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Halloween, 2006
Speak freely. Just don't read any. 
| | Heard through the grapevine that Oireachtas — the Irish parliament — is banning employees from reading or writing blogs, as well as indulging in other ordinary online activities. Went rooting around for evidence and found Blogs banned in Leinster House (and Blackhall Place) in tuppenceworth.ie. That points back to this post at backseatdrivers. That post says A well informed individual tells me that all Oireachtas staff were recently asked to sign a new web use policy document which specifically bans the perusal of any and all so-called "weblog" sites. |
| | Here's a statement I received this morning from the head of Human Resources at the Oireachtas, Dublin's equivalent of the Palace of Westminster: |
| | "The policy of the Office of the Houses of the Oireachtas explicitly prohibits the use of our computer facilities for chat room purposes or for weblog (blog). Staff members who engage in blogging which is not related to their official duties, while using their Office computer will be subject to disciplinary action." |
| | It follows several blog reports (here and here, and here). The story has yet to break in Ireland's mainstream media. |
| | Let me say, straight away, Ireland is not banning its politicians from blogs. TD's like Ciaran Cuffe of the Greens and Liz McManus will continue to blog from both inside and outside parliament. Nor is it necessarily banning all its staff from reading blogs. But it says something for the power and pull of blogging that its capacity to waste people's valuable working time that it has been listed alongside porn surfing as a disciplinary offence. |
| | Most of us who run moderately successful blogs can confirm that the big numbers come to us during the working day. In the Republic this is possibly exaggerated by the poor quality of its national roll out of broadband. One international company recently had to review its offer of a laptop and high speed broadband access to its employees, when a large number of them had to refuse on the basis they could not access it at home. |
| | Clearly Leinster House feels that keeping staff on task is an important priority. But in using such a sledgehammer to crack a specific nut, it is also cutting them off from one of the major innovations in the way knowledge and information is transmitted. It is not inconceivable, for instance, that this same human resources department will be blogging all its messages to its staff, within a very short period of time. |
| | Read the whole thing. And if it doesn't come up for you where it should (it doen't for me), try looking in the Google cache version. |
Using your headlines
| | Says here it says here that my headlines "work well in print" but do not "lend themselves to the world of RSS". |
Tuning up NPR with RDS
| | Here's a good job for NPR (and a better one than going after personal FM modulators): lobby the auto makers to make RDS work in the U.S. the way it does in Europe. |
| | RDS is what makes radios (mostly in cars) display the name of the station and/or the program or recording being aired at the moment. |
| | At the time RDS was being standardized in Europe, the U.S. was busy agreeing to a slightly different standard called RDBS. It's still called RDS here, by those who care about it. As a result, RDS is implemented in a full-featured way in other countries while a crippled cousin does approximately nothing in the U.S. |
| | Here's why NPR should care about RDS: it supports alternate frequency tumning, or AF. Say you're in England listening to Radio One. This "station" is actually carried by many different local and regional transmitters operating on a variety of frequencies between 97.7 and 99.7 on the dial. In the old days, when dials were still dials, you'd tune around the middle of the FM dial, looking the best signal, and staying there until it faded and you found a better one nearby. RDS automatically looks for the best signal and switches you there. It does this for every station in Europe with more than one transmitter operating on more than one frequency. |
| | Through most of the history of broadcasting in the U.S., every station had exactly one transmitter. In the western mountain states, a few FM stations had multiple translators, or low-power repeater stations. But those were more the exception than the rule. |
| | Today most large NPR stations are actually networks of licensed stations and translators carrying exactly the same programming. RDS would come in real handy for listeners in cars who don't want to have to tune from 89.9 to 89.1 to 102.3 to 89.1 to 106.9 — which is how one listens to KCRW while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. I suspect most listeners actually give up and hit SCAN, hoping for the best. |
| | Full-featured RDS would also be a boon to commercial stations with multiple transmitters as well. There is no shortage of those, either. (KFOG, for example.) |
| | By the way, religious stations have been cleaning the clocks of NPR and other noncommercial stations in the engineering department for many years. I see here they're still doing it. |
Telemarketing to death
Saving what, and how?
| | Mine is simple: what makes us think the Internet needs saving? All the empirical measures say it¹s thriving: there are more users than ever before, more web sites, more blogs, more broadband, lower prices, and more ways to get broadband thanks to EVDO, public WiFi, and WiMax (coming soon to an ISP near you). |
| | The biggest and only threat to the Internet is the misguided attempt to regulate ISPs in order to prevent the imaginary threat to the imaginary principle of net neutrality, but it¹s unlikely to go anywhere, even if the Dems take back the Senate. |
| | I¹d be looking at things like terrorist and criminal uses of the Internet, including spam and phishing, because we¹re more likely to see a real encroachment on personal freedom of expression over the Internet in response to the real abuses of bad actors than for any other reason. |
| | I think Richard credits the carriers with too much and the neutros with too little; but he makes important observations here, and he's one of the few that are making them. His is one of the most independent and irrepressible voices in our collective wilderness, and I'm glad he's out there. |
| | But the bottom line is that the Internet is fundamentally healthy, and anybody who tells you otherwise probably has a personal agenda because the only way to sustain the "Internet at Risk" argument is to give more weight to the future than to the present. And as we¹ve been hearing "Internet at Risk" arguments for ten years (if not longer) and nothing of that nature has come to pass, it¹s simply crying wolf at this point, so get back to me when you have evidence of harm and not just imagination. |
| | I'll cop to giving more weight to the future than to the present (because I prefer growth and dynamism over stasis). And to having a personal agenda: wanting the Net to be more than gravy on telephony or cable TV from the local duopoly. In both cases I want the marketplace to be free and open and not your-choice-of-silo. |
| | How do we get that? I think we need something other than a choice between carrier regulation and carrier protectionism, which is how the two sides seem to line up right now. |
| | As for evidence of harm, I'd cite the carrier's asymmetrical bandwidth provisioning (not to mention port blockages) and tendentious arguments — "It's what the market wants" — when the market has no other choice. The Net needs to enable and support production as well as consumption. It needs to support and not just prevent (or make difficult) new business in small and home offices. To name just two pro-market moves. |
| | By the way, I have EvDO. It works a fraction of the time, drops connections, is almost uselessly asymmetrical, and operates in fewer places than Verizon claims. (I was baited and switched on this matter when I bought my Verizon phone/EvDO bridge a few months back, and can't wait to get out of that silo and into — ack — better one from Cingular or somebody. Not a great set of choices.) |
| | * Woops. Kevin Barron just pointed out that in fact he was the first to respond, here. Kevin's bottom line: |
| | ...we can either hang together by supporting community networking, or hang separately by allowing our communities to be cherry-picked by the telcos. Certainly savingthenet implies more than cutting red tape for the telco incumbents. |
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