Tag: Web, Blogging and Computers

Discount Carnival

Michael in Atlanta has this week’s Carnival of Canucks up and Radio Steve leads the issue with the party tonight at Rob1’s barn making the top news from PEI. Rob has a keg, by the way, and is giving away beer.   This guy is doing being the ex-banking-exec-country-drop-out thing in a big way.

By the way, the fact that this post won’t lead to a high school style kid invasion is an indictment of the supposed popularization of blogs. Best invite to mass teen party ever? 1980, Truro, Friday at 2:55 pm. Vice principal comes on the intercom to say “The girls volleyball team will be having tryouts at Black Rock this evening at 8 pm. Bring your own ball.” Black rock was a sand pit on the edge of town. 400 teens showed with their own balls of black rum. Cop car rolled around midnight.

Bizzare Call to Stop Innovating

The best way to ensure nothing new happens is to make that a principle, as Dave Winer has advocated:

Productive open work will only result in standards as long as the parties involved strive to follow prior art in every way possible. Gratuitous innovation is when the standardization process ends, and usually that happens quickly. Think about the process of arriving at a standard. Someone goes first with something new. Assume it catches on and becomes popular. Because the person did it in an open way, with no patents, or other barriers to competitors using the technology, a second developer decides to do the same thing. The innovator supports this, because he or she wants a standard to develop. At that point the second person has the power to decide how strong a standard it will be. If the new implementation strives to work exactly as the original does, then it’s more likely the standard will be strong, and there will be a vibrant market around it. But if the second party decides to use the concept but not be technically compatible, it will be a weak standard.


Read Winers whole statement here.

As soon as rules outside of the marketplace of ideas are made which guard against innovation, advances stodge and we are stuck with innovations led only by those who advocate conservativism. We are witnessing an effort again now to control change on the web by a few as we did with Microsoft in the 1990s. There is an interesting analogy to a point in legal history in the 1800’s in which logical innovations such as negligence were held back by capitalists who did not want to be held accountable under civil law for the accidents caused by industrialization. The same theme is seen now in the rejection of criminal sanctions for industrial polluters.

A call to control of standards is foremost a call to “follow and pay me” to tell you what you what you can figure out yourselves.

If you want to be led, listen to self-appointed leaders aka “gurus” – a word which should be seen as a slander. If you want the best, unleash the innovative.

ISSNs and Personal Websites

I had an interesting set of exchanges today on the topic of the ISSN. I noted a few days ago that Steve’s site had an ISSN or international standard serial number – scroll down lower left to see it. Wanting all that Steve has, I applied for my own. This morning I received a nice email which stated:

Thank you for your application. At the moment, we are no longer assigning ISSN to weblogs, but the situation is under review. The question of whether weblogs will be able to be assigned ISSN is under discussion in the international ISSN Network. The question hinges on the scope of the ISSN but also on the very real consideration of the limited staff resources of ISSN centres worldwide.

In further emailing I learned that the global ISSN system is run out of Paris; that last October they put the halt on listing new personal web pages, web logs or blogs under ISSN; that the ISBN system relating to books does not apply; and that there are global meetings in Paris from time to time on the ISSN system. Very neato.

The person with whom I was having this conversation then went to the effort of called me at work after tracking me to my house. Apparently there are only two staff at the National Library of Canada who administer the ISSN system in the country and they have been overwhelmed by requests for blog registrations particularly – but apparently inadvertantly – after this posting by a Joe Clark who Steve (of the now coveted ISSN) knows as an web accessability writer.  I suggested that I might help the National Library of Canada and its application crunch by way of a post to this old ‘osphere.

There is an answer, however, to the nerd who want another registration number in their life. While my helpful friend in the National Library of Canada ISSN office, who will go unnamed (even though there is a 50% chance of you guessing which one it was) indicated that ISSNs for web blogs get you little but are a real headache, the good folk at CIPO will take 50 bucks on line for a one-time registration of Canadian personal web sites under the Copyright Act. While copyright is inherent in that it arises with the act of writing, registration provides proof of the fact of your writing as of the time registered. This still allows you to grant Creative Commons licenses at all that as they are licenses granted under copyright interest to your own works.   Plus you are paying so can expect you are providing for the resources you are using. 

Consider the lot of the poor ISSN registration worker. The ISSN has now registered over 755,000 serial titles worldwide and grows at an annual rate of about 50,000 new listings.  As a reult,  even though the Guardian recently pointed out that of the 4 million things called blogs, only 50,000 are updated daily, the scale of blogs to periodic serials is clearly daunting and, for two librarians kind enought to pick up the phone, overwhelming.    Let them be, oh bloggers, let them be!    Then lobby Paul Martin for more funding for the National Library.

Spam as Crime

I noticed this over at Will’s: Bill C-460, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Unsolicited Electronic Mail). Sure we all hate spam but this is too much:

  • It is too late. Email is lost. Why criminalize activity in a medium which constitutes more than 50% of activity on the medium. You may as well outlaw cross-posting on Usenet.

  • Is spamming really a crime? What gets to be crime? Not just bad things.

  • The offenses are insane. Up to a quarter million dollars and/or two years for a first offence.

Have a look at a real data related Canadian criminal code provision, s. 181:

Every one who wilfully publishes a statement, tale or news that he knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.

This section actually addresses the wrong – “that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest” – and caps the maximum imprisonment at two years. Under C-460 a second offence can get you five years and there is no requirement to do any harm.   Maybe I have lived a charmed life but I in my seven years as a web nerd have never seen a “sexually explicit pop-up”. Do they exist? Apparently he is a commando in the fight to combat what he terms commercial “cyber wars” with crime control credentials.

Don’t worry. It is only a private member’s bill so has gone nowhere, it’s natural destiny. It was the efforts of Mel’s local MP, Dan McTeague, who apparently believes the annoying and vulgar should be criminalized. Most of my friends are annoying and vulgar.   McTeague appears to be the only Liberal in Canada not to be a cabinet minister under either Chretien or Martin.

New Reads?

For 2004, I know I need some new blogs to read. Right now my reads generally and quite happily fall into these categories:

  • People I have met or know people I have met;
  • People who are yapping about blogs and how they are the future and will have us all eating food from tubes someday undefined but surely soon;
  • People with a connection to Kingston, Atlantic Canada or Scotland;
  • People who have linked to me;
  • People talking about food and drink.

I know I do not want to read blogs mainly about my job – law – as the lawyers who write blogs mainly about law tend to be the lawyers you drift away from at gatherings of lawyers. I do not want to read blogs about US politics as they have that thick veneer about “liberal” and “right” that defies either comprehension or perhaps only extra-territorial translation. Are there gems out there based on other themes? I am really pleased how Switching to Glide has begun to develop from an idea – are there other music based group blogs, for example?

And how do you find new reading?

Signs of Christmas

Well it is time for some kind of obligatory post for Yule from GX40 HQ. Signs of the season seen today:

  • LCBO line ups and emptying shelves. Panicy staff asking who had driven to the Bath and Gan stores looking for fluidy back-up.  Fortunately the Walnut Brown oloroso was there for grannie;
  • The three year old boy of the house getting seriously freaked out out over the Santa and naugthy thing. He is convinced he is off the list. I am close to letting him know that the whole thing is a fraud put on by the eastern corporate establishment;
  • Quiet roads first thing. Largely a half day in K’town so cruising about for last minute things listening to Guitar Picking Martyrs was quite pleasant – skip “Broken Fuckin’ Heart” (track 5) if the kiddies are in the back row;
  • Although Kingston is a military town and a university town like Halifax, the bars are dead. Must be a difference between army and navy. Co-worker happy happy joy joy pint o’ Guinness was in an echo chamber with, oddly, M. Pied Lourd for a bartender.
  • Fox Sport World Canada once again has that weird Egyptian indoor soccer championship – the Egypt International Futsal Tournament – on TV all through the dark days of mid-noon the 24th to the dawn of the 27th. Check here for soccer listings to get you through the entire bleak mid-winter.

So there you go. Happy Christmas to all you readers, to those who have done something worth writing about and to my favorite bloggers to the right – with special best wishes to the silverorange guys for providing the juice and space and the guys at Switching to Glide for running with that idea.

Ed the Orange

So DutchAre the NDP on a national rebound? Or is it a really slow dead cat bounce? Who knows but all of a sudden Broadbent is back in town.

The biggest problem they have faced is the lack of credible leadership. Libertarians and evangelicals will gnash and wail that it is the wacky Volvo in cords vision that people reject. Foooohaaa, I say. These days we do not vote vision so much as visuals. With the “New Conservative Party”™ and the “New Martin government”™, Canada politically has just taken one or two tiny steps but firm steps to the right. As a result, the left is wide open and, supposedly, that is where the heart of many Canuck beats, at least on the social side. And when the visuals align with the heart, who knows?

All they need is a solid presence. Jack Layton has proven himself to be a quality leader – neither strident and ideological or shrieking from the pulpit. Reasonable, if opposing and socialist. A recent poll released three days ago places them, with a commanding 14% of voter support, ahead of all parties other than the Liberals (pretending that the joint 21% of the PCs and the Alliance are still separate – as most of their supporters still are).

I'm with wuzziznameIf I look back over 22 years of voting status, I have voted Green the last two times, NDP, against the Charlottetown Accord, Hec Clouthier as an independent liberal in 1993 and solid NDP before that – when Ed was king…if socialists had kings….which they do not… because they are socialist.

I like socialist politics given that we fundamentally believe in socialist policies in Canada: free universal healthcare, peacekeeping, welfare – even the wacked Ontario Tories only downloaded it and renamed it Ontario Works (expect that last link to die soon). It is just a matter of ensuring no rip-offs and no debt financing which, given the farcical dependency of Canadian conservatives on rip-off and debt, should not to be taken as much of a ideological challenge to the NDP.

Is RSS a virus?

More recent comment by Dave Winer on the issue of RSS overwhelming the internet if the so-called standard of checking no more than once an hour is not honoured.

I wonder…if there is no general acceptance of his late in the day plea for using these apps no more than once an hour, isn’t the question now something like “have Dave and friends really inadvertently released the slowest acting but most devastating virus the web has ever seen”?  I know my aggregator of choice, Abilon, churns every ten minutes [Edit.: “bad, bad Big Al”]. Who is he once he has unleashed the monster to say this:

…the vast majority being good network citizens and accessing it only once an hour…

Wouldn’t it be better to order the recall and fix the dang thang before this goes any further?   Can’t we stop the syndication insanity?!?!