts the family on a diet." That can't be a coincidence, can it? Did anyone outside of the Detroit area see the same episode today?

George Chen, asian guy

The asian guy or internet guy or mp3 guy shows up everywhere. I see him rocking out to all sorts of mp3 players; selling me the world from the other side of emo glasses. But who is he? A 1999 article reveals that he is George Chen (via Waxy.org sideblog) and examines who he is and why he shows up everywhere. Even the New York Times was interested in him, which means that he's fit to print at least. It seems the least likely of fates - to be an employee for a software company and to wind up a ubiquitous model. I guess it's one more example of things that the Internet makes possible, eh Mahir?

Vote no on Jesus

McSweeny's has an incredibly clever review of the intersection of politics and Jesus's teachings. It takes the form of a letter from Pat Robertson to his followers on a presidential campaign by Jesus H. Christ and makes some salient points.

Just six months after His re-rebirth, it has become startlingly clear that Jesus has lost touch with America. Far from being a prudent Savior, Jesus has proven to be no more than a foolhardy liberal. Aligning Himself with the far-left minority, Jesus has adopted the lofty and politically correct delusions that have come to define the liberal elite. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Jesus' irresponsible welfare proposals and pleas for universal healthcare.

[It looks like MI. Governor Jennifer Granhom got in trouble for making similar comments on public television.]

Silly English you-know-what

Tim Berners-Lee has been knighted for creating the World Wide Web (does anyone ever use the first two Ws anymore?) and I couldn't be more in agreement. While the title was originally for an armored soldier, it's been a ceremonial title for the past few hundred years. It conveys a great sense of respect for the recipient, although sometimes it seems like they'll let just anyone in.

This got me thinking, "What if Tim Berners-Lee were an old school knight?" What dragons are there for him to slay? Would he use his power to get the Semantic Web accepted, or is there something bigger? Maybe Berners-Lee's dragon is the end of a free Internet.

Every day the Internet's openness is more and more at risk from corporations and governments. Things like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Digital Rights Management, cable modem routers and unequal upload and download speeds are tightening a grip on the Internet. John Walker has an amazingly well written essay on the anatomy of this dragon and what will happen if (or when) it wins. I know it's long, but it's worth reading. Wired has a battle plan to slay the dragon.

Maybe I'll sleep a little easier if I pretend that there is an armored knight carrying a sword, riding a horse, sworn to protect the honor of the Internet. Maybe someday the Internet won't need a knight to protect it.

A look back at 2003

I've only been keeping this site for about 5 months (with some older LiveJournal entries thrown in for good measure) but rather than write something new I'll just list some of the memorable posts from 2003. It's like photoblogging - easier than actually coming up with something new to say.

• Underappreciated XHTML Tags


• Gubernatorial Prognostication


• Pr0n leads the way


• Lover Spy [more memorable for the discussion than the post]


• Does the Right of First Sale Still Exist?


• Oakland County Police State


• On Tivo and Advertising...

If you missed any of these posts take a look back before heading on to 2004.