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Thursday, August 1, 2002
Stay tuned 
Nothing exceeds like success
| | This post at OxDECAFBAD illustrates the problem. The Infrastructure presentation I gave at JabberConf and OSCon, which is archived at Searls.com, is getting kinda popular. So popular, in fact, that page requests are now past 12,000 per day, and still going up. (Perspective: that's 3-6X what we're generally running here.) |
| | The result: I'm already moving past my traffic limit for August. Look at the calendar and you'll see my problem. |
| | So that's why I'm looking for other homes for the thing. Also why, if I can't find one, I'll either have to pay a lot more to my ISP (which I've been dragging my butt about dumping anyway), or take the thing down until a solution presents itself. |
| | Meanwhile, my apologies. We're under destruction here. |
| | [Later...] We've found a solution. Once we have it working, the new link will go up. Thanks! |
Speaking of curves
| | Eric and Kevin have been debating the DRM thing, and what Kevin is up to with MediAgora. It's good shit. Kevin even posits a taxonomy of DRM types which at the very least shows that he knows his way around this stuff. Eric's response are, as always, insightful and reality-based. Enjoy. |
A peek around the Personal Identity Management curve
| | Esther Dyson, who specializes in hanging out out where the curve starts, covering emerging stuff that's likely to get huge once it comes round the market bend, has an excellent piece in this month's Release 1.0 about personal identity management applications. Reality 1.0 is a paid newsletter, but the executive summary can be downloaded here, and it covers the gist of the issue. |
| | Getting first billing in the piece is Andre Durand's PingID Corp. (on the advisory board of which I serve). Nice. |
| | What's cool about PingID is that it's an identity infrastructure (open source at the bottom, so it qualifies for ubiquity) that proceeds outward from the individual, rather than one that's imposed from the outside by a company like Microsoft (with Palladium) or by an organization like the Sun-led Liberty Alliance — yet is compatible with those schemes and others like them. |
| | Everything happening in this new space involves a cast of characters playing roles slightly off the ones they usually play in the mainstream press, because they actually need to interact with each other. This calls for some suspension of characterization if you want to have any hope of learning what's really going on. |
| | I mean, markets are conversations, right? If that's so, what happens in a market where everybody, even Sun and Microsoft, are actually talking, both with each other and with increasinlgy empowered individuals advocated by newcomers like PingID, as well as by themselves? |
| | And what do you make of participants in that conversation that are actually learning shit from each other and changing their positions as everybody learns more together, co-creating a whole new fucking category? (Or is it a whole fucking new category? I never get that straight.) |
| | Either way, you'll never know if you say the Bad Guy participants suck and they'll never change. |
| | Eric Norlin, more than any other individual on the planet Earth, has put his brave ass in the middle of this thing, and has worked to make the conversation happen — which it is, apparently. He has also been reporting honestly and abundantly about the progress of the whole thing, in his blog and elsewhere. |
| | I suggest that anybody interested in what's actually happening start reading more of his shit and giving him less of it. |
Speaking of politics
| | I've spent much of the last three days working on a story about the murder of a new industry by an old one that successfully engineered — and is continuing to engineer — one of most aggressive expansions of law and regulatory power in the history of the republic. It's a story that should offend every journalist on the Web who cares about free enterprise, free speech, and the free Internet. |
| | Imagine for a moment if every weblog were suddenly subject to an expensive license, obligated to keep extensive records of every post made every day, and forced to pay a federally empowered industrial intermediary for every name mentioned and every link made starting in 1998 — because the publishing industry had successfully lobbied Congress to extend copyright law in a way that uniquely punished journalism on the Web, while leaving traditional forms of journalism free to continue as before. |
| | That is exactly what is happening to Internet radio, right now, because the entertainment industry successfully lobbied through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, and the RIAA successfully steered the copyright arbitration process that followed. The result is a regulatory environment so punitive and toxic that the entire industry it was intended to govern is being eliminated. Completely — at least in the U.S. |
| | And it's happening right now. |
| | I'm curious to hear where our political bloggers (on all wings) stand on this thing. And what, if anything, we're all going to do about it. |
Other handedness
| | Brian Linse has not only identified me as a fellow occupant of the political left, but as nothing less than the Alpha listing on the blogroll of his new Lefty Directory. Right behind me is Nick Denton, who used to have a similar directory of his own (at least that's what I wrote down in my notes). |
| | Funny how perceptions work. I've described myself as a "lily livered Libertarian," and I always come out Libertarian in political quizes. When it comes to the Net, my Libertarianism is near-absolute. |
| | As for the rest of it, well... I like free trade, don't like drug laws, don't favor government subsidies for most things, and generally favor deregulation (although I don't think the market has yet been invented that will save an old growth redwood tree). I would like to see PBS and NPR finally weaned from the federal teat. And I have little patience for the liberal politics of victimhood and political correctness. |
| | As for war, I'm an old Quaker pacifist type, but I don't go there in my blog because it quickly becomes a tarbaby topic and I've got other things I'd much rather blog about. |
| | The short of it is, I tend to avoid all politics other than those involved in saving the Net from the wacko hyperregulators in Hollywood (mostly Democrats, I suspect) who seem to be operating Congress like a puppet show. I'm all over that shit. |
| | Anyway, when I look at Brian's LeftRoll list, I see a few conspicuous absences. David Weinberger would be one. AKMA would be another. Burningbird (who's back after a short hiatus, which is a Good Thing). Tom Matrullo. Dan Gillmor. Chris Locke, although he's sure to violate any label that's laid on him. Dave Winer is a Mets fan, which may qualify him. But Dean Landsman is an even bigger Yankees fan, and my guess is that his politics swing the same direction. |
| | I can see where Brian's going with this thing, but I don't think there's anything on the left to match the what's happening on the right with this whole warblog thing. But the division seems more political/nonpolitical than left/right. So, some of us are into politics, while others are not. There just seem to be more political bloggers on what used to be called the right than what used to be called the left. |
| | But what the hell. Brian needs some public bookmarks, and whatever works for him is fine with me. |
| | Guess that's just my Liberal attitude. |
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