Home

Bio & Disclosures

Discussions


xFruits

2007 Events

Thursday, January 2, 2003

Author:   Doc Searls  
Posted: 1/2/2003; 5:00:58 AM
Topic: Thursday, January 2, 2003
Msg #: 2892 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next: 2891/2893
Reads: 5605

It isn't who you are, it's how you blog 
 At BoingBoing, The Reverse Cowgirl is trolling and polling for various breeds of bloggers for a Thing that Rhizome is putting on Feb 1 in L.A. I'll be there, by the way.
 By the way, the headline harks back to what may be best L.A. t-shirt I've ever seen. On the front was a simple black drawing of a pair of shades and the corner of a face. The text said "It isn't who you are, it's how you look. After all, who cares who you are?" They were around in the late 80s and I haven't seen one in years. But I've never stopped regretting not buying one.
 
Tribal blogging 
 Ross Mayfield: Blog Tribe Social Network Mapping. Very interesting stuff that invites more thinking about identity, as well as blogging and several other subjects that naturally come up.
 
And they probably didn't sweat the porn, either 
 I just aced this geography test (and so will you). Unsurprisingly, most young American Adults couln't find India, and 29% couldn't find the Pacific Ocean.
 The significant finding:
 Americans who reported that they accessed the Internet within the last 30 days scored 65 percent higher than those who did not.
 
It had to happen 
 An alert reader sent me a CBS Marketwatch newsletter that says AOL will offer blogging capabilities to its customers. No link from the CBS Marketwatch front page (which also lacks search)... Ah, Google News just found it...
 AOL said ready to boost 'blogging', by Frank Bamako.
 Along those same lines, here's Mark Glaser in the OJR: The Future of blogs, AOL and tablet PCs.
 
Is Jakob on this case yet? 
 One of the most important virtues of a bloggable (i.e. linkable) blog is copyability. One should be able to copy text from a page. Lately there seem to be more and more blogs that force me to View Source and copy the text from the HTML. That's complicated and aversive.
 I'm not going to point fingers, yet. But I suggest that each of ya'll who are bloggers pause to see if it's possible to highlight and copy your text. If it ain't, fix it.
 Meanwhile, append it to point 5, here.
 
Keeping up with Venus 
 Global heating (why stop at "warming"?) continues:
 In an analysis of 172 species of plants, birds, butterflies and amphibians, Parmesan found that spring events such as egg-laying or flower-blooming advanced 2.3 days on average each decade.
 Her analysis of studies of 99 species of birds, butterflies and alpine herbs in North America and Europe found these species' ranges have shifted northward an average of about 3.8 miles per decade.
 We got a jump on the whole thing by moving south.
 
Keep it Stupid, Simple 
 I just ran across what Glenn Fleishman wrote in Quality of Servitude last month:
 It's better to focus on having more bandwidth than more intelligent networks. That is, forget about the fascist task of deciding that certain network traffic is more important than other network traffic. Rather, spend your energy (telcos and chipmakers and network equipment makers) on simply increasing the pool. In a non-prioritized network, more bandwidth means that more different kinds of traffic have an equal chance to get through.
 Good stuff, with heavy leverage from Frankston, Reed and Isenberg, among others.
 
Shiftage 
 Eric Norlin is thinking of moving his blog to Moveable Type or Radio Userland, and welcomes advice.
 He also has more about NEA, of course:
 ...what the internet gives us now is a blunt instrument for carving out definitions of ownership and control. What digital identity holds out as a promise is the possibility of refining and making more subtle those definitions......and if done right, it won't scare the shit out of people either....in fact, it will empower them to greater levels of commerce and innovation.
 Good stuff. He also points to more from Mitch on the same subject, as it applies to current lawmaking in the State of Washington.
 Mitch also says Doc's "OurIdentity" idea is good, but I'd suggest that the right phrase to describe T2 is "Negotiated and temporary (or temporal)."
 That's fine, but also nonmemorable. Remember, marketing is arson. If your idea isn't combustible, it won't catch. I'm not sure about ourdentity yet. In fact, I'm not sure about the whole Digital ID conversation, which seems to have set fire to a relatively small group of people (yes, it's a big fire, but still).
 Which is why I agree with what I said at DIDW a few months back: we need the killer app for DigID: an invention that mothers necessity. Without that, we're still using soggy matches.
 
More reach, less grasp 
 What would happen if "consumer electronics" became "customer electronics"?
 That's the question that came to me when I read Pact Lifts an Obstacle to HDTV Transition, by Eric A. Taub, in this morning's New York Times. The relevant paragraphs:
 Under an agreement between representatives of the Consumer Electronics Association and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, new cable-ready HDTV's to be introduced in the next few years will be plug-and-play; they will no longer need a separate box to receive digital broadcasts, HDTV versions of pay services or any other available basic cable or pay-TV programming.
 The digital FireWire connection will allow program providers to restrict the number of times that a program can be recorded. Under the agreement, HDTV programs from network broadcasters sent through cable or satellite companies will be completely unrestricted and recordable. Subscribers to pay services like HBO could be restricted from making more than one copy of programs from those services.
 While the agreement allows program providers to prevent any recording of pay-per-view or video-on-demand programs, users of hard-disk-based recorders like TiVo would be allowed to record and then watch such a program up to 90 minutes later.
 Here are a few answers:
 
  1. Conrol of content would no longer reside entirely on the supply side.
  2. What we now call DRM would be a two-way system.
  3. The market for content would be a helluva lot larger and more interesting, because it wouldn't just be a supply-control distro sytem.
  4. It won't happen until the consumers actually turn into customers.
  5. And that won't happen until demand-controlled DigID gives consumers the ability to perform as full-powered customers in the networked world.
 Speaking of CE, I'll be missing CES next week. Be interesting to hear about progress on that front from anybody who might be going.
 
Rings around Uranus 
 It won't make Saturn jealous, but it might do the job on Neptune: dig this story about new photos from Earth of Uranus' rings.
 
Who, who, who, who and who 
 Andre loops back to everybody else in the DigID conversation, and also to a seminal document: his Three Tiers of Identity paper.


There are responses to this message:




Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog

Membership : Join Now : Login

Create your own Manila site in minutes. Everyone's doing it!

Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Blogroll

 
Search archives

Santa Barbarians
Edhat
SB Independent
SB Newsroom
Kevin Barron
Blogabarbara
Craig Smith
SB*Free Press
Joe Andieu
Patrick Gregston
John Quiimby
Das Williams' dad
Katy Pearce
Taymar Pixley
Lisa Gates
Cookie Jill

Everybody else
Spot-on
RageBoy
MysticBourgeoisie
David Weinberger
Miscellaneous
Dave
Berkman
John Palfrey
IT Garage
Bret Fausett
Susan Crawford
Bruce Sterling
Steve Lewis/Bubkes
Hak Pak Sak
Brad Kava
Brad Templeton
Sheila Lennon
Don Marti
Steve Urquhart
Wes Felter
Brad DeLong
Tom Evslin
Brian Oberkirch
Dean Landsman
Hugh MacLeod
LAist
Jeremy Ruston
Geoff Jones
Vaspers the Grate
Sig Rinde
Chris Albritton
Ronni Bennett
Thomas Hawk
Kevin Bedell
Howard
Bryan
Deep Fun
BoingBoing
edhat
Terry Heaton
Jay Rosen
Kim Cameron
George Lakoff
Scott Rosenberg
Larry Lessig
Jim Thompson
Jeff Jarvis
David Isenberg
Stephen Johnson
Tim Oren
Geoff Moore
Rex Hammock
This is Broken
Max Sawicky
Stuart Hughes
Dave Pentecost
John Perry Barlow
Mary Hodder
Dan Gillmor
Steve Gillmor
Dean Landsman
John Stodder
Seth Finkelstein
Renee Blodgett
misbehaving.net
Ruby Sinreich
Ed Cone
Julie Leung
Ted Leung
Ken Coar
Flemming Funch
Mike Sanders
Marc Canter
Joi Ito
Ethan Zuckerman
Doug Kaye
Jon Lebkowski
Judith Meskill
Allen Searls
Esther Dyson
Christopher Lydon
Russell Beattie
Tim Bray
Brian Millar
Mark Pilgrim
Michael Hall
Backup Brain
Frankston, Reed
Britt Blaser
Brent Simmons
Loic Le Meur
Leslie Winer
Mike Taht
Eric Raymond
Volokh Conspiracy
Steven Levy
Lisa Rein
Skywave
Epeus' epigone
Glenn Reynolds
James Taranto
Frank Paynter
Ross Mayfield
Dana Blankenhorn
Ken Bereskin/Panther
Daily Wireless
Filchyboy
OxBlog
Bryan Field-Elliot
Rajesh Jain
Oliver Willis
Gary Turner
Michael O'Connor Clarke
Jennifer Balderama
Kevin Werbach
Amy Wohl
Phil Windley
Fulcrum
Real Joe
Greater Democracy
Mitch Ratcliffe /biz
Mitch Ratcliffe/soc
Wayne Robins
VivaCapitalism
Cut on the bias
Howard Greenstein
The Poor Man
Mickey Kaus
Dave Sifry
Buzz Bruggeman
Ben Hammersley
Matt Jones
Paul Andrews
John Robb
Schoolblog
Tom Shugart
Matt Welch
Blur Circle
Denise Howell
JY
BlackHoleBrain
Chris Pirillo
Marek
Tony Pierce
Chris Nolan's
Spot On

Wil Wheaton
Meg
Brian Linse
Dan Pink
Dawn Olsen
Craig
Yoz
The Head Lemur
Ev
Jeremy Zawodny
Susan Kitchens
K5
Anu Gupta
Jonathon
Fishrush
Dave Ely
Euan Semple
Eric Norlin
Paul Boutin
James Lileks
David Williams
Mary Wehmeier
Bruner Blog
Halley Suitt
Webword
Ann Salisbury
Om Malik
Moxie
J's Notes
Meesh
NUblog
TBTF
Cam
Seth Finkelstein
Tom Matrullo
Chip Hoagland
Deborah
Fortboise
J.D. Lasica
Photodude
Phil Wolff
Andre Durand
Eric Hansen
Mike McBride
Jeneane Sessum
Chris Nolan
Gonzo Engaged
Michael Mussington
UseTheSource
Wes
Adam
Sam Ruby
Miguel
Frank Field
Rebecca Blood
Joshua Allen
Cluetrain
JOHO
EGR
Searls site
Scoble
AKMA
Kottke
Tomalak's Realm
Tim O'Reilly
Mitch Kapor
Bill Quick
Dan Bricklin
Lou Josephs
Alan Reiter
N.Z. Bear
Todd Morman
Zeldman
Glenn
Joshua
Rex Hammock
Matthew Thomas
Brian Dear
Baylink
Burningbird