Tag: Web, Blogging and Computers

Friday Bullet Points For March

Did I learn anything this week? Wheels put in motion have been rolling along nicely. Things not to be discussed, however. Winter does not leave with February – I’m learning that, too. For while there in the night it’s been like someone was spraying the house with jello from a fire house. The world out there is glazed at 4:15 am.

  • This is the kind of tax breaks I want to see:

    “There are situations where somebody receiving social benefits will go to work and the net benefit for them will be $1.08 an hour,” Flaherty told the Toronto Star recently. “So, quite rightly, they say, `There’s not much in it for me going to work.’ So, the new tax benefit is a way of increasing participation in the workforce.”

    While you are at it, claw back the 53 bucks a month I get for child tax credit. There is no way I need that – give it to the working poor or add it to the money for schools in Afghanistan or at least the anti-poppy forces. What tax breaks could you give up? And why can’t the Federal government have options on the tax form, credits you can waive and direct into various reserve funds for particular spending in the future?

  • Drink stout today and write about it.
  • Anyone else notice that Lessig is apparently not in demand anymore? Last news September 15, 2006 and last upcoming event came and went on October 5, 2006. Does anyone really care about Open Source as a revolution anymore? I think it was the stupid beer story that killed it off. Now it’s just a good browser and other co-op products that coat tail to one degree or another and/or are bundled for sale. Which is good.
  • This was the worst idea ever. Hardly worth congratulating the yikkie people that canceled it last week as they were the yiks who started it:

    Telus Corp. has withdrawn its “adult content” service to cellphone customers, effective immediately, a Telus spokesman said Wednesday. The company had come under a barrage of criticism after introducing the service that allowed adult cellular phone customers to download nude photographs and videos on a pay-per-view basis.

    That is just fingers-on-chalkboard yik. Apparently the firm is into hiring the yikky-enabled if the PR spin is to be believed. Note to file: Telus is/was an Alberta firm. Yik.

  • Speaking of endtimes, did anyone mention to you this week that THE PLANET’S CRUST IS CRACKING!!!

    Dr Chris MacLeod, from Cardiff University, said the Earth’s crust appeared to be completely missing in an area thousands of kilometres across…”Usually the plates are pulled apart and to fill the gap the mantle underneath has to rise up. As it comes up it starts to melt. That forms the magma,” he said. “That’s the normal process. Here it has gone awry for some reason. The crust does not seem to be repairing itself.”

    Drag. We need Team Zissou.

  • It is always bracing at moments like this weeks slump in the blogosphere to remember that there have been slumps before and there will be slumps again. The long term history of blogs has proven that blogs are the safest investment you can make with your time, your money, your family’s patience. Rumours that this drop was triggered by the realization that most blogs are abandoned within only a few posts have been denied by the Blog Marketing Board. You are asked to start another blog within ten days.

So enjoy your jello hose spraying, crust cracking planet while you can. Yesterday I put on my voicemail “Tra-la – it’s May!” before I realized it wasn’t.

Web 2.0 Valuations – Or Maybe I Don’t Get Something Again

I haven’t written something about not getting something internet related for a while…days at least. And, of all the things I do not get, I really do not get the Web 2.0 bubble:

Deep-pocketed companies are now angling for a piece of the Web 2.0 action – a quest that already has yielded a couple big jackpots, helping to propel the sales prices of startups to their highest levels since the dot-com boom…News Corp. paid $580 million in 2005 to buy MySpace, the largest social-networking site, and Google Inc. snapped up video-sharing pioneer YouTube Inc. for $1.76 billion late last year…In 2006, the average price paid for a startup funded by venture capitalists rose 19 percent to $114 million. That was the highest amount since the dot-com frenzy of 2000 when the average price of venture-backed startups peaked at $337 million, according to data from Thomson Financial and the National Venture Capital Association.

Having lived tangentially though Y2K and the dot-com boom and fortunate, prior to those points in time, to have advised the webby people I knew that they should recession proof themselves (always good generic Maritimer advice), I can only scratch my head. Not so much at the boom – as these things happen – as history repeating itself so closely.

Once upon a time, the internet promised to replace commerce. The dot-com boom busted when it became apparent that people were just not going to buy dog food and sofas on-line and B2B still was going to require sales reps in 17 year old Ford rust buckets or flying in economy class roving the landscape to meet the people to make the deals. In large part the success of the internet on a retail basis is that it serves as the greatest flier insert ever. No one is really claiming now that the internet has in itself created a retail boom but I do get to find things to get – yet they only replace other things I would have gotten otherwise. And it only works for a few goods. I am still dependent on my grocer, for example, for my access to the most excellent of coffees at a reasonable price…not to mention all my other food. I could ship that coffee in via e-commerce (i-buying?) but that would cost too much. So I use e-commerce really only to buy that which is unattainable (very good homebrew supplies, unpopular books, quirky gifts). E-commerce works great for the unnecessary.

If we get right down to it, the internet now really only promises to replace your social life. I was reminded of this when actually I met up with some bloggers this week and went over all the things that never panned out: video blogging, podcasting, pervasive citizen journalism. Like early TV and its promise to bring education and two-way video communication into every home, lofty goals and intimate technologies get traded in for just more bulk entertainment. This is fine, I suppose, if you like bulk entertainment – and if watching cable TV or being a fiend for movies won’t do it for you. We game, we chat in text, we make connections and discuss ideas with people whose lives would not otherwise touch ours. There is nothing wrong with this but, like the dot-com boom, how is it not just replacement of the inessentials? There is the eternal question of the Internet: would I not be better off if I held a dinner party for people I work with, joined a service club or rec sports team and actually talked with actual people, making real relationships upon which I can depend (rather than creating a dependency)…not to mention doing all that in the context of actually doing something? I would have to give up certain levels of real or illusionary control of the discussion as I would have to deal with people as people and put away the small pulpit and the accompanying pulpitism that the internet gives people. Could you imagine in 1985 the idea that social life could occur in something called MySpace as opposed to an “our”-space? A “my-space” then was where you were alone. I suspect in a very real way it still is except the trinkets and baubles as well as bells and whistles distract you from that.

I look forward to the collapse of social networking sites. The web-0.0-era hobbyists sorts will remain as always but I still plan a party for that great day. It will be interesting again to watch today’s gurus become tomorrow’s apologists, then accusers, then naysayers, then advocates for the next big thing – whatever the venture capitalists will believe that is in 2016. Whatever it will be…will they call it Web 3.0? Not likely. That would be like the guy who, early in 2000, I comforted with the knowledge that he was well suited for consultancy in Y3K.

First Friday of February Chat

Another gentle dawn. Another month.

Friday this week finds us in a full fledged debate on who is most green. I have no idea why as I have resigned myself to ecological disaster a few short centuries after I am gone, sometime after the Venusians get us all and align themselves with our cats.

  • Green is Canada’s new story on the global scene – forget what was said a few weeks ago, please. And it makes strange bed fellows – forget the labour management divisions of the past. I still can’t figure out why our Prime Minister’s conversion on the road to Damascus or at least the next election is not being called a flop-a-rama of the highest order.
  • It is extraordinary in this day that people in leadership positions can say such dumb things.
  • I am not one to reach for the Attends every time the twits at BoingBoing announce the GroupThink of the day but no doubt there is much foaming over the embarrassment that is the NFL’s demands that churches limit the screens they show TV shows on to 55 inches, as the ever excellent Deadspin cuts and pastes:

    Initially, the league objected to the church’s plan to charge partygoers a fee to attend and that the church used the license-protected words “Super Bowl” in its promotions. Newland told the NFL his church would not charge partygoers — the fee had been intended only to pay for snacks — and that it would drop the use of the forbidden words. But the NFL wouldn’t bite. It objected to the church’s plans to use a projector to show the game on what effectively was a 12-foot-wide screen. It said the law limits the church to one TV no bigger than 55 inches.

    The law? What law? The license between the NFL and the calbe network perhaps but show me the red hand with the pointy finger next to “55 inches” please in the terms and conditions of my cable TV agreement. I declare Sunday group projection TV night. Fight the power! Fight the power that restricts us to 55 inch TV screens!

  • Hilarious to see the end of podcasting coming decidedly unbangily but with the whimperiest of whimpers as the 2007 bloggies cut the category for best podcast of a weblog. Remember when people podcasted? That was cool.
  • I still haven’t got the story right about the Space Invaders rip off images being shown in Boston as reported Thursday in this article:

    …yesterday, a subway worker less attuned to the latest in underground marketing techniques called the police after spotting one of the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” cartoon characters on an overpass in Charlestown. The terrorism scare that followed touched off a massive response from police. When it was discovered that the electronic boards were only ads for a cartoon, serious condemnation flowed from Washington and Boston.

    What generation gap? Space Invaders was 28 years ago. Who in the work force who does not recognize this sort of character?

There. It is done. Soon there will be a week of February behind us, then it will be mid-month. Before long, we will meet March and this farce of a winter will be gone.

How To Be A Journalist These Days

An interesting column by the BBC’s Bill Thompson but one which makes me wonder how the conversation got so skewed away from what really is to what is claimed to be. Thompson talks about what a journalism student today is to do given new media:

Unfortunately for those already working as journalists, many readers and viewers seem to feel the same way about the need for professional journalists. The rapid growth of citizen journalism seems less a sign of the emergence of a vibrant new area of online newsgathering and reporting than a symptom of the decline of existing forms of news journalism. It points to a career-threatening loss of trust in what people see on their TV screens or read in the daily papers as they become what citizen journalist advocate Dan Gillmor calls ‘the former audience’. This could be seen as a counsel of despair, but I do not think we should give up hope yet. If we are willing to look closely at what the internet is doing to the practice of journalism then we could do a lot to regain this trust and re-establish a connection with readers and viewers.

My problem, of course, is I have no evidence of there being anything called “citizen journalism.” We have the three news stories that have been affected by popular bloggism: Rather was fired, Howard Dean screamed and someone added 25% more smoke to a picture of a fire in Lebanon. Sure, we have cut and paste cranks of all sorts like me but that is only the new iWaterCooler and nothing more. The closest thing we have to a citizen journalist in Canada is Stephen Taylor’s excellent work at his blog but that, if we are honest, is just a branch of a political party however effective he is – hardly either “citizen” or “journalist.” Other than that? Zippo.

So where did this new era go? If we measure new by new things adding newness, what got gained? We have been happily distracted and convinced of something not well pinpointed. The entertainment value of self-publication and the putative accompanying glam has led ourselves to a more complex but more confused place where substantive analysis let alone criticism is oddly seen as being something only a traitor to the medium would engage in. Trouble is rumours now have it blogs will peak in 2007 which means they peaked in late 2005. Seeing as podcasting, YouTube and MySpace have also run their course by either commercializing, censoring or just looking too damn nerdy, the track record of the digital as dud is starting to show.

Given all that, what would I do if I were a journalism student? Start a newspaper or a radio station or maybe get that masters degree. The next thing is coming and you can’t afford to be be bothered with this old tech, lo-fi anyone-can-do-it stuff. I, for my part, am thrilled to perhaps have access to a summer of 2007 plot where I may be able to get 1000 onions and 50 lbs of storage seed potatoes in the ground.

Friday The Bulletteenth

Friday is the new Saturday in the work world. Remembering working Saturdays in the years of schlepverk, retail wages funding weekends reminds me of dressdowns and finishing the afternoon ending with the Beat Authority:

  • Make a flake. Go ahead. You know you want to. Post them on the fridge in the coffee room after.
  • Baseball owners told not to spoil their monopoly for fear of the imposition of fairness.
  • I knew I liked Vermont and Vermonters but now I have a favorite one, Senator Patrick Leahy who lead the good fight in the cause of Mr. Arar yesterday:

    “We knew damn well if he went back to Canada he wouldn’t be tortured. He would be held and he would be investigated,” Leahy thundered, wagging his finger at Gonzales. “We also knew damn well if he went to Syria he would be tortured. And it’s beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured. It’s a black mark on us. It has brought about the condemnation of some of our closest and best allies.”

  • The Globe is telling iLies. These are iLies as I know the world is better with more expensive future junk that does nothing more for me than a walkman did in 1985.
  • I have concerns. We should all have concerns. This year’s center of the infield is no 2006 center of the infield:

    “He’s very athletic,” Epstein said. “He has great range at the position. He’ll make his share of errors, but we think that’s more than compensated for by his fantastic range. He gets to as many balls as anybody at that position. He’s definitely a plus offensive player for the position. He’s a tough out. He can handle all different kinds of pitching.” Though Lugo probably won’t measure up to Alex Gonzalez from a defensive standpoint — who does? — he has the ability to make up for it in other ways…Lugo, who used to be a pest for the Red Sox when he played in Tampa Bay, will make his DP flips to rookie Dustin Pedroia. The Sox opted not to bring classy free-agent veteran Mark Loretta back for a second season. This will be the first time the Red Sox open the season with a rookie position player since 2001…

    I am thinking these days that not signing Loretta is going to be the Achilles heel of the team. In addition to more errors and shortstop, Pedroia was weak at bat last year batting under .200 in September when he was given some late games. What is wrong with having a solid defense and decent bats in the middle?

  • US Senate ethics changes v. the actual CPC Accountability Act. Compare and contrast.

Real Future Phones

Here we are now,
Entertain us!

More news out of some trade show that the world demands to replicate kids copying the deaf dumb and blind kid playing pinball from Tommy even though we all know the kids are really like the kids in Quadrophenia:

The head of the world’s biggest maker of cellphones struck the tone for the whole wireless industry this week when he rode a bright yellow bicycle onto the stage before giving a keynote speech…Wireless e-mail was just the start. Major consumer electronics and technology players say the time is here for delivering e-mail, music and video to mobile devices, and that theme is dominating much of the discussion here at the world’s largest consumer electronics trade show.

No, not Steve Jobs and his hand Segway but a less interesting but actually practical head of Motorola about putting real things in to real people’s hands.

I do not despair as I am entering that age of life where I am more and more unimportant and my thoughts on things are of less value to the populace than they ever were. But Canada’s nicest geek, Tod Maffin, was on the CBC this morning talking about these new small screen gizmos, yapping them up like the biased frontman any business reporter is – the MSM bias on business never being a concern, of course – when the host gave the telling closing quation “how are your eyes?” Answer: “bad.”

Problem? Like with recent US foreign policy there is no accountability with IT claims, no review of either the return on investment or the practical performance. These announcements will sell a bunch of stuff that does not yet really work and also sell some stuff that does work that has been on the market. Stuff will sell. That is the key to a bubble economy.

A Fabulous Yule Bullet Pointy Chat

That is what I wish for you all. The gift of fabulousness. This season brings out the fabulousness in all of us and lets us witness the fabulousness in each other – in friends, family as well as strangers. Be fabulous to each other and to yourself. That is the true meaning of the season.

  • One way to be fabulous is to ensure you stuff double digit paper money into those Salvation Army kettles you run into in the malls and outside the liquor stores struggling to get the gin from shelve to punch bowl.
  • Gary is playing tunes from The Jam this week. Careful readers will know the tale of how that band and Paul Weller in particular got me through my late teens with a certain fabulous modish style. Where is my green German paratrooper parka anyway?
  • The Red Sox have had a run of signings for 2007, especially in the bullpen, that makes me proud of my six shirts: Coco, Tek, Nomar, a gold shirt, a Ted Williams rookie shirt and a long sleeve blue. I also have an umbrella and a beach towel. And books. And stuff, too. Oh, and a Many Louisville slugger. And caps. I think their plan to make money off of franchising the brand is working out.
  • Ian, who I never have met but who does seek out my advice in things fluid, summarizes the season’s particularities in his family. Best advice I have heard this year? You do not have to go and visit them, whoever the “they” are to you and yours.
  • Hey – I need a cut and paste from the main stream media. What is a blog without a certain measure of MSM copyright infringement? Besides, the courts know about it:

    Providing Web links to copyright-protected music is enough to make a site legally liable, an Australian court ruled in a case that created legal uncertainty for search engines around the world. The full bench of the Federal Court, the country’s second-highest court, has upheld a lower court ruling that Stephen Cooper, the operator of the Web site in question, as well as Comcen, the Internet service provider that hosted it, were guilty under Australian copyright law.

    A very Merry Christmas to all the digitally thieving buggers out there, too. Because the copyright infringing thief and their half-witted amateur and professional apologists in the new e-world (aka iWorld) are people we should remember at Christmas as well.

Must run. I am working on about 15 hours sleep so far this week due to reasons beyond my control and need to get where I need to get to so that I can think about napping later in the eleven days off to come. That is right. I am taking Yule off for the first time since 2002. Woot.

A Yuletide Friday Chat

Is this the ides of Yule? Hard to tell with mid-December temperatures in the 10C/50F range. 55F in Watertown, NY today. It is slowing down around town – the university emptying out, folks daydreaming of Christmas cake soon to come, people writing Christmas cards instead of clamouring in the streets. By the way, if you get anything from me this time of year it will be late. I seem to be always finding a reason to not open up that pack of cards. So it will be late.

  • Dear Mildred Dover, Attorney General of PEI: try that one again:

    …Speaking to municipal officers, he accused Dover of displaying “underhandedness and sneakiness” in the way she prepared the amendments. “That language is totally inappropriate and unacceptable,” said Dover. “He operates under the Canadian Bar Association’s code of professional conduct. The code says, Mr. Speaker, and I do have it with me, and I quote, “he should take care not to weaken or destroy public confidence in legal institutions by broad irresponsible allegations of corruption or partiality ?.”

    Does the highest…h’mph…law enforcement official in a province really think that the Code requires lawyers to not make unpleasant blunt comment about the acts of a legislature? The rules on legal institutions refers to the courts, the body of which we happy few are officers. We are not officers of the legislature. Further, we are otherwise directed to civility in relation to public authorities which generally includes the direction (at CBA Code, Chap XIII, Rule 3) “the lawyer should not hesitate to speak out against an injustice”. Further (At CBA Code, Chap XVIII, 9):

    The lawyer is often called upon to comment publicly on the effectiveness of existing statutory or legal remedies, on the particular effect of particular cases, or to offer an opinion on causes that have been or are about to be instituted. It is permissible to do this in order to assist the public to understand the legal issues involved.

    We are asked to be particularly careful in our discussion of the courts as we also recognize that they cannot speak back…as opposed to an Attorney-General who can and who is in an opposing and adversarial position to the interests of the lawyer’s client. Remember – this is a politician hitting the big red button in their brain for being called underhanded and sneaky. The inhumanity of it all. Sneaky. And at Christmas, too.

  • Have I mentioned recently…ummm…Matsuzaka! The Red Sox will clearly control the universe next year with the best pitching line-up in the history of all human endevor. All are doomed. I have been wearing my Red Sox t-shirts all week in celebration. In oneness with those who know me not but care for me. That is the miracle of sports fandom. They care. They really care.
  • By comparison, I guess I am not that big of a fan of hockey. Maybe it’s that thing I have about anything called a stick:

    Billed as “the single most important piece of hockey memorabilia in existence,” the world’s oldest hockey is now up for grabs on eBay. As of Thursday morning, 26 bids had sent the price of the coveted piece of Canadiana soaring to $2.2-million (U.S.). Gord Sharpe has owned the hand-carved, one-piece hickory stick since the age of 9. It was given to him by his great-uncle, whose grandfather Alexander Rutherford Sr. fashioned the stick on his farm near Lindsay, Ont. for play on a nearby pond. The stick is believed to have been carved between 1852 and 1856.

  • You people really need to deal with the fact that in winter I sleep in a bit:

    Gary Rith to me: 7:34 am (11 minutes ago)

    c’mon, dammit, POST!

    Alan McLeod to Gary: 7:38 am (7 minutes ago)
    I woke up at 7:22

    Gary Rith to me 7:38 am (7 minutes ago)
    who cares! just got a message from cm and the race is ON!

    Go!

  • I am listening to a discussion of “presenteeism” which is the opposite apparently of “absenteeism”. It means encouraging people to not show up at work when they are sick. The pendulum just started its way back. Next, the virtues of a cluttered desk.
  • Speaking of a trend coming to an end:

    After analyzing thousands of credit and debit card transactions over a two-year period, Mr. Bernoff found that Apple has historically been able to sell only 20 songs on average for each iPod device sold. “If iPod owners continued to purchase music tracks throughout the lifetime of their ownership, one would expect to see iTunes sales growing at a faster rate than iPods,” he concluded in a new report. Years ago when CD players were introduced, consumers rushed out to buy new music libraries. Clearly, the iPod is not having the same effect on content, he said.

    This is the problem with the digital world – no stuff. We are creatures of stuff more than we are of money. If things are not acquirable without payment and come with no stuff, why would there be any economic inertia behind that change? It wouldn’t. The transactional event is hollowed out. Soon people will clamour in the streets for the return of stuff.

    Update: my pal Dan noted another issue with the 2.0 world.

  • How does the governmental administrative process of “giving up” actually occur? Is there a protocol? A guide?

    In a major blow to the Bush administration’s efforts to secure borders, domestic security officials have for now given up on plans to develop a facial or fingerprint recognition system to determine whether a vast majority of foreign visitors leave the country, officials say. Domestic security officials had described the system, known as U.S. Visit, as critical to security and important in efforts to curb illegal immigration. Similarly, one-third of the overall total of illegal immigrants are believed to have overstayed their visas, a Congressional report says.

    Tracking visitors took on particular urgency after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when it became clear that some of the hijackers had remained in the country after their visas had expired. But in recent days, officials at the Homeland Security Department have conceded that they lack the financing and technology to meet their deadline to have exit-monitoring systems at the 50 busiest land border crossings by next December. A vast majority of foreign visitors enter and exit by land from Mexico and Canada, and the policy shift means that officials will remain unable to track the departures.

    That is nutty. Aside from the security issue, who gets to decide that they have “given up on plans”. Is this some sort of infiltration of libertarians?

Yes, sort of boring this week. But I am late. I am all ready behind. Next week? Last workday before Christmas. No problem. Week after that? I will be a week into a holiday week. Expect big things. Today? M’yyeh, you know.

Socks and WD40

Seeing this is cut and paste day from the MSM [Ed.: the dastards! Give me more.], this digital world meets the Darwin awards is a decent morality play for the day:

…a university professor needed help after he tried to fix a squeaky desktop computer by squirting it with WD-40 oil. The squeak went away, but so did his data.

I once, during my spotty teens, used astringent face cleaner on my Elvis Costello lps so I feel their pain. If is a darn good thing that we do not have to clean CDs or Mp3s but does anyone think of the layoffs in the lp-cleaning industry? Where are they now? And those who made that K-tel lp flipping storage device. What of those?